Oops.

This entire article felt like one huge callout aimed at me, because of how strongly I identified with the type of person being argued against. It was one of those pieces of reading that's so engaging that I can't keep all my thoughts straight, like everything I want to say is fighting to be said all at once.
At the Writing Center, we're trained to practice non-directivity, meaning that we're supposed to avoid "telling people what to do" at all costs. While this is important in order to avoid appropriating a student's paper and erasing their voice, it can easily border on the ridiculous.
Just today, I had an ESL student come in for a consultation. She asked me to help her with her grammar and spelling, because her professor kept taking points off of her papers for these kinds of mistakes. All my training as a "writing center person" tells me not to correct her grammar, even though her paper is full of things to correct. These situations tend to make me extremely uncomfortable, even anxious, because I never know exactly what to do that's going to help the student succeed and be a better writer. I become so afraid of being condescending that I end up being condescending in the process of trying to avoid condescension. In the end, I usually leave these sessions feeling pretty useless.
Delpit talks frequently about the ineffective and misleading nature of phrasing a command like a question. That's exactly what I tend to do when workshopping or consulting; instead of saying "you need a thesis," I ask "can you show me your thesis?" After reading this article, I feel sort of underhanded and tricky for employing this tactic as often as I do.
On page 13, Delpit says that "to act as if power does not exist is to ensure that the power status quo remains the same." It's dishonest of me to try to pretend, even out of goodwill, that I don't have a greater mastery of the English language than anyone who comes into the Writing Center. The student who came in today asked me to correct her grammar, and I was feeling at a loss, so I did. Ultimately, my doing so will help her get a better grade on that paper. While I find the practice of docking points for incorrect grammar morally reprehensible, I don't know how better to handle the situation. I can't exactly march down to that professor's office and give them an impromptu lecture on the error of their ways. I also can't fix institutional racism by pretending not to notice the technical errors in an ESL student's paper.
I feel that 1) I have walked directly into a trap with my Bartholomae response and 2) I may owe the man an apology. While his tone isn't exactly endearing, I think I better understand now what he was trying to get across. To pretend that the gates don't exist isn't the same as eradicating them. It's difficult to manage the joint tasks of bestowing expertise and helping uplift a person's unique perspective at the same time, but there's nothing to do but try.

Defining Normal - Becca Burke

Fair warning in advance this is probably going to be long…

I hate commenting on and analyzing articles like this. Coming from a white, upper-middle class family, who pushed education, responsibility, and family values, I often think it sounds and feels hypocritical to comment. You struggle with wanting to give a fair opinion and worrying that what you say, or your opinion could be misconstrued as racist or prejudicial. I never imagined being able to speak to the struggles of being a minority in an educational atmosphere, that was until I became a minority. Over the last ten years, I became the D word - disabled. “Disabled” is a word I never thought I would have to use to describe myself. I’ve always had great sympathy for those who are disabled. I pitied the hardships they faced, admired their tenacity and plucky spirits in the face of adversity, and thought it was courageous and brave when they kept functioning in society, trying to have as normal a life as they possibly could. In short, I was an asshole, not just an asshole but a self-righteous one, the worst kind of all. I lost my eyesight and became ill, I developed a permanent disability and found that society and people around me I’ve known my entire life began to have a different opinion and perception of my abilities as a human being.

Before I got sick, I had started preparing to return to university and no one questioned it, there were words of encouragement, and congratulations. When I talked about having a family, being married, or getting divorced prior to losing my eyesight everyone was encouraging and sympathetic. Once you suffer a lack of ability, that perception changes completely. Ableism is the curse and the wall many people with disabilities face in an able-bodied world. Statements attesting to courage and perseverance for living a daily life aren’t encouraging, they’re demoralizing. There’s nothing courageous in the morning when I shower, get dressed, and leave my house. Trust me, it’s not a pretty sight some mornings when I have to have the dogs help to drag myself out of bed, or I’m seizing on the floor. It can even be described as hilarious when I put on two different shoes because in the light in my bedroom the black shoe and the dark brown shoe look the same, or if I haven’t had enough sleep and I’m feeling groggy from one of the six medications I take daily makes me forget to put shoes on at all, but I wouldn’t describe myself as courageous.

Ableism came to the forefront in many facets of my life. The first began when people would tell me about how I must be so sad I wasn’t going to have a family. “Why wouldn’t I have a family?” I would ask incredulously, to which people would respond, “How could YOU be a mother with all your disabilities?” When I told people I was getting divorced, I was met with horror, “Don’t you want to try and work it out, I mean who is going to want to date you or think about marrying you now?” People would stand there indignantly waiting for an answer and in the early days I would feel ashamed, embarrassed, and stupid that I would consider to want things that “normal” people had.

