As you can see/read, I tried slightly harder with my title this time.

I actually enjoyed writing in my blog this semester. It’s the second semester in a row that I’ve been required to have one, and last semester I was the professor-proclaimed excessive blogger who posted a ridiculous amount of pictures, musings (I like that word), articles, and ideas. This semester, the posts aren’t so free-formed but I still liked writing them.

I really do find blogging to be useful. It makes me sit back and actually think about what I’ve read and then post it so I can see others’ thoughts and they can see mine. I didn’t feel any pressure, however, to write a certain way in this blog because, honestly, I felt like no one but Dr. A was reading it (a probably true fact). This is also a disappointing fact for me because I like to think that I’m in conversation with other writers on here, but as it stands right now, and as I stated in my other blog on the class blog as a whole, I feel like this blog has been used as more a drop-box situation.

I think for blogs to really be effective, the whole class needs to be responsible for reading and commenting on other student blogs. However, I also believe that the only way that this would be beneficial is if all of the posts and comments were visible on one central page. This would actually make the blog be conversational, and I think we would all benefit a lot from that. We already have so much discussion in class, which is great, but not everyone gets to say everything that they wish to say for time constraints. I know Dr. A. told us we should post if we didn’t have time to say our peace in class, but if she made us comment/respond to each other, maybe people would actually heed her advice.

Therefore, as it stands, I feel like for many students, this place was just another place where they had to turn things in. But, the blogs could be so much better if we all had to use it a conversational outlet. And this wouldn’t be a punishment, because I feel like we’re all used to blogging by now. I think my main suggestion would be to have more free-writing exercises on here, where content isn’t judged, and where we’re allowed and encouraged to be creative and say what we want about the articles or prompts. I think it would be an amazing thing to add to an already amazing class.

Wow. First let me begin by saying that I am already embarrassed by my title. I think it goes without saying that due to this particular time in the semester, my brain and I are fighting a battle that I’m rapidly losing. Okay, now I will move on to the real point of this post.

When I start reading all of the posts, I find myself wondering how to take it all in. What can I say about 20 distinct blogs? Well, for starters I could say what they all have in common. Oh, about three final papers and some posts on the reading. But, I doubt that’s what I’m supposed to do here. So, I guess I’ll try a little harder.

After I read and/or skim all of the blogs, I’m surprised about how honest a lot of them were. I feel like the class used these articles as well as their papers to put everything on the line. I guess I’m trying to say that I had assumed before looking at ohter people’s blogs that everyone was going to write the bare minimum that was asked of them and move it right along. But, a few people seem to want to say exactly how they feel on the subject (for the most part), and it’s really refreshing. I expected very P.C, and I got Stephanie talking about her boyfriends, Margaret on the Vagina Monologues, and just in general people writing about whatever they felt about the subject. So overall, I feel like some people took advantage of the blog as really being their space, and, as I expected, some people used it as a work drop-off station, which I can’t really blame them for doing. What I think is the coolest part about reading all of the blogs is the fact that I feel like I can hear the people in their writing. I guess there’s some voice in the building for everybody on here. But I think to really study the blogs it’d be more beneficial to narrow the look down to a few people and say what I felt was different about their blogs (imagine that, just as the assignment asked!).

I really enjoyed Stephanie’s blog. I felt like although she said she cut back and self-edited a real sense of who Stephanie is, or at least how she thinks, really came through. She really utilized the space as her own, and I liked the fact that when I read her writing, I felt like she wasn’t trying to right down anything that could be deemed as being relevant. She seemed to actually think about the readings and how they came across to her, what she liked about them, and also what confused her, for example what she did with the Corbett’s article. In short, I liked the personal touch she added to her blog by taking the readings seriously and doing more than she was asked to do.

I found Brandon’s blog to be interesting as well. I said earlier that what I found to be surprising about people’s blogs is that I could hear the writer behind the text, and when I said this, I was really thinking about Brandon and Dave. I like that he always inserts his own dry humor into his text, and both when he speaks in class and on his blog, he seems to already have an established information bank on writing that he’s just adding to in this class. I admired that in reading his blog because he seems to be adding what he already knows to what the articles bring to the table.

The other blog that I found to be interesting belonged to Dave. I know I must have searched him out after reading his papers because I knew he’d have something interesting written down. He makes himself undoubtedly present in everything that he writes. I appreciated the fact that he took risks in his writing both on the blog and in his papers. I would never be able to write like he does and feel like I could get away with it. So kudos to him? His blog is definitely memorable if nothing else.

