We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. 
This hurts my brian. I mean… brain.
So I was a bit nervous about this blog post because honestly, who thinks about any kind of theory of writing unless they’re told to do so? Well, that’s exactly what I’m doing now. I don’t really know what I actually think about writing as a theory sort of speak, so I’m hoping I can just type away and think as to what I want to say and make up a good theory in the process.
Speaking of thinking, I can actually pull off of this point because one of my favorite parts in the past week’s reading was some 4 simple words, “We write to think“. Currently, I am in the action of doing just that. I am partaking in a critical exercise to make myself THINK about what exactly I want my theory to be as I write.
[Cue thinking music.] In this type of sense I would like to think of thinking as a way of thinking as a form to exercise the brain, which is a good thing for students. It pushes the boundaries of expressing their knowledge and feelings of how they view certain things. Although, our writing may not be as fluid and as expressive as we may think. As an example, when Kim pointed out our limitations on writing, it really opened my eyes to really see that, wow yea we really don’t have much power over the way we really want our writing to actually be. Such as this blog post? I feel as though possibly we do have a sort of freedom in our writing because there are no actual formalities we have to follow, its simply all on what we think on a certain subject. I personally love the idea of these blogs. It makes me actually look forward to something because I like to write and I don’t have many chances to do so since high school (like 4 years ago, oh.my.)…
Also, referring back to the reading, I loved the section on words for other words because it certainly brought up a fact that not a lot of people think about? But that’s also just one thing that I absolutely LOVE about language. Language is my number one love of things that is beautiful in this world. So, it spoke about how certain words led up to other words being created in specific languages. (e.g. shiranai [I don’t know] + hito [person] = shiranaihito [stranger] – Japanese) (e.g. persoña [Spanish] –> persona [English] ). It just amazes me how certain things come together in many languages to formulate understanding and something that everyone knows it as.
So I want to say my theory of writing is nothing more than the fact that its completely fluid and inconclusive. Its something that is never finished and is always running its cycles. I say this only because writing is never the same unless plagiarized, and because of that, writing is simply malleable. Our thoughts might be on the same page on occasion, yet never in a sense the page has been copied because we think our own things.
I’m not entirely sure if I got the point of this through, but I really just wrote what was on my mind about the matter. I may not talk very much at all, but I guess that’s why I like writing what I think.
2 Replies to “This hurts my brian. I mean… brain.”
I totally can agree with you on that last point. It can be wayyyy easier to write about something than actually speak about it. Even more so in a new class and no one really knows each other yet. I think as a future teacher it is nice to think about subjects like this, because it can help you understand just how difficult writing is, which we often think the opposite. Example if you go to Japan to teach, in say the JET program, it might be very frustrating at times when you are placed in a 3rd grade classroom and the students can’t read or write simple English. If you know the difficulties involved you can understand the students perspective and give them advice like, “just write down anything to start thinking, and maybe the answer will come to you” since we have seen that writing is a way of thinking.
Thank you thank you thank you for all the easter eggs you leave in your posts. I smile the entire time I’m reading. You get the affordances of the blog: hyperlinks, embedded images, video, etc. Elements that are not easy to include in Word that is then printed out on paper. We should talk in class about taking advantage of this form/mode of composing.
I also appreciate how you highlight writing to learn vs learning to write. This will be useful for us to talk about as we think about helping writers.
I’m very bummed that the comment box is more limiting as a multimodal space. But at least I can include one link: http://media.giphy.com/media/kwNSxdqqutsEE/giphy.gif