Rhetoric and Composition

When I was quite a few years younger than I am now, I was once asked the qestion, "Do you believe everything that you read?" and my prompt reply was "it depends on wether it is fiction or nonfiction." Since then, the literature world has not gotten any more simple, through high school I am faced with some teachers bent on teaching me how to write to fit their personal opinions with no consideration of teaching me to write well. This is definately not true of all teachers, but it does rise the question... ... ... What is good writing? And the answer to that question, has not yet been discovered. This past thursday afternoon I accompanied my mom to a lecture on Rhetoric and Compostion at Westminister College in Salt Lake City. I was excited to go mostly because I wanted to be in Salt Lake and not for the lecture, but against all odds it was a lot more exciting than the title foreshadowed (I didn't think that anything could ever be more exciting than Rhetoric and Composition sounded, but it was). What I learned was, that "good" writing-as it seems it must be--is completely subjective, and dependant upon the audience. And, therefore, a really good writer would be one who could appeal to many, or dare I say, all audiences. Now, it seems much to difficult of a task for the average highschool student, and I am no different, except maybe that I actually care. It is important to me to be a good writer, I do not really care wether or not my writing gets me a good grade, I want it to be good, and hopefully a good grade will follow. In this lecture many different types of writing were aknowleged that I had never even thought about before. For example, the lecturer displayed a YouTube video as a form of composition, and though it had many different mediums it was writing. Lab reports, memos, letters, blogs, the backs of cereal boxes. Those are all examples of writing, and someone had to write them. Each of those are different an serve a different purpose, but they are all writing, and people actually think that writing is unimportant and not at all useful. How wrong they are. So its Easter sunday, and I sit here writing a blog about the importance of writing while eating yellow peeps, and waiting expectantly for a dinner of stirfry with brown rice, and an after dinner activity, coloring eggs. And, I wonder why the heck I even care. And really I don't know. I want to have the perfect elixir that cures bad writing and tranforms the minds of young writers, creating a complete moster- the author. But, despite my efforts, I cannot, it is a second type of alchemy, and destined to fail. But i did not write this to be the discourager of students, My actual intent was to show that you can be a good writer, even if all of your essays come out with a large red letter F on them. That is not the only writing, and that same essay could be submitted to a different audience and win some strange writing award. Don't be afraid to find the writer inside of yourself.