Reading/Class Discussion Notes
Teaching Writing: Fall 2006
5 principles for a writing workshop
[a kind of writer’s bill of rights I have students put into their writer’s notebook]
1]Everyone who writes is a writer: thus we are all writers
2]Writers learn to write (and develop as writers) by writing: thus writers learn from the experiences (good and bad) of their writing
3]Writers keep track of their experiences—with the world, with ideas, with their own writing: thus the importance of the writer’s notebook or journal
4]Writers develop their writing over time, in a process of exploring and composing and revising, working individually and with other writers: thus the workshop
5]Writers communicate through their writing and seek audiences for their work: thus the importance of publication
Meehan’s reading notes/journal (from Bones 1-33)
Was I a goody-two-shoes as a writer in school? Were you?
3: note the point she teaches over and over: trusting your own mind and creating a confidence in your experience. Thus focusing on ‘experience’ in writing is not just as subject matter, but as a way of building confidence.
My thesis and premise, underlying course and asserted throughout my teaching of writing: to develop as a writer, to become a stronger/better writer, one needs to develop confidence.
Does confidence matter in other practices? What practices?
Consider my experiences with basketball, tennis.
6: writing is physical. A key point often neglected by school (writing, and generally learning, is an embodied experience). I write with my body and my brain. Who were the first writing teachers in America? Arithmetic instructors. Why? Because they also taught penmanship, the physical act of marking numbers and letters.
First thoughts vs. internal censor
12: the process that matters
[we will be exploring process in the course]
30: we learn writing by doing it
True of other practices. Has that been true of how writing is presented/taught?
Class discussion notes [9/1/06]
Other practices: music—piano; voice; basketball; running, driving; moving to a new country (the process of getting adjusted).
Voice: everyone can sing, how well, or how one learns to sing better is a different matter [anaology with: everyone who writes is a writer]
Peter Elbow, “Write First” 9/8
Some keywords and ideas in Elbow:
Expressive, expressivist
Write before reading
Emphasis on writing output (from the writer), not input (from the teacher)
Writing while my eyes are closed
Writing as expression of personal voice
Response over grading/criticism
Class: 9/11; use of Journal and personal writing
Freewriting: for creative flow; also for establishing writing practice
9/13: initial assessment
Response / Assessment / Evauation / Grading
For the 2nd version of your experiment (on its way to a draft of your autobiographical essay): we will focus on assessing 2 key aspects of strong, personal writing (which is not simply writing with lots of appearances of ‘I’)
1] showing: back to Goldberg, importance of showing vs telling about something, using specific language and details (not remaining distant)
2]showing up as a writer: claiming/owning the writing: the writer needs to show up
5 revision prompts for developing/composting personal writing
From Katherine Bomer, Writing a Life (2005)
1]Where are you in this piece?
2]Revise by telling the truth (about how you felt)
3]Revise by telling ‘lies’ (compensate for what you can’t remember)
4]Revise by leaving things out.
5]Revise by telling another side of the story: from another perspective, in the voice of someone else.
9/15: Inventing the University; Bartholomae vs. Elbow
What does Bartholomae mean by inventing university? what approach to teaching writing do we see in the essay?
--specialized language/conventions of a field: communicate with experts
Discourse/discipline
Students write (or try to) in the discourse of the teacher
--errors: “grammar”/surface errors: reflective of inexperience with discourse
Compare/Contrast with Elbow
DB: not concerned with writing as individuality; imitation
Original ideas, supported by accepted framework, structure
Elbow: disregard the audience; writing without teachers, writing with my eyes closed
Originality: developed from personal experience
How would each teacher have you approach the essay you are currently working on?
Further contrast [9/18]
Elbow:
Romanticism: Romantic writer, individual genius: Whitman, Wordsworth
Internal; originality
Bartholomae:
Imitation; fluency; conventions; exernal (focus not on interior voice, but voice of the audience, discipline, field)
Post-Modernism (Foucault): identity determined from social discourses
9/25: grammar research; how to approach the teaching of grammar/mechanics to writers
Weaver, Teaching Grammar in the Context of Writing
Some key terms: prescriptive, descriptive, transformational
Competence vs performance
[we make performance errors all the time; rarely make competence errors]
9/27: applying grammar lessons to writing
My teaching grammar principles (or “How To” list) that I apply to teaching writing [informed by both Weaver and Parsons]. Yours for only $19.95 plus shipping and handling!
