Assignment sheet for Process Narrative

Reflecting on your Writing Process

Purpose
This assignment provides an opportunity to document and analyze your writing process. The purpose of this work is to prompt you to actively WATCH what you do as you write and to reflect on how and why you produce writing. These reflections will enable you to: characterize your different processes for writing; identify your strengths and challenges as a writer; and become aware of possibilities for writing “differently”.

Description of the assignment
Write an essay to analyze and reflect on how you create writing for the different rhetorical purposes you confront in your life. You are doing lots of writing this term that will serve as evidence for your process. You may choose to describe your practices for writing: notes, conversations, brainstorming documents, and successive drafts, and final documents written for a range of purposes. Descriptions of the social, interactive practices (such as talking to friends, going to forums, surfing the net, listening to music, etc) are also important to this characterization. To produce the evidence necessary for this essay, take notes on how you write long assignments (like this one), writing you do for your own purposes (chats, updating your facebook, notes to friends), and any other kind of writing that is important to your life.

Based on this evidence you will create a coherent essay where you present: a focused characterization of your overall process; a description of differences in how you write for different purposes, reflections on the strengths and difficulties in your various processes, and a plan for how/what you want to change about your process.

Criteria
A series of statements to characterize your practices during each part of the writing process
Detailed observations/descriptions to support or “prove” your claims about “how” you write
Discussion of variations/distinctions in how you write for different audiences, purposes, and genres
Discussion of how/whether your writing process is changing
Reflections on which parts of your writing process are working and which are not so effective
Synthetic conclusion that observes the strengths in your process, notes how your process is changing, and sets up goals for strengthening your writing habits (and considers the reality factor of whether you will actually change)

Form:
Introduction that characterizes your writing process in a general way
Specific discussion (supported by examples and illustrations) to describe each part of your writing process, as well as how your process is different within different rhetorical situations
Reflective discussion on the on-going evolution of your process
Conclusion that sets up a plan for your future writing process

Length: suitable for in-depth development of your material, minimum 5 pages.

Due dates:
Documentation of your writing process: Blog 6, Blog 10 (2/22); Blog 11 (2/25)
Draft Process essay: March 11
Due Final New Literacy Narrative: March 22