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Austin Arnold

Sarah Wilhoit

Writing 101

23 September 2019

A Writing Self Study

Through analysis of five different samples of my previous writing, I have determined that

my voice could best be described as highly improvisational. After going over what my process

for each piece of writing was, I realized that, regardless of context, it is not unusual for me to

draft at the same time I am creating and planning a given work, and that my revision and editing

takes up a very small portion of the time spent writing, since my biggest rhetorical strategy is to

use the type of humor I can only really write effectively by improvising to better get my point

across to the reader.

The first piece I went over was a report on ​Dracula ​I wrote in high school. In it, I

analyzed the plot, characters, themes, and more from the novel. My analysis of the plot involved

pointing out how it only seemed like a retread because of the hundred and twenty years of

adaptations since its publication-- and surprisingly quite a bit of Pathos stemming from my sense

of humor, which started showing through and heavily influencing my writing around the time I

wrote this particular report. Among other things, I called the one American in the book “the

human incarnation of the state of Texas” (5) and the female lead one of the only people in the

novel who is not so genre blind as to be an idiot. Looking back, I see that criticism as less a flaw

of the story and more something that stems from my own bias and preconceived ideas of how
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people would act in those situations, which themselves stem from dozens of tropes and common

scenarios in horror that simply would not have existed when the novel was published in 1897, as

the genre was in its infancy. As I put it in the paper, “I found the book predictable, but that

comes almost exclusively from the benefits of living a hundred and twenty years after it was

published.” (5). This bias seems to have caused me to make a lot of critiques and sarcastic

remarks that would not have been needed had I simply avoided my own bias and looked at the

book as a product of its time, or even tried to look at the plot as someone reading it around the

time of its publication might have.

Yet another paper from the same class, my analysis of “Meditation 17” by John Donne

was a timed writing on a piece which I confess, I had forgotten to read the night before and thus

had to frantically skim in the ten minutes before class started. Luckily most of my writing is

composed frantically on the fly anyway, and this paper is a testament to how my real skills seem

to lie in improvising because of those factors. I start off with a distinct lack of a goal (the biggest

flaw in my style), instead opting to utilize sarcasm to poke fun at the nature of the work; I spent

the better part of a paragraph comparing the author to an angst-ridden middle schooler suddenly

starting to grasp his own mortality until I finally figured out his point: “He posits that this pain

we feel, either when dying or in the aftermath of someone else doing so, is like a crucible” (1).

At that point I shifted over completely from my Pathos based ramblings about a long dead author

having apparently hit his emo phase a tad late, and instead shifted into, oddly enough, Logos

based analysis of his Pathos based death essay.

The third piece I analyzed was a term paper on the life of George R.R. Martin. This is the

least similar to my previous two, as one of the requirements was that I make an outline and
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gather a set of facts to use on note cards. The process being so different affected the actual

content of the paper quite a bit, With much less of my usual sarcasm and quite a bit more Logos

and Ethos from the more planned out and better researched way I went about going over the

material. This is probably the worst of all my artifacts, since it reads like a dry biography “He

first lived in an apartment on Broadway, but...they moved to a housing project near the Bayonne,

New Jersey docks (Martin). He spent much of his time watching ships sail in and out... and

dreaming of traveling with them to those far off lands.” (1). My usual process, if it can be called

a process and not a sort of frantic, deadline-induced panic, has a tendency to produce things that

are at the very least enjoyable to read, if not exactly of the highest quality. The heavy planning

completely reshaped my style and every single ounce of rhetoric I could use, turning my usual

voice into something unbelievably dull. Other than a nice form of juxtaposition with the sentence

“He has created flawless worlds and filled them to the brim with flawed characters” (6) there is

honestly not much value to this artifact unless someone is desperately searching for a boring bio.

