Journal One - Michaela Dugdale

• Writing is a form of communication that allows authors to express their feelings and ideas.  Writing is personal, it allows the authors to describe what they’re passionate about. Writing can be done through symbols or words.

• A successful writing piece, to me, allows readers to understand the feelings and ideas conveyed through writing by the author. Whether this is done so in the form of a blog, a fictional novel, or even an essay, if the reader can understand why the author wrote it than the piece is successful.

• Although writing is not my strongest asset, I do enjoy writing about a topic I am passionate about and that I can relate to. I like to express my opinions for others to learn and understand.  Writing about current events also appeals to me as I enjoy keeping up to date in world news.

• Creativity, Emotions, Communication, Education, Passion, Opinionated, Clarification

• The main argument these authors are making is that the push for ‘original’ writing in the school system is not making children better writers. Instead, it is hindering their ability to write using their creative freedom.

• I learned about assemblage and how that form of writing can help learning writers grow. I also learned that assemblage is not a bad thing, it could be used as a writing exercise.

• This article was successful according to my criteria on a successful writing piece.  As I read the article, I fully understood what the writers were trying to say, and how they felt about it.

• My understanding of writing certainly has changed after reading Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s article.  As a student who grew up in a school system that enforced a no plagiarism policy, seeing the different ways of writing that could help my writing ability grow really makes me think.  This article reminded me about a book I read senior year called ‘How to Read Literature Like a Professor’ by Thomas C. Foster.  Although this book focused more on reading and less on writing, there were still parts of the book the I connected to this article. This book explained that there a only a select number of stories in the world, the rest of the novels and stories are simply spinoffs of the basic set up of the story.  For example, many stories written in the 21st century are reference fairytales or even the Bible. This idea can be applied to writing and plagiarism as well.

• I do not wish to revise my list of key terms.  This article only reassures me that writing is done using the 7 terms I listed.  However, I do realize that there are many more terms that can be used to describe writing