In order to gain knowledge as a writer, it is imperative to recognize and understand how the conventions of writing categorize and distinguish text from larger genres of writing. Conventions are the formal guidelines that categorize texts into specific genres that include placement and type of claim and citations. Writers reveal their claim at different points in an essay after determining what the audience’s rhetorical situation is. In academic writing, the claim is clearly stated in the last few sentences of the introduction paragraph and is coherent with the old-new contract. This is because academic readers prefer to see the claim specifically referenced throughout the essay after the addition of new thoughts, whereas in non-academic writing like David Foster Wallace’s “Up, Simba” the content is displayed in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, where his main argument is not presented until the last pages of the essay.
In my Major Paper 1, I state that McCain’s campaign was subject to the biases of media as every politician is even though he marketed himself as an anticandidate. In doing this, readers know what I intend to convince them of, and are using my evidence and analysis in reference to that initial claim. Citations are also distinctive in each genre of writing. These distinctions arise from improving the accessibility interested readers have to the sources a writer references. For example, the articles I cite in my essays cohere with the MLA format, which involves referencing the source and author before the quotation and a page number in parenthesis at the end of the sentence, this is because if a reader wishes to find the source it will be easiest to find the article by author’s name, article title, and then page number. While conventions may seem to lack the importance of the other outcomes it is important to consider that conventions provide the basis and standards for which writers adhere to in designing a piece of writing that will be ultimately effective in aiding an audience’s understanding.
You can see an example of how I have worked with the conventions of academic writing in my final revisions of Major Paper 1, “The Conventionality of Anticandidates.”
Continue to my Final Reflections