Category: Intro

In a way, everyone’s technically an author. People write things on a daily basis, whether they serve a big purpose or not. There are many reasons why people write, and it can be as simple as texting a friend or something more complex such as completing an assignment for an ENG 1101 class. It may not seem like much, but for even for simple tasks, such as emailing a professor or messaging a friend on facebook, we think about small details such as tone and word choices depending on who and the context of the messages we write. People don’t write emails to professors using slang and acronyms and likewise, friends wouldn’t message friends using eloquent, verbose vocabulary to talk and gossip about things as well. As students, these details are very important to keep in mind also. For example, a student writing a research paper for a psychology class would have a very different style of writing when compared to writing a creative piece for an advanced English class. The student would have to keep in mind various things such as the purpose of writing and the target audience for each essay. If these things are not clearly defined and determined prior to writing, the essays might not be as refined and polished as the student might have liked to be. These are very important decisions authors have to constantly make while writing. Setting the right “stage” for the piece with details such as purpose, tone, audience could make or break the writing. Therefore, I believe this the idea that Mike Bunns is trying to convey when he stated that we are all already authors. We all make these decisions, whether consciously or subconsciously, to best communicate our thoughts while writing anything, just like authors.

One thing I would like to do in my writing is consider my word choices more. Near the end of the essay, Bunns analyzes the first paragraph of his essay and the importance of word choice. Usually when writing, I tend to just stick as many complex words in my essays to look and sound smart to the reader. However, through his analysis, I realized the impact that word choices actually have on dictating the mood and flow of the story. So now, rather than just looking for fancy words to fill the page for my papers, I will carefully consider my word choices to fit the overall flow and ideas I would like to convey to my writings.

Mike Bunn’s intention when he says “You are already an author” seems relatively clear to me. Everyone has their own experience as an author if they have ever written an assignment for school. They have also formulated the same kind of ideas and strings of words, to sentences, to paragraphs that Mike Bunn described earlier in the essay. If you have ever had an argument or if you had to give a speech to any sort of group of people, then you have gone through the same process of structuring and planning as an author. Yet I would still argue that being an author is much more intricate, and I think that the essay also happens to support that view too.

As for any strategies that I would plan to use in my own writing, there are a couple of things that I never really thought too much about when it comes to writing until I read the essay. One example of that would have to be the part about considering the genre of the work. The main point in this essay is largely the idea of figuring out what techniques in reading that you may be able to use for yourself for your own writing. In this scenario specifically when you consider the genre that you are reading or writing, you want to consider what techniques work and are effective. On the other hand you want to see which ones are not effective. It is actually a useful thing to consider when writing for assignments and what not. Depending on the formality of the assignment you may find that writing in a joke might work more in say a speech class (like I had last semester) compared to a research paper. Then of course there is obviously the matter of considering your purpose for writing. As the essay sort of describes, knowing assignments ahead of time (or knowing what you are going to need to write) helps a lot to direct your thinking and the choices that you might make when you actually get to it.

When Mike Bunn states that “You are already an author.”, his speaking on how in your day to day life, whether it be writing an essay or writing a letter, you already made the choice and author has made in his writing. you are constantly making choices on how a pieces you’re writing should flow. Having written countless of essays throughout my educational path, I can agree with what he is saying. There’s where I purposely choose to included different writing strategies to send a point home, even with me knowing all of that, this is the first time I hear the term “reading like a writer”. Maybe subconsciously I have borrowed writing techniques that I’ve seen in book and article that I have read, but it was never something that I was actively looking out for. I personally feel like moving forward I will definitely be more aware of the writing strategies to borrow them and implement them in my own writing, one writing technique that Bunn use that I would like to implement in my writing is the way “broke” away from his own ideas to quote another person and made what said person it’s own part in the essay. Another thing in particular is how he separated his ideas into what I could describe as section and he titled them as well from what I can remember I never titled different section of my writing, it was always pick a topic write 3-5 paragraphs supporting your idea and end it there, so I do look forward to separating my idea into their own sections to make writing easier for my so I could focus on one idea per section, makes writing and reader at easier. Overall, I believe this was a great read to start off the semester, there’s definitely a lot of strategies that I will take with me moving forward in this class.