Blog 4 (from the week my account did not work)

 Hi Everyone,


Whoops! I forgot I had to put this post in from when my account was not working as well! It's below:


The opening of chapter 12 in the Lindemann book immediately captivated me, " For most students, rewriting is a dirty word. It's a punishment, a penalty for writing poorly." When I tell you, this summed up the story of my life in grad school in two sentences- it did. I had never had to almost completely rewrite papers till I came to grad school. As you know from my literacy autobiography draft, I am ultra insecure about my writing, so I have been making sure my professors read all of my papers before I submit them for a final grade. I may be annoying at this point, but I would rather be annoying than get a mediocre grade because I felt bad about asking my professors for help. Anyway, these meetings/ email chains with my professors typically result in me having to pretty much rewrite the whole paper. I never had to do that before because I did pretty decent, notwithstanding my insecurities, but this is a real new scenario. When accepting the reality that the last bazillion hours I spent working on the paper are headed to the trash, I'm torn between thinking I suck and thinking this is normal because I am literally in grad school to learn all this stuff I didn't know. I also have to accept that those bazillion hours are part of the process because this stuff is more complex! Hopefully, the bazillion will turn into a million at some point. Her list of 12 reasons people rewrite drafts reluctantly was spot on because I feel that I have felt all of those at some point in my life. I really enjoyed this chapter because of the ways that she explains we can decrease these feelings in students. I think one thing to start with is removing the negative connotation from the idea of rewriting and accepting that it is a normal part of the process of writing. I am not going to go into specifics here about all the tactics Lindemann uses, as the specifics are in my 2-fold notes, but one thing that really stood out to me as a tactic to remove the negative connotation from rewriting was her showing her students her rewriting process in writing the very chapter I was reading: "My students have seen the several... share theirs with other students." (Lindemann 195) I believe the struggle with rewriting is heavily influenced by emotion which is influenced by the negative connotations to the idea of rewriting that we have fostered. Her showing that she also had imperfections she needed to fix humanized her and made the rewriting normal and better final drafts accessible. More teachers should definitely humanize themselves and show their students that they, too, are imperfect and have a process. While all of the technical fixes she explained are valuable, appealing to the emotional effects of rewriting/revising/drafting is often overlooked and is critical to our success as writers and I had not even thought of this till I read this chapter! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lindemann Chapters 8-9

At the top of page 131, Lindemann explains how artists create forms and later writes how "we begin building a repetoire of forms for poems, dialogues, explanations, and arguments." The previous life as a musician taught me this. I learned to play guitar and bass by learning other people's songs and in doing so the songs I wrote sounded like the bands I liked (even though this similarity wasn't intentional). I learned how to play by mimicking the bands I liked, which is how I learned how to write. I found writers whose words sounded the way the words in my head sound and I mimicked their styles. I'd like to think my words (and songs) have deviated from this mimicry, but the influences remain. I found this practice helpful for anyone learning an art. If you're learning how to play guitar and you want to be in a punk band, there's no better teacher than Johnny Ramone. If you want to be an essayist circa 2021, David Sedaris is a good place to begin. This idea ...
Read more

Blog Post #3: Dominic Lopez

                      Some of the things I have been thinking about  and wondering  about this week are:   - Chapter 8 of the book provides a meaningful explanation for the purpose of teaching students how to properly form and format their writing. Teaching students how to use certain forms of writing can be a hinderance to their growth in writing because students then only stick to that form of writing. Their writing style and writing content often suffer since they try to fit their topic and their writing voice on the topic into a set format.    However, it is still important to teach students forms of writing because it gives them ideas for how to write coherently and how to structure their ideas well. Their ideas will become more connected and written better. We can show students a good  amount  of different forms of writing so that they  are able to  write well for any to...
Read more

Blog #12: Dominic Lopez

      These are the areas of the reading that I wanted to discuss for this week:   1.) I would really like to implement the method for teaching writing that is discussed in chapter five of the Warnock and Gasiewski text that has to do with peer reviews. In this method, students provide feedback to each other on the peer reviews and revisions that they do for their  peers when  reviewing each other’s writing. What I like about this method is that students will get feedback on the type of feedback that they are giving when they do peer reviews for others which allows them to see if the type of  feedback  they are giving is useful and effective rather than feedback that shows little effort. It helps them to understand when they aren’t being specific enough or reading their peer’s writing as thoroughly if their comments aren’t very detailed. It also allows them to help their peers improve their feedback as well which makes  all of  the stude...
Read more