1]Always teach grammar in the context of the writer’s writing. A writer who is having difficulty with ‘grammar’ may actually be having difficulty with writing. If needed, get the grammar monkey off the writer’s back, then work grammatical problems in at the appropriate place (the editing stage), and give more time and focus to editing if needed.
2]Less focus on terminology, more on describing the writerly or rhetorical effect of a particular part of a sentence or piece of writing.
[The ‘thing-y’ that connects the parts of a sentence and shows cause and effect works just as well for me as ‘subordinating conjunction’]
3]Have a mangageable and containable list: 7-10 issues that you might work on during an entire course, year, etc. Use resourcees like the Guide to Grammar and Writing to explore these common problems. The writer needs to take responsibility for developing the ‘grammar’ muscles that he/she needs to develop. The teacher can guide this individual exploration in response to writing, in conferences, and in mini-lessons in workshop.
4]Read/glean resources like ‘Grammarama’ and use in your mentoring and teaching; share with and borrow from teachers, ideas for approaches to or lessons about particular writing. No teacher or writer has a fully complete ‘how to’ list for grammar or for writing; we develop it as we go along.
5]Pay attention to the ‘grammar’ and the various styles and rhetoric that writers use. As Parsons puts it: both grammar and reading are caught more than taught. Bring that principle into your teaching/mentoring. Listen for ‘grammar’ going on around us (and outside of the grammar books). What’s the grammatical identity of “mmmbop”?
6]Freely admit when you don’t know the answer to a grammatical question. Just as it helps to share your experiences and struggles with writing, be willing to share your own struggles and creativity with language usage. Isn’t that what makes you a good writer? [cf. Parsons, 105]
10/2: Notes on Writing Processes
Objectives: Exploring writing process (now as a teacher, or coach); exploring the coaching analogy for teaching (and for process); exploring the concept of fluency first.
Prompt: Schon (p. 20) “Students cannot be taught what they need to know, but they can be coached.”
Your experience with coaching/catching learning
1]Remembering/sharing:
Jot down 3-5 memories you have of learning a process (other than writing) of some sort and/or learning from coaching (rather than teaching)
Class share
2]Selecting a memory
3]Jotting or ‘prewriting’: details of the snapshot.
Record as many of the ‘grains’ of the photo as you can get to—or take as many frames of the same thing, don’t think about composition yet
[one strategy: fill in the picture with as many details and sense information you can remember]. Can also do clustering, webbing.
[consider software such as ‘inspiration.com’]
4]Getting it down: initial drafting
Explore different strategies for drafting:
My suggestion (from my photography learning): a 3-shot bracket. Try the idea, in draft form, but 3 different versions of it.
10/9 – 10/13: Voice and Audience
Fluency
Flow of language
close to Goldberg’s ‘begginner’s mind’ or freewriting; composting;
unedited
key stage: joural and composting, practice writing
Control
Voice
The “I” of the writer (or the writing) speaking to the you of the audience
The writerly quality of writing
The ‘style’ of the writer
Key stage: drafting and revision
Precision
Audience
The you; the readerly quality of writing
Key stage: editing
How do we develop and control our ‘voice’ in writing? Where does voice show up in writing?
Markers (and makers) of voice:
[1]vocabluary and idiom (word choice, diction)
[2]the pace and syntax and sentence structure of our writing, the ‘line’ our writing takes [linear, circular, repetitive, parallel, stuttering, complex, simple]: consider the difference between Whitman and Dickinson
[3]punctuation: controlling the line and the reader’s path—or not.
[!, --, ; , : …]
[4]figure/image: use of rhetorical figures such as metaphor, metonymy, personification; think of these as the colors and shades we can add to writing.
Consider this paragraph from Emerson (“American Scholar”): he not only uses metaphor in his writing, but the very idea of the paragraph is about how our writing and language ultimately comes from the source of metaphor. [note that Emerson is speaking to an academic audience]
Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, — in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
Audience example:
[a book review recently sent to me]
Everything Good Will Come, by Sefi Atta, Interlink Publishing, 2004, $24.95, in hardback only
I think after you finish this novel you'll find that you don't have any easy answers. In fact, you'll hopefully have questions, and also, a worthwhile experience.
It's the story of a young Nigerian woman's life, seen throug her, Enitan's, eyes. Since it treats only a few select time periods, the focus gives you intimate insight into the important people in her life: her mom, dad, Sheri ( a friend), a lover, a journalist friend, her husband, and a surprise arrival towards the end.
