Ink and Influence: Tracing the Roots of My Writing Journey

Writing Influences

Purpose of the Assignment: To learn more about the writing process. To learn more about your writing process. To learn more about the influences that have shaped how you think about writing. To generate material for your self-portrait.

Intended Audience: Classmates. Instructor. Writing teachers. Scholars interested in studying the writing process. Individuals interested in the writing process.

NOTE: Take a minute to set up the writing process data collection for this activity. Write down the answers to the following questions in your Writing Log while you write this response: What was easy and what was hard about writing this response and why? Where did you write this response (physical location)? How long did you write each time you worked on this assignment? What did you work on each time you wrote for this response? Where did you struggle with this writing assignment? Where did you get stuck and why? Where did you have writing bursts? When and how did that happen? Did you plan? How long? What did you plan? When and how did you go back and edit? How often? When did you walk away from this assignment and why? How long? Put these notes in your writing log and add any other notes about your process that you found valuable.

Assignment Instructions:

1) Use about 350 words to tell us about your writing influences. Consider these questions:

Who influenced how you see reading and writing, and how did they influence you?
What particular experiences with reading and writing have shaped how you see reading and writing?
Did you read a particular book or text that influenced how you see or think about writing and reading? What book? How did it shape your views of literacy and reading?
Did your parents read to you as a kid? How did that shape your reading habits?
Did you have a teacher or friend who shaped how you see writing? What happened?
What types of multimodal texts have influenced your understanding of reading and writing? How has sound and visual content informed your understanding of reading and writing?
Be as specific as possible when recollecting your influences. This will help you generate material for your Writing Process Assignment, in which you’ll be reflecting on your experience learning to write and on what your writing process looks like and connecting to course readings. These ideas will help you start thinking about ideas that will come in handy as you start to write the paper; you should aim for being able to pull from this assignment for ideas and examples for your essay.

2) Come back to this forum and read at least two of your classmates’ responses and tell us what you learned from reading about their writing influences using 3-4 sentences. Add this to your initial response when you come back. Place it at the top or bottom of the response but provide a heading so we can find and read it quickly. React and relate to each other.