The Dreaded Hook

I am guilty of teaching my students that they need a hook, that their thesis needs three parts, and that they have to complete a 5 paragraph essay. While I want them to break free from that, so many are hesitant to start writing if there is nothing concrete for them to see and cross off a checklist. I do the same brainstorm strategies as the other teachers, and there's nothing creative about how I teach writing. I can see some students zoning out, and yet, if they don't have that 5 paragraphs, they can't pass the CAHSEE or write a coherent essay that has some sort of organizational pattern.  

I'm going to absolutely agree with Jane on this one.  Although I am not a teacher right now, I did go through the credential program to obtain my  Single Subject English credential and was taught, both in class and in observation, that these were the essentials to teach your high school students.  The Hook always seemed the most cruel to me.  It sets up a block that many students simply could not overcome, despite brainstorming and outlining, and any other prewriting activity that their particular teacher deemed important.  I have always found that writing the introductory paragraph to any essay, academic or other, is my biggest hurdle when it comes to writing. Add in that the opening sentence has to SPECTACULAR and it's no wonder students can't seem to get their flow going.

I do think it necessary to  showcase the fact that it is not simply high schools pigeon-holing students into this pattern of writing: Hook, thesis w/ three main points, topic sentences, and a conclusion restating your thesis.  Colleges, including our own, are guilty of the same crime.  When taking the GWE I asked a professor to explain the process to me.  As a transfer student I was unaware of the requirements and my previous school had no such test.  her advice to me was to be "as elementary as possible."  I knew exactly what she meant.  The topic was on alternative energy sources, if I remember correctly, and I produced the world's best five paragraph essay that no English major should ever write past the age of eighteen.  It felt wrong.  It felt like I was dumbing myself and my writing down.  It felt like I was in high school again.  And I scored 11/12.

We have been reading pieces about helping students break the mold on the five paragraph essay.  We have been told that it is no longer "the way to write."  Then we continue to judge students based on these archaic conventions of writing.  How is that fair?  How can we teach students new and interesting ways to write when we know very well that they will be judged on how well they adhere to the old rules.  To me, it's all wonderful in theory, but until we find a better way to judge writing that does not follow such a strict format, we really shouldn't criticize students who follow the patterns because they might know very well that following that pattern is their way of succeeding.

The Composing Process: Individual vs the Collective

In a nutshell, the composing process is insane. 

The 4 articles assigned for us this week each highlight what I just called insanity through personal experience, student observation, & empirical data.  

I don’t know how to talk about this.  Actually, I don’t know how to write about this.  At this moment I’m at the DH bar on my laptop typing out my thoughts while attempting to come up a with a visually and structurally accessible way of portraying my ideas so that 1) you understand 2) I make clear as possible what my thoughts are 3) I do it in a manner that I am neither embarrassed or bored with. 

I am failing at all 3, especially because I don't even believe myself or what I just wrote, even though I wrote it and think it and believe it :(   

 

Thinking about you and me and me and you and us and me and you and we and them isn’t difficult, or I should say, it isn’t a labor for me.  Remember how student example Tony was said to be extremely repetitive and recursive in his process.  I don’t know how that supports my point or what my point was, but yeah.

This isn’t working for me.  

Rather than touch on the concrete examples and points of these articles that stood out to me, I am going to jump to the “bigger picture”/”epiphany”/”light bulb” moment in my head that I imagined and created. Some of it is directly related, some more of a choral connection type of comment.  

So you may or may not get me, but when does anyone ever get or not get me…   

What was repeated, what was recursive?  

What is the same, and what has changed?

Our psychological association with writing is intense.  

I keep reading “ingrained” and “internalized”.  That seems to be one of many difficulties with the composition process, that each individual has to 1) come to an awareness of it’s existence within their lives 2) take that consciousness and then play with “process”… for the rest of… life…kinda, sorta. 

“People who have little or no tolerance for ambiguity perceive ambiguous situations as sources of psychological discomfort, and they may try to reach conclusions quickly rather than to take the time to consider all of the essential elements of an unclear situation” (Harris 184).

Words, specifically written, have this distancing, seemingly objective effect.  

