Group 3 Collaborative Journal

Throughout this course there have been multiple different main ideas and concepts that has been taught to us. The main concept of this course is to see how writing impacts our everyday life. These past four weeks I have realize that writing is a major factor in every one’s life in today’s day in age. Whether you are captioning an Instagram post, texting a friend, or writing a poem, we all use writing as a tool to communicate or entertain. This course has expanded my overall knowledge capacity of writing, it has challenged me in different aspects in writing that I’ve never faced. For example writing about peoples tweets is something I haven’t done before and it was very challenging.  I think this goes to show that this class’s main concept is to challenge the students in a unique way to make them realize that writing isn’t always traditional and it could be as simple as a tweet or quote.  Another concept of this class is that has been brought up multiple times is the question of why should we study writing? This question has made us all think deeply about it because it is not an easy question to answer. But the fact of the matter is we study writing to improve our better understanding of life. Studying writing allows us to see how people feel about certain topics and also understand different cultures and experiences one has.

When looking at the major concepts of this course you should also look at literacy.  Literacy is the ability to read and write.  When you think about it, that’s pretty much you do in this course.  Although you delve into more detail when reading and writing, they are the base of what this course is all about.  Discourse, as we have heard many times over the weeks is also a very important concept of this course.  Discourse is the process of identifying yourself through language.  This is a key concept in this course because much of what we read is how people use their writing to identify themselves.  In “The Library Card” by Wright, we saw a writer identify himself in his community as not well respected and pretty much looked down on by everyone except for one man.  Wright used discourse here to help explain where he fit in to his community and how it shaped him as person along with the forming of his own values.  Then there is learning and acquisition to consider.  Learning is taught to you in your conscious state of mind.  You are aware that you are retaining information when you are learning and that is what we have done in class whenever we learn about a new concept.  We pay attention to what Joe has to say and we consciously remember it.  Then with acquisition we are subconsciously or “unknowingly” absorbing knowledge.  An example of this would be when we were watching the “Everything’s a Remix” videos.  We were not actively trying to remember what we were learning but the next time we listened to Led Zeppelin on the radio, most of us would have remembered that they have used beats from other bands without even trying to recall it.