Fun? with Understanding Composing

Perl: Sorry, how is "felt sense" not like inspiration? The picture to the left is a visual translation of Perl's notion of "felt sense" within the writing process.
Perl basically structures an outline for everything before "felt sense" and how we use it after we experience it...but it's really like using a Y-shaped stick to find water. Don't get me wrong...I personally love the idea of "felt sense" because I do think that inspiration exists. I was startled by its mention, however, because the last few readings have been about the formulaic structures of the writing process and how we're fools to believe in divine inspiration. I don't know. Maybe I can't properly use "projective structuring" to make all of you understand what I'm trying to say. Whatever, Perl.

Runciman: This essay was a breath of fresh air. I really was getting depressed about all of these researchers sort of throwing their hands in the air at the inevitability of not being able to completely structuralize the writing process so that it's teachable. (That sentence may not have made sense but I just feel like chugging along here, ok?) I seriously wanted to high-five Runciman, as dorky as that sounds. I loved this quote -- "Another pleasure, a recurring one though its frequency is unpredictable, lies in finding some accurate phrasing. This phrasing need not be particularly felicitous or pleasing to others; what makes it a source of pleasure is its accuracy" (204). For me, that's what is so great about reading text that's written by a talented writer. It's basically THE reason I enjoy literature. For instance, what do I have in common with a stuffed shirt like Thomas Hardy? Basically nothing, but some of his sentences perfectly articulate feelings I've had or ideas I believe in...it's relatability through the accuracy of his phrasing. Hardy's just an arbitrary example but I agree with Runciman that there is immense pleasure in finding the perfect way to say exactly what you want to say. There's so much pleasure, in fact, that it comes as a surprise that you were able to do it at all. I guess that's what Flower and Hayes found confusing about the term "discovery."

Maybe this isn't the place for my Oscars commentary, but people can stop reading at this point if they don't care to hear my thoughts about the Academy Awards. It's the one television program I refuse to miss, so I get pretty excited about it. I get emotional about it too, but let's not get into that. I'll just sum up my reactions in a few phrases. Paltrow's Zac Posen dress was my favorite. I felt bad that they wheeled out Peter O'Toole just for him to lose (though he's just an arrogant Irish dandy to me). Forest Whitaker's speech was fantastic and reaffirmed my love for that particular awards show. Why does the press use the word "size" a few seconds after mentioning the name "Kate Winslet"? Speaking of which, I love the fact that Meryl Streep told that tool, Ryan Seacrest, that she's a size 14 which matches her 14 total Oscar nominations. I predict that she's going to be the new female Jack Nicholson in the "ah, just screw it!" category of life. Finally, watching Scorcese win his Oscar was really a treat but it made me miss Stanley Kubrick a lot.

Unskilled Children, Discovery, and Experience

Graves: I'm just going to say it...the note "Stops, rubs eyes" is adorable. There. Now I can move on. Besides being bored with the tables and charts, the results in this text were interesting. I was intrigued by the gender findings, in particular. For the most part, the results were expected, though I'm not sure exactly why. I was not surprised that boys did better in informal environments than girls. I just assumed that girls did better with a structured environment and assignment. Turns out my assumptions were correct. What I thought was most interesting is that the "boys seldom use the first person form in unassigned writing, especially the I form, unless they are developmentally advanced." My guess is that the topics the boys chose for unassigned writing tended to be fictional stories that they were telling in third-person narration because they were perhaps used to that sort of story-telling.

Perl: I really don't like these readings. I can't stand the coding. I just want everyone to know that it's taking every ounce of self-discipline for me to plow through these. Anyway, I saw a lot of basic mistakes that I've found myself making in these "unskilled" writers. The "reading-in" part, especially. Always a good idea to have someone else proof-read for that exact reason, but I guess I don't need to restate that.
Perl hit the "rule confusion" nail on the head, I thought. I've screwed up my writing plenty of times by mistrusting my initial written response to a prompt because I've been paranoid to break a cardinal grammar rule. This is another case where practice makes perfect (or organic, if I haven't driven that term into the ground yet). Using correct grammar and punctuation, while allowing your thoughts to flow freely onto the paper requires parts of practice and self-trust.
I did like how Perl focused on the unskilled writer and what teachers can do to improve their writing, rather than another study on habits of good writers. She's got the right idea, that Perl.

