My Events of Writing Transiting into My World of Events
The event and experiential marketing world involves writing, as do most careers. This writing is what I would consider “snackable” and new age as the world transitions into rapidly produced content on digital platforms. This style of writing opposes what I have been conditioned to produce at my time at Wake Forest over the past four years where I have mastered the formal writing procedures of different genres and disciplines. I will be trading in my seven-page argumentative essays and my analytical research papers on economic trends for email correspondence and internal page long briefings. Although these two different styles of professional and academic writing may have different rhetorical goals, I have learned how to navigate these contrasting genres. Writing for me has become a conscious ability to realize there is a set of discursive tactics in all discourse communities, formal and informal, that are utilized to achieve communication goals. This realization of language patterns and writing tactics was discovered through my progression in the Writing minor, allowing me to grow into a transferable writer into the future event career ahead of me.
The foundation of these adaptive writing skills has been my main focus in linguistics and semantic moves made in writing. For example, how do people place themselves into their work without being overbearing? How is informal spoken language changing and being appropriated into academic writing, and is it altering prescriptive rules? Or simply how does anyone make their audience understand their point or “so what?” These questions are ones I now can now make informed presumptions about, but I would not have known as a freshman that these applied to writing.
As a freshman I came into Wake with an idea of structure and rubrics. My high school put heavy emphasis on ACT writing and aligning to necessary prescriptive expectations. Marcia Curtis and Anne Herrington define these expectations as instructor objectives that are aimed at “grammar, syntax, and a limited range or single type of writing” (85). This objective is often seen used in the five-paragraph essay on standardized tests or argumentative essays that students are conditioned to write in early education. The mastering of these expectations led to my cognitive efforts being placed so much on prescriptivism that content was an afterthought. If I were to look at my writing before college I would not be able to recall the much of what I added to subject matters I wrote about, but I can recall it was a likely regurgitation of someone's thoughts on the topic following set rules that someone decided should govern writing in the eightieth century. I would have avoided first person, starting a sentence with for, or broken away from the hollowed topic sentence. For example, I recall my final high school paper being a detailed five-paragraph essay on How to Kill a Mockingbird perfectly formatted with a topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence. This broad format did teach me there was a certain way to write, but simply that it was one formulaic process for everyone.
My naive ideas on writing are likely why I did not test out of Writing 111, and luckily for me this set me up to acquire a skillset I did not know I would ever need. I was placed into a Writing 111 class called Slang to Schoolbooks with Professor Laura Aull. The first day she discussed linguistics, how language changes, and how she wanted to discuss the slang of our time. Slang and the notion of informality coinciding with formal writing seemed too foreign to grasp. Yet, it was in this class I learned that analyzing my formal and informal writing worlds allowed for me to understand the tactics of writing. My first assignment required me to pick a slang word and track its change over the course of time. I chose the slang term basic taking a semantic shift from a scientific term to an adjective describing a stereotypical girls behavior. Although the word itself is trivial, it was in this assignment that I realized writing is not always a formal subject matter but is fueled by human discourse. Not only do prescriptions and linguistics set by dictionaries and panels change how we write, but informal platforms and discourse communities can affect writing equally.
This curiosity of informal platforms but formal writing prescriptions continued throughout my time in Writing 111 and created the foundation for my final project which brought me into the Writing minor. I was concerned with cohesive language, stance through hedges and boosters, and introductions. I utilized my social media and informal blogs such as the Onion to draw from to show how all genres utilize these tactics to serve their rhetorical goals in different ways. For example, my piece on introductions related John Swales’ CARS model focusing on the three moves of establishing a territory, establishing a niche, and occupying that niche. Although this seems very intuitive to me in my academic writing now, the Swales model was something I realized went beyond the standard thesis statement approach to a paper. More interesting, I explored how this model related to decisions made by writers informally to introduce themselves on all platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. For Example, the WFU spoon Instagram stated, “All things food in & around the Forest #spoonwfu to be featured!” This introduction on a social platform occupies a niche of food, gives background on where they are located, making a conscious effort to engage followers as an academic introduction engages a reader. Similarly, I showed how hashtags are a cohesive move to clarify the purpose of a post the way repetition and conjunctions may function. These parallels allowed me to grow into a different mindset away from traditional writing and think about the conscious moves people make at all moment, especially in the rapid growth of digital content to communicate successfully and efficiently.