When I decided to go back to college, the ableism reared its ugly head and came up in every conversation I had when I announced my plans. A common response I received was, “Why would you do that? Won’t that be so hard, especially for you?” I also was met with the famous statements of, “You get disability, just be happy with that.” However, my favorite question I was asked by everyone was, “What are YOU going to be able to do anyways?” During a particularly frustrating class in one of my first semesters back at Boise State, which I was struggling with the material I met with the professor during a conference and his response was, “The material is challenging for normal students, I’m sure it’s especially challenging for students with disabilities, so be happy with a C.”

I would find myself absolutely livid to the point I could hardly stand it. What the hell did “especially for you” mean? Why would college be any different for me than anyone else? Why did I need to be happy with a C? I considered myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, but somehow there was this mindset that because my body physically doesn’t work the way everyone else’s does that it somehow had turned my brain to mush. For some unknown reason, people seem to think that once you have a disability that you’re resigned to a life of sitting on a couch watching Judge Judy and NCIS reruns and drooling on your shirt. That because my body doesn’t work “normal” that I should be content with giving up and declaring myself feeble and incapable of anything better. 

I felt and often feel pigeonholed, I think in a lot of ways our educational system pigeon holes minority students and students from low income backgrounds. We assume that because they come from a low-income neighborhood, or they’re from a different ethnic or minority group, or don’t use the vernacular or linguistic patterns we deem as “socially acceptable and correct” that they’re incapable of maintaining the same level as other students. The ones who do keep up with their more privileged peers are deemed as exceptional, while the ones who are more challenging are deemed broken and damaged.

Unfortunately, public education has become the judge, jury, and executioner for children in an underfunded system, with overworked employees. Kids who are deemed as problem children or struggling are often isolated because the teacher doesn’t have time to focus all their energy on one or two kids, when they’ve got 33 others sitting in the room depending on them to teach. So we see kids passed along for the sake of passing, handed off to be the next instructors problem, and that how you get kids in high school who read at a third or fourth grade level. We expect less from students who face adversity, like because life has given them more challenges, it's normal for them to not succeed and when they are successful they're exceptional rather than just like everyone else.

I worked in a grade school a few years ago with kindergarten through fourth graders who tested behind in their reading comprehension levels and saw firsthand the breakdown between teacher communication and students. Our demand for a politically correct and soft touch society leaves these kids thinking they can walk all over the teacher, and the teacher is frustrated because she can’t control them, and when they call home, the parents are frustrated because they don’t have behavior issues in the home. They don’t understand why the teacher isn’t doing their job and controlling the situation, all the while the teacher is petrified that the wrong harsh tone or “mean” look could get them fired.
Education and academia breeds “normality” it sets up standardized tests and tells you that you should achieve x rating otherwise you’re not normal or you’re lacking in a skill set. Academia, sets standards on exams, papers, and writing and tells us if we don’t achieve these standards, we’re behind. We’ve stepped away in education from encouraging free thinking and creativity in a lot of ways and instead we tell people that they should conform to the standards that those in as Delpit puts it, the culture of power deems acceptable. The problem is, how do we fix this, which there isn’t an easy solution. You have to be able to see progression and teach material and know the student is learning it, and benefitting from it, but without setting up an individual curriculum plan for each student this is impossible without setting up some standardized margin, and academia and public education doesn’t have the funds to meet each individual students creative and intellectual needs.

Clarity, Purity, and Other Such Nonsense

Clarity, Purity, and Other Such Nonsense

Yesterday while my brother, father, and myself were driving to Costco, my brother and I got into an argument, like we are bound to do. He’s currently teaching a UF class about the current state of Amercian health care to true freshman who are majoring mostly in Health Sciences. Common assignments are reading responses and single-page essays, as per the UF program’s expectations. They don’t like to write, and he doesn’t like to grade their writing, because he has no idea what he’s supposed to be grading on.

I told him that grading young writers doesn’t mean you’re evaluating whether or not you agree or disagree with their ideas, you’re reading to see how clear and effectively developed those ideas are. He told me he’s only ever been harshly graded at the whimsy of opinionated teachers who marked him down because the idea he expresssed did not match their own. I rolled my eyes and told him that couldn’t have possibly been the case. He insisted it was, and that writing was simply a guessing game where you tried to guess what whoever was grading you wanted to read, and then wrote that. I told him to give me an example.

He said, “Two students have an idea about what water is supposed to symbolize. One says it symbolizes clarity, and the other says it symbolizes purity. They both write a paper on why and turn it in. If the teacher thinks that water symbolizes purity, even just a little bit more than clairty, and even if they think so privately, to themselves, and if they never tell the class their opinion because they think they it will influence what they write about, they will still give a better grade to the student who wrote about purity. They can’t not do it.”

I rolled my eyes even harder. To me, the only thing more asinine about the scenario he described is that he actually believes it’s a reality. I guess to him it is. I asked, “What if the student who wrote about clarity was so compelling that the teacher changed their mind?” He said no, that couldn’t happen. English teachers would never entertain the idea that one of their students is a better writer than they are, he explained.

