I haven’t been posting for a while—interrupted by a trip
to California (best state in the Union)—and some life redirection as a
consequence of professional conflicts—how’s that for a teaser?
A friend included me in a post on her blog about a
course she is trying to reimagine (it could use some re-imagining), so I took
some time out from my personal life reconstruction to write the following
reply:
=============
Hi, ****. Thanks so much for the
nod to my blog. I appreciate what you're doing in your course: Style in the Personal Essay. I'm going
to make a couple of comments that may or may not be very helpful--I'm thinking
as I'm writing.
One: over on the right hand side of my blog is a book my students wrote:
Writing Ourselves into Each Others' Lives. I have had subsequent classes read
from that book--the response is always good. Look at the chapter on Voice; or
Kaitlyn's essay at the end of the book; Hope's; there are several others that students
love to read and link back to their own writing. In sum, I almost always have
students read other students rather than anything published. By reading what
other students have written, they get ideas about their own writing.
I don't want to make this too long. I would think more about the reasons for
having them write a certain kind of essay, i.e., in a specific genre--even
something as amorphous as the personal essay. My take: students don't need to learn
how to do this or that; what they need are good experiences in writing (I get
criticized this claim), but what the hell--you want them to be writing what
they will enjoy writing and reading--I mean reading and responding to what
others have written. There are no end of topics that students will automatically
start writing about (when they know they are writing primarily for their
classmates (and the teacher--who is NOT grading but is reading as the other
students are reading).
Leading to another topic: we can perhaps move away from thinking that students
need to produce completed pieces-- X number of essays. I have lately moved away
from revision--kind of letting students revise on their own. When they know
that the primary readers are the other students, they automatically revise. Automatic
revision was one of the first things we learned about in the Bay Writing Project—nods
of gratitude to Jim Grey & Miles Myers.
When students are writing like this, there is all sorts of room to have some in
between sessions on ways in which they can improve their styles, and little
structural problems that most students seem to make.
I also like to have
students read "Correctness" by Joe Williams (in early editions of Style). Then we can have interesting
discussions about what's right: He don't know how to tie his shoes backwards--
or-- He doesn't know how to tie his shoes backwards (and of course what
"right" means--leading to Bill Clinton's famous remark: that depends
on what "is" is-- for a little humor). Then we can have discussions
about whether the comma goes inside or outside the quote marks and whether it
matters and why some people think it might and why others don't give a shit.
(personal admission: I had to think about whether I could write
"shit"). Talk about cultural imbrication--including a reference to something we all do!
We need to think about all the writing they do
as writing. That includes the responses they make to each other (and the
responses to the responses). What I'm getting at here: the flow, the continuous
flow of writing--as is happening right now, me with you. That's writing.
---
I wrote my response to **** without looking at the course description for Style in the Personal Essay. After
looking at it, I wrote the following:
I just looked at the course description:
looks as if people threw in everything but the kitchen sink. Notable that
nothing is in there that aligns with attitude toward writing, the experience of
writing. It's almost as if we're teaching students how to write nothing to no
one--but pretend that it's something to someone. Really awful course
description.
I'm going to add my final impression: it seems as if much of what
rhet/comp people do (and have historically done) is directed outward--proving
to outside stakeholders that we're responsible educators and in the process
eliding what we know as writers and writing teachers (or maybe forgetting what
we once knew). In sum, I think we need to direct our pedagogy back to the
students, helping them with their writing and experience of writing and imagine
outside stakeholders as tertiary at best.
=======
Postscript: I hadn't looked too carefully (typical me) at that picture. One needs to add the act of writing, which doubles the transition from the old me to the new me--this at least is true in expressive/reflective genres.
x