I have to admit that if I were to back up again to look at the blog on a larger scale, I could say that when I read the blogs I found myself searching out the posts on writing and race that we started with. I was really interested in what everyone thought on the subject, but I was also very—well frustrated that everyone with the exception of a few people said, “yeah, doesn’t effect me, so whatever moving on” to the whole idea. I’m not saying that this is sad because race doesn’t affect their writing, but most of the people who said statements to this effect seemed completely nonchalant about race and wrote it off as not their problem. I don’t want to say much more about it because I feel like I just finished writing a small novel here, but these are the things that stood out and the specific blogs in particular that caught my attention.

The “Write” Expectations

In the classroom, the student is asked to perform. The student is told again and again that he or she has the potential to be a great writer. In fact many teachers will tell their students that they have the potential to be powerful speakers, powerful contributors in the classroom, and most of all, these teachers will ask these students to be powerful writers. But how do these teachers grade power in writing? They grade students often in part by the elusive term, “voice.”  This is not to say that simply every teacher will grade for this trait, but the numbers of teachers that do is steadily on the rise.

You may be asking, like millions of students, what does “voice” mean? If teachers are looking for it to see if a work is powerful, students need to know how to deliver it. What does it entail? And, what can the students do to have it? Well, according to Elbow, the supposed founder of the term, “voice” is something everyone has within, but it is also something that appears to be indefinable until one actually experiences it. Similarly, Richard Graves, author of “A Dance to the Music of the Mind,” states that “voice” is seemingly indefinable to many but also vital to powerful writing.

Many teachers expect students to participate in, what Graves terms, a writing “dance” in which “everything is just right-the ideas are clicking [and] the words are coming” (109). An inherent part of this “clicking” process would undoubtedly lie in “voicing” if “voicing” is shown to be the teller of powerful writing. Yet to explain this process of power through “voicing,” or the power of the “click,” Graves states in his essay that writing will simply grow stronger if the students have the belief in themselves to will themselves to be better writers. But can teachers expect so much when they teach the students so little about how to believe in themselves? Some fear that since powerful writing has in many realms been defined by the “voice” within it, scholars will no longer be teaching writing. Rather they will be preaching “voice” and the value it holds within the text. This is an issue brought up by another scholar, I. Hashimoto, who admittedly has reservations about writing classes preaching what it seemingly cannot teach.

Hashimoto explains in his essay, “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition,” the writing community has come to equate good writing as simply being writing with “voice” (70). Yet, as I stated earlier, the writing community, in which teachers play a part, cannot clearly define what it is asking for. Hashimoto’s fear is that if good writing is simply made to be writing with “voice,” “teaching composition…at a college level,” such as for term papers and various research articles, may be undermined by some “anti-intellectuals” who are advocates of more “motivational appeals to writing (79). I believe Hashimoto is understandably concerned about the standards the writing community uses to judge “good” writing. Because, he fears that if the writing community turns to the indefinable to judge the quality of writing, composition classes could deteriorate into the vague arena of writing simply how one feels. And, here is where the problem truly begins.

Since Graves states that when one writes with a belief in oneself, writing does indeed simply click, as if in a “dance,” and Hashimoto is against teaching the “dance” of “voicing” since the “dance” moves are unclear, where does this leave the students and teachers in the debate over whether or not powerful writing is writing with “voice”? How does the writing community expect teachers to teach the subject of writing in which the “je ne sais quoi” of “voice” is expected and writing just works well when it does work? It appears that teachers are expected to ask students to write with something they don’t understand and to tell these students that if they just start writing, it will all just work out. Also, how will “voice” be located by the teachers who cannot define it? However all of this leads to, what is to me, the most important question of what happens to the students who never acquire this “voice” thing that they don’t understand. Does this mean their writing just wouldn’t “click,” or come together powerfully?

The writing community cannot deny these students the chance to contribute in the writing process, because the writing community itself believes that everyone can, indeed, write. I must say, however, that I believe this community that claims to support all people as writers also has very different beliefs regarding who can write well.  I like to think of the writing community as being like my fourth grade classroom. My teacher, who I’ll call Mrs. Foster, told everyone that they had to write a short story about their summer vacation. Some children in my class were reluctant to do so, claiming that they couldn’t write and that they hated having to do this story. Mrs. Foster assured them that they can write just as well as anyone else if they tried. But, what she did not say is that at the end of the day Tommy’s paper would be on the bulletin board with the gold star at the top of his page. It is the same with the writing community. It says that everyone can write, but it is implicitly said that some writers will be praised and some will not. But, what I am concerned with is making the students who, by the writing community’s standards, don’t have the “write” stuff to rise to the gold star level. And, to me, the gold star more than likely falls into the “those with ‘voice’” realm of writing. Yet perhaps there is no “voice” within the assignments because there is no passion for the assignments the students are being given.

