Learn

Writing with Confidence

Throughout Unit 1, you did the following:

• identified techniques that text creators use in order to communicate with their audience
• showed how these texts are relevant in both your life (personal connection) and the lives of others (global connection)
• created texts of your own

Creating an original text takes a certain amount of agency.  Agency can be defined as a person’s feeling of empowerment to act independently.  In other words, if you have a sense of agency, you believe that you are capable of doing something and you have something worthwhile to say.   Even posting a Facebook status or an Instagram photo requires a certain degree of agency because you expose yourself to the judgement of strangers.  However, if you believe what you have to say is worthwhile, the risk is worth taking.

Read the following pages to learn some writing strategies that will give you a sense of agency and confidence to write your first essay in the course.

Writer and Professor Jim Parsons, who you encountered earlier in the course, believes that everyone has the ability to write well if they follow some basic steps.  Watch Parsons’s short video about the writing process, and think about how these steps might be applied to your own writing.