Response to Last Week and Winsor

Since I didn’t write a response last week and my student conscious has made me feel awfully guilty about it, I’ll try and remember the topic of last week and attempt a response to it.

I extremely like Winsor’s notion of writing as invention because it’s something that I believe in but never knew it until I read her article. For me writing allows us, especially in a collaborative environment or community, to invent new ideas and new knowledge that wouldn’t otherwise have been made known to the community. What the act of writing does is it forces us to assign a language to abstract thoughts so that we can articulate those thoughts to others. The act of writing itself is social since it is meant to be read by others, and it allows others to respond to and think about these ideas in relation to their own. So by writing a thought down and articulating it in language and sharing it with others, it creates new knowledge with others in the community that then becomes shared by the community as a whole. So in this sense, writing is epistemic but not by itself. It is epistemic through a community and in the community. It is the communal aspect of writing that invents and creates, because much like an open forum that is always shifting and changing, writing is also shifting and changing through the community that it is a part of.

Taking this idea of writing and placing it in a community and site such as a blog or online forum, it’s easy to see the power in this. Looking at an online forum’s timeline and seeing all the written responses to other pieces of writing and seeing how new ideas are being considered and shaped within the community of the forum is a very powerful thing. It allows for new ideas to be invented and created within that community, and it is the community that assigns meaning and power to those ideas. Now taking this idea of writing and applying it to a freshman composition course, it creates numerous possibilities and ideas to be invented within the communal class, and it’s precisely these new ideas that give students the ability to think of things they hadn’t considered before and write about them. So then the act of writing becomes perpetual: initial writing is followed by responding writing which is then followed by more responding writing in a cycle that has no limits. And I think this is one of the great and amazing things of writing.