Introduction: What Is Writing, Really?

by Glenn Lester

A few semesters back, I was working with a student in a writing class. The student, who I’ll call Ana, was searching for a topic for an upcoming research project. The topic had to be related in some way to writing, and Ana was struggling. Ana claimed they had no experience with writing. Literally none.

A few minutes into our conversation, however, Ana told me about an art therapy program they had participated in. They had written some things there. Ana had found it helpful to write down what they were thinking and feeling.

Does Ana’s experience sound familiar to you?

It sure sounded familiar to me. For years, I’ve observed that many of my students write for one reason and one reason only: to complete a class assignment. Like many other student writers, Ana found it difficult to connect the writing they did for a grade with the writing they did for individual satisfaction. And because of this, it seemed that Ana’s definition of “writer” did not include Ana.

But once Ana made the connection between personal writing and school-sponsored writing, their research project suddenly opened up. They could research and document the value of writing for therapeutic and healing purposes—a value they had personally experienced. Ana ultimately realized that they had already developed a writerly identity—and they could further define who they were as a writer through school-sponsored writing.

In this chapter, we want to help you make the same conceptual leap as Ana: from thinking that writing is merely a tool to achieve a grade to understanding how you can use writing to achieve personal and community goals. Ultimately, we want you to be able to articulate your own identity as a writer.

This chapter is divided into three sections, each written by a recently graduated writer— someone who very recently sat in your shoes. Each author will share their expertise and experience with an aspect of writing that is not school-sponsored. We explore three types of writerly identity:

Throughout the chapter, each author will explore one of these writerly identities in more detail. As you’ll see, each of these critical concepts of writing aligns with the ideas and findings of writing researchers and scholars from the 1980s to today. We introduce some of these concepts and theories, not to bog you down with jargon, but to help you begin to understand and define who you are as a writer. In doing so, we want to suggest that who you are as a writer depends much more on your own reasons for writing than on any outside definition or standard.

If you are a student who has already recognized the power of writing for building personal agency, resilience, and social engagement, then great! Come along as we explore ways to use writing for these purposes. But if you are skeptical of the value of writing outside of school—or if you just plain don’t like to write—then please trust us, and keep reading.

Personal Agency and Self-Expression

by Taylor Lucas

It wasn’t until my first college writing course that the concept of a writer’s identity came into play. Like Ana, I wasn’t sure it was possible to think like a real writer and do “real” writing. In fact, the biggest lesson that introduced the concept of a writer’s identity—and why writing mattered—was when my English teacher required students to get approval of their thesis statements before they could begin working on writing analytical essays. After careful consideration of the essay prompts and drafting and redrafting a thesis statement, I would finally, hesitantly, approach her with my thesis statement. She’d read it, hand my paper back to me, and ask me a question that sticks with me to this day: “So what?”

What she meant by that, of course, was that I needed to consider and clarify the implications of my argument, but I found the question So what? to be intimidating. So what? suggested that I had to center my focus solely around what the audience should do with my topic. I’d spent class periods carefully considering what angle and argument my teacher would want to read, hoping to write something that would please her, as she was my sole audience. Of course, the audience is important, but it is easy to forget that one of the most beneficial things that writing does is allow the writer to gain personal agency. It was easier to see the obvious answers to So what? I was writing for a grade, responding to predetermined prompts. As a beginning writer, it was difficult for me to accept that what I said held value beyond percentage points and grades. I knew how to strategically meet my teachers’ expectations, and I knew how to tailor my message to an audience. But So what? encouraged me to think about how writing could benefit me, personally, in addition to my audience. Through practice, I learned that part of writing is considering what I wanted to accomplish from my work and what I wanted the words on the page to mean to me; asking these questions allows you to start developing personal agency through the act of writing.