This is because students as writers are often forced to write what does not interest them. The students enter into an assignment knowing that they are writing to an audience of one, their teacher, who will in turn judge their writing by placing a grade on it. “This paper doesn’t sound real.  Where are you in this piece? I can’t tell that you care or are invested in this topic;” these are all comments I’ve received on previous papers throughout high school. And, I know that from these instances in my writing career, I have been asked to produce “voice” in my papers by a different name. Perhaps, many students can relate. How can many teachers ask students to give “voice,” a trait that comes with being powerful, passionate, and honest about a subject, in a paper that they are being literally forced to write? If teachers demand passion in writing, and the students are unable to produce, I cannot believe that this would make these students bad writers. I believe these students would be writers in need of a topic more suited to their own fervors. This is not to say that every assignment should be catered to each individual student, but students should be given the leeway to expand the topic’s scope to also engage their own realms of interest.

Although, I know that students even when given this freedom to write what they are interested in, they become intimidated. Many students feel daunted by being asked for things they do not understand, such as “voice,” in their writing to make their writing powerful. In turn, I believe that many of these students have shut down themselves as writers, believing they do not have what it takes to be “good” at writing simply because they do not know how to deliver everything being asked of them. But, I am sure that that all members of the writing community are concerned with making writers better than the ones that came before. It is a common goal to want good writers to emerge; the writing community, especially the teachers within it, just needs to know how to reach and encourage them.

However, teachers cannot turn to students and just say “if you truly try to write, good writing will come.” They cannot say this because it simply is not true for everyone. And where do the students who simply hate writing fall? Are teachers to say to them as well that they should “keep trying until they learn to love it”? Teachers cannot demand people to participate in a “dance” in which they do not know the moves in as much as they cannot demand students who have no love for writing to conjure up a faux love to complete an assignment. Both would be activities in which the student would be playing a passive role in his or her own writing education. If the teacher asks the students’ writing to be powerful, to be moving, or to appear authentically true in the text, the teachers are asking to see “voice,” a characteristic that can in no way be achieved through passivity. The students must be engaged to write passionately, to write with “voice.” And, perhaps writing for some will get better and “voices” will be found with practice and with time, but some students will inevitably require more structure and more definition of their writing problems in order to further their writing development. And, I fear, teachers will be unable to tell these students how to better themselves without confusing the students further.

Yet even though teaching “voice” to students can be a confusing, trying, and searching endeavor, I still have to concede that if “voice” could be taught effectively, it would be a good means to encourage writing in students. Therefore, however judgmental I may be about grading writing on the indefinable term, “voice,” I can still say I believe in the process of writing with this “voice” to better one’s writing. I can say this because, like many “Elbow-ians” and followers of Graves, I believe in a student’s potential to be a great writer by being his or herself. However, I disagree, like Hashimoto does, that this “voice” constitutes the best or the only way for a student to reach their goal of being a good writer.

Teachers must encourage the students to write what they feel needs to be said, to allow themselves to let themselves shine through on the written page. But, I firmly believe that teachers cannot and should not grade students on this ability until it becomes definable and easily recognizable to the students being asked for it. And it is my hope that in the meantime, the “voice- challenged” students will not be ignored while the world of writing teachers and scholars tries to define what they are asking for. These students who aren’t so “voice” apt must be addressed and must not be allowed to fall through the cracks of the writing world. They must be reached. But how will they be reached? How should a balance be struck in the classroom between Graves’ “dance” and Hashimoto’s fear of preaching “voice” as power in writing?

I believe writing should be taught as an exploratory process. Writing research papers or essays for the academic realm should still be taught and graded on form and content, but teachers should also allow students to experiment with this “voice” quality that everyone currently esteems so highly. Alongside writing these academic papers, teachers should also request memoirs, short stories, and opinion papers. But, I do not believe that these papers should be graded. This section of writing should be a positive experience, and perhaps these papers should be marked similarly for form and content, but this would only be to benefit the student’s growth and should be nothing but encouraged, and therefore, not judged, or more specifically, not logged for a grade.

Yet through all of this, I understand that the process of teaching writing will always be under debate, and the teacher’s preferences will always come into play when, in fact, they do grade, undoubtedly. But, teachers should always encourage the growth of their students in composition, and the best way to encourage writing is to give clear expectations for them to strive to accomplish and to not give them vague terms they may not yet understand. These students should always be encouraged to experiment with their writing, and this experiment should never be punished through harsh grading. This is because we as members of the writing community and teachers need to remember that students typically want to succeed and can succeed if given the right tools to do so. If the goal is to make better writers, which I sincerely hope is the goal of all composition educators and all members of the writing community, we must try to understand the needs of the upcoming generation of writers and then the writing community must, in turn, learn how to facilitate these needs.

Works Cited

Graves, Richard L. “A Dance to the Music of the Mind.” 109-114.

