Writing as An Act of Choice – a threshold concept in Communications class

A response to the Like Driving a Car Activity
created by jill jones (@teacherlyjill)

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There are a couple of threshold concepts in the field of writing/composition. The most obvious one, in my opinion, is the writing process; once embraced, it becomes just like driving a car, to borrow eCampus’s analogy — it becomes a series of rote actions, where we don’t think about what to do next … it just becomes habit of mind. Another threshold concept is the principles of rhetoric; I always tell students: once you know about the principles of rhetoric, you cannot un-know them, and once you know them, they will change the way you see the world of communication.

For this assignment, I have chosen to extend my thinking on the idea of writing as an act of choice. I had forgotten about this notion until I got out my old notes on threshold concepts in writing/composition.

Using the work I completed a few years ago, I have created a table to summarize the elements of threshold concepts (Meyer & Land, 2003), in relation to the idea of writing as an act of choice.

Please see the blog post for all the work I did on this. Warning: it’s long.