My Story

My name is Connor Kaniewski, and I am a senior majoring in Economics and double minoring in Interdisciplinary Writing and Entrepreneurship. At Wake Forest University, my interest in writing really surprised me. In middle and high school, I was strictly a math and science student. I remember always doing my math homework prior to reading a book or drafting a paper for English class. I dreaded analyzing papers, and I vividly remember having an outline-based writing process that I used for every single assignment; I always constructed a five-paragraph outline: an introduction with a thesis as the last sentence, three body paragraphs, and then a conclusion that repeated my essay. Additionally, there was significant tension between my teacher’s academic requirements and what I wanted to include in my writing. In turn, I felt my grammar, syntax, and range of writing narrow. I was extremely focused on writing what my teachers told me to write as opposed to writing what I found to be the most fascinating. It was not productive for my own writing development, and I became increasingly frustrated and uninterested in any written assignment.

Reflecting back on my own development as a writer at Wake Forest University, I feel that as an underclassman I was accustomed to using the standard five-paragraph format with the thesis at the end of the introduction paragraph. Additionally, I wrote short paragraphs, and each sentence consisted of around ten words per sentence. Lastly, my syntax revolved around using short and common vernacular. As mentioned in the Curtis reading, my personal development, specifically my lack of confidence, played a large role in shaping my rocky early writing collegiate career. Now, as I finish the Interdisciplinary Writing minor, I believe I have experienced a lot of writing and personal development, which is a testament to my fluency and control of the English language as well as my variety of structural knowledge. Lastly, and most importantly, I feel that I now have a strong purpose for writing. To best account for my own development, I will examine patterns of paragraph development, syntactic growth, and my overall purpose for writing. I feel that these three main factors will grant me the opportunity to standardize my writing development in the most analytical way, which will give me the ability to track my writing and personal development throughout my collegiate writing. 

As pointed out by Amy Deviit in her piece titled “Transferability and Genres”, she concludes that the concept of genre creates a massive challenge for the learning of writing. In essence, she argues that “writers use the genres they know when faced with a genre they do not know” (Devitt 222). Additionally, she points out that “genres might seem to represent generalizable writing skills, ones that can move from one unique situation to another within the same genre” (Devitt 217). Devitt makes an extremely strong argument as to why boxing different types of writing in genres can create such an educational nightmare. As students, we learn how to write different types of sentences in middle school, which implies that we can then write in any situation, but in reality, just because we are prepared to write a research paper in a first-year composition class does not necessarily mean we are also as equally prepared as students to write a research paper in an advanced science class. 

From Devitt’s point of view, she argues that learning how to write is like a massive literary web. Students of the craft start off in the center, and after each lesson, slowly learn how to expand their knowledge a little bit more. Then, in order to learn something new, the student has to fall back on lessons and practice from an earlier moment in order to begin to practice and grasp their next concept. As Devitt puts it, a “new genre is not the same as the known ones, but knowing some genres gives the associate a place to start, a location, however different, from which to begin writing” (Devitt 220). Finally, the last claim Devitt makes in regard to why the creation of genres creates a challenge for learning writing is when she writes, “such variation from the genre’s situation does not stem from my being an expert in writing or even from my being an experienced writer. All writers must vary from the genre’s situation every time they write, because no two situations are identical” (Devitt 218). All in all, writers take what they learned in past lessons and experiences and then do their best to apply it to new writing situations. Personally, I know what I do not like when it comes to writing: having to force and focus my thoughts into a rubric and structure that is not my own.

After reading Devitt’s piece, my writing experience in my high school freshman year history class stands out as a particularly difficult one. It was my first exposure to writing five-paragraph analytical essays. I vividly remember my teacher using a rigid key for grading. He would use various letters and symbols to indicate areas of weakness or moments where we would have to revise. As I started to learn how my teacher graded, I became fixated with trying to get no comments on my essay; other members of the class joined in, and by the end of the semester, there was a competition in place to see who could write an essay with the least number of comments. Looking back, as students of this class, we learned how to write a very niche style of writing. Frankly, we learned how to write an essay that our professor thought was excellent. There was no instruction about how to actually write, and we used our past experiences and papers in class to attempt to write a better essay with each assignment. My experience in my freshman year high school history class proves Devitt’s argument about genres. The skills I learned were not transferable to other classes I wrote analytical essays in because each teacher had a different standard and set of expectations for what a proper essay should entail. 

