Take a few minutes to think about what writing means to you. If you close your eyes, lean back, and think about writing, what comes to your mind? Do you imagine a journalist sitting behind a cluttered oak desk pounding away on an old Underwood typewriter? Do you imagine a young woman curled up in the corner of a trendy coffeeshop scribbling angrily in a tattered journal? Do you imagine a middle-aged man jotting a grocery list on a small, flip-top notepad? Do you imagine a small child scrawling page after page of jagged, swirling crayon monsters? Or a teenager flipping madly through an encyclopedia the night before a paper is due, desperate to come up with a decent 3 to 5 page paper?
In truth, writing is all of these things, but it is also much more. Writing is more than just a part of school that you dread. It's more than 5 page essays or 1 page reading responses or even 400 page bestselling novels. One thing to keep in mind is this: writing is NOT a product. Some traditional models for teaching writing have treated writing as a product that is created. An end to a means.
We, here at the Writing Center, take the alternate, more progressive view. The view that writing is a means to an end. Writing is a process, a method, a means of discovery that leads the writer to new ideas and new discoveries. Writing is thinking. Through writing you make connections between previous experiences and ideas and new areas of thought that you are experiencing. Writing should be, and can be, a transcendent experience, in which the writer leaves his/her normal mode of thinking and transcends to a new mode of thinking. It is through writing that we can achieve not only new ideas, but new ways to develop new ideas.
That's not to say that all writing is transcendental. Some writing is just writing. At its most basic, writing is communicating.
How about this. You write your composition so well that you don't need any editing!