As a reader, there they are- they hang

and live and are and as I read them and think about them and become influenced or not

I can control my self and the way I feel-

sometimes I can’t control my feelings and this lasts anywhere from a second to a lifetime.

As a writer, there it is- I create and construct

and even when I think I am limited (prompt, grade, shame, guilt, “unskilled”, stupid) 

it is a feeling-

sometimes I can’t control my feelings and this lasts anywhere from a second to a lifetime.

Words, specifically written, have this associative effect- identification. 

As a reader, I inhale ink and find comfort in moments of justification

for what is relating to another, fictional, real, or fantastical

but a chance to feel validated that you are not alone

As a writer, this potential when made manifest is… empowering. 

When I read that quote, and as I contemplate the various perspectives on the psychological aspects concerning the relationship between writing and an individual, my reality became/becomes a link for understanding as I, like Tony (Perl), strive to create direct personal relationships to the topics I am faced with in an attempt to make concrete meaning out of abstraction (the generalization, majority, or controlled facade).

 

For us, at this moment, this topic is the composing process.  

Along with the psychological association with writing, there are many others.  Shen is the quickest example of this as he highlighted the ideological influences inherent in writing.  We can talk about the economic, social, cultural, etc. 

So I wonder, am I supposed to then help students become aware of each of the factors? Or privilege some? 

I bring this up because, ironically for me, I get to witness and participate in the use of writing for therapeutic uses.  And that, is more along the lines of… well, not a composition course in the traditional sense.  

I say ironic because this purpose for writing is more or less associated with the expressionist click and with my multimodal pedgagocial stance I seem to get pitted into this dark hole of arts and crafts and self-indulgent bullshit that I completely understand because I am both a multi and single drafter so my mediation of extremes in every aspect of my life has left me dancing in the void sustained by analytical, rationalism and divergent, what the fuckism.  

However, what struck as me as fascinating about this kind of writing (therapeutic, cathartic, for a purpose, relevant… wait, this sounds familiar) is the individual and communal aspects it encourages and utilizes (wait…that sounds familiar to).  

Let me be more specific. 

My brother and mom are going through their 12 steps right now. So it’s all about AA meetings, and their sponsor, and themselves. Community, companionship, and self.  This is all via conversations and writing.  They must write a lot. A lot, a lot. 

But this writing… they WANT to do…And when they do it- it is free. As in- completely free.  The psychological constraints, among many, were bypassed momentarily… not because they weren’t present, but because they were apart of the content in conscious and unconscious ways that allowed for… “truth”?

I read some of their stuff and encountered:

1)    multiple genres  i.e. prose, lyric, short hand, narrative, charts, data, other stuff that I don't know what to call 

2)    complete sentences as well as fragmented thoughts

3)    cohesive sentences & paragraphs as well as stream of conscious type ramblings

4)    variety of brainstorming, prewriting, drafting, and editing strategies similar to those mentioned in any of our 4 readings

5)    structure, organization

6)    critical thought and meta-reflection

I don’t know why this is bothering me or sticking with me or making me think and re-think the way it is, but there is something about this…whatever it is…that is getting to me. IDK. 

Loose Heuristics

A heuristic is a mental shortcut, or what Rose calls "a rule of thumb." It's a concept I for some reason struggle to fully grasp, at least when it comes to writing. This is likely because my early writing education was not built on rules of thumb, or maleable concepts. What teacher said was fact, and what was fact was unchangeable. The idea of writing 'against' the rules is still new to me. Blogging is new to me. Writing for me is new. I have always written with purpose, and never my own. I am not a journaler, a blogger, or even much of a free writer. I write all the time, but at some one else's request. At work I write to 'clients'-- prospective parents looking at me as the gatekeeper to their child's education. (Which I am). At home I write to my husband to fill him in on things--this too actually happens at work, we both keep gmail chat open all day and write all throughout the day about office gossip, shopping reminders, cute internet nonsense etc. But even these situations have rules.

I am the type of person that carefully edits every text I send because I think autocorrected words and lame language are embarrassing...even when sent to my husband. -- Who will text me while he knows I am editing a text to make fun of me for editing. I am not talking punctuation necessarily, but spelling and tense. I don't criticize others for 'text talk' but I hate receiving an email that is written in shorthand. I am not a teacher or a grammar nut, I just like for their to be some order, some rules that all follow in certain situations.

