The Vision of Words (Unit 1 Project DRAFT)

 7/6/2025

The Vision of Words

Words. Words are way more than letters that make different sounds coming together to make something that people can use to talk to people or text people or even write a blog about literacy and words. But it is art, it is creation, it is evolution. Words are the reason people can do the things that we do today. There is so much meaning behind words that you might not even think about. Like the phrase “shut up” you can use those two words in soooo many different ways. From and girl flirting with a guy saying “shut up” after he said something, or if some is bothering you and you get annoyed by them and you scream at them to “shut up”, or even if ur just with ur friends and yall are all cracking jokes with each other and then one of them says “shut up” with funny intent behind it. Words are so powerful, there's a quote that everybody might know and it's “actions speak louder than words”. But if you really think about it, words are the reasons behind actions, the way people are taught, the way people learn right from wrong, the way people make friends, make decisions, get angry, all stems from the usage of words.

All these ways that words are used can be put under one umbrella term, and it is called Literacy. What is literacy? When you think of literacy you are probably thinking about books, essays, articles, news, language, ect. But literacy is the ability to read and write, but in a broader sense, it encompasses the capacity to understand, interpret, and use information effectively in various contexts. Literacy is in everything, from books, to conversations, to TV shows, even pictures.

“Writers such as Cynthia Selfe, James Paul Gee, and John Seely Brown argue that beçause of the explosion of digital communications, a literate person needs to be skilled in more than just print literacy. Many new types of communications blogs, graphic novels, streaming video, PowerPoint, text messaging, e-mail, virtual reality— require skills that are different from the skills needed to compose in traditional print literacies.” (Melzer). One of the many types of literacy is music. Music is a very popular and powerful way to communicate to people because people tend to be attracted to things that sound nice and are short because humans have a short attention span. Not only that people listen to music that either connects with who they are and how they feel now or music that brings out a different side of them that is influenced by the music they listen to.

On the topic, music is personally one of my favorite types of literature because I am a music writer, and I use music in so many different ways. One of the ways that music helps me is that it gives me a platform to express my feelings, feelings of happiness, sadness, hartbreak, confusion,ect. Another way that I also use music is to say my thoughts about the things going on in the world, things going on around my community, and things going on around me. And the way that I can talk to people through words put in a certain way to mean something is literature. The sounds that music makes can make people feel powerful knowing that there are deeper meanings behind every word and every piano and every bass and every beat. And outside of songwriting, playing instruments and being able to read different notes and different cords is a form of literacy. These books and papers that have pictures of notes on them and just like words each individual note means something and when they all come together it creates something that people can relate to, people can understand, and people can feel.

There is not only one type of music there's so many different types of music. There is; Rap, Jazz, Pop, HipHop, Funk, Rock, Country, Contemporary, and so much more. All of these different types of music are called Genres. “A genre is a typified utterance that appears in a recurrent situation. A genre evolves through human use and activity to be a durable and usable form for carrying out human communicative intentions in fairly stable ways.” (PRESSBOOKS). Aside from genres in music there are genres in other things such as; movies, shows, books, paintings, dances, pretty much any form of literature or any form of art. “Charles Bazerman, writing in Naming What We Know, says that we can see genre as habitual responses to recurring socially bounded situations. Regularities of textual form [like the header on a memorandum or the section heads in a lab report] most lay people [i.e. not experts] experience … [are] the structural characteristics of genres [as they] emerge from … repeated instances of action and are reinforced by institutional power structures.” (PRESSBOOKS). Basically what this means in simple terms is that there are genres in conversations. Say you are at a workplace or a business setting and you are talking to people you would talk to them with a more professional dialogue. But if you were talking to your friends you wouldn't talk to them the same way, and the way that you talk to your friends isnt gonna be the same way you talk to your parents. That is because you are changing the genre of your speech to be able to communicate and create an understanding between you and the person you are talking to. 

So as you can see the usage of writing and words and literature in general is so powerful, from the conversations we have, to the music we listen to, to the actions we make. Even this blog is literature with a total of 985 words. When you think about something just make sure you think about all the literature and the meaning a vision behind every single word

Works Cited

Melzer, Dan. “Everything's a Text.” Melzer, Dan Melzer, 2011, https://afitzsim.expressions.syr.edu/practicum/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/07/Melzer.pdf.

PRESSBOOKS. “What is a Genre.” PRESSBOOKS, PRESSBOOKS, https://pressbooks.pub/openenglishatslcc/chapter/genre-in-the-wild-understanding-genre-within-rhetorical-ecosystems/.