Forum: General Discussion

For me, writing is a way to gain, as well as, convey information. I am going in to the education field, and there are always new and innovative teaching techniques, aids, or programs that can be applied in the classroom. Also, writing can be used as a creative outlet, such as poetry, plays, and songs. All of these require some knowledge of the English language because of the natural rhythm and rhyme that is necessary to convey a certain emotion.

Writing provides a medium in which I could share my ideas with a large group of people through a newsletter, comments to an editor of a educational journal, or even in writing my own article for a magazine or paper. I feel that in order to be able to convey such ideas to the public, one should know how to express themselves through proper planning and writing tactics.

We are studying these things in order to be able to develop our own writing tactics and organizational strategies, so that one day we may be able to write our own article, magazine, paper, poem, play, or song. In doing this, the composition will have created will have a deeper meaning to us due to the fact that we would be putting out our own thoughts about a subject for others to observe. We might be able to help out those that are faced with the same situations or feelings in whatever profession that we might choose to go in to.

Writing is the expression of our lives. It represents everything that we know in a way that is unbeatable. Writing allows everything that has, is, and has yet to be, reincarnate through our memories and imagination.

I can love, hate, touch, smell, feel, see, and hear; but there are only few means of remembering the specifics. Aside technology, writing allows the reader to use their imagination and experience to refer to the text and see what is really going on.

In addition to specifics, people can communicate information to other people, nations, cultures, and ethnicities in ways that visual and oral methods could not. Try learning a language and its grammar; then try conversing with another person of that cultural background. Writing will always be the best reference.

Writing is not merely a way to express emotions and information, but it allows so much more representation of those emotions and information that people miss in visual and memory means. People can watch a movie but can they really see all the details and information? I can speak to someone but can he or she remember everything I mention?
Writing is important for its verifiability, clarity, consistency, and for its trustworthiness. These reasons are reasons to be good in the art of writing so humans can understand each other, share stories, and learn and analyze what has not been learned or analyzed before.

Writing represents our lives, so write well.

Writing in the most general and common sense is required to relay a message from one source to another. It is used to articulate matters such as feelings, instruction, stories, facts and opinions. Essentially writing is used for communication.

Speaking from a business sense, writing, primarily emails, is one of the most basic forms of communication. I have seen terrible writers and I have experienced very articulate writers. There is such a large discrepancy of the levels of writing in the business world today. However, despite the many levels, one must remember the reason for writing at all: to get a message across to the audience in a clear and concise manner. Whether a writer is very decriptive in conveying a message or very simple, both messages must convey the same end message.

I am not a writer. Writing is one of the most difficult tasks, academically speaking, that I must encounter. While I do not have any problems writing business documents, the writing one must do for a Composition class is difficult for me. Because I am not a well-versed writer, I write as little as possible. By studying the skill of writing it expands the horizons and experience of a writer. It gives one the opportunity to practice and refine the skills of writing.

I very much agree with the comment of the first person in this topic. I tend to post on message boards online that share common ideas and positions that I seem to enjoy. I also play the position of moderator on one of those forums. In the many people that I have run into through the last three years doing so, I've met my fair share of good and bad writers. I can generally tell if someone has enough sense to write a good response based solely on the delivery of their message in a post. Writing is meant to convey an idea to others in a concise way that anyone you wish to read it will understand. Of course, a third grader would never understand something a college professor wrote, but the college professor probably didn't write the paper for a third grader.

I plan on studying Mechanical Engineering. Writing is very important even in that field. I couldn't just hand a set of numbers and a sketch to someone and tell them to make it without something to explain what it does or tell them details about the types of materials I want used. Every field of study at some point requires a bit of writing, that is why colleges have a requirement for writing. It would not be right to reward a degree without giving some idea on how to do general subjects like mathematics and composition. If that was the case, the value of a degree would plumet to being nothing more than a technical degree.

Writing is a way to express one's thoughts on paper. By writing, an individual can express what they want and when they want. Writing can express feelings, thoughts, and just about any other type of information there is. Writing is another method of communicating. It is a way, besides talking, to convey information to just about anybody. Also, writing is a way to express ourselves. Individuals can show who they really are and what they really feel through their writing. It does not even matter if people don't like it just as long as the writer does. Writing enables people to paint a picture with their words. Sure a story can do that also, but you can never really explain details through a verbal story. With writing you can pinpoint ever detail with ease. If someone tried telling me a story where they talked about every single detail, I would get bored and walk away. But with writing, explaining every single detail keeps the reader interested. We study writing for the main reason of knowing how to write well. If you are a horrible writer, than no one will want to read your work. But, if you are experienced and know how to write correctly, it won't be as hard trying to get people to read your work. This way, you can be the one painting pictures in people's heads with your words.

