Research
Theories of Writing
Dr. Richard Colby
Fall Quarter 2018
In Theories of Writing, Dr. Colby guided us through the development of writing and theories of writing’s origin, utility and greater purpose to create and share meaning. Through projects in this course, I used technology alongside my writing, incorporating transferable skills into my growing writing practices. Learning about my individual approach and style in writing was another large portion of this class, and, through developing my ability to reflect on my own writing and intrinsic motivations for writing, I am now better able to analyze how my writing practices and style work in different rhetorical situations.
For my final research project in Theories of Writing, I analyzed how undergraduate students write and found that there are three primary ways of how undergraduates write, and none of them are more effective than another. After finding several peer-reviewed research articles related to the topic, I read each of them and gathered that students are primarily taught one linear writing process throughout their education, but undergraduate writers primarily use three distinct writing processes. Once I had an idea of different writing process possibilities from Torrance, et. al, I interviewed five University of Denver students in different majors and asked them to describe their writing process to me. After the students responded to the best of their ability, I described the three primary methods found by Torrance, et. al and asked students if they most closely identified with one of the processes or not. In correlation with the findings by Torrance, et. al, my interviews found that there was no superior writing process in terms of grades or achievement, and undergraduates follow no singular writing strategy, contrary to the single method that most of them were taught in elementary school.