Personal Writing
From Ken Macrorie’s Uptaught (who we will read later)
A girl who early in my Shakespeare course had turned in a sharp paper asked to talk to me after class. In an empty room she embarrassedly but determinedly told me that in the small college from which she had transferred she had studied under a teacher who admired me, that she had a great deal of respect for me, but she couldn’t stand the class because it didn’t offer any “hard-core scholarship.” She said, “I don’t want to listen to some sorority chick telling what she said to a friend in the cafeteria line.” She was referring to a student written dramatic dialogue that had been read in our class.
Hard-core. I thought of how the epithet has sounded to me on the tongue of the narrow-minded and ignorant. I have heard them talking of “hard-core pornography” and “hard-core communists,” all the while licking their lips as if evil tasted delicious. (114).
From Ulmer’s Internet Invention
Mystory is not a text, but a “felt”: let us begin to use this word to name our productions, whose overtones suggest the emotional quality of image meaning. (37)
From Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida
I am the reference of every photograph. (84)
From Nigel Thrift’s Non-Representational Theory
We now have the tools to turn to the third element of signification: creativity. It is remarkable how little effort has been exerted by academic writers upon precisely the element which they would - presumably - most wish to characterize their work. Yet, it is not that such work has not been attended to or that it has no connections to contemporary thought. (118)
Common assumptions about personal writing:
- It’s not academic writing
- Academic writing must be objective
- Academic writing is based on non-personal writing
- Therefore, the personal should not be a part of academic writing
Some definitions:
Notice keywords.
Dartmouth: “scholar,” “college student,” “audience,” “keep the audience in check,” “evidence over feeling,” “watch personal pronouns.”
UNC: “argument,” “critical thinking,” “reasons and facts,” “evidence.”
Two highly quoted Internet sources. Neither seems to recognize the “writer” as belonging in the writer; the writer is mostly outside of the writing she does.
The absence of the personal; emotional distance as preferred writerly state.
All four writings for the week are both academic and personal.
The lore: Academic writing is “objective” and not personal.
The practice: Many academic writers make their writing personal (beyond usage of the “I”).
How do we negotiate the lore (the common assumption) with the practice (the ways academics may, in fact, write)?
Some common issues from the readings:
- Imaginative
- Ethos
- Generative
- Juxtaposition of experiences
- Narrative
- Research interwoven with personal issues
- Usage of citation in a variety of ways - from support to context to mood
Identity
- What it is? Student or writer? Scholar or composer?
- Role within writing?
Challenges for us regarding these approaches to personal writing:
- Turning readings into assignments
- Practicing juxtaposition
- Personal + research
- Shifting perspective (as Corder argues) regarding what something (like academic writing, personal writing) “is” or “isn’t.”
- Demonstration as valuable as “proof”
Stylistic Models
- Usage of citation as compositional - different from pedagogy that frames citation as provided only in support of claim
- Usage of the fragment - as opposed to the extended idea
- Implied claim - instead of explicit thesis
- Speculation as rhetorical device - as opposed to argument
- Non-linear composing - as opposed to linear argument (supports following claim)
- Sustained metaphor
- Object of research (class, teaching, history and memory) is followed or engaged with at level of pattern formation
- Juxtaposition
- Mood (the writing is mean to provoke feeling, particularly to the writer) as insight. While an audience will find interest in the writing, it is obvious that the mood produced is meant as much for the writer
Possibilities:
- Modeling (our readings posed as models for other projects)
- Usage of juxtaposition (alter ego/Malcolm X)
- Teaching/doing mystory
- Others?
Experiments in Design
- Temporal move. 3 areas. Two - discipline/pop culture….one the anecdote
Bishop257- creative nonfiction as introduction(style)259 anecdote serves to show need “to discover what you don’t know”connections b/w teaching, writing, learning of creative nonfiction260 memoir261 other media for creative nonfiction: personal essay, autobiography, new journalism, travel writing…262 should we teach literary nonfiction within composition?