Writing is a deep expression on what one is thinking. Unlike speachs, you can go back and revise your thoughts so that you convey what you are trying to say without any question on where you stand on an issue. We are studying writing and why it is important. We need to study for many reasons: One is that if we do not study it then we will look like idiots by the words we use and the way that we express what we are trying to talk about. This is not only important in college but afterwards when we are applying for jobs or formulating a project for the fields that we will eventulally make our careers in. Writing is one of the single most influencial ways of communicating to others, it can be translated into different languages, reproduced an infinate number of times, and many other ways of reaching the public.

Once again this is why need to study it and have it as a course requirement. If we do not learn how to write correctly and concisely then we will not make it far in college and in the job field after college.

Most say that writing is a way of expressing ideas and thoughts. While that might have been that case when only priests and high nobles could read or write, in today’s main stream lives that no longer is the truth. I have an idea that writing is a way of leaving our personal mark on people or on history. With the population being over 6 billion in 2000, (Campbell Reece, 2004) there is no way for every one to leave a mark on human history. The idea that humans aspire to leave something behind to be remembered can be seen throughout history. The Egyptians left us the pyramids, if it were not for that, few would even know or care about them. The Egyptian pharos believed that not only by building pyramids would they reach the gods better, but they would obtain a form of immortality by reminding future generations of their presence.
Writing leaves a mark of immortality as well. We remember writers like Poe and Dickens, not of common writer John Doe or Billy Bob next door. My idea is that each person wants to be different and individual. By writing blogs, posting on forums, or complaining about the lines at the airports in the local newspapers, people feel heard and important.
“Shock Jockeys� are a great example of this. While their medium is the air ways, they are crude yet effective in being heard and gaining attention. The more crude they are, the more attention they receive, so the more of an individual and the more important they feel. Not many can find themselves of the air ways, or even less, on TV so that leaves writing as the last medium and chance at immortality.
I think we study writing as a way to learn from mistakes made in that past and to make improvements. While writing is ever changing with the culture, one thing hasn’t changed. People only listen to the best writers. By studying writing we can improve and hopefully gain an audience large enough to leave a mark of immortality.

Writing to me is not just an expression of words, it is also an expression of educational background. When somebody reads your writings, what do they learn from it? If you are not a decent writer, they will probably think that you have not been through proper education. You can be writing a research paper with incredible information, but if it is not clear and understandable, you will not receive much credit. On the flip side, you can have an entire essay of lies and crap, but if it sounds good and intellectual, people will more likely believe it.

To graduate from USF, you have to take two years of ENC. To graduate from high school, we had to have four years of English. This is because that to get the higher paying job in this critical society, you have to sound better. Technology has grown so much over the past years that job interviews can be done over the internet. This means that the applicant who sounds the best through writing, will get the job. So if you can't write well, you are just about out of luck. You cannot go anywhere in life without knowing how to write and convey information. This is why I think it is a huge requirement at both universities and high schools.

Writing is an interesting subject that I have never really thought much about. It is something that we all do every day but never really take out the time to think about why we are really doing it. To the common person, writing is nothing more than jotting a couple of meaningful symbols on a piece of scrap paper so you don't forget what to pick up at the grocery store. But to an author, it is so much more. When Ovid sat down and wrote his Metamorphosis, did he consider it to be a work of art as many do today, or was it just rambling in a journal? Writing is an art. From the Bible to the Illiad, these stories remain in our minds because someone wanted us to remember them. They have survived years and years of weather, war, and culture to end up in our libraries today. Writing is how those in the past communicate with those in the present. It is necessary for us to study writing in order to understand why certain things deserve to be written.

What actually is writing? This question is a very good question that probably has many different answers. Most of these posts have already answered this question pretty well. I feel that writing is a way to express your feeling by writing on paper, on the internet, or just in your head. It is very different than talking to one another. Writing in a way is just like television. Even though you do not physically see something, in your head you are creating a mental picture that you may keep with you longer. Writing gets your mind thinking. It seems as if it is heathier that watching tv.
Think about it.....why is this class a requirement? You are always writing something or reading something someone else has wrote. Writing is around us all the time and we need to read and write to survive. People that can not read or write really have a hard time surviving life itself. Writing helps us in so many ways. From helping to relive stress by getting your feelings out, to giving us something to do by writing a book or paper.

