Within the text “Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity” by Kevin Roozen, he expresses the fact that there is many different forms of writing that we find ourselves doing: writing an email, text messages to our friends and family, birthday cards for our loved ones, or simply just writing to ourselves within a journal. Whenever we are writing, we always find ourselves unconsciously considering our audience’s feelings and how we can fulfill the wants and needs of our audience(s).
“Writing puts the writer in contact with other people, but the social nature of writing goes beyond the people writers draw upon and think about.”
This simply means when you are writing you are always connecting to people, but people never realize how deep writing goes; writing has been reshaped by many people to help us gain the knowledge to really connect with our chosen audiences. We take for granted just how much people have progressively changed the differing ways that we find ourselves writing daily such as: pens, pencils, laptops, keyboards; we don’t realize how much of our everyday tools have been shaped and changed in order for us to write freely and easily, as well as, help us easily better the relationship between one another.
Even when we find ourselves writing and doing it for personal use, that’s not actually the case. According to Kevin Roozen,
“… writing can never be anything but a social and rhetorical act, connecting us to other people across time and space in an attempt to respond adequately to the needs of an audience.”
When we find ourselves writing a journal entry or a email and saying only we did the work, it’s not true. We will always be connecting ourselves to an audience, whether it is ourselves or other people, and we will forever put ourselves in the mindset that we are writing for other people, even without knowing, and it helps us connect to the writings we make even more.
While reading “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity”, I began to realize a lot. When we think that we are writing for ourselves, and thinking no one will read or see what we have written, that couldn’t be any farther than the truth. Anyone at any time can see our work and find a connection to it without us truly realizing it. We find ourselves subconsciously connecting to an audience at any point that we are writing, and when we begin to allow ourselves to think that way, our writing tends to become even better! We want people to see the work we have made and feel the emotion and possibly an attachment to it, making us and the people who are reading our work, decide more thoroughly on the decisions and assessments every person apart of the process wants to make along the way.