Hashimoto, I. “Voice as Juice: Some Reservations about Evangelic Composition.” CCC 38.1 (1987): 70-80.

Miller’s understanding of the self/weiter in relation to the text is twofold. I say this because of her points on 172. She seems to take two stances on the subject, that I have to say I agree with. She starts by saying the equivalent of “it’s just text, I can change it or start all over again with it because I made it. It’s my creation.” Yet from this stance, she can turn right back around and say the equivalent of “Well, I just wrote it. It’s out of my hands, because I just put it out there for you to do something with it.”

I think this covers the question in class of who is more important, the reader or the writer. In Miller’s world, she understands the writer’s importance to the text. She made the text; it’s her words; and it is made and/or broken by her. Yet Miller also understands the reader’s power by saying that once she’s done writing/beating up/forming the text, it’s not longer hers. This is because the text is then standing practically on its own, in a world where she “only” wrote it and has no real other contact with it.

Interestingly, Miller also talks about an area Bazerman speaks of, the writer’s “spot.” Miller states that “my writing varies depeding on why, what, who I am writing at a particular time” (170). To Miller, the writing that comes out of her is based on her “spot,” as Bazerman coins it, in relation to her writing. Her writing depends on her motivation and which Miller, meaning which facet of Miller, is being asked for in said assignment. In other words, the text forms who she is to the reader in that the text dictate which side of her is being shown to the readers of said text. So in as much as she, as the writer, creates the writing or text, that same writing or text forms her, how she is perceived, how she will write, and what her shines through.

The most powerful portion of this essay to me is the section where she said a curse word and realized the power of her words through that experience. Miller’s line, “I learned the words could actually ’speak me,’” are really strong to me and relatable. It ties back to the notion that all words are loaded and are bringing something to the textual table. The writer chooses his or her arsenal of meanings to show the reader who he or she is, or rather, to construct for the reader who he or she is.

I’ve chosen to look at this article with respect to Elbow since Hashimoto engages him so frequently within the work.

When I read this article, I believe Hashimoto is name-dropping Elbow because, as it has been stressed in class, Elbow is the “writing guy.” He is the answer to questions about voice. However, what is troubling to Hashimoto, and what I believe he is critiquing is Elbow’s inability to define “voice” even though as he says on page 73, Hashimoto quotes Elbow for saying writing without voice is “dead.”

I completely believe that Hashimoto is cynical when it comes to trying to find the worth of this whole “voice” thing. It was like he was saying, “if Elbow himself can’t explain what ‘voice’ is, how are we, as teachers, expected to explain it to our students?” And I know Hashimoto says this because he is concerned that as a writing community, we are pushing whole-heartedly for “voice” and equating “voice” with writing greatness, an idea that Hashimoto is both concerned about and upset by. In fact, Hashimoto states that by pushing this is writing classes, teachers are no longer teaching but preaching about some intrinsic magic in everyone that allows them to write with finesse and some kind of honest truth.

The way I read Hashimoto speaking on Elbow is that Hashimoto is extremely skeptical of this undefinable quality of “voice” being pushed in writing now, and I believe he resents people like Elbow for painting the academy as a place devoid of creativity and full of “nit-picky” critics. I think he engages Elbow so frequently in this work because he’s trying to see what’s so great about “voice” and is failing to see it’s all-encompassing importance because no one is able to explain to him what exactly voice is and how it is attainable for everyone. Hashimoto is weary of everyone running to a term for which no one has a real definition. I believe Hashimoto is hearing that everyone is turning to this magic “voice” for good writing, but no one can say anything more about “voice,” including Elbow, than by merely saying, “Well, voice is…magical.”

Therefore, I find Hashimoto’s essay to absolutely be a critique of Elbow’s concept of “voice” being powerful and available to everyone. Hashimoto speaks his concerned very explicitly about the writing community asking from writers a quality that even a “god” in writing cannot define. I believe Hashimoto is concerned with teaching writing via this quality, and he is perhaps more concerned with the academy losing its esteemed place to “anti-intellectuals” who stress “the self” more than “the text.”

Honored Curse

It was a Wednesday in May of 2005, which meant at my Christian high school that on that morning, I was sitting in chapel between my two best friends. The pastor told the student body which songs to sing and undoubtedly pointed out that some of us were getting a little too risqué with our uniform accessories. But, as usual, I tuned him out. Then, I laughed a little as I realized he may have been talking about my neon purple and yellow tights that stood out brightly against the approved uniforms of khaki, red, and black. But, I didn’t really care if this was the pastor’s way of pointing me out in a line up. I just cared about the announcements that would be given at the end of his sermon, the announcements that would let me know that I had won the year-long race against Amanda for salutatorian.