Writing is important to our society because it records our history, our loves, our minds, our property, our ideas, our everything. We want to read things that relate to us, even indirectly. We love reading about our country’s past because it has lead to our present. We love to read love stories when we’re in love because we can relate. Best sellers are best sellers because the characters are believable and we can understand what they’re feeling. So we study writing in order to learn how to express our ideas in ways that people can understand and relate to. Writing was started simply to record information for future use, like crop production. It was only turned into an art form because, just like theatre, that is the natural progression of things. If we didn’t learn how to write, we would be left stabbing around in the dark trying get our point across. Because of writing classes, we can learn a process to get that point across. People also write to learn about themselves. Diaries are so popular because it gives people a chance to express their emotions and thoughts so that they can analyze and understand them. It can be easier to do that when things are written down. In that situation as well, if you don’t know how to express what you’re thinking and feeling, writing can’t help you. Or when you are telling someone else what you think. If you can’t express it, then there is no point in even trying really. That is why we study writing, to express ourselves and our thoughts and to record them for others.

I think writing is a kind of power. It is like how some people are smooth talkers they can persuade people to do things, writing is kind of the same way. If your a good writer than you have an influence on a persons emotions. One minute you can make them happy the next minute you can make them sad. Another reason that I think writing is powerful, is that unlike television or theatre, writing uses your imagination and allows you to make whatever your writing into how you feel it should be. Writing is a way of creating something original and allows you to express your opinions to others. Like others have said writing is also a way to communicate and pass information from one person to another.

I think the reason why we study writing is to increase the power. The more you do something the better you can get at it, writing is the same way. If your are good at writing it makes you seem like you are intelligent, because what you say is more believable and that you know what you what your talking about. Most careers require us to communicate by writing on paper or emails. If you are bad at writing it makes it difficult to communicate with other people and get your point across to other people. I think that this course is required for this same reason because it helps develop ore ability to communicate with the rest of the world.

I believe that writing has multiple definitions. If we were to go back to the beginning of the human race or should I say “Cavemen�, we would discover that they communicated through the use of imagery in the form of cave painting. Of course that went on for a long time before words became a meaningful and significant form of communication. This is not meant to be a history lesson, so I’ll get to the point. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the saying goes. If everyone is looking at the exact same image at the exact same time, everyone will draw the same conclusion of the subject matter, unless it’s an abstract image which could have various meanings.

Writing allows the reader to use his or her imagination in an attempt to mentally visualize what has been written. If three separate people were to read the exact same chapter from a Stephen King novel, for example, even though the story is told the same way for each person, they will each have separate visual accounts of the chapter. The characters and their surroundings will seem different to each.

Another importance of writing is for documentation. How would we know what went on in the past if we were not able to write it down? It would be a definite complication to have to learn our history through the use of imagery and overlapping verbal accounts that change dramatically as it travels through the grapevine. We need writing for detailed explanations of what went on before our generation existed.

It is important to study writing because the learning process is never ending; it’s a continuously evolving relationship between communication and expression. As students, it is our responsibility to further history. To do this we must solidify our means of communication and in the process learn new ways to express ourselves and our stories.

A lot of the comments that were posted before me have very good points. Some students said that writing is keeping our history, or our thoughts onto paper to pass down for generations. As time has progressed over the ages, this has become many times easier. Before, every time a person wanted to write down something, there was a great chance of the document being destroyed. Now, with the internet and computers, I could post something on the internet, just as I am doing now, and the material will be there for many years to come. Writing makes communication a lot easier because with a simple search of Google.com I can find almost anything on the internet. Writing has also been considered, and very well is, an art. Without writing then there would be no internet. Without writing then there would be no way of recording our thoughts. If a person wants to do well in life, then writing is almost necessary. It would be hard to continue through college and not have sufficient background in writing. That is the primary reason why ENC 1101 and ENC 1102 are course requirements to graduate from USF, or any school for that matter. I like the quote that was stated earlier in this forum. "you can be the one painting pictures in people's heads" (SeanyL). This basically states that if you are a good writer then people will actually enjoy reading. That is exactly what this course wants us to accomplish, becoming good writers by the end of the semester.

I must start off by saying that I think the answers on this forum are all very well worded. There are many great points that were brought up. From recording our history(vamp_bat) to righting poems(Wing), writing does all of this,and I find it amazing. We all understand these lines we put together and know what eachother thinks. It's crazy...If you look at the Chinese writing it looks like a bunch of non-sense, but to Chinese it is there language just like us. To me writing is an important part in communicating with all types of people. You can meet people that are not even alive anymore by the books that they wrote. It's nut's now that I'm thinking about it.
It is very important to study also because you use it more than any other subject that I have ever been thought. We all started with the voices of our parent's learning to talk and now we all are quite experienced writers. I do believe that by the end of this course I will be a much more talented writer.