I wanted to bang my head against the window.

What happened to my poor, dear brother? Did his high school writing education, the very extent of his tutelage on rhetoric, fail him that badly? Or did his own stubborn aversion to the field as a whole lead him to his own hyperbolized conslusions about how it always has been, and always will be, inaccessible? I told him he better tell his students what all his opinions are on American health care are and encourage them to structure their papers around those perspectives if they plan to get a good grade in his class.

He told me to stop being a smartass. I said, “You first.”

Bartholomae’s ideas about the pressure to create effective discourse that the academic forum places on writers can warp their prose to unrecognizably complex, and at times hilarious, lengths really shed a light on what it was my brother and I were arguing about. My mouth got dry as I read the student piece about modeling a clay globe, it was gaping so wide. What could ever possess a human person to insist that use of the word ‘cranium’ is preferable to ‘head’? Jesus, the poor thing. As if I don’t know.

Students emulate commonplaces of what they think is ‘university writing’ like kook surfers buy foam boards from Costco and try to brag about how radical it was when they smacked the lip of that barrel, bro. You get called a kook because you don’t know what you’re doing, saying, or look like, and the answer to each is silly, You just look damned silly, you poor thing.

That said, I get the haughty nature of Bartholomae’s prose, but truthfully, I don’t see too much problem with it. I think the only reason we are able to agree or disagree with his idea is because he has articulated it effectively; that’s the whole point, isn’t it? In fact, the line that held the most meaning to me was “The act of constructing a sentence becomes something like an act of transcription, where the voice on tape unexpectedly fades away and suddenly becomes inaudible.” Your internal idea is the tape, and your fingers are its conduit. The stress to sound smart is what breaks down the connection, and it takes away from the fidelity of the idea. Any idea has value. Blood has value. But if I can’t take your blood type, it’s only going to exist in you. If I can’t understand your idea, well, ditto.

My brother is of the viewpoint where the fidelity of the idea is not as important as the identity of the idea. In his world, wah-wah sound effects from the Charlie Brown cartoons could comprise an entire essay as long as the world “purity” appeared in there somewhere. English teachers are merely a bunch of Lord Palpatines concerned only that their gaggle of impressionable Anakins continue to express interest in the Dark Side. No, Princess Amidala won’t die in childbirth, write your little papers, now.

Grace and elegance can’t be measured in a piece of writing any more than they can be measured in a person. Are concepts necessary to give writing value in certain contexts, though? They certainly are in people. Even if I’m not the best at keeping it perfectly within my lipline, I still apply lipstick when I go to a wedding, job interview, or formal party. I’ll get better at applying it the more occassions call for it, but in the meantime, who’s going to be there to scrutinize my face?

I guess I hope anyone with a keen enough eye to notice would just smile politely and pretend I looked fine.

Inventing the University

In many ways I think that some of the points that Bartholomae makes in "Inventing the University" make sense. It makes sense that students should make attempts to engage and write in the way that the field that they will be entering writes. Practicing in college and gaining some insight on it, so that when thrust into the real world people will not be at a severe disadvantage. Though in my opinion, Bartholomae puts to much emphasis on strictly adhering to the rules of academic discourse.

Writing especially always has room for innovation and personal growth. No matter what type of writing a person is doing there is always a place for improvement. There isn't just one way to write something. I think the context of the piece is of particular interest with this as well being as it is all about first year writing students. This emphasis on students only following and emulating models given to them by their instructors might lead them to be better able to write like those in their field but could also be stifling and restrictive. They are just starting out and this approach may lead them to disliking writing since they have to follow exactly what others are doing.

In my own learning experience and the reason that my interests gravitated towards writing was the freedom that it gave me. Sure there were also certain guidelines and examples that served as starting points for many of the pieces that I have done over the years but I have never been forced into trying to emulate them. I have always been given choice and I think that had I been made to copy the language and form of another then I would have not been nearly as happy with writing. I would find it difficult to see it as my own.

For the Audience

I don't agree with everything Bartholomae is saying, let me get that out there before anyone burns me at the stake, but some of the points he is making have purpose. When writing academically we must acknowledge who our audience is going to be, and speak to them. There has to be vocabulary and formatting which is generally accepted by an establishment if that establishment falls out of the realm of creativity. The questions which have been raised in order to write the paper must be answered in a full and thoughtful way, otherwise, it is not enjoyable to read. How can we deny that writing a scientific article would be much different than writing a poem?

These established principals mean that writing for academia must be inherently academic. While a writer may not have all of the tools to express an idea without having the knowledge first, the idea must be presented in a comprehensible way. One of the examples spoke of plumbers and how they could have missed a leak to which a student wrote a creative story about always needing to watch your back. It didn't answer the question, and it didn't show promise of being able to better express a solution to the problem after knowledge was acquired. This knowledge is not just isolated to academic writing either. There are many tools and strategies creative writers can use which will undoubtedly improve their writing. Very few people naturally possess the toolbox of someone who has years of postgraduate study under their belt.