Getting salutatorian had been one of things I had actually cared about senior year. I couldn’t say that this general detachment to everything else academic was necessarily senioritis, but what I can say is that very little registered as being important with me as I was finishing up school. I had begun to hate sitting at the same desks and seeing the same fourteen faces that made up my senior class. I had begun to rebel, quickly becoming the “worldy heathen,” as the pastor coined it, that school so desperately fought against.

 I wore black constantly, not to be gothic, but to be different. I blasted music that was the antithesis of Christian music to and from school. I felt my class of bubbly, perky followers just didn’t get me, and I made it a point to not get them, with the exception of my two best friends who I, despite my attempts to be an individual, was completely dependent on to have a good time. I used them as my fleshy safety-nets and clung to them, because with them I didn’t feel so awkward or so shy. With them, I was the loudest person at lunch, a fact unbelievably hard to believe if one saw my perfect mouse-like impersonation that I used in class. 

Mine was an awkward place to be in. I was loud with my friends, quiet with everyone else, and I dreaded being the happy-go-lucky yet subdued “good Christian” that was so idolized in my high school, yet grades were my sanctuary. I used them to validate my own personal success, and apparently I worked hard enough through high school to reach the rank of second in the class and to receive the privileged trial of writing the opening speech for graduation. I was happy for the honor but wanted to puke when I realized that I, the girl who made it her business to appear off-kilter, now had the task of writing something deliverable to a parental crowd of wide-eyed and, to me, judgmental “good Baptist Christians.”

It was a twofold dread. I had to not only write the speech and deliver it publicly, a feat equating to jogging briskly up Mount Everest, but I also had to say this speech in a way that wouldn’t offend these people I felt no connection with, or embarrass my parents, or, and this is a big one, get me expelled. I felt screwed. And, this is all before I found out that the speech not only had to meet these personal qualifications that I had set for myself, but the speech also had to be approved and personally edited by my principal, a man I had personally complained about for being close-minded all of my years in high school.

What could I possibly say to this audience of parents, “peers,” staff and principal? I had no idea. I couldn’t tell people other than my friends what I felt high school was like, or what I had learned in my fourteen years at the same institution. I couldn’t tell them because I couldn’t look into four hundred eyes and sat it correctly, and they couldn’t listen and be prepared for me to say it.

My experiences in high school were, by the school’s standards, taboo. I couldn’t talk about my friends and me claiming to want to go to a Christian college tour not to actually consider the school but to get out of high school for a week. I couldn’t look at the audience of parents and peers and tell them I felt we had all been cheated by being given one language option, one computer lab with computers that were older than me, and an atmosphere where the diversity of the school did not just include me but consisted of me. How was I supposed to look at them all and say that I felt that for at least four years right-wing politics had been preached as doctrine so often that I would forever resent it? Finding a balance seemed impossible, and even if I was able to, I wouldn’t have been allowed to articulate what made my high school years so memorable because my principal would never let that fly. I couldn’t ask approval to tell the entire attending body what I thought about a school that I believed provided little education for the thousands of dollars being spent in tuition every year. I would have been better off asking the principal if I could open the graduation ceremony by doing a naked tap dance number. These were both horribly, and I mean horribly, unlikely to come to pass.

But I remember being more upset by the idea of the principal editing my speech.  Who was he to take a red pen to my high school experiences? I felt he had no right to tell me whether or not my feelings and my opinions were “Christian enough” to deliver. I didn’t know him more than I knew the picture I passed every day on my way to class, the picture of him smiling broadly in his blue suit, grinning like the Cheshire cat. I was bitter, and I was scared. Yet after all of my upset over him editing my experiences, I felt this growing pressure to write a speech that he’d like. Honestly, I wanted to make the speech perfect so that more importantly than it sounding good, I didn’t want his self-righteous hands to touch it.  I wanted the speech to be my speech. I didn’t want him hacking away at what I though was important, so I figured that I had to find something to say that pleased him enough to stay away from it with his little red pen. Yet, I wanted it to also be something that rang true to me. But I honestly had no idea how to accomplish this.

I remember sitting in front of the computer days before the speech was due for review fuming that I was responsible for delivering a speech that was not only generically relatable for everyone in my senior class, but also had to be appropriate for two hundred people I didn’t know. I felt artistically choked in an area where I had previously had no issue. I knew how to write well enough to get by, and writer’s block luckily hadn’t had my number. But, when I was told I needed to write the speech, I had felt like screaming that I couldn’t write my speech, because I had to write the speech that every senior gives as he or she stands on the pulpit of the graduation platform.

I knew what was expected in my speech. I was supposed to thank everyone and tell them with a smile that these four years had been the best years of my life thus far, and that this would not have been possible without x, y, and z. Oh, and of course I was to give my peers a spirited charge to “make something of themselves.” We were going to be the best darn graduating class to rocket on to lead the future. But, that “we” wasn’t me in high school.

