"Writing to the World"

         A time that I can think of in which I had success in “writing to the world,” was in my senior English class in high school. We were assigned a final research paper for the course with a wide variety of subject topics. I wanted to write about something that was progressive and something I was interested in. I ended up choosing to write about the autonomous car, also known as the driverless car. It was a subject that hardly anyone in the class knew about. My goal was to learn as much about the autonomous car as I could and then use that information to explain what it was and how it would change the world. Going into writing the paper, I had to make the assumption that hardly anyone in the class knew anything about my topic, mostly because it is a very recent technology. For the assignment, we were instructed to have a written paper and to perform an oral presentation. I wanted to make my paper interesting, not only to my teacher, but also to my fellow classmates. I knew that my teacher’s expectations were high for my writing and I also knew that my classmates had expectations that my presentation writing would be interesting to listen to. In order to meet these expectations, I needed to analyze what about the autonomous car would be most interesting or revolutionary to my audience; my classmates.  I formulated my paper around these ideas and because I was affective in writing according to my audience’s expectations, I received an A on both the written portion and on my presentation.

                                                                 -Luke M.