Even if you don’t feel like a writer, it is imperative to understand that, like me, you will benefit from writing, firstly by developing personal agency. Educational psychologists Barry Zimmerman and Timothy Cleary define personal agency as your “capability to originate and direct actions for given purposes” (45). To me, “originating” and “directing actions” for a purpose sounds a lot like answering the question So what? So, because writing helps writers develop knowledge about themselves, their interests, their goals, and how they fit into the world around them, writing contributes to personal agency.

According to writing scholar Peter Elbow, writing can help students discover hidden meanings, explore their feelings, and communicate (2), all of which build personal agency. The development of personal agency can be broken down into several sections, including feelings/self-expression, thoughts, and actions/goals. What you’ll notice is that all of these topics can be found in all sorts of writing that you do, whether for class or for personal purposes.

Part of developing personal agency means to discover and understand your own feelings. Writing theorist James Berlin suggests that the world around us “provides sensory images that can be used in order to explore the self. … Authentic self-expression can thus lead to authentic self-experience for both the writer and the reader” (485). And when the writer is the reader, in a sense, then the writer can gain more perspective on their own, well, perspective.

Writers do this in several ways, including journaling, blogging, and even posting on social media, in addition to the more “predictable” types of school-sponsored writing like articles and essays. While you’ve probably been assigned a personal narrative at some point during your education, other forms of writing that you likely do frequently and by choice have helped you learn to express yourself too.

Sometimes the thought of consistent, assigned writing can sound difficult or overwhelming. Students might think that consistent writing means that they need to sit down for hours to write an eloquent piece of work that accurately describes and portrays exactly what they want it to. This may seem intimidating, but it is not necessarily true. Even writing a few paragraphs in your journal every day can help you process your emotions and retrace your thoughts. Berlin suggests that “discovering the true self in writing will simultaneously enable the individual to discover the truth
of the situation which evoked the writing” (485).

Writing also teaches you how to express your thoughts and feelings to others, including family members, friends, classmates, and even potential employers or professional colleagues. Writers face the challenge of explaining their opinions and ideas by blending passion and research. I call this a challenge because producing eloquently written work with the goal to inform/entertain/persuade the reader is not an easy task. First, writers have to learn to do research, which in turn teaches you how to evaluate sources and select critical information. Then, you have to relay that information, as well as expand upon it in a way that your readers can understand. This process of selecting pertinent ideas and communicating them efficiently is helpful in classroom, casual, and professional settings.

In addition to learning about self-expression and strong communication, writing teaches you to go out of your comfort zone and reach tangible goals and offers proof of self-growth. As I mentioned earlier, journal entries or casual social media posts can provide you with a physical trail of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. In fact, any writing can provide this trail of evidence of your thinking as long as you keep track of it. Writing teaches you to challenge yourself to meet goals; completing a 5–7 page essay by the deadline shows you that you were able to achieve a goal. Continuing to meet goals, both in and out of the classroom, builds your confidence. You can take this one step further by submitting your work to literary magazines and conferences. Actions like this force you to brave the next step and share your hard work with others in your field. This provides you with tangible proof that you’ve written work worth being shared, and in doing so, sharing your thoughts and feelings with others.

So what? You’ve tried your hand at writing. You’re starting to recognize that any form of writing counts as “real writing.” And now you understand that any attempt at writing, whether it be an article or a journal or a personal narrative, or creative writing story, can help you develop your personal agency. Now it’s time to begin considering your identity as a writer.

You might be thinking, “There’s no way I’ll ever be as good of a writer as my peers,” but it’s important to realize that everyone’s writerly identity will look different. Comparison is a normal part of many fields, writing among them; when you catch yourself comparing your work to the work of your peers, remember to ask yourself, “So what?” What are you learning about yourself and the communities you engage through your work?

Simply putting your best foot forward will be the best way to start your journey towards calling yourself a writer and developing your own personal agency. As you take this first step to calling yourself a writer, you’ll see personal growth not only in your writing style but also in your personal life. Perhaps your passions might flourish as you write about them, or maybe your ability to express yourself emotionally, creatively, and critically will expand as you learn to write consistently. As you build your personal agency and start to see your voice grow through all of the writing you do, you’ll learn that writing also teaches you resilience, both academically and personally. In our view, “real writers” ask themselves, “So what, for me?”