The “me” I knew didn’t get close to many people on purpose. She preferred rock music to Christian, and the preaching she heard daily at school made her feel guilty for it. She found a new freedom in cussing and naively felt dangerous when she did it. She had just begun feeling a struggle between the Kelley she was at school and the Kelley she was at home, and she was trying vainly to see how being African American played out in both realms. She had discovered dark eyeliner, was insecure around boys, and was embarrassed by that, and she was so busy trying to figure out the kind of life she wanted beyond high school that anything asked of her beyond the basic requirements, she felt, would overload her brain. Yet beyond all this, she didn’t know how to keep herself in tact or to use some of herself to write something that her principal could read and not expel her for.

            I couldn’t ask my friends how to write a speech, frankly because I knew how to write the speech. I just wanted to know how to write my speech, the speech that could both include me and appeal to those who I felt were so distant from me. I tried so hard to make the speech personal that I found I was unable to write anything at all. So I did what I had to. I wrote down and put to paper what was expected of me, a speech in which no “me” was inserted.

Good Evening,

I would like to welcome Mr. Stanton, Dr. Lyman, faculty, fellow graduates, parents, friends, and honored guests here tonight. On behalf of the class of 2005, we would like to thank you all for coming here to share in one of the most precious times of our lives.

It is hard for me to grasp the concept that high school is over. All of us had been counting down the days since the beginning of the school year, and I was so happy it was almost ending. Now, it feels as if time has skipped ahead somehow, and if everyone else feels the same way I do, they feel overwhelming excitement and maybe just a little sadness mixed in too. Our class has spent so many years together that I just cannot imagine not seeing their faces almost everyday anymore. There are some people in my class that I have known since kindergarten, others from elementary and so on. We have all grown so close that it is going to be hard to go our separate ways.

We have had so many special memories together that I know I will never forget. I have always been close to Ashley Thompson and Lydia Robinson, but in the last few years, especially this year, I have felt myself growing closer to other people in my class as well. Our class bonded the most during the senior trip at the Christian camp last month. We all did a lot of growing there. We also had a lot of fun as well, like the “Mighty K-dog” appearances, the ride up and back, and of course, rafting, which was fun and slightly frightening. We have shared many laughs, some tears, but I can honestly say I could not have spent my high school career with a better group of people.

I know that each person in our class has the potential to turn their lives into something great, and I pray that all of us will become the fantastic people I know we all could be.

Again, I want to thank everyone here for coming, and I would like to give a special thanks to the faculty and the families of our class; because we could not have gotten here without each one of them. You have all helped mold us into the people you see now, the people who will influence the world in great ways. The Class of 2005 thanks all of you!

However, this is not May 2005, and I’m proud to report that I have a firm belief that I’ve learned some things in the past three years. I now know that to give a speech without me being present within it was a crime against myself, and I need to say what should have been said.

Hello,

            I’m glad you all have found your way into this auditorium this evening, because I have some things I would like to talk about. First, let me start by saying that the last four years of life have sucked, and I have some complaints. I wasn’t allowed to wear skirts above the knee, and even the little amount of freedom I had in skirt choices was usurped by an administration who thinks girls will act like sex-starved harlots if more than five inches of flesh shows. Well, newsflash, people, I have a hell of lot more skin to show than a little bit of thigh.

            I would also hold this school personally responsible for my undoing if I leave these hollowed walls and commit come awful crime, because this school has single-handled try to squash every bit of creativity that had the audacity to walk into these doors. We, as students, were here to learn, and how could a school adamantly try to stop this by teaching us that there’s only one correct way to live, only one language to learn, and that art shouldn’t be appreciated unless is an exact replica of what the art teacher produced.

           This school is completely turned backward, and I, for one, am pissed off that the world has been moving forward while we have been forced to behave like we’re in the 1950s. We, as students, were robbed of a real education, and every parent sitting in the crowd tonight has been lied to and stolen from in this school’s vain attempt to produce mindless robots who can recite Bible verses on cue.

            I would complain about the school preaching President Bush’s presidency as being Jesus’ second coming and about the countless amount of racist jokes I’ve heard in these so-called “Christian” hallways and classrooms, but I feel like we’ve all wasted enough time here, and I, for one, am so ready to go home.