The author, a Nigerian, has written a masterpiece. At one point she makes an allusion to James Joyce without actually naming him.
The meshing of social-political history with personal stories gives it very much the ring of reality.
Don't get the idea from the title that it's a "happy-face" story. It's gritty, with emotions that will teach you things. And make you wonder. For instance, how did this woman survive her time in jail?
The book helps westerners understand Nigerian culture. Enitan takes time to tell you what a "wrap" ( a type of clothing) is.
It balances the "public story" with good pictures of domestic life. For instance, Enitan, as a teenager, has just snuck Sheri into her family's house.
"I'm telling you, if my mother ever catches you in our house, she'll send you home."
"Why?"
I pointed at her pink mouth. "It's bad, you know."
She sucked her teeth. "It's not bad. Anyway, you think my father allows me to wear lipstick. I wait until he's gone out and put it on."
"What happens when he comes back?"
"I rub it off. Simple. You want some?"
I didn't hesitate. As I rubbed the lipstick on my lips I mumbled, "Your stepmothers, won't they tell?"
"I kneel for them, help them in the kitchen. They won't tell."
"What about the one with the gold tooth?"
"She's wicked, but she's nice."
I showed her my lips. "Does it fit?"
"It fits," she said. "And guess what?"
"What?"
"You've just kissed me."
I slapped my forehead. She was forward, this girl.
As an example of the social-political history that comes into the story, the name of the environmental martyr, Ken Saro-Wiwa, comes up.
After finishing the book, I felt somehat disgusted by some of the decisions that Enitan had made. For instance, when she left a certain man. But then I realized, "Who am I to judge?"
If you're open to a book with new ideas and pioneering womanism in it, and also one that's smartly written, you'll definitely want to check this one out.
10/16: poetry
What makes for poetry? How does it work as writing? Are there lessons we can learn from writing poetry and apply overall to the teaching of writing?
Definitions of Poetry:
Poem: literally, a made thing
Intensity
Sound: device, alliteration, melody
intimacy
density
rhyme: redundancy
relation
humor
audience
My anthology (favorite poems and poets):
Emily Dickinson:
NEIL
YOUNG LYRICS
"Pocahontas"
Aurora borealis
The icy sky at night
Paddles cut the water
In a long and hurried flight
From the white man
to the fields of green
And the homeland
we've never seen.
They killed us in our tepee
And they cut our women down
They might have left some babies
Cryin' on the ground
But the firesticks
and the wagons come
And the night falls
on the setting sun.
They massacred the buffalo
Kitty corner from the bank
The taxis run across my feet
And my eyes have turned to blanks
In my little box
at the top of the stairs
With my Indian rug
and a pipe to share.
I wish a was a trapper
I would give thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin'
on the fields of green
In the homeland
we've never seen.
And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome
and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Pocahontas.
Basic format for Curriculum (like an essay)
1]Introduction: Theory/ Principles/ your thesis
2]Practice: How the principles are supported: the activities, individual lessons
3]Conclusion: Assessment. How the principles and activities are concluded, culminated.
Writing Principles
Hypertext
What is it?
Academic definition: The term is coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s. He described it this way (citing him from Landow, Hypertext)
“By Hypertext I mean nonsequential writing—text that brances and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connecte by links which offer the reader different pathways.”
[also definition linked on writing resource page]
Your definition (from experience in the digital domain)? What does it entail? What are the possibilities? What does digital/hypertextual writing do? What about more broadly electronic communication?
Patterson hypertext:
What are key ideas from it concerning how hypertext writing is different from traditional ‘school’ writing? [related question: what would be advantages/disadvantages of teaching/learning writing by way of a hypertext environment?]
One key: linearity http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/5.1/binder.html?coverweb/patterson/home.html
[beginning, middle, end; drilled into us since Aristotle. Does writing always work this way?
Consider hyperfiction [brings the implications of non-linearity home with a vengeance]: Walter Sorrels, The Heist
http://www.waltersorrells.com/2.html
or this hypertext autobiography, “Growing Up Digerate”
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/infotech/digerate/TITLE.HTML
wikipedia: see non-linearity plus additional issue of reader control [Barthes’ version of the writerly text]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext
and multi-media (interactive in sense of media experience). Consider e-potery as an example:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/