Building and Maintaining Resilience

by Sydney Doyle

Personal agency acts as a stepping stone towards understanding resilience and its role in personal and academic writing. What sparked my understanding of resilience in writing was a metaphor from one of my first college writing classes: writing is a lot like training to run a marathon. My professor went on: “Runners have to build stamina slowly to multiply their miles while minimizing their minutes—writing, and learning to write, involves the same kind of stamina.” Sounds simple enough, right? It did to me. All it would take to have me acing essays and finessing fiction would be to write as much as I possibly could—easy! But I quickly realized that, much like training for a marathon, developing my writing skills didn’t mean simple repetition. Instead, I needed to develop resilience. After all, you’re not a prepared marathon runner if you spend all your time training on the treadmill at a single speed.

Don’t believe my metaphor? That’s okay! Instead, take wisdom from writers David Bayles and Ted Orland, who remark that what is needed to write well is “a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way” (21).

If you take anything from this crash course on writing resilience, take the idea that resilience is not something specific to your writerly abilities. Practicing resilience in one aspect of your life tends to flow outwards, making this something useful to you regardless of how you feel about writing. In fact, the experts agree again here. Recently, a group of scholars at the University of Michigan conducted a six-year study of how students wrote in college, ultimately concluding that “writing led students to various forms of personal and social development,” especially when students took an active role in navigating their own writerly identities (Gere 320).

But, this leaves us to wonder: isn’t personal resilience a very different thing from resilience in the classroom or a social setting? What does developing writerly resilience have to do with your identity as a person outside of writing, or in your community? We see some possible answers to these questions in our next section, which discusses writing for social engagement.

Writing for Social Engagement

by Alison Overcash

My co-authors have shown how writing can build personal agency and resilience, which are two valuable intrinsic benefits that I have experienced as well. When I was in high school, I started writing in my journal every day to help me cope with my mental illness. Journaling allowed me to explore my emotions and personal goals while developing my skills as a writer. I also enjoyed writing for school, but ultimately, I found myself wishing that my words could actually make a difference in the world. I couldn’t help but compare myself to my favorite authors, who seemed to have been born with a destiny to change the world, while I was simply writing into a void. While the personal benefits alone make writing a worthwhile endeavor, I didn’t fully embrace my identity as a writer until I started writing for audiences besides myself and my teachers.

Once I started studying English in college, I learned that writers have the power to educate, persuade, and empower their readers by practicing the art of rhetoric. As you study composition, you will learn, just as I did, how to harness the power of language to engage with the world around you.

Even when your audience only includes your teacher, that’s still “real” writing. However, expanding this audience beyond yourself and your teachers can help you understand your own writerly identity and decide how you want to wield this unique power.

You may feel distinctly aware of your position as a student, meaning that you might feel more like a “writing student” than a “real writer.” However, the writing that you do in your everyday life is just as valid as writing a novel or essay, and as Taylor points out, personal or self-sponsored writing has just as many personal benefits—and, I would argue, additional social benefits—as any piece of school-sponsored writing. You probably already practice various forms of digital writing, which involves applying the skills you learned in class to create creative arrangements of multimedia and text. Social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. frequently use the same rhetorical strategies as an argumentative essay, even if this isn’t done intentionally. In the Writing Spaces essay, “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You about College Writing—and One Thing It Can’t,” Ann N. Amicucci argues that the rhetorical strategies that students use on social media can also be effective in an academic setting. As with any essay, a social media post requires the writer to understand and appeal to the rhetorical situation at hand.

During my first semester as an English major, I wrote a personal narrative about my experiences with depression. After receiving some great feedback during a peer review activity, I revised the essay extensively and eventually got to a point where I was truly proud of what I had created. My peers encouraged me to share the essay with the people close to me that were mentioned in the essay. Every time I shared my writing with someone new, I was showered with compliments and deep conversations, and it felt like I was exposing a little piece of my soul every time, but it gave me a rush of excitement to show people what I was capable of doing.

