How appropriate to read an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing before I begin a blog that my professor and my peers will read. Academic blogging is intimidating! The previous statement was truthful, although it may be merely "not the truth" but..."some kind of truth" (300). I can honestly tell you that this is not going to be a truthful writing. I have already made corrections. I have added added words to make my meaning clear, and before I am finished, I will have changed my writing so much so that I will be guilty of committing Engfish.
Engfish is not truthful writing. It is the "phony, pretentious language of the schools" (207). It is the writing of academia. It IS the writing we students believe our professors and our peers expect from us. Are we not like the boy who "reaches for impressive language"? (300). Truthful writing, on the other hand, is devoid of phoniness and pretension, and instead, is "natural language without thinking of ...expression" (302). That language might be achieved by free writing.
Macrorie asks students to complete a number of free writing exercises. In those writings, students write words quickly without concern for grammar and punctuation, and for specified periods of time. He compares writers who write freely for "Truth" with those who write for "Great Thoughts" (303). The differences are profound. Those who write with the intention of achieving "Great Thoughts" tell. Those who write for "Truth" show. Macrorie shares two paragraphs written by identical twin girls relating the same event. The first tells: "I feel like I have evolved from a cocoon now. I can see the light again." Telling writing is filled with lifeless state-of-being verbs and inflated adjectives. The second twin shows: "The first day we got in the wrong math section...Then Tuesday we got stuck in the snow in the driveway, and we missed the math class" (304). Writing that shows paints vivid, concrete images. Truthful writing, born from our heart differs from Engfish produced by our brain. Could Mozart, then, have been a truthful composer and Beethovan an Engfish (of sorts) composer?
Although composing orchestral scores differs from writing prose, the creative process is similar. In The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, Janet Emig shares an excerpt from Stephen Spender's "The Making of a Poem" that a "Mozartian is one who can instantaneously arrange encounters with his unconscious" (234). Free writing could be compared to a Mozartian plunge in which a writer loses himself or herself in the depths of his or her art and "surfaces with a finished pearl." A "Beethovian" conversely, "is the agonizer, the evolutionizer." Beethovian writing is an evolutionary process. I sometimes write with Mozartian abandon, but I write for academia like a "plodding miner." I suppose it must be that way. Truthful writing is just too naked.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Writing Across the Curriculum and The Appeals
Should our schools - and the state of Colorado - require proficiency in belletristic writing?
A question I've had after perusing our assigned readings, and especially David Russel's American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement, is why do our schools - and our states - require that our students write in belletristic modes? Not only is it required that students write in descriptive, narrative, and fictional genres, but it is required by the No Child Left Behind legislation that they be proficient. Mandates also require that students be proficient in expository writing (typically persuasive and research writing), but those are genres which are more conducive to writing about real world situations.
Writing in education, as our authors have shown, has not always been what it is today. Education and the evidence of what was learned was oral. And as our readings have pointed out, various types of writing, which have included rhetorical writing, have ebbed and flowed in our universities and in our schools. Writing was once stictly rhetorical. Responses to reading were once written as well. Educational institutions have required combiniations of both. As David Russell relates, writing was once seen as a "central function of the emerging disciplines." Most writing done by students and professionals was "real world" writing. Belletristic writing, that which was "the product of genius or inspiration," was left to humanities departments.
I teach writing to middle school students. I teach students how to properly respond to literature. how to use transitions, techniques for adding voice, improving their word choice in descriptive and narrative essays, how to build character development in fictional writing, how to organize research papers, and how to incorporate the three modes in persuasive writing. Without fully comprehending the Latin terms, students learn how to appeal to the logos, pathos, and ethos of their audience. There is value in learning the appeals, because while they are students and after they are not, students' arguments throughout their lives will be more persuasive if they effectively use rhetorical appeals. There is value in writing in many different modes, but is it necessary that they do so? Must they write proficiently in all of them?
It is true that most of my students, and many students who share similar demographics of my school district in southeastern Colorado, are not proficient in Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) writing. Interestingly, not one group collectively, grades three through tenth statewide, exceeds 49% proficiency. Singularly, districts may have higher or lower rates of proficiency. When districts with high poverty rates, such as many of those in southeastern Colorado, are compared with districts which have higher incomes, the proficiency rates are much lower. Perhaps if we returned to the "real world" writing that David Russell describes, our pre-secondary students might be able to focus on the basics of writing. Students need to learn how to respond to literature and how to simply write coherently and correctly before they can write in the more belletristic modes.
A question I've had after perusing our assigned readings, and especially David Russel's American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement, is why do our schools - and our states - require that our students write in belletristic modes? Not only is it required that students write in descriptive, narrative, and fictional genres, but it is required by the No Child Left Behind legislation that they be proficient. Mandates also require that students be proficient in expository writing (typically persuasive and research writing), but those are genres which are more conducive to writing about real world situations.
Writing in education, as our authors have shown, has not always been what it is today. Education and the evidence of what was learned was oral. And as our readings have pointed out, various types of writing, which have included rhetorical writing, have ebbed and flowed in our universities and in our schools. Writing was once stictly rhetorical. Responses to reading were once written as well. Educational institutions have required combiniations of both. As David Russell relates, writing was once seen as a "central function of the emerging disciplines." Most writing done by students and professionals was "real world" writing. Belletristic writing, that which was "the product of genius or inspiration," was left to humanities departments.
I teach writing to middle school students. I teach students how to properly respond to literature. how to use transitions, techniques for adding voice, improving their word choice in descriptive and narrative essays, how to build character development in fictional writing, how to organize research papers, and how to incorporate the three modes in persuasive writing. Without fully comprehending the Latin terms, students learn how to appeal to the logos, pathos, and ethos of their audience. There is value in learning the appeals, because while they are students and after they are not, students' arguments throughout their lives will be more persuasive if they effectively use rhetorical appeals. There is value in writing in many different modes, but is it necessary that they do so? Must they write proficiently in all of them?
It is true that most of my students, and many students who share similar demographics of my school district in southeastern Colorado, are not proficient in Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) writing. Interestingly, not one group collectively, grades three through tenth statewide, exceeds 49% proficiency. Singularly, districts may have higher or lower rates of proficiency. When districts with high poverty rates, such as many of those in southeastern Colorado, are compared with districts which have higher incomes, the proficiency rates are much lower. Perhaps if we returned to the "real world" writing that David Russell describes, our pre-secondary students might be able to focus on the basics of writing. Students need to learn how to respond to literature and how to simply write coherently and correctly before they can write in the more belletristic modes.
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