What Do You Consider Writing?

I just read an essay on Searching for Writing Culture Across UVA by Heidi Nobles and was taken by her opening paragraphs.

“In Spring 2021, a group of students and I set out to investigate the “culture of writing” at UVA. We sent out an informal survey to UVA undergrads, asking questions like “What, if anything, does the phrase ‘culture of writing at UVA’ mean to you?” and “How do you think you are influencing that writing culture, and in what ways?”

“I only do engineering writings”—Writers Who Don’t Know That They Write

Out of 49 responses to the first question, 25 indicated no sense of our institution’s writing culture, with comments such as “Never heard of it”; “No clue”; “Nothing unless you’re in English”’; and “As an engineering student, I’m largely unfamiliar with the ‘culture of writing at UVA,’ though I know it is a rich and storied tradition at this institution.”

“I only do engineering writings”—Writers Who Don’t Know That They Write

Out of 49 responses to the first question, 25 indicated no sense of our institution’s writing culture, with comments such as “Never heard of it”; “No clue”; “Nothing unless you’re in English”’; and “As an engineering student, I’m largely unfamiliar with the ‘culture of writing at UVA,’ though I know it is a rich and storied tradition at this institution.””

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Later in the essay, she expands upon UVA”s writing culture.

“We were simultaneously studying the robust history of writing affiliated with UVA, which includes of course world-changing social and political publications going back two hundred years, as well as searing works of art by many of our faculty members. We were perhaps most delighted, though, by the rich collection of student writing that also goes back to notebooks and letters as early as the first decades of the 1800s, and on through papers and records still being produced today. We studied what writing reveals about a culture, and how writing changes a culture.”

Why do you write? How does it change you?