My sh**** first blog

After reading Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" essay, I was both inspired and surprised. Anne seems to have a few screws loose after she explains that writing drafts includes listening and ignoring the voices that appear in your head. She tells the audience to silence them by shooting them all in the head. But there were a few useful tips I took away from this piece. She taught me to just write and not pay attention to the voices in my head that are telling me to go back and revise the last sentence and maybe change "tells" to advises because thats just not the "AP" level word I was taught to use in high school. So thats what I'm doing for this blog right now, just writing whatever is on my mind pertaining to that article. I always used to let thoughts get in the way of my writing, which interfered with my writing process. I would lose my train of thought and sit there in a writers block trying to recall that brilliant idea I had a second ago. Anne tells her reader that if one character wants to address someone as "Mr. Poopy Pants" then you let that character do that. From now on I'm going to practice just writing and not letting myself go back and correct every sentence.

Reading 1

I never actually realized how almost every piece of writing we write is rhetoric. Our purpose is always to persuade our audience to accept the idea that we are trying to impose in our writing. The last year I've written quite a few rhetoric pieces, college essays, college personal statements, scholarship letters, all examples of writing pieces where I was trying to convince my audience that I was the best candidate.

Up until reading those chapters, I had never thought that we really do use persuasion in everything we write. Even a letter to a teacher about trying to bump up our grade, is a form of rhetoric writing because we are attempting to persuade the teacher to give us a boost in our grade and we usually state our reasons as to why we deserve it and why we want it.

There's also a whole process we have to go through before we start writing, you can't just sit down and and begin rambling on about whatever it is you're trying to talk about... Well you can, but you most likely will end up with a pretty bad essay. You first have to identify your audience, because writing to a person in authority is a lot different than writing to a group of elementary school students. You then have to try to connect with the audience and focus on what position you are taking of that idea.

It was interesting to see the writing process laid out in front of you, these few chapters really brought to my attention the importance of writing rhetorically and the process behind getting started in writing a rhetoric piece.