Journal #2

Writers are people who write. They don't necessarily have to be any good at it, they just have to do it. I would say the people of the Shenandoah National Park are writers because they are conveying their opinions about their situations to the park officials in letters. Some of these letters have improper punctuation and grammar, or even misspelled words, but they make sense to the reader and so the letter's purpose has been fulfilled. Those same letters would not have conveyed the rhetor's ideas if the material on them was not writing. If the park residents had instead written "random squiggles on a page" as Avery said, they would not be considered writers. They used whatever knowledge they had (which in some cases didn't include schooling or proper education) to ask for help with the problems they faced and couldn't solve themselves.

The National Park residents wrote to try to communicate their problems, which made them writers. They did not try to sell their letters or appeal to a large audience, however, and were therefore not writers in the occupational sense of the word. They did not do it for a living, but rather to help with everyday problems that may have gotten in the way of their lives. This is the main distinction, I think, between writing and everyday writing.