WC: 1682

The “Free-Right”

            Writing is scary. It leaves you opened and exposed for all the world to see, to judge, and even to criticize. Yet scarier than writing is the writing process itself. I used to believe that whenever I was given an assignment, I simply did that assignment. No middle steps were involved; neither were there any stressful, deep, searching thoughts about what to write, how to express myself, or even what to say. Somehow the job always got done. In fact, my writing process was to me what my cell phone or my computer is to me now, a thing that you do not spend too much time worrying about just as long as it is running. After all, why mess with the something if it is apparently working, right? But eventually, like a magic trick, what goes on behind the scenes needs to be revealed, even if the magician herself is reluctant. And on this quest or journey of finding what I do to write what I write, I came to the surprising revelation that I too have steps, processes, and phases which I go through to get words on the page. Who would have “thunk” it? But the more I think about my writing process the more I think about all of the work and hoops to jump through. From this self-discovery, I have found that writing is kind of exhausting, to be honest. There is so much that goes into making a semi-decent paper, but there has to be way somehow to cut the time and basically cut the fat, or the unnecessary, right?

            Freewriting is the ugly procedure where it usually all begins. It is a purging of thoughts, a conceptual brain dumping, and a garbage list of anything and everything relevant to the subject at hand. Yet what really is bothersome is that not only is freewriting everything I can possibly write down about a subject, it is also what I had for breakfast, what I am worried about my roommates doing to my stuff while I am asleep, or any other problem that happens to come to mind when I am trying my best to put everything down into one colossal, all-encompassing brainstorming session. Nevertheless this assemblage of disjointed thoughts haphazardly being thrown together is an essential part of my writing process, a fact that I would have denied up until extremely recently. Normally, I place everything that needs to be used in my paper somehow all together on one page to be assessed. It is all the information I have researched, the summaries of all of my sources, and all my opinions on the subject pushed together in an end-all battle to see who makes it to the final paper playoffs. Yet, even though this is the process that I use every time that I write a paper, I find myself questioning whether or not the explosion or eruption of thoughts is even necessary. Is freewriting worth the trouble? Does freewriting help or hurt me? To say that sitting back and assessing what I have is not intimidating would be an utter lie, but is freewriting a necessary evil?

            Nine times out of ten, after all is said and done, I have written down everything that I could possibly say about-well… everything, and I have so much garbage to dig through to find the usable bits and pieces that the process hardly seems worth it. Cutting out the unnecessary subjective emotions that have seeped in, the completely unrelated junk and spare parts thrown throughout, and the scraps that are frivolous can be so time consuming that I hardly can bear to begin the process for every paper. By the end of the cutting out phase of the freewriting experience, ninety percent of my brainstorming has ended up crumpled and useless in the trash bin. Yet, Peter Elbow states the importance of the process for this very reason. It was made to help me sort the junk from the gold so that all the bits are not rubbing elbows in my final product, what I hope is a decently written paper. But isn’t there an easier way? There has to be…

            The best way to go about assessing the worth and value of the freewrite would undoubtedly be the logical method of weighing out the pros and the cons of such a process. What does the freewrite actually do for me beneficially and in what areas is it merely time consuming? Do the pros and cons balance out or is this a clear winner? The cons are numerous. It is time consuming. It is tedious. Half of what I have written goes to its final resting place in the trash can before I can even begin to write my paper. I hate doing it, because I always feel that before the end I am wasting more time than if I just wrote my paper without the pre-writing process of brainstorming. Regardless of the weight of the cons, the pros must too be considered. One pro for instance is that the good bits that are salvageable from the brainstorming mess of thoughts and ideas is pretty good stuff. I get to assess the entire situation before embarking on the fearful and perilous quest of battling the blank Word document. However, like it or not, the pros list appears to end here. So what does this conclude? And what kind of alternatives can be taken from the results of this pro-con match-up?

            My beliefs are that the freewriting process was once good enough for me to use without question, yet throughout the years, I have found myself growing tired of the process of writing the unnecessary with the necessary, or the junk with the gold. However, I am hard-pressed to find an alternative that yields the same usable words or ideas with less of the junk of the unnecessary concepts. So what needs to be done is for me to alter the freewriting process into a new method or idea that does its best to bypass the unnecessary to leave what it useful exposed for my eyes to see. Yet, even though this sounds easy enough, words are just pretty without concrete meaning or action behind them. Luckily for me, I believe that I have found a way to use the freewriting process so praised by everyone in a way that does not leave me yanking out my hair and cursing Elbow for tedious, lengthy invention.

            What I have decided to do is to make a freewriting prototype, for these purposes to be called the “free-right.” To do the “free-right,” the writer simply compiles the summaries of all of his or her resources and writes out every one of his or her facts found so that all of the essential information to be used is in one central location. However, the “free-right” differs from the freewriting process in that the “free-right” is completed upon the information compilation. In the “free-right” there are no emotions to later edit, no opinions to sift through, and there is no room for roommate worries or menu reviews of breakfast. It is merely an information bank. However, unlike the freewriting method’s adaptability to creative avenues, “free-rights” are restricted to the realm of argumentative or explorative papers. After all, we cannot expect this new invention to take on the weight of all the writing processes, can we?