“You should post this on Facebook,” my mom had suggested.

I had laughed at the idea initially, and responded, “Nobody wants to read my homework assignments except for you, mom!”

However, I was so proud of my work that I eventually decided to rewrite it as a blog post, which I published on Medium and shared to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Several friends and family members reached out to me to thank me for putting their own complex thoughts and confusing feelings about mental illness into words. Multiple people reassured me that my voice was important, and my words were valuable. By repurposing my personal narrative as a blog post, I was able to connect with people in ways that I never would have been able to if I hadn’t stepped out of my comfort zone.

In studying rhetoric, I discovered that the writers I idolized were held in such high esteem because of their ability to say the right thing, the right way, at the right time. The next time you write something for a school assignment, a journal entry, or a social media post, I encourage you to reflect on the rhetorical situation as well as your own motivations for addressing that situation. These motivations may be a culmination of those we have discussed thus far, or you may have your own reasons entirely. Some writers choose to harness the transformative power of writing for personal growth, while others, like myself, use writing as a tool to promote social change. Now, it’s up to you to figure out what motivates you to write.

Conclusion

by Glenn Lester

I’m a writing teacher. And at this point in my career, I’ve worked with several hundred writers—all of them “real writers” in my book. But it’s not my book that counts—it’s theirs.

And yours.

Taylor, Sydney, and Alison are just three of my former students (who are now friends and colleagues). In this essay, each has discussed their own reasons for writing, and the moments, experiences, and readings that led them to construct their own writerly identities. Specifically, these concepts about writing that helped Taylor, Sydney, and Alison develop their identities as real writers. We hope that reading our stories will inspire you to discover your reasons for writing, and that you might try out elements of their processes and concepts as you construct your own identity.

For instance, in our “Personal Agency and Self-Expression” section, Taylor points out that she had plenty of practice writing in high school, but it wasn’t until she began to consider the purpose of writing besides to earn a grade that she began to understand what writing meant to her. Having been challenged to go beyond her initial assumptions, Taylor began to see writing as a cognitive process that she could adjust and control. Soon, writing became a tool for Taylor to build her own personal agency. You might compare Taylor’s experiences with your own as you move ahead in writing.

Likewise, Sydney’s section on writing and resilience raises a series of interesting questions that you might attempt to build on in your reflections and discussions about writing in your college classes: Does writing, as Sydney suggests, provide an occasion to develop resilience in other areas of your life? If so, how does writing help us become more personally resilient? What does that resilience-building ability have to do with treating writing as a “series of concrete steps,” as Sydney describes? Does the personal resilience built through writing act as a bridge to engaging in social action and solving the problems you want to solve?

Alison, in our “Writing for Social Engagement” section, offers a different perspective. Alison describes an early experience using writing to build resilience through journaling. But they did not truly construct their own identity as a writer until they discovered the power they had to affect readers through their words. The act of sharing their writing with others changed Alison’s relationship to their own writing and its purpose. You might take note of how sharing your writing with peers, classmates, and friends—whether through an in-class peer review exercise, a campus literary journal, or some other informal publication—changes your thoughts about who you are as a writer.

Or take my former student Ana, who I discussed in the introduction. Ana didn’t see themselves as a writer—even though they had a good deal of experience with writing—because they didn’t see the writing they did “for Ana” as “real writing.” But by conceptually reframing their experiences, Ana took the first step in the journey of understanding who they were as a writer.

So, constructing your identity as a writer is not as simple as selecting from a list of three, or five, or ten possible reasons for writing. You certainly can’t learn your writerly identity from an online quiz or the Hogwarts sorting hat. What you can do, however, is experiment. Embrace the new.

