Tell me, what is writing?

What is it that comes to mind when a person reads or hears the word “writing?" Is it a poem? Is it a novel? Is it a song? Is it a video? Is it a speech? Is it an oral story? Is it a photograph? Is it the action of putting pen to paper? How is it that the word writing is defined?

------------------------------------------- a b ----------------------------------------

If you were to look in the dictionary, you would find the definitions of writing as follows:

According to Merriam-Webster, writing is defined as:

• "the act or process of one who writes: as the act of forming visible letters or characters; the act or process of literary or musical composition"
• "something written: as letters or characters that serve as visible signs of ideas, words, or symbols; a letter, note, or notice used to communicate or record; a written composition"

According to Oxford English Dictionary, writing is defined as:

• "the activity or skill of marking coherent words on paper and composing text"
• "written work, especially with regard to its style or quality"
• "a sequence of letters, words, or symbols marked on paper or some other surface"

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------

Before I began my journey in the writing program at MSU, I would have given you the most traditional and basic answer. If asked the question, "What is writing?" I probably would have laughed (because isn't the answer obvious?) and I would have told you that writing is the act of putting words on paper. I would have said it was the actual physical act of taking words and inscribing them upon paper or typing them onto a computer screen. I would have probably rattled off a definition that sounds a whole lot like I pulled it straight from Merriam-Webster or Oxford. I think we have commonly come to some "general understanding" that writing means one thing, yet only with further discovery do we learn that this "common knowledge" may not be so.

After beginning a more in-depth exploration of the subject of writing, I've come to learn that it can't be that simple. The word writing has so many more meanings and definitions than what we are regularly presented with. So, I asked a question. I asked, "What is considered writing in a world that largely relies on multimodality, and how does that change the way that people view writing?" That's where I began really learning what this whole writing thing is all about.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------

In our formal education, we are taught the most traditional ways of defining writing, "we tend, despite all of our sophisticated theorizing, to teach writing much as we have long taught it: the creative production or original works in learner streams that some reader receives and understands" (Johnson-Eilola, 200). We are rarely, if ever, asked to expand our definition beyond the way that the dictionary would define the word. So I took to my peers the question I have been asking myself. I really wanted to see if my peers had learned to look at such a "simple" subject, such a "simple" question, and think of it in a new and different way, or if they still thought of writing in the way that has been drilled into their heads since they were children. I wanted to see if the exploratory approach that most people take to sciences is applied when my peers take a look at writing too.

In order to do this, I created a survey in which my peers were asked to ponder the word writing and define it, and then identify different things as writing.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



The photograph directly above is a sample of the survey my peers were asked to complete. Across the survey there are questions that relate directly to the traditional definition of what writing is, but there are also a few examples of more contemporary definitions of writing. I also decided to include a few options that I may not see as writing, but that someone might consider writing.

My theory was that my peers would look at the survey and automatically circle the traditional definitions. I also thought that there was an unlikely chance that after seeing some of the other options, alongside the traditional option, maybe my peers would start to question their own definition of what writing is.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------

As can be seen from the above charts, twenty of my fellow MSU students were surveyed on what they thought "writing" was. These students came from many different academic focuses, ranging from the social sciences to the hard sciences to agriculture to the arts. Therefore I was given a wide range of different types of people surveyed. Of the pool of people surveyed there were five seniors, four juniors, eight sophomores, and three freshmen. In addition to simply being asked to identify what "writing" was from a list of things that could be considered "writing," my peers were asked to define "writing" in their own words. This is probably where I saw the most variation, given that the subjects were allowed to say whatever they thought here.While I will never know how my peers thought about the survey, and if the contemporary examples got them to question their definition of the word, I did get results that were unsurprising. With the exception of fellow writing majors, my peers largely viewed writing through the same lens that I saw it before I began studying writing.

The results of this survey largely fell in lines with the traditional definition of what writing is. Most of my peers viewed writing in the traditional sense. They looked at writing as either the physical inscription of words onto paper or screen, or as some variation of an alphabetic text. As you can see from the above charts, almost all of those surveyed identified a poem or a novel/book as writing. Additionally, a large population of those surveyed identified writing as a speech or a script. A majority of the people also identified writing as the act of putting words on paper. There were very few people who identified writing as something that was a bit more contemporary, as in a song without lyrics or a photograph.