            I got the opportunity to actually test my “free-righting” last semester, and I have to say, I did not lose any hair from stress in the process. At the end of my last semester, I found myself smirking about the fact that I did not have to go in not once to take a final in class. All of my exams were take home. No time-crunching tests and multiple choice questions–Great, right? No, not so great. I had five essay exams all due practically back to back. I did not know how I was going to finish one, let alone begin and finish five. But with the “free-right,” I got it done. The week before finals week, I got up every morning around 5 a.m. and set my sights on finishing one exam a day. I chose an exam, pulled up the ever-startling blank Word document, and put down every single bit of information I had on the topic at hand on the page. To be honest, this process took me hours for each exam, but the pay-off was amazing. Only after I finished the “free-right” could I really assess the damage before me. Surprisingly enough, the facts I had for each exam “flowed” and transformed into a fairly decent paper. In my case, at least, seeing the connections between ideas needed for a paper only happened when all the facts were laid out in their “free-righty” glory before me. Overall, everything ran pretty smoothly, and believe it or not, I finished one exam a day, leaving my finals week to be a week of drop-off dates.

            For me, the “free-right” is just what the doctor ordered, and I am completely indebted to it for helping me out last semester. The “free-right” gets all my sources in one place, and it helps me from dealing with the frightening blank Word document all by my lonesome, while also saving me the time of writing down every frivolous thing to get to the good bits. I cannot fully say that the “free-right” is perfect for everyone. In fact, many people may be overwhelmed of having to pull every fact together in one setting, but the “free-right” is a sure-fire way to assess what information is available, and that is a great way, I think, to start a paper. It is also true that this does involve a considerable amount of self-editing that Elbow would protest and hate me for, but since, as Elbow implied, we are so naturally inclined to self-edit from years of being told to do so, I am sure that we, as writers, can muster up the strength to self-edit again for this “free-right” endeavor.

Reading Response (due on your blog before class time): Muckelbauer claims that the practices of imitation still have value, despite Romantic conceptions of the subject (i.e. the belief in a unique/autonomous/essential self). HOW does he support this claim?

    Mucklebauer supports his claim that imitation still has value despite a belief in the autonomous self by first establishing clearly what the belief in the autonomous self is. He says that Romanticism emphasizes the need for novelty and variation, an idea that in itself that seems to contradict the idea of imitation. However, he counteracts this apparent opposition by saying that the way to imitate is not to blindly copy, but to find a correlation between what is being copied and the actual copy that is made by the imitator.

   Thusly, Muckelbauer is pointing out the inherent importance of studying what has been copied, and by this he is stating the importance of studying the dynamics of how the model, whatever model it is, is copied. Therefore, by his idea of styding connections between what is being copied and the actual copy, many more imitations can be studied and can be seen as valuable in the way that the dynamics can now always be studied with imitations.

   As far is the literal way that Muckelbauer gets his article across, I believe that he is using ethos and logos primarily. Throughout the piece, he “name-drops” often, showing his credibility on the subject by explicitly showing the research that he has done and the knowledge that he has. He also appeals to the audience’s logos by giving various points and stances on the subject leading the audience to ”logically” follow him. However, if made to choose between the two methods, I would have to say that ethos is more strongly used throughout the article.  

This wasn’t assigned, but I’m in a poetry seminar, and we are currently reading Langston Hughes. After I read this poem, I thought it was relevant to both our first post and voicing, so read it if you want something to do, I suppose…The site I took it from is linked.

THEME FOR ENGLISH B

By Langston Hughes

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

1951

Honestly, I did not find myself getting upset by this article. The issue is not that Gen Y is more self-centered/oriented than previous generations, but that our generation, ones before, has more tools to judge whether or not the society should be labeled ego-centric. I sincerely doubt that there were even half as many sociologists and the like “back in the day,” and if there had been, there would undoubtedly be higher numbers of people being concerned over themselves more than other people.

I hate to fall back on the idea of “blaming society,” but we are in a way conditioned to be how we are in regards to life-focus. By this, I mean that people now more than ever have come to realize that “one must do for his/herself.” Past generations didn’t have to deal with the “get in to college or be a failure” mania a third as much as generations today. Back then, yes, college was important, but so was family, now the mindset is that one can’t have a family until one looks after oneself, or rather, has one’s own life straight.

So perhaps this generations isn’t so ego-centric as this article portrays, but maybe our priorities have merely shifted based on societal necessity. People used to be able to focus on family mainly and get by, but now one has to be a go-getter just to “stay above water” at least financially, and due to this, I’m sure, focus has fallen on getting one’s own life together before focusing on the rest of the world. Though, I’m not saying that everyone would agree or adhere to this opinion.