Flower & Hayes: "Myth of romantic inspiration"? That statement ticks me off. Maybe I am a Romantic. I'm just sick of reading these texts where the notion of inspiration is completely ruled out. I really can't tell what Flower and Hayes came up with, either. It seems like they pointed out some differences between "experts" and "novices" and then said, "Yep, we need to teach novices how to handle assignments like the experts do." This was my least favorite reading so far, by far.

Sommers: I am no good when it comes to revision. I was comforted to read that Sommers found that "students understand the revision process as a rewording activity" and that they "list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about." I completely agree. That's exactly what I think of it as. This is why I get confused when a teacher tells me to go back and "polish" my essay. Do I need to make different vocabulary choices? Are my sentences unclear? Have I used an adjective too often and inappropriately? Just telling me to "polish" something doesn't really tell me what is wrong with it.
Sommers is right about the writing process being nonlinear, to some degree. Even the essays we've read before say that students and writers often go back and reread and rethink parts of their paper as they are writing it.
So yeah, if I look at my essay as a whole, then I need to start looking at revising it as a whole too. I realize this. I am not, however, going to call my writing a "seed." That is lame.

I'm sorry. This blog is pretty negative, now that I've gone back and reread it. I guess I'm in a bad mood. It's this weather, I suppose.

The Shining, Composing, & Competing Theories

I have to be completely honest here. After reading all of these pieces on the process of writing, I dreaded actually writing anything. Even a blog. To me, it was like thinking too much about how one breathes. I seriously almost had a literary panic attack.
I am certainly not implying that writing comes as naturally to me as breathing. I often struggle with writing, as I believe everyone does from time to time. Call me a Romantic, but I think writing should be processed organically. Even the term "process" makes me leery...though I do not know with what word I should replace it. So, onto the readings!

Tobin - First off, I really liked his frank style. I liked how he recognized the usual procrastination (on the end of the student and the teacher) on writing college papers, as well as the hesitation to teach composition. Tobin, as a professor, also had an extremely positive attitude towards the writing he received from his students. He said he looked for possibility and potential in his students' writings, rather than inspecting their papers purely for assessment. Ultimately, he joined the two ideas of process and product and acknowledged them as not having to be completly binary oppositions. I think that a lot of these pedagogies can be meshed for the benefit of the student and the professor.
Perl - I thought this intro did what it was supposed to do - it overviewed a lot of the different approaches and studies on writing and composition. I liked how Perl pointed out questions that have been plaguing the study of writing since the beginning of its research. I'm not really sure how to respond to her introduction, as a lot of the comments I have to make have to do with researchers or theorists she quoted throughout the piece. I liked that it was mentioned that writing is usually not a linear process, that if writing is seen as a problem then people make it into one, that writing is, on some level, a social activity, etc. Of course, I am paraphrasing a lot of quotes found within the piece.
Emig - What I got from Emig's essay is that people that society recognizes as great writers often cannot describe their exact processes when it comes to writing. What that tells me is that the composing process is really an undefinable thing. The quote from John Ciardi about riding a bike was an appropriate one, I thought. If you sit back and analyze something enough, it becomes difficult to actually execute it. In the spirit of me being open-minded, I will play devil's advocate for a second. Most likely, all of these writers who were interviewed were seeing their writing as an artistic expression. It must be hard for them to think of this artistic outlet as something that should or can be formulated. I could even go far as to compare writing to painting. A lot of painters start out with a pencil sketch, which I could liken to an outline. That makes sense, I guess. I think the type of outline and how formal it is should be left up to the writer and students who are writing should be in charge of making their outline as formal as they think it needs to be. None of this one-sentence-on-an-index-card routine like I was taught in high school.
Faigley - Yep, I'm of the Expressive school, it seems like. I think maybe during our online class it came across to everyone that I did not believe in room for improvement with one's writing ability. I wouldn't be going to school to be a teacher if I believed that. I think that writing may come to some people with greater ease than it does to others. Just like some are born with a runner's body and then others have Edwardian piano legs for gams (like me). The thing is, I sort of agree with the Romantics that there are things like inspiration and that "'good' writing does not follow rules but reflects the processes of the creative imagination" (152). Faigley points out that if this is the case, then every writer's piece should contain evidence of "false starts and confused preliminary explorations of the topic" (153). I disagree. Writing isn't purely a mirror to one's thoughts or imaginations...the writer is obviously capable of making change within his or her piece.
The Romantic idea of "self-actualization" is also an interesting one. I agree with the Romantics that writing should lead the writer to a certain level of actualization...it's a journey of discovery to some degree. I've written things before and have gone back and been surprised at what I have pulled out of myself (that sounds gross...it wasn't intentional).