However, this isn't to say that just because a writer doesn't possess the same level of knowledge means that they are "basic" (I interpret this as calling someone a bad writer). Many writers with years of education and training will never be great writers. There seems to be a dash of talent one must possess first. Perhaps not the most popular opinion, but I think there has to be a foundation to build off of or the building will never quite stand up straight.

This isn't to say that I am with the "gatekeepers". It isn't to say that I think someone with extensive education is better than someone who doesn't. I'm merely saying that we must consider our audience with any piece we intend to be read by one. We must acknowledge (and in some ways this goes hand in hand with respect) the subject matter, the audience, and clarity of ideas when we write.

Here, let me bang my head on the wall because you said so.

I had read this piece previously but couldn’t remember much about it and now I remember why. My biggest frustration of this piece and his position is the standpoint that you must first teach the academic fine points of writing, and then you can move onto the more enjoyable writing. I think this is such a backwards convention because if you don’t enjoy something, you’re not going to want to do it. I hate math, with a passion that could burn down a city block with nothing but a match and some newspaper, and the more academic and conventional the math the less I enjoy it, but I took a math class once years ago from an instructor who made math relevant to me on a personal scale and made it enjoyable to do and it made the class easier to get through and more enjoyable. I walked away, no longer HATING math. 

I think writing is the same way, if we make writing accessible, interesting, and enjoyable to students I think more people would be drawn to it, it would be less daunting of a task and more of an enjoyable pastime and what I take from “Inventing the University” is almost this self-inflated almost elitist mentality that if you can’t write well and to strong academic standards you shouldn’t be writing the more enjoyable and creative pieces, however, if all people see is the academic side of writing how much is that really going to inspire people to write more?

I think academic writing has its technical merits and importance, but I know I would be completely discouraged if every time I sat down to write, it had to be to the standards of exceptional which in a way Bartholomae alludes to. I think conventions and guidelines are helpful, but I think the more you limit creative expression with writing by making it a right or wrong process you’re just making it more of a task and assignment, and less of a piece of creative work.

Hey Bartholomae... what's the deal, man?

Every time I read David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University" I always get instinctively defensive. I just don't entirely agree with his values, as I understand them. My initial opinions are very similar to Elise's in their most recent post, pretty much. I also think he has a judgmental tone, and the way he talks about his students sets me on edge. Maybe we're biased because we're writing center consultants. Maybe I'm biased because I was first exposed to this piece in Melissa Keith's argument class... and Melissa is our writing center director. We didn't tear "Inventing the University" apart in that class too much, but we definitely poked fun at Bartholomae a little. Writing center consultants are passionate, opinionated people, and we care a lot more about content and ideas than grammar and structure. (Even though those are important too.) We get a little heated about this kind of stuff.

I do understand that this piece prompted a lot of important discussion about writing courses at the time. It was kind of groundbreaking, from what I understand, so I completely respect that. He clearly cares about writing and I think he wants what's best for his students. His language just makes him seem so detached from them, which really grates my cheese. That might just be how he writes academic papers, but it still makes me uncomfortable. Maybe he's trying to remain objective, but the way he dissects student writing here feels cold. It feels like an actual dissection, and not a gentle investigation.

I don't even think his ideas are that bad, mostly. They're a little confusing to interpret, though. For example, on page 10, he says that "Leading students to believe that they are responsible for something new or original, unless they understand what those words mean with regard to writing, is a dangerous and counterproductive practice." His whole argument sounds kind of shitty at first, like he's trying to stifle student creativity. For the most part though, I think he's just trying to say that students should be taught standard genre conventions so they can better navigate the world of writing, instead of focusing entirely on freedom of personal expression in writing.

As someone who loves freedom of personal expression in writing, this offends me, but I also kind of get it? I think I understand why he's saying stuff like this. He's trying to give student writers, especially "inexperienced" student writers, the tools they need so they can do the fun stuff later. For me, the fun stuff has been a big part of learning writing, and I believe it helps students become less scared of writing as a process, but I understand where Bartholomae's coming from.

He seems like one of those strict writing instructors that always give you harsh criticism - not because they're entirely an asshole, but because they believe in you and stuff. I've definitely had writing instructors like that in the past. My English teacher in junior high was kind of like that, except he actually was entirely an asshole. One time he got so mad that no one finished the homework (which was admittedly pretty confusing) that he screamed at us and threw a stapler at the wall, shaking everyone into silence. I don't know a lot about who Bartholomae is as a person, but I'm hoping he's not the kind of guy who would throw a stapler at the wall in English class.

Voice of privilege

Last semester in literary criticism and theory is when I first began to think about power and privilege within the university, specifically the inclusion and exclusion of content and how we are appropriated to learn in a certain way. As students we must adhere to the conventions of our chosen discipline and mimic the established scholars in those fields. Like Bartholomae points out, we must pretend to be familiar with our audience and establish a false credibility. We have to speak the language of our audience. I particularly like the metaphor on page 9 where students are the shepard that has to be a member of the court in disguise to speak to a courtier (scholar).