Fourth among the artifacts, and most out of place in terms of context, was a pair of texts

I sent to a friend while discussing a movie. These, while a sixth the length of the term paper at

best, are in my opinion actually better written on some levels due to their return to my usual

pseudo stream of consciousness style, where I simply write what comes to mind as it does so.

They are fairly influential on an individual level-- which is more than can be said for the rest of

my writing-- since they have the potential to shift someone’s opinion about something, even if

the “something” in question is as inconsequential as a movie we both happened to see. The

rhetorical strategies used here are primarily Pathos when I address a moment that could have

been more enjoyable, and Ethos when I back up my opinion by citing knowledge of the source
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material. The Pathos certainly shines through more, however, since the texts are really just me

testifying how much of a comic book nerd I am to a friend in the form of an excited yet brief

rant.

The final artifact I used was co written by two of my friends. In short, a random joke

about how a corn field near where I lived at the time had declared independence (I would say it

made sense in context if that was not a blatant lie) and was now its own country led to us drafting

a series of ​Game of Thrones-​ esque short stories we lovingly referred to as “The Corn

Chronicles”. The artifact in question was a short synopsis of characters we intended to create.

Needless to say there is no Ethos or Logos to be found here and instead it is entirely a Pathos

based attempt at an elaborate extended joke among friends. We decided that part of the story was

that corn would be seen as divine in these kingdoms and this led to such glorious moments of

wordsmithing on my part as “...the very Corn itself supports his rule” in an attempt to satirize the

concept of the divine right of kings. My usually comedic style is now hidden under several layers

of irony in my attempts to emulate a pseudo George R.R. Martin grimdark tone in my character

summaries. Essentially my usual rhetorical strategy of dry humor is taken to an extreme extent

here, and while this was written as a joke it is surprisingly the most value and influence on a

social level simply because of one factor none of the other artifacts shared: I intended for more

than one person to read it. With all the other works I found for this paper, value could only really

be held between two people, namely myself and the one person the paper or texts were meant to

be seen by. But with these few paragraphs we wrote on a lark at lunch one day, I helped to make

multiple people laugh, and consequently to brighten their days.

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After looking through every single detail of these artifacts, I discovered something in my

writing that I never really considered. While in formal writing I use copious Logos, and in

personal texts I can use just as much Ethos, the underlying Pathos that appears regardless is the

part of my work with the highest amount of value. My attempts at comedy are not only likely to

be the only reason I passed most of my high school English papers, but they are something that

can bring people great joy if only I let more of my writing see the light of day. Before I started

this self study, I felt that there could not really be any value to my voice, and believed that the

only value my writing has was utilitarian; that my writing was only valuable as a means to pass a

class or communicate. But now I see that the only real reason for that is that no matter how much

work I put into something, no matter if it ever ended up on paper or was disseminated digitally,

the only way to increase that value is to let more people see it. Value is essentially what you can

get out of a piece of writing, and to get more out of my writing and thus make it hold more value

I need to simply expand the amount of people who can see it.
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Works Cited

Arnold, Austin. ​Dracula ​by Bram Stoker. 2017.

Arnold, Austin. “Still Can’t Believe This Inspired a Metallica Song”. 2018.

Arnold, Austin. “A Life of Ice and Fire”. 2017.

Arnold, Austin. Texts. 2019.

Arnold, Austin, with Johnson, Camden and Miller, Noah. “The Corn Chronicles”. 2018.
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Appendix

https://drive.google.com/open?id=11PjXbEDGAmtriI8xG4gvAWNuxImJK5dEbCy8nS5tGdQ

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1z8qVqCn39tE3rVc--lE3u_IFaagb8PqresjntzOVoac

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1f6Dkv3lLAtOqEkyqUWNYgdQ3udWMgqtnh5ZaMk2lKjQ

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bAypBSl7JGEoErMKEokYvG3WjRocfACEBh0IjdTwBj8

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2ul9bEpvYW8WnA5XzJ3Zl9hSTI5Rm5qYkNaVVpkZkx

6LWdF