Writer, Tweeter, Texter, Blogger: My Writing Research Identity

Learning Outcome One: Writing Research Identity

"What is your Writing Identity?"
Upon being asked this question, I suddenly found myself having an identity crisis. What is my writing identity? Okay...I'm a texter - that's part of my writing identity. I'm a post-er; I post on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. I'm a high school graduate, which basically means that I can spit out a novel based, A+ worthy 5 paragraph essay faster than you can say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. I'm a short story author, unofficially. And I'm also a not-so-short story author - receiving 109K reads (and counting) on a story published on the website Wattpad. And, I guess I'm a blogger now, too. I'm a writer, tweeter, texter, and blogger.

But what about my Writing Research Identity? Can my Writing Identity play into my Writing Research Identity? Well...I'm a writer. As a writer, I like to start by looking at the big picture, and then break it down into smaller pieces. This plays out in my genre research as well. When I made movie posters, for example, I started by looking at the basic designs of posters, then I broke it down into more genre specific examples in order to get a better idea of what to do for each poster that I was going to make.
I'm a tweeter and a texter. I like things to be short, sweet, and to the point. When researching, I don't want to spend hours upon hours scouring the web and skimming through encyclopedias. I use resources that are going to give me the information I need without having to spend a lot of time looking for it. That being said, Google is my primary resource.
I'm a blogger. I've found that blogging combines the big picture thought process of writing with the short-and-sweet mindset of tweeting. But what does that have to do with my Writing Research Identity? Part of genre research is understanding how CHAT is related to the genre that you are researching. Throughout this semester, CHAT has become a part of my Writing Research Identity. In blogging, for example, I understand that I want to represent myself as coherent and organized. I don't want my thoughts to be sporadic (big picture thought process). As part of the reception, I know that my target audience doesn't want to spend 20 minutes reading one post, so I have to keep my thoughts and ideas short and sweet.

Throughout this semester, I have been able to develop my Writing Research Identity. I know that this will help me to better research different literary genres not just in my years as an undergraduate, but after college as well.