I think my favorite part of the survey was the individual definitions that I got from the free response section. I got a lot of definitions that were different variations of "putting words/symbols on a page (verb), and a piece of text (noun)" these were most representative of the popular consensus. A variety of other people responded with something similar to, "writing is a way for people to put into words their feelings, thoughts, and observations." Again these fall in line with what my peers have conventionally been taught throughout their careers as students. There were two responses that just made me laugh. One stated: "Something we have had to do all through school :(" and the other stated: "Writing is a form of nonverbal communication."

The surprising responses came from just a few people, and oddly enough their academic focuses greatly varied. I found these few written responses to be quite enlightened beyond the traditional way of thinking of writing. A senior film major stated that they thought "Writing is both a verb and a creative process. In other words, writing is a visual means of communicating through a common language, and also can refer to someone's means of communicating a creative and original idea to tell a story." A sophomore psychology major reported that they believed writing to be "the process of communicating thoughts, images, or language by using a native vernacular to express said ideas." Finally, a sophomore pre-veterinary medicine major said that "writing is comprising letters and words to create a story, article, letter, or another form of writing." These definitions stood out to me because they were the most contemporary of all of the definitions my peers offered me.

What is interesting about this is that it didn't seem to matter which class standing a student had achieved, or the major that they were in for most of them to agree on the traditional definitions and examples of writing. This isn't terribly surprising considering most, if not all, of those surveyed likely received this sort of education on writing in their pre-collegiate studies. And throughout their college years, it is not likely that many of my peers have received an education that would have introduced them to the many different ways a person can view writing.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



After taking a deeper look at the professional, academic writing that has been done on the subject of writing I have really developed a deeper, and potentially more confusing, definition for what writing is. After doing my own mini-research, and standing on the shoulders of the giants who have explored this topic before me, I have come to the conclusion that writing can be just about anything, if you want it to be. I learned that writing is not just a piece of work that has been written by someone such as . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



A novel . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



A poem . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------

Or song lyrics . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



I learned that writing is not simply the act of putting words on paper to form phrases that mean something, such as . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



Scribbling words in your notebook . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



Or typing things out on your computer screen . . .

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



Writing doesn't have to be tied down to black words on a white background. Meg Callahan, author of the essay Intertextual Composition: The Power of the Digital Pen, agrees, "Text . . . can be print sources such as stories, textbooks, novels, poems, and essay. Text can also be non-print sources such as music, drama, video, art, and gesture" (48). Writing can be composing a song and then playing that song. Writing can be memorizing a speech and then reading it aloud for a room full of people. Writing can be a video that took hours of editing to get just right. Writing can be so many different things if we just open ourselves to the possibility of it.

In order to come up with my working definition of writing, I've had to do some re-defining of things that I thought I understood. I had to begin with redefining what I thought I knew to be "literature." At first I thought of works by Jane Austen, William Shakespeare, and the likes. I considered literature to be very rigidly defined--I thought of novels, poems, and plays. After a while, though, I changed that definition. I began understanding literature as "anything composed across modalities that told a story." I started approaching literature as if a movie, a play, a book, a short story, a comic book, a graphic novel, a tv show, or a song could be literature because each of them told some story--any story.

After broadening my definition of literature, I could open up my definition of a "text." Obviously, if all of these things could be literature, then they could also be texts, so a text became something in which a story is told (because even if it is a research paper or an academic article it is still telling the story of how the research was conducted and what results were found). Once I had decided that texts were the places where stories are told, and anything that told a story (no matter the modality and no matter what kind of story) I had to define writing.

This is where the going gets tough. Defining writing is never a simple task for anyone, particularly when you are looking to broaden the current working definition to include the new work spaces in which texts are created. But here's how I've come up with the definition I am working with now.

In order to develop a working definition of writing (which I am sure will only serve its purpose until I learn something new and develop a new definition) I studied up on a multitude of different professional writings on writing. I pulled part of my definition from Jay David Bolter who stated, in his novel Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, "All the ancient arts and crafts had this is common: that the craftsman must develop a skill, a technical state of mind in using tools and materials. Ancient and modern writing are technologies in the sense that they are methods of arranging verbal ideas in a visual space" (15). While I can't wholly agree that writing always revolves around verbal writing, part of the way I define writing comes from the idea that there must be a craftsman, a skill, and tools to develop some craft involved in this thing called "writing."

