What Writing is to Me (In my own writing)

 

Writing is a process.

My writing process begins with my audience. No matter what I am writing, whether it is a personal or business email, a discussion post for a class, a research paper, or a creative piece, I consider my audience. Perhaps that audience is me. Perhaps it is a professor I want to impress or my grandfather who primarily speaks Spanish or even a close friend, I never just write. My writing includes a lot of editing, though most of that takes place before the words are on the page. I am consciously choosing different words, placing commas in different places, or polishing a transition. Much of my time writing is spent looking a the screen/paper and considering the words in my mind. Different uses of punctuation (semicolons, commas, hyphens), different syntactical choices, and even formatting are all considered before they are placed on the page. That is not to say that I do not edit what I have put down on the page, because I most definitely do. 

A quote I heard today that I found insightful was that writing is like a brick. Though the author of the quote may not have intended the meaning I took from it, I found that this was unintentionally insightful and that makes it quite ironic, another aspect I loved. Because writing is like a brick. Bricks surround us and make our lives possible. They were once used to pave roads for transportation, they are still used in architecture to create the buildings we use for shelter and to house institutions, and they have been around since the beginning of civilization. Are words really so different? They surround us and make our current society possible, and they can hit you like a ton of bricks.