Writing Under Rules: Olivia Rosado
by Mary Walters
Last week, I interviewed Olivia Rosado, a student at the College of Charleston, about her digital literacy practices. We mainly focused on one specific instance — as a freshman in college, she was thrown into a technical writing class. Prior to that class, most of her writing had been creative fiction, like poems. She found technical writing to be very different from the other writing she had done. The poems she had written had been pretty freeform, with very few of what she calls “rules.”
Olivia found that the new genre conventions restricted her creativity a lot — although she still had some freedom in choosing the subject matter of the texts, and in writing the content, she had to stick to the specific format for each genre.
And Olivia felt frustrated and uncomfortable as she struggled to teach herself new genres. When she was asked, as a part of the technical writing class, to produce a white paper, she was intimidated. She found the amount of “rules” overwhelming. Later on, Olivia had to write a feature article, and expressed frustration that she didn’t really understand what a feature article was.
And learning about different genres independently can be time-consuming. This 28-minute youtube video by Brett Atwood touches on some of the genre and style conventions associated with feature articles, like the one Olivia was asked to produce.
For Olivia, she felt like she didn’t understand the genre conventions enough to be comfortable writing in those genres.
What are the takeaways?
Olivia’s story suggests that students like her might be able to benefit if professors spent more time teaching students about genre and genre conventions .She approached new genres feeling confused about what was being asked of her, and unsure where to begin. She reached out to her peers and her professors to try to get a better idea of what the genre conventions were, and even turned to Google to see some examples of white papers and feature articles. But even after all of that extra work, she still felt defeated.
For every piece of writing that is produced, there are expectations that go along with it. Based on the genre and the context in which a piece is written, there are different conventions that writers are expected to follow. These come both in the content, and in the form of the content — the combination of what it contains and what it looks like make it recognizable as belonging to a certain genre. Each genre has a lot of these, and they’re often not explained in much depth, so students go into new writing situations feeling overwhelmed and unsure. They write under the weight of “rules” that they don’t feel like they understand.
Helping students become familiar with specific genres and their conventions before asking them to write in that genre might help them feel more comfortable. It would likely allow them to focus more on adapting their content to the genre, rather than getting frustrated because they don’t understand what they are being expected to produce. Even if this is just taking some time to walk students through several examples of a genre, and highlighting the similarities and differences across examples, it might help students feel more confident approaching the assignment.
Along with teaching students more about genre conventions and how to follow them, professors should also teach students how to break them in deliberate ways to create certain effects. Then, rather than feeling like they are weighed down and restricted by “rules,” students like Olivia will feel like they have the power and permission to adapt genres to suit their rhetorical purposes.
Interview Transcript
The following transcript has been edited for conciseness and clarity.
Mary Walters: In one of your literacy journal posts, you mentioned a technical writing course that you
took. So, before that, you said that you’d been exposed to some fictional writing. How did that
exposure happen? Was it through your own reading, or did you write fiction?
Olivia Rosado: A lot of it was through my own reading, but I — I mean, I took a few courses in poetry
writing. That’s very, very different. The whole genre of poetry is very vast. You don’t need to
follow any sort of conventions with poetry — it’s all like, well if you wanna do it, go ahead and
do it. Nobody can yell at you for it. So, technical writing — that was really hard. I was like
“whoa, there’s too many rules.”
Mary Walters: Yeah. So, in what ways — you mentioned more rules — like, in what other ways was it different from the writing you’d done previously?
Olivia Rosado: There was a lot of research with it, it had to be very planned out. It had to be very structured. And with like poetry writing and fictional writing, in general, it’s very “do whatever you want.”
Whatever makes you happy, that’s what you do. And with technical writing, there’s so many conventions that you have to follow for it to be successful. You could write a poem and it would be successful, just without any rules. And with technical writing, and its genres, you have so much that you have to follow.
