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.
The free writing thing has always been strange for me. I have rarely seen much value in it when asked to do it in a class and I personally have a hard time making any connections to the course content from my free writing when it is required. I think the free writing has to be focused for me to really get anything out of it, but then it just becomes a sort of prompt, what Macrorie cited as focused free writing. Isn't that an oxymoron? I'm not trying to sound cynical, I'm genuinely confused by free writing because I've never read or been told its real value and I'm hoping it is one of those wonderful "teacher things" that a teacher orchestrates and that a student unconsciously plays a part in.
ReplyDeleteI was first introduced to free writing in Juan Morales's creative writing classes here at the university. And, it is a rather unnerving experience to discover the mishmosh that's floating around in our brain at any given moment. However, I found the experience to be very liberating once I got past the rigidity of formal and even informal writing which demands we write in complete sentences, spell correctly, and punctuate for comprehension. There is a freedom about free writing that unleashes a lightness. Macrorie states, "Most good writing is clear, vigorous, honest, alive, sensuous, appropriate, unsentimental, rhythmic, without pretension, fresh, metaphorical, evocative in sound, economical, authoritative, surprising, memorable, and light" (311). And, I have generally found that when I read my free writes, there is always a gem: a unique word combination, an evocative verb, or an emotional response that has been stiffled. Besides, it's free therapy!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure about this free-writing stuff either. I've done it for class assignments, and I've practiced it some in journals, however i feel like practicing this Engfish stuff probably makes me a better writer than free-writing. Even if it's stilted writing the exercise does require some degree of mental exertion that I don't see happening in free-writing. Yeah, some truth may come out in free-writing, some thoughts that were just floating around, and for art's sake this might be what a writer wants to achieve, but if the goal is to teach writing for practical purposes than it seems to me that all most writing does in fact take a stilted form adopted to meet the requirements of the situation and audience.
ReplyDeleteThere is a time and place for everything - and for every kind of writing. I would not have thought of free writing as a prompt, but it definitely is. Some students who may otherwise not write a word for another topic are inspired when they write freely. Gems may not appear, but it's a place to start. And Rey, I agree with you, too, about the mental exertion of academic writing. Writing harder makes us better and more competent writers.
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