Week 3

The people of Shenandoah Park were certainly not writers by my standards. They wrote letters to the park officials about problems they were facing and if they could have assistance. The writing abilities demonstrated by the residents are, for the most part, at a level demonstrating very little education. The spelling and grammar (although some it might be correct given the time period) is not well thought out and it would appear as though the people write the same way they speak. If I was to consider the residents writers simply because they wrote something I feel as though the question “what is a writer” becomes a redundancy as the answer includes every literate person. For my definition of what constitutes a writer I am going to try and narrow down the amount of people who can claim writer as a title.

I believe the title of writer should be given to those who write at some sort of professional level. What I mean is people who: write for magazines/newspapers, authors of books, or any other type of writing that reaches a relatively large audience. In addition to quality I think quantity, as in the length of the writing and how often the individual writes, is important in classifying someone as a writer. Ideally a writer should be able to profit from his/her work. A writers revenue should be looked at in order to rank writers on how well they write because success is the goal most writers strive to achieve.