Mary Walters: Yeah, it’s a lot more concrete, right vs. wrong than some others, yeah, for sure. Was there anything that was the same? Was there anything that did transfer over from your fictional writing to your technical writing?
Olivia Rosado: For my technical writing course, it was all, it wasn’t like she handed us something and — we had a white paper to write about. And it wasn’t like “oh, this is what you’re going to write your white paper on.” You could pick your own — whatever you’re gonna write your white paper on. And that was, I feel like, the only thing that was in both fields. That creative freedom to do what you wanted to write about.
Mary Walters: Gotcha. Okay, what were some of the — you mentioned that you used several different platforms in the technical writing class, what were some of the ones that you found yourself using?
Olivia Rosado: I know I used Google Docs, that’s what I use for every writing thing, so that was something that I was comfortable with. I used Microsoft Word — wasn’t really comfortable with that, and then she had sent us links to a bunch of different things to use, and I was like “I have never used this before.” So I had to go to office hours.
Mary Walters: So like a whole bunch of them that you hadn’t used?
Olivia Rosado: Yeah. At that point…I can’t remember them because I struggled so much with them that I put them in the back of my mind.
Mary Walters: [laughing] I definitely understand that.
Olivia Rosado: I remember just feeling defeated with them — I think a lot of that feeling of defeat had to do with that it was my first semester of college, I was trying to get my bearings and that maybe wasn’t one of the best courses to start out college with [laughing].
Mary Walters: Yeah, a pretty big jolt, huh?
Olivia Rosado: Yeah, versus, like my last year of high school I didn’t have any — I mean, my writing classes weren’t like “oh, we’re gonna read all of this,” it was very much like fictional writing. So I didn’t have that structure, for a year, of like “oh, this is — we’re learning a new genre, we’re learning new… let’s do research papers.” It wasn’t like any of that.
Mary Walters: Yeah, gotcha. So, I guess this is kind of similar to the last question, and I know you might not be able to remember a bunch of them because that was a long time ago like you said, but what were some of the — do you remember some of the formats of documents you were asked to produce? Like reports, or…
Olivia Rosado: Hmm. It was, we did like a bunch of memos, and we did a white paper, we did like some interviews, we created a website — of course I used like some crappy, pre-made website designer [laughing], I was like, “I’m not doing the whole nine yards.” It was very basic stuff, and a lot of it was learning accessibility. That was one of the main focuses. But yeah, the whole white paper thing — that was the majority of our class, was writing the white paper, and that ended up being like fifteen pages.
Mary Walters: So like during that process, did you have to, since you weren’t familiar with writing a white paper, did you have to rely on outside sources? How did you kind of figure out, “what are the genre conventions, how am I going to tackle this?”
Olivia Rosado: Yeah, a lot of it was referencing the textbook, going to office hours, emailing my professor and my peers, and going online and reading sample white papers.
Mary Walters: Right, just to figure out “what does this look like, how do they do this?”
Olivia Rosado: Yeah, I mean of course the name of it is kind of off-putting, you’re like “well what the fuck is a white paper?” [laughing]
Mary Walters: Yeah.
Olivia Rosado: But yeah, that was basically it.
Mary Walters: Okay, so, moving more to the kind of writing you do today, that you’re going to be doing, what are your areas of expertise now? Like what do you find yourself writing now?
Olivia Rosado: It’s definitely a lot less like technical writing. Most of my classes right now, because I’m gearing more towards political science, it’s a lot of research papers on politics and reading books, and doing that type of thing, and writing up… because I’m doing pre-law, so it’s a lot of “oh, we’re gonna be structuring this case, and pulling things from this case to make it easily readable to you.” A lot of it is annotation, for what I’m reading.
Mary Walters: Gotcha. So, in your literacy journal number 3, you mentioned writing a feature article. Do you do a lot of those these days, or was it like a one-off thing?
Olivia Rosado: That was just one thing, it was for a professor. He was like “write a feature article” and I was like “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”