Blog 10

 One of my main problems is that I worry too much about doing what the professor wants. I get hell-bent on making sure I am catering to what a specific professor wants, which is why this class has been interesting because you give us too much freedom for my comfort, which is good! Because learning should not always be comfortable! I am so conditioned to having the voice I think professors want to hear that having to use my own voice is taunting. It's why the Microsoft Word synonym tool is a means of survival for me, because if my word is too simple, I just may have a nervous breakdown. When you gave us these informal blogs with no word count and the word "informal" attached, I feel like I did not even know what that meant. I remember for my first blog, no matter how hard I tried to sound informal,  I still sounded formal. I am still getting past the idea of just writing down my reaction to what I read. I keep feeling the need to give a reaction followed by a synthesis to my reaction. Freedom is scary! I promise you everytime I write anything informal for this class, I wonder if what I wrote is ehat you meant by informal, which literally defeats the whole purpose of writing informally. I am doing it right now. 

Well, according to Mike Rose, this undying desire to please my teacher is one of the main culprits of my writer's block, so maybe I should stop that. When I read that essay, I felt like a I was reading my horoscope or zodiac chart because he was reading me like a book! 

Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She'll write a sentence, then erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward ten o'clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow's deadline, begins to wind into herself, she'll compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction at herself and her page: "No. You can't say that. You'll bore them to death." (Rose 2)

He may as well have written the name Iselle in there instead of Ruth. 

"The five students who experienced blocking were all operating either with writing rules or with planning strategies that impeded rather than enhanced the composing process. The five students who were not hampered by writer's block also utilized rules, but they were less rigid ones, and thus more appropriate to a complex process like writing." (Rose 3)

I always base my outlines on what I think the professor will want. Maybe if I worried about what I wanted, I would not have so much writer's block.

"As Gagne implies, we wouldn't be able to function without rules; they guide response to the myriad stimuli that confront us daily, and might even be the central element in complex problem-solving behavior." (Rose 4)

And here is how you, Dr. Cauthen, have been the death of me. How dare you allow me to have my own mind and think my own thoughts?! How dare you expect me to be confident in what I want to write because i want to write it and the ideas in Iselle's head may actually be worth something?! I do not know where you got this audacity to make me encounter my biggest fear with these vague prompts that require me to think for myself. This has definitely been the class where I have had the most creative freedom in writing with my literacy narrative and blogs and notes, but even the seminar papers I have had for all my classes have really been the death of me. When I had to choose to write about what I wanted to write about for my seminar papers for all my graduate classes and when I had to converse with sources and not just agree with them- I nearly lost it. Who was I to disagree with a published source?!

Anyway, it seems like you and Mike Rose are telling me that in order to combat my writer's block, I need to relax and have faith in my own thoughts, and if it doesn't work, just problem solve, it's not the end of the world. Also, something you also seem to believe in that I realized actually worked for my discovery draft: "When stuck, write!" or "I'll write what I can." (Rose 9)