Do writing robots dream of electric Schaffer?

Ah the old five paragraph essay. I have not so fond memories of having to fill in the little worksheets out for all my high school English classes. I felt like a machine just hashing these things out simply for the sake of it.  

Writing in this formula felt more like tedious paperwork that didn’t teach me anything other than structure. And while I agree with Wiley that if taught as one of the many writing strategies it can prove to be useful, school teaches students to rely solely on this restricted formula, which gives them very little room to think and explore beyond its limitations. The five paragraph essay is a stepping stone: a place that can get us on the path we need to go but it isn’t a be all, end all solution. I like how Wiley puts it in that, “writing contexts vary, writing tasks vary, and our students, in order to grow and succeed as writers, must gradually develop a repertoire of strategies for identifying and then handling the differences each situation presents” (66).

As we’ve discussed in class, there is a lack of voice and personality within this formula to the point where it can be stifling and detrimental. Stommel noted in “The Twitter Essay” on how, “Students aren’t terrified to send text messages or post status updates to Twitter or Facebook, but they are often terrified to write academic papers.” So this fear puts students two steps back rather than three steps forward. It limits how writing is approached because of the fear of failure. It is certainly a feeling that I felt when in high school and still do.

http://giphy.com/gifs/brooklyn-nine-v0rNv3kxwQDDO

Even with this blog there still exists in me this small, ingrained fear that I’m somehow doing it wrong. It’s a dumb fear but one that persists all the same. There have been times in college where I felt like a writing robot that can’t react without a command that been prompted by the teacher. And all that is just baggage that I’ve carried over from all the years of schooling. It’s been hard sometimes to detach myself from that formula and from that way of thinking about writing in such a rigid form.

It’s why I kind of like things like the Twitter essay because it breaks down the expected form of what constitutes an essay. It’s not necessarily easier, but it is different and it allows for students to stretch their writing legs in such a unique way. These kinds of approaches push back against the form, yet it’s not without its own rules and I find that so interesting.

Combining Stommel’s and Wily’s approaches, it’s clear that there are ways to continue to change the way that writing is handled in school and that it can exceed the boundaries of an overused, stagnant formula. It is not like the system is leaving teachers without the means or ways to do so. Change is hard and I’m not saying that it would be so easy as to simply make the Schaffer method disappear off the face of this earth. I’m not that idealistic. But there needs to be a shift in code that will benefits students in the long run. Ultimately, school writing needs to be rewired to prepare us for all kinds of writings, instead of relying on singular system that only gets students by. It’s time for an upgrade. We are long overdue one.

*Insert terrible DragonBall Z joke here*

Moving past these overused jokes and memes,

Thinking back on my own writing through school, I could recall this particular moment in my freshman year in high school where I was completely lost on the kind of writing structure that my English teacher had wanted us to write in. Having just transferred out in the middle of the year from a school whose English instruction was practically non existent (thanks for nothing private school 😒), I felt like a fish out of water the whole time in that class because I couldn’t for the life of me grasp how the teacher wanted me to write an essay. Writing was something that I had thought I was marginally good at back then but in a new environment, I floundered.

Dumb fish puns aside, Russell talking about in how writing “does not exist autonomously, divorced from some specific human activity.”(8) hit home for me. There have been classes in college and in high school where I couldn’t adapt so easily to the writing style that was required of me because I only had a limited skill set that wasn’t as versatile as I needed it to be.

Writing is an intricate and complex thing, but Russell’s ball analogy really helps put things in perspective in the ways we can think of how writing functions within different aspects of our life. I like that simplicity in his explanation that, “Some people are very adept at some games and therefore at using some kinds of balls, while they may be completely lost using a ball in another game because they have never participated in it” (9). This makes me think of video games (sorry, it always seems to come back to that for me) but like I love Role Playing Games and those are the ones that I gravitate towards. I can identify and know my way around the system that those kinds of games are built in. Yet, I’m terrible at any kind of puzzle game or puzzle challenge within a game. It’s not that I hate them, but I just don’t have the patience or great perception skills for that kind of thing.

As Russell puts it, there is no “generalizable skill called ball-using or ball-handling that can be learned and then applied to all ball games”(9). I really like that he puts it that way and I feel like this is something that honestly needs to be plastered everywhere and shoved in the face of our academic structures. Writing has been thought to be this singular, isolated thing that everyone should be able to do right off the bat. But as we’ve been talking about since the beginning of the semester, writing is social, dynamic, and it’s ever changing. It is not as this stiff construct as it’s been dressed up to be; writing should be taught as being malleable.
In my internship, we’ve been trying to get all these students to gather up their work and look at how their writing has (or hasn’t) evolved over the years. Through trying to engage them in creating their e-portfolios, it’s pushing them to create a different kind of literacy with the use of technology and their own webpages on WordPress. It’s not easy, for them or for me. There are lot of confusion along the way because it’s getting them to interact with a kind of literacy they aren’t accustomed to. Yet, in having this big class that allows for mutual collaboration, it creates this atmosphere of reliance with one another and helping each other figure it out. This comes back to what Russell was saying about how “Activity systems are inherently social”(6). It’s very interesting to step back and see that in action. It helps me get a better perspective on this idea about how writing functions in different environments and used as a tool in a variety of ways.

(Pictured here is me internally screaming inside as I try to figure this all out.)

 

Ok, I’m going to try (emphasis on try) to take a stab at this whole theory of writing thing, so please bear with me as I try to get my thoughts together.

