Writing always was the thing I do not like to do until I take the 1122 writing class. In junior middle school, teacher was told me to write a diary every single day (in Chinese). Writing a diary was similar to post a blog post in this class, but the difference is writing a diary do not consider the elements of rhetorical situation and do not think about how to make the writing more persuasive or creditable. Writing a diary maybe just considered about making sense to the audiences. For example, I just wrote about what things I did in the day, and what benefits these things brought to me.

In high school, teacher told us the methods to decorate a piece of writing. When we write an essay, we can divide writing into narrative writing, argumentative writing, expository writing and practical writing. Narrative writing can be divided into poetry, prose, journal and fiction. In each certain writing genre, we can use different writing methods to make the writing more beautiful or persuasive. For example, we can use some parallel construction to make the paragraph more persuasive and creditable. We can use personification to describe an abstract thing more clearly and visually. We can use metaphor to make a sentence more tactful and understandable. The knowledge I learn from high school is related to rhetorical situation. However, the ideas of the knowledge were so vague that I cannot apply this knowledge into my writing. I still do not have my own writing process.

After I take the 1122 writing class, I know what I should do before writing, during writing and after writing. Understanding the rhetorical situation gives me general idea of writing. At first, we should confirm our audiences in order to use a certain genre. Then we should know the purpose of the writing. The purpose of the writing is very crucial to a piece of writing, because if you have an equivocal argument and many contradictions, audiences would not understand the meaning of the writing. Moreover, in order to make the writing persuasive and creditable, the tone of voice is significant in every piece of writing.

An appropriate genre can arise consensus of the audiences. Different genre should have different ethos, pathos and logos. When I wrote a piece of writing for New York Times, I considered explain my opinion more clear and more professional by using big words and sophisticated sentences, because the audiences of New York Times usually are the professionals and knowledgeable people. However, when I wrote a piece of writing for Entertainment weekly, I use less formal words and talked about the causal topic with an “Entertain Mood.” If I used more big word and complicated sentences, many people would not read the magazine, because they want to relax by reading the magazine instead of reading an academic paper.

At last the peer review is the most helpful way to improve our writing quality, because we could know where we have logic errors and how we amend the logic errors. The grammar problems and logic problems can hardly solves by ourselves and software, so the grammar mistakes and logic errors are the biggest problems in our writing and are hardly evitable for us. Thus, we surely want anyone to review our writing in order to identify anything that does not make sense or anything that confused the readers in our writings.