I really enjoyed "Inventing the University" because it made me think about the university world in a larger context and in a different perspective. I realized I am the student who can imagine myself in a privileged place to pretend to be a professional -- a writer, researcher, rhetorician, critic -- to appeal to other professionals reading my work. I have thought for a while about how problematic it is academic articles discuss the most relevant issues but are incomprehensible to the layman, but I never questioned exclusion within the university itself. Bartholomae's point about university language excluding student populations struck me and made me think about how I would read 101 students' work if accepted for a teaching assistantship. The second paragraph on page 8 pretty much sums it up, the student speaks a language of defiance when they can't imagine themselves in that place of privilege so by default they "offer the wisdom of their own experience." I don't think we should penalize those students but instead encourage their voice with a blend of academic conventions but not commonplaces.

A brief rant

Bartholomae's style of communication has always been pretty off-putting to me, maybe because I get the sense that he's incredibly full of himself. It's true that he's an academic who has earned his place in that sort of high brow discourse, but the way he talks about student writers really rubs me the wrong way.
I appreciate this idea he's putting out there about how students ought to feel welcome to shape discourse by participating in it -- it's actually a pretty cool thought -- but all the talk of correct vs. incorrect sentences makes me grind my teeth a little bit. That might be kind of petty, but as a writing center person, I'm more inclined to overlook "errors" in writing, in favor of ideas and clarity. I think that Bartholomae ultimately comes around to a similar point by saying that the "errors" don't matter as much as the depth of thought, but I still can't help but interpret his tone as fairly judgmental.
Maybe I'm being unfair, and still holding a grudge on behalf of Peter Elbow, but the idea that academic discourse is up here and regular donkey discourse is down there seems inherently classist and exclusionary to me. This opinion is also shaped by the fact that secondary education is so expensive in the US; Bartholomae's stance, in the context of my staggering student debt, seems grossly gate-keepy. While it's true that folks who go to school for writing are probably going to receive more advanced training, practice and growth as writers than what Bartholomae refers to as "basic" writers, I'm extremely wary of the idea that any writer ought to adhere to what he calls "our peculiar ways of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking" (11).
I don't know if I'm eloquently stating why, because maybe it's just a feeling of the heart that can't be put into words, but I just want to shake Bartholomae and tell him to get over himself. If it's true that students invent the university, then maybe he should sit back and allow that to happen, rather than trying to mold students into his ideal version of what an academic looks like. If writing is a mode of learning rather than just a way to express one's knowledge or understanding, if higher learning is about becoming a better thinker, then how is "personal writing" anything to scoff at?

Thoughts on Bartholomae by J. Jackson

I must admit, Bartholomae's text feels deep and fascinating to me. His writing on writing was at times difficult to follow due to 17 or so pages of mostly (IMO) winded points, and by the end my mind was a bit clustered. However, I enjoyed the reading immensely because not only did most points make sense, but I was like "yes!" to many of them. I may have this wrong, but it seems like Bartholomae's point is that we must be allowed to imagine for ourselves what it is to be an uppity writer and work out the kinks in action without being made to think we have to invent a new language, have to perform right out of the gate. We should encourage experimentation rather than setting expectations (or letting one assume) of a higher station, whether covert or overt. It gets deep, but its like we don't want to make our students think that they're in one single box, with only one single scary successful route out of the entrapment - which is to stay perfectly inside the four corners of the box- but they have to guess what that box means and discover or create a new unique code to gain permitted and respectable access outside of it. When we pop our head out, we're looking with a scared look on our face to see what the reaction is, but worse, more often than not we get no real idea.

Instead of all that, a better way might be to think of writing with authority as several 'boxes.' Say many boxes are to be presented to the student, allowing them free access in and out of each one, clearance to enter,, to exit, to evaluate whats inside- see it, touch it, feel it, experiment with it, then leave to check out something else if they begin to feel overwhelmed with one box. Each box can be revisited as part of a tour, not a matrix of a single box. Demystification. Start basic, record the process, and build the bridges from there. This can help eliminate student assumptions of teacher expectations, and allow students to explore and build the steps to the top of the mountain with less anxiety. I feel like I'm talking in a riddle worse than Bartholomae now. I think having discussions about writing in a classroom setting is equally as important as the act of writing itself.

A couple times, Bartholomae touched on "acts of appropriation which constitute authority" in writing. Instead of coming up with bullshit, the writer is clear and concise about what they know and don't know, what they assume, or don't , what they experience or lax in experience. There's authority and integrity in honesty. If someone proffers a style of B.S. authority, its going to seep through, and potentially misinform or worse, be spotted as fake, piss-off the reader and detract from the writer's authority, which is disaster. The writer would be better off to lay-out facts, assumptions, experiences, and beliefs honestly in order to reflect the genuine and real persona. When discussing the various writing samples offered and analyzed, Bartholomae writes "The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or perhaps, best begins) when a student can both define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a 'common' discourse, and when he can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the 'common' code but his own." This tells me that the path to good writing, or good writing is perhaps a hybrid we concoct, drawn from several factors and not just one place or the other, assumed or inspired.

