Influences on Writing

This semester in my Writing for Electronic Communities class, each student was assigned to present a book relating to the course. This week it was responsibility of the ever fabulous Famous In My Own Head to produce questions that help the rest of the class members think about the book we read this week, Margaret Syverson’s The Wealth of Reality. After reading the first three chapters and musing over Famous’ comments, the question he asked that stuck with me was this:

 ”I’m fairly certain that everyone in my Writing For Electronic Communities class has had a freshman comp course. How do you feel it shaped you as a writer? How do you feel our current class is shaping you as a writer?”

I hate talking about what it means to be a writer or how experiences have shaped me, but I must admit this question is a veritable goldmine for creative-non-fiction pieces. I could, no doubt, delve into great detail about how my experiences as an international student learning American English have scarred me for life, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. All I have to say about my 101 undergraduate courses were that they made me regress – I hated them – I could not believe that my teachers wanted me to continue to write traditional 5 paragraph essays with only one point of view. I stopped writing those in England when I was twelve. Needless to say, my freshman comp was frustrating and did nothing to shape me as a writer, other than make me resentful.

Then we have this class, Writing for Electronic Communities. The wonderful thing about this class is that it forces me to interact with the people, to form bonds and take note of other people’s opinions. And as a writer and a self professed loner, this is fantastic for me. On page 9 Syverson states that:

“By privileging the individual writer composing in isolation, we have slighted or ignored compelling evidence that writing, like other cognitive processes, occurs in ecological systems involving not only social but environmental structures that both powerfully constrain and also enable what writers are able to think, feel, and write.”

This is a perfect way to describe how I feel WEC class has influenced me as a writer. In the classroom environment I am constrained and am forced away from writing methods that I prefer, such as being alone and only taking my own views into consideration. Being in an ecological situation where I have to take other people’s opinions into consideration forces me outside of my level of comfort and into new areas of awareness that I would never have experienced on my own. Sure, I restrict myself to certain topics, hoping to integrate my ideas with other students’, but in the long run this helps me to develop social ideas in much greater depth and my classmates perspectives have offered me insight that has spurred a wealth of writing material. I am, and always will be, a lone writer, but I do believe that there is worth in forcing yourself to be a part of a group, to experience the different dynamics and I think I will continue to welcome the changes these experiences can have on my writing.