ChristopherMell

ENC213532
8December2015
RachelEfstathion
MyTheoryofWriting
Before I took ENC2135, I never thought much about the importance of havingatheory
of writing. The only previous exposure that I had to such ideas was in high school where the
theory that I was taught could be simplified as, Its up for debate. The broadness of this
method of teaching meant that I didnt properly formulate atheoryofwriting.Thewordgenre
was meant to refer to a classification of work in a specific medium that was distinct from other
genres by the content of the work. Examples of genres include thriller, crime, horror, comedy,
etc. This made up my prior thoughts of writing. I only thought of writing to apply to writing
fiction, such as novels and short stories. I also had a narrow definition of writingtechniquethat
excludedsomeofthemoreavantgardeanddadaistinterpretations.
I still hold that writing is, in general, a visual representation of language and that this is
the only requirement for something to be referred to as writing. The collection of letters in a
linear structure will henceforth be referred to as general writing. If you were to examine any
culture thatdevelopedwriting,specificallyatatimeimmediatelybeforethisinnovation,youwill
find that the main use ofitwastovisuallyrepresentspokenlanguage.Genresofwritingsuchas
a novel, a lab report, an essay, a research paper, and an article later came about in order to
perform any task that generalwritingcoulddowithagreaterdegreeofefficiency.Ineachgenre,

there are rules for how to properly interpret the text. It is possible for writing to be useless a
meaningorpurposeisntrequiredtomakeatextwriting.
The writing that I did in class were a series of journals, projects, word maps, and
reflections including this one. The journals and the projects didnt really affect my theory of
writing, but the reflections and maps did because I wasconsciouslythinkingaboutmytheoryof
writing while I was writing those. You can see my writing evolve from an auteur theory
interpretation to amorepostmodernistviewinfluencedgreatlybythe20thcenturyAvantGarde
and the Beat Generation writers. This shift can be observed in my blog posts. Meaning and
purpose used to be key terms in my theory of writing, but they have been dropped in favorof
words such as intent and a much broader interpretation of the word technique. The ideas of
the communication theory philosopher Marshall Mcluhan were also influential to my theory of
writing, specifically his idea that humans shape the media that they use and then the media
shapeshumanityafterwards.
Writing is a visual representation of knowledge. In fact, one of the reasons a system of
writing was developed was to allow for the recording of knowledge. One of myopinionsisthat
knowledge is fundamentally independent of writing and that writing was just a means of
recording and disseminating knowledge not a way of creating new knowledge. But writingcan
do a lot more than record knowledge it can be cut up and rearranged as the author William S.
Burrows did in the 50s and 60s or strungtogethertomakenonsensicalsentencesandpapersand
bookssuchastheworksofLewisCarroll.
Writing has proved to be a useful tool to humanity with historical precedents set by the
Sumerian hieroglyphs, the code of Hammurabi, the Gutenberg press, etc. Over time, genres of

writing were developed in order to provide a more efficient way of putting the written work to
good use. Finding and synthesizing new and old knowledge acquired through research is best
accomplished using a research paper as I did for project 2. Spreading information to young,
ordinary activists in the information age is best accomplished by a podcast or a video, which I
didforproject3.
As those who have ever attempted to answer what someone really meant when he or
she said something would know, the interpretation of a work is much more difficult than
understanding how it was created. Tomakeiteasier,itisbesttothinkofeachgenrehavingaset
of rules thattheauthormustfollowif heorsheistowritesomethingandanothersetofrulesthat
the audience followsinordertounpackagetheinformation.Asonewritingalabreport would be
obliged to detail each and every step with an unwavering level of precision and accuracy, so
must a writer of a research paper cite every sourceheor sheusedandmakeitcleartothereader
exactlyhowandwherethosesourceswereusedusingamethodsuchasparentheticalcitation.
To finalize my current theory of writing, writing can be defined as any visual
representation of language that uses symbols with an arbitrary, generally agreed upon meaning.
This is the only requirement of anything that makes it writing. Writing can be organized into
genres that have rulesforproperwritingandtheycanbebetterinterpretedthroughanothersetof
rules.