Theory of Writing:

From Seed to Harvest

Version 1

January 21, 2020

Imani Carter
Sophomore, Sociology Major
The City College of New York

Dear Imani, “The Freshman,”

You may be wondering how your first year of college is going to go. I know you are full of anxiety. You’re not sure of what you’ll major in. You’re out each day buying supplies, hoping to meet your tribe, and planning to embark on a journey you’re honestly quite skeptical about. I know this. I have seen this, because I am you—from the future. I have gone through great pains to get this letter to you in hopes thatI can answer questions you have not even considered yet. The points I am going to make in this letter may seem arbitrary to you today, but in time they will truly help you grow the power of language and composition that is buried deep inside you. Read each point of this letter very carefully.

What is my theory of writing?

I know, I know what you’re thinking. This is completely random and unhelpful. You don’t even know what a theory of writing is. Of all the things your future you could tell you—blah blah blah. I get it. Anyway, a theory of writing is a a description of what we understand writing to be and how our own writing practices have worked in the past, currently work, and might work in the future. Well, what is ours? I (I mean mean you, us, whatever) have done a lot of thinking. Writing is about finding the seed of “truth” in any given text, even your own. You locate that seed and you plant it in your own words, thereby growing your own meaning from it. This is a charming theory, but it will not do for English 110. Like the seeds you love to collect, your theory of writing is going to evolve. It will become so much more than one seed. After you have learned to nurture the seeds with the right ingredients—evidence, context, purpose—you will discover a harvest composed of purpose, discourse, and interpretive power. There is a process of growth for the writing, just as it is for the seed. Writing needs its own photosynthesis, what I call the 3Rs: Researching, Rhetorical Analysis, and Revising. Each of these is part of our theory of writing. We cultivate ideas through a cycle of—from planting seeds to a harvesting meaning.

R1: Researching

Coming into Freshman Composition, your idea of researching went a little like this: Google, google some more, a little more—and done. In Freshman Composition, however, your theory of writing will grow out of research. You will learn to seek until your find. You will continue to look for the seed of truth, but now you will look for it in various sources. That means, you will have to get familiar with different “grounds”or ”fields” or “genres” for your seed: magazine articles, newspaper print articles, essays, scholarly articles, websites, YouTube videos, etc. The process of finding suitable-seeds will be difficult, but it is this process that will strengthen the claims of your work, allowing you to make meaning out of what you read. Our process looks a little like this: (1) coming up with a series of keywords for our search (2) using the search box of a credible online database from Google Scholar to CUNY Onesearch, where your favorite databases will be Jstor, Academic OneFile, and EbscoHost (3) Searching until you discover other seeds of the “truth” that can support your essay. (4) Scanning the document for your keywords to find evidence (4) Narrowing down your search for the necessary genres (newspaper, magazine, web, and scholarly).

R2: Rhetorical Analysis

Prior to Composition 1//English 110, your theory of writing went a little like this: Writing is deep. It’s about going below the surface of a text and finding that kernel of truth. Prior to this class, you assumed that at the heart of all texts, there was a truth or “stance” that the author wanted to share with the reader. You were always concerned about finding this seed of truth or purpose behind a text, but looking back, you only had a few tools to bring this seed to life. For instance, do you remember your final research paper in high school, Native Son: A Critical Analysis?

This essay was a great accomplishment at the time. It taught you how to read a text to understand its purpose. It taught you how to draw evidence from the context and the author to interpret the work. It even taught you how to pull evidence from the text to support your interpretation. It can be likened to another essay you will come across in your first year writing class: The Source-Based Essay. In this essay, you will be assigned to pick a language-based topic. Then, you will find four sources (specifically a magazine article, a newspaper article, scholarly article, a web-based source) on that topic and do a rhetorical analysis of those sources. Trust me, this process may seem straightforward or easy, but it is not. A rhetorical analysis consists of analyzing the rhetorical parts of an essay as put forth by Aristotle, but even further-so by the necessary parts of the rhetorical situation. Rhetoric, itself has to do with any piece of writing that is used to influence its audience. The rhetorical situation is whatever problem (context, existence, purpose, author) existed to bring that writing into existence. Sound good so far? Well, further rhetorical analysis on any source requires you to know nine rhetorical components. At the moment, you know about three. Digging through a text to find your “seed” of truth will not do for the Source-Based Essay. You will need to understand the entire ecosystem of the seed in order to do a quality rhetorical analysis.You will need to locate, explain, and support the text’s author, audience, tone, purpose, stance, genre, language, medium, and rhetorical situation.

Thus, in your first essay of your college writing, you will have to understand far more about finding the “seed” of truth buried in text. Your theory of writing will be concerned with finding the “seed”and growing it by nurturing it with other “elements”—rhetorical “elements” that is. Just as the sun, water, nutrients from the soil—all combine in the photosynthesis process, writing is a seed that requires an analysis to grow. Our theory looks at all the elements of a text, from the publisher down to the font, to extract meaning around the relationship between author, tone, purpose, genre, and more. You will have to understand and take responsibility for the rhetorical parts of the text. Here is an example of a news source I found using an online database called Jstor, which will be new to you since you are not accustomed to using anything besides Google Scholar. Like your high school paper, you will be able to pinpoint the author, purpose, and stance quite easily. Other rhetorical parts will be more difficult to support and locate.

R3: Revision

Revision is the aspect of our theory if writing that will contribute most to our growth.

Planting the seed of your own ideas is important, just as important as integrating the right elements of rhetorical analysis and seeking the right nutrients of research. But the most helpful and impactful part of the writing process is gaining insight from peer reviews. The revision process will introduce you to peer reviews with other students, who will use a rubric to give you feedback on what is most important. In this process, you will find such a refreshment from seeing how other seeds grow. Often, you will even share growth concepts. Revisiting your drafts after getting feedback is pivotal because it gives you the new lens you need. Here is a look at how you used group feedback to make some upgrades to you draft:

The Harvest

The harvest is where you see what your ideas can become when you take them through the 3Rs cycle.

In one of your assignments, Composition in Two Parts, you will use two different genres to communicate the key message(s) to the audience of your choosing. Here is where you go from nurturing the seed to seeing the seed come alive.

Writing isn’t just about the seed. I think you’ve seen that. If you invest in that seed, starting by planting the little that you do know, you will see a harvest of knowledge. What is the relationship between our theory of writing and how we create this knowledge? It’s a cycle of courage, to offer the most critical and inventive ideas we can, to hold them up to the light of evidence, to weigh them against the elements of rhetoric, and to allow them to be changed. That is our true theory of writing. It is our true journey from seed to harvest. If you take that step each time you write, your knowledge will become fruit that holds seeds of its own, able to multiply and grow beyond your wildest dreams. And you see, that is the utility of our seeds. Though they start small, they grow to produce fruit that will multiply knowledge. If you were wondering, how might this theory of writing be applied to other writing situations both inside and outside the classroom?

The harvest you develop in your writing here will grow beyond this field. It will grow across fields of history, math, art, and science.

I know this letter is a lot to take in right now, which is why I put it in a letter genre so that you could always have something to go back to. Anytime you feel overwhelmed or lost, return to this letter and let it remind you that your future is in good hands—your own.

You got this. See you around, kiddo.

Sincerely,

Imani Carter—2020