My faithful friend Johndan Johnson-Eilola also really helped shape my current working definition of writing. Johnson-Eilola's essay, The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation calls into question the difference between "truth" and "creativity." This article calls into question what the difference is between writing and composition. This text made me question what creativity is, and if writing is creativity, and if writing is the act of composing a unique text.

All of this questioning, all of the reading I've done on this topic brings me to my current definition of writing. Remembering that a text is something that has been composed in any modality in which a story is intentionally told, I've come to a tentative understanding that writing is composing a text, and also the text that has been composed. The craftsman has intentionally created something that tells a story, and by virtue of that intention they have created a text which I consider to be writing.

There will be resistance to this, of that I am sure, but just look at these things and tell me that they do not tell a story. Tell me that they have not been composed to tell us something.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



Does this not share with the world the story of a life? There are no words (orally speaking)--none at all--yet this video is a text that tells a story. This has been put together meticulously to do so. The creation of this piece took craftsmanship and the ability to work with a specific set of tools to create the text. Not only that but this seems to be done on a computer, which will come back around later, but for now let's just focus on the fact that this has been written, and is a piece of writing, by my definition.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



Let's take a look at this video. This one uses words, both written and vocalized, with drawings to give us some chunk of information. It's rather informative, and doesn't necessarily have a plot, and yet it tells a story. This tells the story of motivation. Is this not a text? Because I would call this a text, and if it is a text then it is a piece of writing.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------





Look at these photographs. Ignore the words on the page, and just look at the pictures themselves. Don't they each tell a story? Looking at the first photograph, one could tell a whole tale about this girl with a fiery yet fearful look in her eye. What about the second photo, it is easy to formulate a story on how these extinct creatures might be brought to life from advances in science. These pictures show us something, they tell us something. And if these photographs do tell a story (a picture says more than a thousand words, does it not?) then they are texts, and given that they are texts, then they are writing.

------------------------------------------ a b ----------------------------------------



I think you see my point. My point here is that yes, absolutely, words are writing, and the act of putting them together is writing, but there are so many other things that are also writing--depending on the way that you look at them. I am sure you could poke holes in my argument, in my definition, in the conclusion that I have come to from this research, but then maybe that means you, too, are expanding your definition of writing.

A major contributor to this would be the world wide web, in fact, according to Jay David Bolter, "the web has provided the most convincing evidence of the computer's potential to refashion the practice of writing" (xi). Our constant access and use of the internet has really opened up many different avenues of what writing can be. The many different modalities that have come out of our access to the internet also make a difference here, "technology . . . provides a new mode of writing and expression, one that allows students to capture the multimodality of texts in their everyday world" (Callahan, 64). If we consider more modalities than simply alphabetic text, we can come to a more broad definition of what writing may be. To this, of course, there is always resistance. We want to have a box into which we can place the word "writing" and to file it away in an orderly fashion, but alas it is not that simple after all.

So, I asked a question. I asked, "What is considered writing in a world that largely relies on multimodality, and how does that change the way that people view writing?" I think I've come to some sort of a conclusion here. I've come to the conclusion that writing is the intentional creation of a text in which a story is being told, and the actual text that is produced from such a composition. I think that just about anything can be considered writing, just so long as it tells a story. I think that working across modalities 100% influences the way that writing can be viewed and understood. Do I think that everyone will see writing in this way? No. Do I think that the many modalities definitively change the way people view writing? No.

But this just goes to show that maybe we need to expand our horizons. We need to have an understanding of the traditional definition of what writing is, but if we take the initiative to introduce the contemporary examples of writing to students at a younger age, we might just be able to more definitively say that multimodality does, in fact, change the way that people view and understand writing. I know it did for me.

Technology and you

The game layer. Interesting. I hear the words "game layer" and I imagine something along the lines of World of Warcraft and the Sims taking over the world. But really, it is something I never could have imagined. I don't hear the words "the game layer" and think of creating new ways to use technology to influence behaviors. This whole idea is that game dynamics, things that make games work, have a way of completely influencing the way that things actually work in the real world. Basically, the concept is that everything is a game in life. Every single person has a way of being motivated int he real world in the same way that they can be motivated to continue playing a game until they've succeeded to their desired level. This is such an intriguing concept, and one that I have never really thought of before. Yet I see how true it can be. It's easy for us to continue doing things if we reap some benefit from doing it. In fact, we often won't do something if we don't see some benefit, some reward, to be gained by doing so. We don't do our homework for fun, you know, we do it because it gives us the grade that we want in order to mark on along the path toward graduation. We don't get a degree for fun, we get it because we know that it will help us attain a good job. Attaining a good job will help us buy a good house, and live a comfortable life. Etc. It seems that nothing that we do is done without the consideration of the reward. Quite the concept.