263 issue of splitting personal experience from intellectual
264 we typically compose in nonfiction genres / rise in the personal
265 Heilker: truths are anything but certain - especially at points of intersection
266 Connors - myth of “academic” writing which is in fact with research unconnected to a writing purpose
essayists seek to discover
267 Spellmeyer - become ethnographers of experience (see Brodkey, Ulmer, and Corder)
269 Sanders - no experience is lost (DETAILS) - how do we help students grow up in their writing (generic to details shift)
270 teaching people to CARE to write (see end of Brodkey)
271 as if writers are not shareholders in composing process / textbooks regularize (see Corder)
272 academic writing which learns so much from cultural studies and postmodern regarding how to challenge/subvert,/alter perception - is in fact CONSERVATIVE
273 challenge to develop a new and generous pedagogy (think about this)
Ulmer
210 It’s important not just to critique, but to perform mythology
210-211 quotation out of context
220 patterns. mutilation/ colonel, kernel
222 letters from mailbag / letters in the map the mystory begins with
225 the vanguard
Other patterns? colors? the letter H? long hair? the dog? Others?
Corder
4 does studying rhetoric change us as teachers?
5 – being in rhetoric
about CHANGE: teaching must change or it becomes memory (like 5 paragraphs)
HOW is one in rhetoric?
For a personal place (ethos - place of dwelling), how can you be IN rhetoric
Mowing the lawn
6 a response - slagging, lacking energy
7 – how is it we are not alarmed more?
Pleasure? – coffee, people, houses…
9 all of these (the food classifications) were “weeds” thought unusable
what material is usable for writing, what isn’t? How do you know? What is usable now and later will become a “weed” again?
The “imagination” is contagious
10 – it allows “me” to follow a variety of patterns (and not one best way)
if we be what we have always been – we become weeds (the metaphor - the weed does not change; the turnip is the evolved weed)
11 our purpose is not to arrive (here’s how it’s done!) but to be on the way (keep figuring out how to do it)
intellectual monism!
The commonplaces of teaching - assumed right ways
Institutional assumptions - prepositions, separable forms, etc
13 issue of thesis
14 can’t order a hoe out of a 1936 catalogue – can’t teach in 2006 as if it’s 1870
Anecdotes used to relate ideas
15 catalog describes a fixed world - a single vision
16 Fort Hill - space and personal - imagination and real researched place
17 more metaphor – which “Fort Hill” does one look at? Past, present, imagined? All?
19 myths can make us inactive (they keep things fixed) - we act as if our work is sacred
21 the house - more usage of space to advance ideas - juxtaposition/overlap/pattern
22 teacher’s work is future making
23 – what do you need to know to be a good teacher? There isn’t one thing. But there are suggestions (a mantra for this course)
24-25 Maverick – it’s pretty easy to dismiss this concept (students can’t be mavericks if they don’t know basics). Yes. Agreed. We know the commonplace. Now let’s ask: what might be the benefits – and not just “freedom” from rules.
26 modern writer must CREATE a world – it is not enough to only speak to a or past, you have to merge a number of things to create
27 maverick is not anarchy - but it introduces inefficiency
28 suggestions for being a maverick
29 invention feeds and informs structure and style and is informed by them - we are shown and we make “letters”
30 ethos - all discourse is ethical - revealing speakers’ character or design
32 generative ethos – allowing texts, ideas, and ourselves (our character too) to continue to emerge
33 communication as an invitation then - a living space (a flow, as Deleuze might say)
a becoming
36 Generative ethos unbinds itself
Brodkey
Narrative. Metaphor. Attention to a problem via personal reflection (see Ulmer - mystory as way to explain social problem)
528 early memory tied to issues w/rules in writing
531 correctness –
540 – first exposure to college writing – the formula
541 thesis like middle class values – correct/perfection
545 the bias – the oblique lines that cut across the grain
which is the “pleasure” of being an intellectual
546 writing begins w/a troubling image
547 I look at language and imagine essays I can write
*learning how to write follows wanting to write
- why we do we want to do anything? Sew? Sing? Work?
Why do we want to write?