I enjoyed Bartholomae's summation of the high school writer's thought process of "trying on the discourse" and writing for an audience he/she could mostly only guess-at - the assumed "impressive air of authority," of which I can connect with well, as I think back. The real and the fake can be spotted.

I love the analysis of the thought processes of the student writers. This seems to touch on a though process of learn and apply, like the anecdote by the basic student writer of figuring out how to build the clay earth model. What is there to consider, what may vary, what can make the clay model unique and be best representative. The clay model of the earth, and the process of going about it may represent, in a way, a similar process we go through as we try to decide how to tackle our writing - the main idea of the student paper being creativity. Even though the student sample of the earth clay model wasn't meant as a comparative to writing (i don't think), I saw it as one because I'm always looking for hidden meaning. Probably nothing in fact.

Notable thoughts from Bartholomae:

A paraphrase of sections of the writer's thought: the text discusses a writer's need to  acknowledge and anticipate readers' assumptions and biases, building bridges between his viewpoint and the theirs, beginning with common points of departure. This sounded a lot like basic technical communication. Begin small, basic and build up slowly so comprehension and understanding can take place. 

Talking about a writer who has lost himself in the discourse of the readers - "entering the discourse without successfully approximating it" when someone feels forced to write about something, and in the early example on page 8 switches from an authoritative-sounding writer to a bullshit-sounding writer; Slipping into a role and voicing that role with believable authority

Writing Bad Real Bad

I just sat down at my computer, looking over the announcements to ensure that I had got everything that I had need to for this class as wrapped. I had done all the readings and wrapped up my Re-genre pitch but when I read the first sentence I realized I had totally spaced the blog. So in the spirit of the readings this week I am just going to let my writing run free and tell just what I got out of these pieces.

The first piece really intrigued me was "Writing as Practice" by Natalie Goldberg. I had never thought about the ways that writing could be directly compared to something like running in which we get better the more often we do it. I mean it makes sense when you think about it but I had often thought of writing as simply being an innate skill that a person is either good at or they're not. Thinking back to the classes I took in my earlier college years I can look back on the ones where everyday we were doing some sort of writing in class and realize that these activities truly did help my writing, though often times I would stare at the blank page and be at a loss for words. This relates to another one of the readings, "Write before Writing." This may be one of the pieces that I was truly missing within my procedure. I generally sit down and just try to pound out whatever it is that I am working on. It usually involves staring at my computer for several hours before I finally put down my first words. Hopefully this quick writing before writing will help me today.

The second piece that peaked my interest was "The Importance of Writing Badly." It interested me for several reason: first it was written by our professor, and secondly it was something that I had been working on for the past several years and has truly helped me. Early in my career I wanted every single thing that I wrote to be perfect. Every sentence had to be perfect. This lead to me absolutely dreading writing and putting it off. I would find any thing more enjoyable than writing. It made college pretty hard especially as an English major. I knew that this way of writing just wasn't working for me. I decided that instead of making everything perfect I would instead just not care. I would write as much as I could as fast I could. And this truly helped me. It took a little bit of time but now I feel like I can get my ideas out on the page without fear.

The Importance of Writing... Perfectly

For three years I’ve been tutoring students who are just starting their college writing journies in English 197, English 101M, and English 102 as a Learning Assistant. I sit in on their classroom sessions, I host out-of-class study sessions, and I take all the questions that students who are brand new to college writing are too afraid to take to the teacher for fear of letting their educator know what it is they have yet to learn. As a supervisor of both brand new and experienced LAs for other subjects, I often hear them offer their students reassurances like “Yeah, I struggled with that when I was in this class, too” and “I still don’t fully understand how to solve that problem, but we can work through it together”. I have never once said anything even remotely resembling these admissions to a single student of mine.

Obviously there was a point when I had a less than exemplary command over the English language, as my own personal Mrs. O’Neills have so readily pointed out, but I never once saw the value in letting my students know this. I never felt that they cared. In my experience at this position I have come to see the value in those humble reassurances because they let your students view you as a peer instead of an authority figure, but still, my tutoring style has not completely evolved to adapt this philosophy. One of my coworkers, an LA and Mentor for Microbiology, often admits to me, “I hate it when they ask me something and I don’t know the answer off the top of my head. They love it.” I feel her. English and Microbiology truly can’t be that different.