When I came to college, my first-year seminar briefly touched on exploring the college writing process, but we mainly learned about the rhetorical impact of various famous American speeches from the 20th century. However, something clicked during the fall of my sophomore year in WRI 210, which was taught by Dr. Aull. I vividly remember sitting in the basement of Tibble Hall when I felt two ends meet in my head as I was analyzing two works by Professor Justin Catanoso, which was an assignment that was part of the final case study project. I felt the concepts of structure and analysis meet. At this moment, I realized that analysis should drive structure as opposed to structure forcing the content, which was how I wrote previously. As a result, WRI 210 was an especially formative writing experience during my writing career in college. After my WRI 210 project, the ease of writing came more naturally. It did not feel so formulaic, and I had a much easier time beginning papers than I previously did in high school. Each assignment I wrote had a different structure because content became the driving force. As I have progressed through the Interdisciplinary Writing minor, I feel that my ability to write various types of genres has strongly developed. I have been exposed to many different types of works, journalism, poetry, and creative writing, which has given me an opportunity to feel more comfortable with different writing structures and styles. 

I really struggled with learning and mastering the genre of journalistic writing; honestly, even after taking Introduction to Journalism during the fall of my junior year, I still do not have a firm grasp on it, and I am extremely challenged by disciplinary expectations in writing. In analytical and research paper writing, I generally think about those two writing genres like an upward-facing cone, especially in the beginning. The introduction starts with a broad idea or concept and then as the writing continues, the topic becomes more narrow and defined. As the topic and argument become more specific, the thesis at the end of the introductory section ties the essay together. I learned about writing essays in such a way during my senior year English class in high school. These concepts from my journalism class built upon the knowledge and exposure I gained in my FYS 100 and WRI 111 classes that I took during my freshman year. 

However, in the genre of journalistic writing, articles are supposed to start similar to an inverted cone, and then the third or fourth paragraph is the nut graph. Trying to completely switch how I began a writing assignment proved to be more challenging than I thought. In journalism, a nut graf is a paragraph, typically the third or fourth one, that explains the context of the story. In most journalistic writing, the essential facts of a story are included in the lead, the first sentence or two of the story. The nut graf tells the reader what the writer is up to; it delivers a promise of the story's content and message. It’s called the nut graf because, like a nut, it contains the “kernel,” or essential theme, of the story. These features of journalistic writing caused me to spend extra time on my assignments because I had to completely rethink how I started writing assignments. 

Another aspect of journalistic writing that challenged me was the proper way to end a piece. It seemed that with each assignment I had to learn a different way to end an article. The content and topic really set the stage for how an article should conclude. In some instances, I was instructed to end my article with a summary of the facts and answers to any questions that the article may have raised. For example, if it is a crime story and the police have not yet reported that the crime has been solved, I was told to end with a discussion of the ongoing police investigation and explain further, if more information is needed, what the police are seeking to learn and what can bring the case to a conclusion. If I wrote a hard news story on a political event, act of war or natural disaster, then there should be focus on the future at the conclusion of the piece. 

Contrastingly, in analytical and research paper writing, I typically conclude by considering the implications of my argument. There is also brief mention of what my argument implies in the broader discourse. Their differences in form and structure between journalistic writing and typical academic writing posed massive challenges for me as I tried to adapt and learn other disciplinary writing expectations.

The writing in my portfolio on the following webpages encapsulates writing genres that I participated in during my collegiate career: discipline guides, research papers, community writing, creative writing, and personal writing. I hope as you read some of my work you notice some of my writing cross-functional skills. I feel that my writing style showcases various types of my identity and personality, which I am proud of.

I hope you enjoy reading my portfolio!