Beyond experimentation, you might also find value in what other writers have to say about how they see themselves. For instance, in another Writing Spaces essay, Sarah Allen explodes the myth of inspiration by examining “The Inspired Writer vs. The Real Writer.” Allen’s essay resonates with me because it helps me understand that I can be a “real writer” even when I’m not feeling inspired. And in fact, as Allen argues, part of being a “real writer” might be writing even when—especially when—you aren’t feeling inspired!

Another Writing Spaces essay, “Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters In Our Writing,” Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Eunjeong Lee offer a striking metaphor for writerly identity: “language architects.” For Alvarez, Wan, and Lee, a language architect “works” language in order to help build up their community. What an original way to think about who you are as a writer! Or take this quotation from Wendy Bishop and David Starkey’s “Keywords in Creative Writing,” which describes the therapeutic power of writing: “Not only does writing help authors process the events of their younger years, it also helps them grapple with the continuing … challenges of their lives” (180).

These three conceptions of writing can help me figure out what kind of writer I can and want to be. Like Allen, I want to be a writer who will persevere through adversity without waiting for so-called inspiration to get the writing done. Like Alvarez, Wan, and Lee, I see myself as building something—an architect of language who writes for and with my community. And, as I write, I will take heart from Bishop and Starkey’s point that writing is a way of processing both past and present, and that its positive effects on me extend beyond finishing any particular piece of writing.

But just because these three perspectives resonate with me doesn’t mean they will or even should resonate with you. Instead, my point is that you can start to build your writerly identity by taking note of what other writers say about their reasons for writing. So, as you explore writing in your college writing courses, take note of the writing advice that resonates with you—especially the writing advice that goes beyond “how to get a good grade” or “how to give your teacher what they want.” Try writing it down! And take note of the new concepts you’re introduced to—perhaps you’ll spend time learning about literacy sponsorship or discourse communities or social advocacy. As you do, challenge yourself to not just learn the concepts, but also to identify which of those concepts can help you discover your reasons for writing, your own writerly identity.

As we composed this chapter together, one theme came up over and over: the idea that anyone can be a writer—and that everyone should think of themselves as a writer. There is not one “right way” to be a writer, and no one “right” reason for writing. Writing for yourself can be incredibly valuable. And writing for others can be equally valid and meaningful. But recognizing what makes you the real writer you are means recognizing your purposes and reasons for writing.

And so, we offer this new definition of a writer:

Works Cited

Allen, Sarah. “The Inspired Writer vs. The Real Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemlinsky, Parlor Press, 2010, pp. 34–44.

Alvarez, Sara P., Amy J. Wan, and Eunjeong Lee. “Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters.” In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4, edited by Dana Lynn Driscoll, Megan Heise, Mary K. Stewart, and Matthew Vetter, Parlor Press, 2022, pp. 1–17.

Amicucci, Ann N. “Four Things Social Media Can Teach You about College Writing—and One Thing It Can’t.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4, edited by Dana Lynn Driscoll, Megan Heise, Mary K. Stewart, and Matthew Vetter, Parlor Press, 2022, pp. 18–34.

Bayles, David, and Ted Orland. Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. The Image Continuum, 1993.

Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English, vol. 50, no. 5, 1988, pp. 497–494. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/377477.

Bishop, Wendy, and David Starkey. “Therapy (and Therapeutic).” Keywords in Creative Writing. Utah State University Press, 2006, pp. 178–186. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgr61.40.

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 46, no. 1, 1995, pp. 72–83. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/358871.

Flower, Linda. “What is Community Literacy?” Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement. Southern Illinois University Press, 2008, pp. 9–43.

Gere, Anne Ruggles, ed. Developing Writers in Higher Education: A Longitudinal Study. University of Michigan Press, 2019. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvdjrpt3.4.

Koch, Stephen. Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. Random House, Inc., 2003.

Zimmerman, Barry, and Tim Cleary. “Adolescents’ Development of Personal Agency: The Role of Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Self-Regulatory Skill.” In Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Adolescents, Information Age Publishing, 2006, pp. 45–69.

*This article originally appeared in Writing Spaces Volume 5 and can be viewed here in its original format.