There is a degree of importance to writing badly. I can’t pretend there isn’t. But to me, that importance has always come through the process of correcting that bad writing. I’ve seen how anxious my older siblings get when they sit down with me and ask for revisions on the papers they need to put together for graduate school. I make jokes about their comma splices and vague pronouns. I hand them their papers and ask them to read aloud their awkward sentences, following up with smartass questions like, “Is that something you would ever actually say?” When my siblings write badly, they don’t get discouraged by my merciless quips (miraculously). They get a chance to see their ideas take a more cohesive shape when they listen to my feedback and take my advice, which is something they rarely do in other situations. And I get to make fun of them.  It’s a grand time, but I promise, I don’t ever actually handle my students this way.

I know that those with less confidence in their writing skills need encouragement. I know how special it is when a student, especially those who are just getting accquianted with the English language and college-level writing, read over a simple 1-page freewrite, blind to all its sentence-level errors, and see the first inklings of a full-length research paper. I’ve never been anything short of touched when I see these moments unfold before me. I know that spelling and grammatical corrections can all come later, in the final stages of a draft, where the sense of accomplishment can fully fuel the editing processes, which is oftentimes dull to the fledgling writer.

But that editing process can be approached with the same amount of passion and thoughtfulness as the free and flowing first stages. In fact, I think it should. However accomplished a student feels with their final draft, those ideas will only extend so far if a teacher, elitist or not, can only struggle for so long to access the thoughts hidden behind a style that they find incomprehensible.

Last semester my advanced fiction instructor said to the class, regarding rampant sentence-level errors, “At best, it makes you look incompetent. At worst, it makes you look careless.” Savage, but true. And we could take it. We’d all been through numerous workshops by that point, and we would all bleed for our writing, if that would make it better. We knew how instantaneously even the most innocuous error could yank us right out of a draft. But however true that statement read to us, I wasn’t about to turn around and relay it to my freshmen. Like learning the chords of a guitar, you start with G, and the face-melting solo comes later. You must learn the joy of writing first, and the joy of writing perfectly comes later. However shit that chord is, it’s something, Jukebox Hero.

At this semester’s LA training, a sophomore and first-time Learning Assitant pulled me aside and relayed to me that she had met with the English 102 teacher she would be working with. Worriedly, she said “I was told not to correct their grammar. How am I supposed to teach them how to write if I don’t correct their grammar?” I bit my tongue and gave a partially honest response. You can encourage the flow of ideas, you can demonstrate the writing process, you can share with them readings you find useful or inspiring, but you can’t go against your teachers’ wishes, however strongly you disagree. At least not to their face. Even though you have free reign over your learning sessions, red-penning your students’ papers to a pulp is not in anyone’s best interest. Try and understand where your teacher is coming from, and expand your idea of what it means to ‘teach writing’. I added one last thing at the very end; if a student comes to you, begging for a yes or no on whether or not a compound sentence is structured correctly, please, for the love of god, give them a taste of the confidence that comes with knowing how to write perfectly.

If you know the answer off the top of your head.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

I really enjoyed reading all of these pieces! Writing sucky stuff is the best. I have always been passionate about the idea that English grammar is kind of ridiculous and self-proclaimed “grammar police” need to calm the hell down. I do totally get having a love for grammar. I always feel a big sense of personal satisfaction when I can dissect a sentence and poke around and change things. I like it when people tell me I spell good, or whatever. Validation always feels nice, okay! BUT I still absolutely reject the mindset that we need to force this grammar elitism on others.


I reject this especially when it leads to scaring/scarring young learners. In 2016 I presented at NCPTW (National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing) with a panel of three other Boise State Writing Center consultants and our former director. We are friends and coworkers, and we are all passionate about English, writing, Writing Center studies, and social justice. The theme of this conference and our panel was diversity and inclusivity as it relates to Writing Centers. I focused on the concept of linguistic discrimination and the ramifications of this dangerous mindset. If y’all are curious, here’s a link to the handout I made for the presentation.


I love this idea from The Importance of Writing Badly: that we need to stop “alienating young writers from the language we expect them to master.” Additionally, Dr. Ballenger’s article was published in 1990 - I find it very sad that this problem is still as insidiously buried in our education system as it was in the past. We really haven’t improved much. 


I love writing and the power of the English language (and all languages). We should be allowed to play around with English, have fun with it, and learn from our mistakes. We should be allowed to write about whatever’s in “this moment” and write about whatever’s running through us, like Natalie Goldberg discusses in her piece. English as a language has consistently evolved throughout time, and continues to evolve as society changes, so why should grammar police have the right to say what is wrong? There are certain grammar conventions that should be followed, especially in academic settings, but we shouldn’t utilize fear tactics to help people learn them. Although I had my traumatic experiences in school, I never had a teacher in writing or English scare me like that. I consider myself lucky. All I feel I can do now is perpetuate the idea that writing should not be terrifying. My work at the Writing Center in recent years has energized this belief.