Before even addressing "Gaming can make a better world" can we please just acknowledge how great it is that her name is Jane McGonigal? Like how cool is it that she gets to have the same lat name as one of the greatest witches in the entire Harry Potter series!? Jealous much. Now this Miss McGonigal, she encourages us to play more games. Wait, what? Did she just encourage the entire world to do exactly what we've been discouraged to do for the past . . . I don't know, ten years? Gaming, can apparently save the world. Gaming is really all about problem solving. And well, problem solving is what's going to allow us to save our world. We need to tackle to obstacles of the next century and the only way that we can do that is to problem solve. For gamers, they seem to feel most empowered and brilliant playing games, they have their biggest AHA moments when they play games. This sort of thing is exactly what needs to be brought into the real world. We need to feel the urgency of our epic mission, find the inspiration to attempt it, and feel empowered to follow the mission all the way until we succeed. This may take more work than we ever expected, and it may push us to our very limits, but whatever we set our minds to can be done. Now that's freaking cool. I've never really realized that games had this sort of power. In all honesty the only time I play games is when I am bored and have free time (which as a college student is awfully rare). And when I play games I don't feel like I am achieving anything other than alleviating my boredom and relieving the mounds of stress that sit on my shoulders each and every day. But if I really, really think about it, I guess it's pretty damn true that I am still solving some sort of problem.

Out of all this, we can look at games as tools to conquering the problems of the world that we live in. If we capitalize on the potential of the game layer, and the influence that games can have on people, the suggestion is that we can come up with solutions for all of the obstacles we currently face, and the ones that we are bound to face going forward. It's a little mind blowing to think of the potential power that these supposedly "mind-numbing" things called games have.

Who's Smarter?

Am I smarter now than I was before I read this text? Am I smarter than I was before technology started inundating and consuming my everyday life? I don't know. I'd sure like to think that I am not less smart because of it! I think it is not that I am smarter or dumber due to my use of technology and its function in my life, but rather that I think differently because of it.

I remember the days when we had to unplug the telephone line and plug in the computer line in order to dial up the internet that worked slower than molasses. I remember when I had to write down or memorize everyone's phone number to that I could reach them, and hope that they were at home when I called. I distinctly remember playing games on the boxy home computer that were nothing more than Sonic the Hedgehog, Math Blasters, Math Rescue, and Clue Finder's Adventures--all of which I had to battle my siblings for time to play. I remember when playing was synonymous with the outdoors and Barbies and dolls, and not with computers, phones, and game consuls. I remember looking things up in the encyclopedia and dictionary when I needed an answer that my father could not readily provide for me. While I remember all of these things, and probably glorify them as the "good old days," I don't know if I was smarter because of it. I am not one who hates technology, or resents it, or feels like it should be limited. In fact, I enjoy and use technology just as much as the next person. I recognize that it takes a whole different level of consciousness, and that finding information on my own and not relying on technology to tell me an answer requires a different amount of mental expenditure. But I am just not sure that having little to no access to technology made me smarter back in the 1990's and early 2000's than I am today.


Technology has the power and capacity to hold mass amounts of information--far more than my brain can hold that's for damn sure. In less than a second, I can access almost any piece of information that my heart desires. At the push of a button, at the swipe of a finger, I can discover just about anything. With all of this potential just a few moments away, I'd like to think that we are not entirely at a loss in the digital age. I think of all of the things that I have learned and read thanks to the internet, and I can't help but thing that it is thanks to technology that I have expanded my knowledge of many things to where it stands today. I think that technology has allowed me to gain a lot of knowledge and access a lot of information, but this doesn't inherently make me any smarter than I was in the past. Nor does it make me dumber. No, it doesn't take as much work to find the answers I am looking for. And no, I don't spend as much of my time playing outside. And no I don't play simple, educational games on my computer any more (most of my screen time is dedicated to homework and Netflix). But I don't necessarily think this makes me any less smart.

So who's smarter, me or technology? Well I just don't know.