So while I identify most with 'Mike' from Rose's essay, I have never thought of myself as a writer with a "block" problem. My main problem with my writing really happens in the prewriting phase: once I pick and idea I stand by it...to the death. Even if it is tedious, even if I spend three extra hours just trying to make sense of a nonsensical first paragraph and thesis, even if the idea sucks. Fortunately, I learned this about my own writing early enough on that I took steps to abate it. So while I still struggle and carry on with a topic that is ultimately not a perfect picture of my thoughts on a given subject, I at least can recognize that fact and make tweaks to things to find a "back door" for my set thesis statement. I look at what I decided I wanted to say, try 50 different ways of saying it and then finally find some sliver or semblance of acceptable truth in that statement and then start over from scratch. I will have 10 pages written, but each page has 20 separate "paragraphs" that is really the same thesis just written in a slightly better or much worse way than my original thought. I am a Mike, but I do not have a block...

There's More Than One of Everything

"The horror...The horror..." --Colonel Kurtz

Oh, how well you know your audience, Miguel. This is irrelevant, (EDIT: actually having read it, it actually gets pretty relevant, so hold on, be strong) but when I was in the second semester of my Mortuary Law class back in mortuary school (I'm a licensed Funeral Director in the state of CA, in case you haven't taken one of the several classes with me wherein I revealed that information), we had to look at 50 cases regarding lawsuits against funeral homes and funeral directors and for each one write a summary and our own personal thoughts. Now, we were given this assignment early in the semester, with the idea that we'd do them piecemeal throughout the semester.

This was the last semester of the program, so I'd already gotten a reputation as somebody who always did essays at the last minute, so as soon as this was assigned by the teacher (who gave explicit warnings about not waiting until the last minute), my friend turned to me and said, "You're waiting until the last minute." Not even a question, just a statement of fact. I actually--you know what, this is getting a little bit off topic. Long story short: I did them all in one night with the help of caffeine pills (the same pills that helped Jessie Spano reach new and terrifying heights on a classic Saved By The Bell episode), and after I had finished, I went back and added relevant Simpsons quotes to each of the fifty cases because it's my favorite show, and it was harder than I thought it would be.
















ANYWAY, Miguel, I think you're right that there isn't really a great opportunity to infect, no that's not the right word...inflict? No, that's even worse...imbue! There it is! Take two:

ANYWAY, Miguel, I think you're right that there isn't really a great opportunity to imbue a piece of academic writing with the kind of ethos that might reveal itself in non-academic writing. Though, I suppose that, because everything you see, think, feel, experience is filtered through a very specific lens, and that anything a person expresses, even if it is, like, 10 pages on Derrida or a just a 1 page close reading of Huck Finn will in some way reflect your view of the world.

And maybe I'm different here, but when I've written assignments for class, I never picture the teacher reading it, at least not consciously. I don't ever think "Is he/she going to like this?" I only ever think, "Is this the best I can do? Is this the best, most thorough support of my thesis that I can muster?" But with academic writing, I kind of divorce myself a bit from the material I'm writing/writing about. I don't put less effort into it, but I put less of myself into it, if that makes sense. Which, for some reason, makes it easier to write academic essays than it is to write fiction. I don't know. There's something more there I was about to say, but I stopped to answer a text after that last sentence and now it's all gone. Ah, well, C'est la vie, life is cruel, treat you unfairly.


Switching Gears--


Like Grace, I also found the Harris piece illuminating. I've always been closer to the "One-Draft" side of the continuum, even though this was not what they taught in school. (I remember my very traumatic first experience with multi-draft writing. It was a 5th grade social studies essay about the Boston Massacre, and this was before computers, so I had to hand write two pages as neatly as I could. My dad asked to read it, then he took a red pen and started marking all over my beautifully written words! The horror! When he was done, he looked back at my stunned face and said something like, "this is what writing is. There's no such thing as an only draft, just a first draft. Go correct this and we'll do it again.")