Here I’d like to move from this idea of social writing into this idea of personal writing, which are totally connected but also different. (That's why I called this post "Two Sides of the Same Coin.") I love what William Stafford explores in his piece. It’s interesting to me when he says that he wants “to take a definite position, and [his] main plea is for the value of an unafraid, face-down, flailing, and speedy process in using the language” (22-23). I actually didn’t like his piece at first, because the beginning was floaty and vague, but then I realized that was kind of the point. He's describing his own personal writing process, and how it doesn’t have to make sense or adhere to a “standard” writing process (although this is probably more common than he thought, at least now it is). 

I identify with his “dizzying struggle with the Now-ness of experience” (22). This section on page 20 is also fascinating: he says that he is “not writing for others, mostly” and that his “guide is the self, and its adventuring in the language brings about communication.” Writing has always been really fun for me, and I hope I will always feel this “elation, and discovery” Stafford talks about (20). I don’t personally like that he doesn’t write for “the learning of methods” or “the broadening of culture” (22) though. One of my instincts is that writing is very social, which is why stuff like linguistic discrimination is important to me. However, I also still write just for me. 


I write what I want, and I write it how I want. I always listen to outside opinions and seek them out, because I value that part of the process too. I will always consider the effect of what I write, because I am concerned with societal development and social justice stuff. But in the end, I take everything that I learn from society and history and whatever else, and I form my writing around it like a protective shield thing, with everything that excites me and fills me with passion hammered into the metal. I don’t even know where that metaphor came from, I’m so tired right now. But I like it!


I use language how I want, and structure and genre and everything else. A lot of this is probably influenced by my experience writing genre fiction and making silly shit up all the time. I love mixing genres (Mystery/science fiction! Horror/romance!) and I love blending genre and literary fiction and ignoring all the rules (while still kind of following them). I mostly just do whatever I want always. That’s why I really liked Stafford’s piece after I let myself get into it. He sounds a little bit pompous sometimes, but aren’t all writers kind of assholes? No matter how kind/open/selfless we are, we still write because we want the world to hear our thoughts that we think are cool. We talked about this last week, when we discussed why we write. I’m not saying writing for yourself is a bad thing at all, or that it actually makes you an asshole. I’m just saying I write because I want to, and sometimes I’m selfish about it, and that’s okay too.


Thanks for reading! See y’all in class tomorrow. :)

Coming to Terms with Bad Writing

I got my first bug to be a writer in junior high school because I spent the summer with my godmother who writes period era Harlequin Romance novels. Yes, I know I thought the same thing everyone initially thinks when they hear this, “How cheesy” and then I spent the summer researching Scotland during the 1890’s and realized how much time, energy, effort and dedication it took for her to write one novel. Although I’m not a fan of romance novels, the challenge of writing intrigued me, and she told me one of the best pieces of advice, which is that in order to be a writer, you had to learn to love what you write even if you don’t love it in the beginning.

My next great piece of advice about writing came as a freshman in college, when I had a professor give me a D on a paper after she said my revision was lacking. She told me, “Revision isn’t just about structure, it’s about revising your brilliant ideas.” It became my personal challenge that when I wrote, to try and write brilliant ideas, preferably the first time, but if need be, the fiftieth (which tends to be more realistic) as long as I got them written down.

I think for this reason, I’m not bothered by the concept of bad writing. Where the fear kicks in for me is two-fold, first having to share that bad writing with someone else who could pass judgment, and secondly, having to figure out what to do with the bad writing once it’s written. I feel like everything I write should be improved on, the type-a personality in me takes over and I want to make it better, worthy of the page it sits upon, and I tend to look at my bad writing like the dog hit by the car. If we take it to the vet, poor money, time, and effort into it eventually it will get better. When in reality, that’s not the case – I have a hard time pulling the plug, sometimes learning to let go and realize it’s just bad and has no hope of ever improving is really difficult if not close to impossible for me.

I really found the idea in Murray’s piece about the resistance to writing interesting and connected with it. I think often having that resistance is important and I find myself with it often because sometimes I feel like I have to really let something stew, and simmer and toil over it, resist the urge to write and have an aversion to wanting to write about it because it’s like I’m waiting on that moment of clarity, when I know how I really feel about whatever the topic is, or I get to the point where I’m running out of time and have to force myself to really search my own knowledge and emotional base to see how I feel and what I want to say. I think naturally in academics especially we struggle with this as students because the idea of procrastination and writers block can and does feel like failure, whether you’re failing yourself, or failing your assignment.

Ultimately the writing tends to not be what plagues me, it’s the endings. It’s finding the perfect thing to say when I want to say and making sure my message is heard the way I think it should sound in my head. I think that’s always been my biggest struggle with the workshop process is sometimes I think I’ve said what I need to and want to and yet when those around me read my piece they have no idea what I’m talking about. I have a love/hate relationship with writing, a lot of times, that relationship is like an over caffeinated four year old on a sugar high and I can’t decide what I’m doing, how I got here, and what made me think I could write in the first place – but it’s the love that keeps me coming back and wanting to make my writing better and experiment and push myself and see where it will take me.