Writing is not just expressing your thoughts on a piece of paper, it is a very unique and innovative form of communication and it requires lot of skill and talent. In my view, the good writer is the one who get his/ her message across, in a simple, interesting and intelligent way. I think, writing is composed of three components. The first component is knowledge about a given subject, second component is converting the knowledge and the thought process into an interesting idea and the final component is putting those ideas on a piece of paper. Writing is an art which is partly God gifted. You can definitely learn and improve on some of the aspects of writing but it is not entirely a learned phenomena.
I think that we are studying this subject so that we can learn and improve our basic writing skills and if some one has the first two components of knowledge and a great idea than one can put everything together in an organized way and come up with a good paper.
In today's age, unfortunately writing has become a complete business. People read you not because you are an excellent writer but because you are famous, popular or controversial. It's mind boggling when people like Monica Lewinsky, O.J Simpson and Scott Peterson's mistress are not only writing books and making money but some of them are best sellers as well. When you look at the above examples, i think one more component you need in order to be a successful writer is deviant or controversial personality.

In an American Literature class I read letters exchanged between John and Abigail Adams. So what? The fact that personal letters between a husband and his wife found their way into an English student's textbook two hundred plus years later absolutely blew me away. They didn't write these letters with the idea that they (the letters) would be immortalized and saved for posterity. They were simply writing on what was on their mind. There are many example of writings by famous and not so famous individuals that were not originally meant for publication. No one knows what the future holds. Could the circumstances that leads to the publishing of some work of ours in the distant future come into existence? Possibly. But even if it doesn't, the way I write is just as important as the way I talk, groom myself, dress, and carry myself. The way that I write is me (bad grammar for effect). We should care about how we write as much as we care about what we see in the mirror. Anything that improves our writing will improve what people see in us and think about us. I know that it is popular to not care about what others think but that is so anti-social as well as down right lazy. Embrace your writing like you embrace your hair-do and wardrobe. Its just as important, if not more.

Writing can serve multiple purposes, depending on the intent of writer. It can serve as a way to convey information to others, to put one's thoughts on paper for later reflection, to entertain others, etc. It's hard to really define writing because there's so much to define. Some people may only write in order to send information or get in contact with someone else, while the next person may write a story or novel to entertain people. In my opinion, writing is also an art form. Just like other forms of art, such as painting or music, writing is a craft that must be learned and practiced constnantly. If the writer so desires, this craft can be used to entertain just as well as paintings, music, or any other forms of art.

We are currently studying writing because it is vital to our futures. Like I mentioned previously, there are so many important uses to us that we must learn and practice this craft. We are here to further our writing ability and to take our writing as far as we can. Learning new techniques and incorporating them into our current writing style will only help us to become even more well-rounded writers. Also, I feel this course is designed to help us become better thinkers, in addition to being a better writer. Learning to beccome a good thinker will prepare you for life, and learning these skills in addition to writing skills will make us better students.

Writing is the basis of communication. Writing is the basis of the information age. Our society is based upon writing. Our society is based upon the correct combination of useless markings and symbols that allow us to visualize sounds, thoughts, speech, and language. Individually, letters tell us minimal information, but just by changing their pattern they can tell us anything and everything. Learning to become a better writer is simply learning more complex patterns strung together in different ways, more complex ways.
Writing is a college requirement because of its importance to our existence. In two hundred years we will all be long forgotten, but the population will be able to learn from our mistakes and advance because of our writing, which we will leave behind us. Without writing true stories become folklore and facts become fiction. Ideas are not always expressed clearly through speech, but if we write those ideas they can be read and reread allowing the reader a better understanding. We must study writing and learn to write clearly, concisely, and interestingly, because our ancestors will only have our writing. I believe every idea is important. At the time the idea is presented it may not be relevant, but if it is clearly conveyed it may become useful to someone else. This may be useful to someone with more or less resources than you have. When we learn to write well, we will be communicating well. Many confrontations in our society stem from simple misunderstandings, improving our communication skills will allow us to avoid these misunderstandings. Overall, writing is what we leave behind and how we share ideas with different corners of the world. The better we are at writing our ideas, the better they will be understood.

Writing, like mostly everyone said, is a form of communication. To me it is amazing how we, as humans, have developed languages. It is amazing how the English language is based on 26 letters.

Writing is how we convey our emotions, feelings, thoughts, theories, etc. on paper (or computers). We study writing so that we, as people, can continue to flourish and advance ourselves, which is done through communication. Through writing, we are able to document things like history. We are able to learn about the past so that we can make the future better by learning from mistakes that were already made.

Studying writing helps us to be able to communicate our ideas, feelings, and emotions in an organized manner. Organized communication is very important because it helps us to understand each other’s ideas as well as to build our own. Most importantly, studying writing helps us to complete basic, everyday tasks. A lot of students say that it is unnecessary to waste money on a Composition class because they won’t need it for their profession, but I believe that studying writing improves the way you verbally communicate. It helps with organizing your ideas so that you can verbally communicate them clearly.