I used to think that I was just dysfunctional, that I was writing wrong, until I read Stephen King's On Writing when I was like 19. His prewriting process was essentially making sure he had a pen and sufficient paper. No plans or outlines, just sit down, write and figure it out. I recognized myself in that and I wished that I had known that there was more than one proper, or normal, type of writing earlier. You don't have to necessarily know what you want to say before you say it, but rather you can figure out what you want to say by writing.

I think I might be mixing my points there. Anyway, that's all I have for right now.

Mike Rose's Writer's block

I found a lot of his article really difficult to follow. All that stuff about the rules and TOTEs flew by me. What I found most interesting was when he said that the "five students who experience blocking were all operating either with writing rules or with planning strategies that impeded rather than enhanced the composing process" (390). I feel like I've been teaching writing all wrong. So much of what we are asked to do as teachers is to give students structures and guidelines. I am guilty of teaching my students that they need a hook, that their thesis needs three parts, and that they have to complete a 5 paragraph essay. While I want them to break free from that, so many are hesitant to start writing if there is nothing concrete for them to see and cross off a checklist. I do the same brainstorm strategies as the other teachers, and there's nothing creative about how I teach writing. I can see some students zoning out, and yet, if they don't have that 5 paragraphs, they can't pass the CAHSEE or write a coherent essay that has some sort of organizational pattern. When Rose gets to describing his test subjects, I see my students in Ruth and Laurel. Some get stuck on the hook (OMG, are they going to write a question as a hook again?! I told them not to do that...) or some turn in their papers WEEKS late with some good parts and some stuff they totally did not come up with on their own (probably had help from an older sibling or student cause they wanted me to stop calling home or mad dogging them in class). My plan has always been to get the kids used to the 5 paragraph structure fall quarter, then branch out spring semester when there's a little less pressure after testing. My tenth graders are all very resistant to writing, and I'm having writer's block about how to get them not to have writer's block.

Muriel Harris: "Composing Behaviors of One- and Multi-Draft Writers"

Muriel Harris' purpose here is to "provide a basis for considering the pedagogical implications of dealing with individual differences".  She acknowledges that most people probably "exist somewhere between the two ends of the continuum....however, one- and multi-drafters do exist". She says we need to be involved in "enlarging our perspectives on revision and our instructional practices with students". 

Based on her findings, she says that there is a "real danger" on imposing a "simple, 'ideal' composing style" on students. She says this because both types of writers have pluses and minuses involved in their composing behaviors. Hence, she feels that we need to be flexible with our pedagogy; like when we assign freewriting to the entire class. Well, for some students this may not work. Ultimately, she says we need to be aware of how we talk about composition, and also making sure to talk to students about their own compositional practices in order to gain an awareness of where the student is situated.

This article resonated with me because I found that my own composing processes do fall along the continuum. I believe my composing process has changed over my academic career. I was mostly a multi-drafter because that is how I was taught. But now I am more of a one-drafter. Perhaps because I have internalized the process, and no longer need to belabor it?? Ultimately, my struggle is that I make all of my writing reader-based, when I would really like to make it more writer-based because I feel the complexity of my thoughts call for it, and I don't want to make my meaning so clear and succinct when the issues and thoughts I am trying to convey are more complicated than that.

Fulwiler/Audience

“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.” – Homer Simpson

(Thaddeus-  My comment mainly concerns the  analytical/“critical” response-type essays and the ethos we may approach/compromise/ and present in this specific type of assignment; also, I only had in mind literature, and then only prose assignments; the Foucault article from last semester kinda fits here: he wrote that discourse is not equally inclusive in society because of societies’/y’s innate desire to believe its own bullshit. Truth is subjective because of the different experiences of cultures whose history-I can’t remember whether I should capitalize the h-is a discourse. Societies have different perspectives and they want to defend their truths, their discourse, by exclusive knowledge. Maybe the Fish article also fits here, one of the things he mentioned was that seminar classes have their own, artificial, discourse).

So in the classroom, the student, to refer to Fulwiler, writes to a teacher as the main audience. She points out the first biased audience is the teacher, whose reliability and authority we trust. It’s an example of discourse, the political microcosm of the classroom to the rest of the world; this is exactly why Elbow developed free-writing. It seems to me, analysis papers/assignments are the disproportionate majority of a student's academic writing and their ethos shows up less in these instances.