I think that's all I had to say about those things. I've also just received a phone call from a beautiful man who was inviting me to go have drinks with him. This rarely happens, so wish me luck!

"This is my happening and it freaks me out!" - Z-man*

I don't know how to start out this blog. I guess I'll just start by saying that I thought some of the happenings were a bit kooky. I don't know how seriously I would take them if an instructor had me do these things in the classroom. It really sounded like a Drama class activity from high school. Also, for as free-thinking and "out of the box" as these supposedly are…they are all constructions by the teacher. All of these students were supposed to be manifesting the continual randomness of day-to-day life with these strange sayings and actions, right? How can it emulate randomness if they have received instructions on an index card? I had a hard time understanding exactly what the point was, I guess. If I was an instructor who wanted to have a happening, I would take my students on a nature walk. We would go for a walk and stumble upon a man with a wooden leg being chased by a nun with an ostrich on a leash. Did I hire them? The students don't have to know that. (Where am I going to get an ostrich? I should have thought this through…)
The silence activity was my favorite. It's really hard to know what sort of environment is writer-friendly for all students. For me, it changes with my mood. Sometimes I like to go to the pub with my notebook for writing and I can fully concentrate. Other times I need my surroundings to be as silent as a tomb. The silence reading was good because it seemed like no matter what type of writer the student was, they got something done. Kind of forceful productivity, it seemed like. But really, if a person stays silent for a long period of time, he or she is forced to at least hear his or her own thoughts. That alone can be productive for some students and can help whatever stage of the writing process they are in.
Masks. Good stuff. I was kind of embarrassed after reading this one. I know I've used masks in earlier things I've written. Lambert says something about the freshman writing in what he thinks is a mature style. That's very true, I think. Before I transferred to UMBC, I was a political science major and I wrote all of my papers in a very frank and clear style. When I first became an English major, I was convinced that I had to be Goethe in all of my papers. I think I've found a happy medium and I become increasingly more confident in my writing, but Lambert's right. I sometimes used to hear this dusty old voice in my head, narrating my words before I write them out. Maybe it was the Ghost of Papers Past. I don't know, but it was intimidating.
I sometimes wish my internal monologue would speak in an accent. I was thinking maybe an angry German man or a disappointed Yiddish woman. I really think I would get things done if I had that going on up there. Just a thought.

*Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Wysock-it to Me!