The Metaconcept reading brought up a lot of good points about this idea of reading and writing. I liked what it said about how writing (and by extension, reading)  “connect[s] us to other people across time and space” (18). It is a conversation happening even when we aren’t thinking about it, yet we are influenced by past experiences, audiences, and purpose. Audience and purpose as we discussed in class become these big motivating factors for the things that we want to convey in what we write so that we may be understood. Which brings me to one major point in the reading that I thought was interesting in section 1.4 about using words to define other words. This got me thinking about how this theory could be applied in terms of trying to communicate with others whose first language isn’t your own. As someone who grew up in a bilingual home, sometimes it was necessary to use other words to define and the explain the meaning of the word I was describing in a certain context to create better understanding.

In doing that the conversation no longer became one sided or misunderstood but rather it became a shared one in which both speakers come to be on more or less equal footing and I think that writing can function in that same way. As quoted in the reading, “language lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s.” (25). I really like that quote because it made me realize how social writing is. That even when I’m writing for myself, there is still  a conversation that is shared between what is written and the one who is reading it. Of course, as we discussed in class, the tone of of our writing shifts and changes based on the situation, the audience, and the purpose. Things like the internet and social media are the main examples of how social writing can be and  rather than blurring] “the boundaries between writer and audience” (21) like stated in the reading, I think in having that social aspect it allows for the conversation to be expanded on. It allows for new voices and different experiences to shape our understandings and to contribute (well, most of the time, if exempting trolls, haters, and what have you) something to the conversation at hand.

Possible theory: Writing is a complicated process heavily influenced by our experiences as much as it is influenced by our motivations and intended audiences. It is a process that relies on the writer and the reader to reach a level of understanding between one another in order to effectively create a better conversation and a more fluid exchange of ideas.  

I say possible because like all theories, mine is also subject to change as I continue to get a better understanding of these topics and continue to learn more as the class goes on. I’d like to consider this as more of a starting point, which to be honest was more than I had like a day ago but I digress.
Anyway, this turned out to be a convoluted mess of a post that I’m not sure made sense, which is funny given what I was saying about mutual writer-reader understanding just a few lines above but well…

 

Terrible first blog post title aside…

 

Yo,

 

I’m Marie Cuenca.  I’ve been at Chico State for about three years now. I’m an undergraduate English studies major with a minor in Japanese (though fluency still escapes me). I’m still not really sure what I plan to do after I graduate, but I’m keeping an open mind. For me, English 431 is a way to sort of test myself and to see if teaching would be something that I would be interested in doing. I think it will be good to experience how a classroom and its students function from an outsider’s perspective rather than being a student myself.

I’m honestly a giant nerd to the point that it’s kind of embarrassing sometimes. I really love video games, tabletop games, anime/manga, and so on. So my literary interest pertains to those kinds of subjects. Throughout the week I found myself noting how often I check up on video game reporting sites like Gameinformer or Polygon. In terms of writing, at the moment most of it was for school. I was writing another blog post similar to this for my English 315, which is intro to publishing among reading for assignments. Obviously, there is also texting and other social media outlets (for me it’s mostly messaging friends from Tumblr or IMing them in Skype). While waiting for a responses to messages, I’m constantly switching between and engaging through different literacies all at the same time. From my tablet, to my phone, to my computer, or my even 3ds, I’m sifting through my reading or writing either to communicate, for knowledge, or to engage in an entertainment medium.

Which brings me to the point about Szwed when he talked about “book culture” (425). I always think about how there is the perception that books are the be all end all of what defines literacy. Something that comes to mind when I think about this concept is my younger brother, for example. He isn’t a fan of reading books especially assigned reading he’s given in his high school classes. Yet, he loves to read comic books, manga, and even fanfiction on his phone. He’s constantly engaging in a sort of literacy that interests him, however, my parent’s don’t approve that he’s always on the phone reading. Yet if he was reading a book, would their response to him reading all the time be the same? Of course not, but that idea remains, that for them and his school “good” reading can only stem from books and books alone.

It makes me kind of take a step back to examine all the kind of literacy I encounter without thinking. Which brings me back to video games, because they have been such a constant in my life. What always kind of amazes me is how much reading a person actually does in video games and for video games. Szwed’s  idea of “reading matter that is not normally included under the category of literature” (424) instantly comes to mind in relation to how literacy is found even in the places one wouldn’t think. Video games, whether it be the game itself or video game walkthroughs and so on, have really shaped and helped define my own way of reading and writing in ways that I don’t always realize or notice. Especially for video games that rely so heavily on text to be the “voice” of the characters (and even the ones with voice acting do this with captions).

So then it starts to become more than just a medium to “waste time” with, but one that actively has the player involved.  When I was a kid, I always had trouble reading. I was always put in the lowest reading group with others who struggled. It was frustrating to have to sit still for so long and stare at a block of text I couldn’t understand or engage with. But with video games, like Legend of Zelda, or old text based adventure games like the Oregon Trail, I found I could spend hours reading something that engaged me thoroughly and never get bored with it. Another great example I can think of is game like Ace Attorney in which the player is a lawyer that must analyze the language of the characters and gather evidence to help solve courtroom cases. The player is often allowed and encouraged to analyze the words of the person being prosecuted and to gather as many clues as possible. I equate it to doing annotations or analyzing a text.

I know I’ve rambled a lot about games but I find that in correlation with how Szwed talked about different forms of literacy, video games are such a good medium in which to explore that kind of discussion about what literacy is and how it tackles that question in its own unique ways. It’s something that I find fascinating. I look forward to seeing where this conversation will take us.