The Composing Process - Reflection

I began this class with a fairly firm grip on a sense of my own writing, and with expectations far from the realities I discovered in my first run through the syllabus. I know I have a lot to learn about writing (which will be ever thus), but I thought I had the basics down. WRONG. Like almost all of my homebred education, I came into writing with a sense of it based on successful osmosis. I really couldn't tell anyone boo about how to write, I just "knew." Just like I just "knew" how to do a PHEOC, or holistic math. I never really thought about teaching someone who doesn't love books as much as I do, as much as my family does - and thus has learned how to write essentially by reading. We breed good writers in my neck of the north woods because we spend our lives immersed in books. I momentarily forgot that, shockingly, everyone isn't like me.

What all that rambling means is that in all likelihood I needed to learn the basics of writing far more than anyone else in the class. I needed to know where to begin to teach someone who is NOT like me to write. Therefore even though I had a sense of invention, arrangement, style and delivery, I had no idea how to teach it. I was aware of the basic steps, without some of the terminology, but I was far from understanding it well enough to direct someone else through the process, or fine tune it to the needs of a class. Now I feel like I at least have a start at it, though I have an incredibly long way to go.

Conceptually, the process starts with a big unformed lumpy blob of literary clay, waiting for an idea of what to do with it. So as artists of the written word, we brainstorm ideas for our lump, and start to imagine what it could become. We draw up some ideas, toss them around a bit, and see if they might stick. We poke around a little in our literary lump with prewriting, free-writing, playing with words and ideas until we start to envision our message. We do a little research to see what might be made with our literary lump, and how it might transform.

And then the formation begins. First we rough it out in very crude form, arranging our ideas into physical manifestation. It has come from the tossing around in our heads and rough sketches to starting to become something. But what techniques will we use? Will we throw it on a pottery wheel, cut it away with a molding knife, shape it freehand, add other materials? What elements of style will shape our literary sculpture? Will rhetorical form will it take? How will it look as we begin to craft it – to draft our ideas into a rough sense of form? What will make it appeal most to our audience when we deliver it?

The same steps that must be taken by an artist sculpting clay have comparable forms in writing. Ideas must evolve through analysis, augmentation and experimentation into a written form. In the course of teaching it each step needs to be taken one at a time, introduced playfully but effectively so that it makes sense without intimidating inexperienced writers. I like the clay analogy because who is afraid of clay? The language inexperienced writers already know is the mud that builds a pie, and becomes clay and then a sculpture – crafting from the known into the unknown with techniques and options explored along the way.

I could write a very specific list of all the things that we have learned and all the ways that I will teach them, but instead I wanted to focus on the theory of lesson delivery rather than the nuts and bolts delivery. That is yet to come, but I have a much better sense of it now.

The reading and discussions have shaped my opinions about what is “right” and “wrong” in teaching writing, and I have learned that there are many routes to offer and take to writing success.

My own writing has shifted into more deliberate purpose. In some ways my audience has widened, at least in terms of my academic writing. I am currently doing way more revising than I have ever done in my life in an attempt to play with the form, the function (as in who I write it to) and the message itself. My academic writing until now has been essentially a process of ascertaining what will please the professor (or teacher) and delivering it. In my writing for work I know what will please my audience, and I write it, even though it often bores me due to what I cannot write (but that’s a story for another day!). In my academic writing I am trying to take a few more risks – at least in this class!