Wysocki – I generally liked this reading. As I said in class, I enjoyed the piece where Wysocki mentions how text is read differently depending on how it is presented, formatted, what the reader approaches the text expecting, predicting, etc. I actually tried to picture the text as scrolling up a computer screen, held within an AIM box. After our class discussion, I went back to the text and read some parts while trying to picture it as being laid out in an issue of Teen Vogue. You know, pink flashy letters at the top that say "NEW MEDIA" with a scribbly teal-colored question in the margin asking, "Is linear text really all that fair?"
Doing that seemed kind of joke-y to me, but really it calls to mind the supposed authority of the text. With that, I thought about visuals within a text. Wysocki asks us to think about the use of visuals within academic texts and how that makes readers value or devalue visual information in the context of text. For me, I feel that visuals are devalued in those situations. On one hand, when I turn a page of my textbook and I see a picture, the first thing my eye catches is that picture and I'll even read the caption underneath it before reading the lengthier text. It really doesn't matter what that picture is…in all of my education textbooks there are usually pictures of child reading a book while holding a pencil and looking contemplative. What does that do? Most of the time, the caption underneath is of some statistic of student performance or government policy. It rarely has anything to do with the child in the photo. That's the other-hand point I was trying to get to…kind of went off there (sorry.) Do these textbook companies have stock photographs of children thinking, smiling, frowning, playing, singing, and raising their hands? It seems that they must. That, to me, devalues the visual. Moving on to the Selfe chapter, I would have liked to have seen a visual for the story of David. Maybe not David's photo but perhaps his school, his university, an example of a webpage he created? That would have been a useful visual in that it would have helped me interpret the narrative while I was reading it.
Selfe – Okay, I get what she was saying. If we don't embrace new forms of literacy, then we are setting students up for failure by not recognizing their talents with new media…right? Maybe my paraphrasing is wrong, but I think I get it. I definitely agree. I think there should be a partnership between composition and new media. Use both to help each other, rather than one helping the other.
I had a problem with how Selfe presented the story about David. While I liked the interview format, I did not understand what the purpose was with including all of the "ums" and "uhhs." Maybe I thought about this more than I needed to, but I was thinking about reading an interview in Rolling Stone magazine as compared to David's interview. Is Selfe implying that in all other interviews in publication, David is the only interviewee who sometimes stammered with words during the conversation? I don't believe it. I guarantee that Alice Cooper has dropped an "um" or two in an interview before. (I didn't just pick Cooper arbitrarily…I really think he's quite eloquent.) I just don't understand Selfe's purpose, if she had any purpose at all. Was it supposed to drive the point home that David wasn't so good at using language to communicate? Okay, whew. I'm done with ranting about that. I really liked Selfe's mention of postmodernism as it applies to new media and the creation of personal identity. I think what she says is important because it certainly embraces things like social identity and digital community. Are these necessarily good things? I don't think I can answer that but it is wise for Selfe to be recognizing these things as potential tools for literacy and composition. Selfe is right, too, in pointing out that David is active and respected in an online community. He seems to be a leader in that field. That's important because that is where a lot of business is conducted now. More and more people get their information from an online source. So, good for David.

I heard the song "Freeze Frame" by the J. Geils Band on the radio yesterday. I was really sad to discover that it really is not as mind-blowingly good as I thought it was when I was little. Is getting older supposed to be like that? I'm bummed out.

Kicking Airplane Soldier

The title refers to the name of the band I wanted to form at the age of seven. I never got around to it, but it's relevant because I was thinking of voice in the most basic sense the other day.
I have an hour long commute to and from school so most of the stuff I post on here is going to be from my internal monologue created in the cab of my truck on 695. Don't worry...the thoughts mainly consist of school-related things.
As far as music goes, the voice is something that kind of keeps the composition all together. Neverminding instrumental music (which has a voice all its own, I suppose), I'm just thinking of a frontman to any basic rock band. I'll just use the examples of Elvis Costello and the Attractions and Queen. Both Elvis Costello and Freddie Mercury use their voices as instruments, rather than simply talking devices that churn out lyrics. More than this, their voices change to convey the emotion of the song being performed. Costello can go from endearing to snide with one guitar snap. It just depends on the rest of the song. Freddie could coo like a lounge lizard but also packed enough punch to fill any stadium.
My point is, voices change. Even the same voice changes. The question remains, "can voice in writing be taught?" I have no idea. I think you can help students find their own voice. Find out what rhetorical devices work for them. For instance, I like to make epic metaphors for everyday things. I can talk about squabbling with the local grocer like it's some kind of ideological warfare. But that's what teaching is, isn't it? It's not pure instruction...it's more like guiding students along. Suddenly, you and your students are in some campy '60s movie and you're walking with them while pointing out Las Vegas-style signs that say exciting things like "SIMILE" and "ALLITERATION."
Righto, well that's all I have for voice. I know it's a bit late (topic-wise) but I couldn't figure out how this confounded thing worked until 6 o'clock this morning. I'll respond to the readings tomorrow.