Due to Professor Aull’s interest in this style of social effect on writing and language majority of my minor was completed with her. I built upon my Writing 111 basic tactics to focus on discovering how people navigate imposing their stance in writing and how the ability to do this has expanded. A short inquiry about stance led me to a deeper understanding of Ken Hyland and his ideas on stance as a “textual voice” and stating, “It is the ways that writers intrude to stamp their personal authority onto their arguments or step back and disguise their involvement” (176). This notion of voice is always taught traditionally as individual, but I exposed no writer has that pure voice they gauge their reader. In terms of informal writing, this same rule of individual voice is muted by a coherence to social boundaries online. Therefore, writers even in personal dialogue consciously withhold, express, or make linguistic decisions to adhere to their audience. Once again showing how the interplay of decisions between formal and informal writing cannot be easily separated.
These decisions I have learned are growing closer due to the closer the informal and formal writing worlds have come. One reason stance, specifically a respectable appropriate stance, is so important is due to the growing population of writers and readers of content. Once again, focusing on language change I analyzed essays and how they have developed alongside educational developments in America. This paper continued to build my knowledge about social sphere playing into writing conformity and change. I from the time of the 1950s as the war digressed education became more accessible and the single vantage point of the media reduced. This still continues as Buzzfeed, The Onion, and self-proclaimed blogs allow an essay to show numerous stances and be uncontrolled by mass media or allowing anyone to be the elite essayist there once was. I familiarized myself with COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, to understand the if the observations on education growth and the growing number of writers affected actually linguistics moves within texts. Through analyzing the phrase “in my opinion” I found there was a declining trend of this personal assertion or direct opinion statement in writing. This lead me to conclude that as authors and readers expand there has become more rules and adjustment for more general audiences, such as less insertion of opinions. Although this class initially made me wonder how the history of the American Essay would directly relate to my interest in linguistics, how were people making these changes in language? They were using tactics such as hedges, boosters, and cohesive ties I had learned in Writing 111 to allow me to understand this broader conclusion about causations of writing styles and growth.
By my sophomore year before going abroad I began to understand how writing had so many different aspects socially, linguistically, and prescriptively which played off one another. These all worked together to create patterns of genres in informal and formal settings. Genre was the term I was introduced to earliest but was the last term I was able to write about or comprehend. However, I finally discovered it was not a simple phrase to address a type of writing such as a research paper or argumentative essay but relied on your audience or more specifically your discourse community. It was not just the set patterns of expected discourse features within the writing, but also the agreed upon motives by the discourse communities behind these moves. This was the moment of linking it all together where I understood how people write, for whom they write, why it may be altering, and more importantly why the academic writing can no longer fit into the simple box of terms and structure I came into college confined to.
How does this knowledge serve me now as I am embarking on the world of events? I have learned how to adapt in writing. The classes I chose in the minor gave me a very specific look into the tools of writing. These tools could be criticized as a narrow view of how writing works, but I see them as a way me to navigate my future with writing. My final writing class, once again with Professor Aull is called the “Structure of English” and focuses on how English can change in written and spoken dialogue. This change is catalyzed through the finite means of our language that holds infinite possibilities. Writing in a general sense has these same finite means prescriptively and linguistically. It is this broad category yet has an endless amount of topic niches, genres, and discourse communities. These categories only continue to grow with the expansion of social media and publication outlets allowing for different stances to influence language or what is prescriptively understood and accepted. I feel established in understanding how formal academic writing can be transferred into these spheres and that is what will help me in my future career. Event marketing is a field that relies on trends and media to create an experience not only onsite, but also a secondary experience typically online. This content is not always formal but requires audience awareness and coherency of presentation. Although my content may be shifting to catchy jargon or informal slang on posts, I am a writer who knows how to navigate the discourse tactics to my situation and rhetorical goal.
This portfolio is comprised of all my writing about language, language change, and discourse tactics. As you read I hope one sees how each piece builds into one another and create a mysterious illusion about writing being undefinable. There is a clear base of tactical understanding and usage in all the pieces, however there is also a clear sense of flexibility these tactics give to topics such as what genre means, how language can change, or how live talk show dialogue increased hedging reflects language. Hopefully, you will also see my main illumination on relations to social communication changing informal and formal communication. This is the overarching realization of my time as a Writing minor at Wake Forest. Understanding how we affect what we do and why is unconsciously is hard to realize, but beneficial to make predictions on the future of trends. As I depart from my academic writing career, I will maintain this awareness of my discursive tactics over those who may be unconscious. Hopefully in my portfolio you how distinctly this conscious has adapted…