Thanks to Uptaught, this post is going to be entirely self-conscious.
Not that my writing isn't self-conscious already, or rather, social-conscious. It's something that I've been struggling with the most last semester, and something that I'm trying to forget about for this semester. Here's my giant moment of honesty, which I have myself convinced of, despite the fact that I know it's only partially true: I don't think that anyone really cares what I have to say. Uptaught validates this, in a way, especially in the moments when it reflects on teachers (for instance, worrying about form, worrying about grammar and spelling instead of content); so I believe that I have learned to write Engfish fluently. I'm probably one of the best at it.
It's hard to move forward after reading the first half of that book. Because I am filled with this enormous dillemma: have I really even learned anything these four years of school? Have I only been preoccupied with grades, with pleasing teachers, and with attempting to be only noticeable as much to be able to ask the minimum amount of people for recommendations?
One thing that I remember being preoccupied with as a high school student was the idea of "writing with voice." I had an excellent English teacher for three of my years of high school. He was definitely not traditional, in a sense. His classroom was covered with student materials: the ceiling had a disco ball and a Grateful Dead flag clinging to the tiles, the front door had a light up "applause" sign, and by the end of the third year that I had been a student of his the front end of a Ford Ranger (spray-painted orange and military green) was mounted on the wall. He was trying to get someone to rig it so that the headlights would be able to turn on. Among other things: a full size standee of the Red Baron (like from the pizza boxes), microwave, broken skis, stickers and garbage Elmer-glued to the walls. When he took a sabbatical he declined to clean up the room because they weren't his items, they were the students'. His motto was "Fight Apathy," and he even had bumper stickers made up; a white background with the words in bold and a fist next to them. English Power.
But that's the main thing I thought about while reading; wondering if I've really had a voice in my papers, or if I've been just singing the tune that I'm expected to memorize and mockingbird back to the teachers, in order to validate that I can play the game. I never thought that that was what it was all about, but I certainly got good at it. I think I'm most afraid to try and write and speak in my "own" voice, whatever that is, because that's exactly it; I don't think I've found it yet due to years of being told how I should write and what I should care about.
How do you even begin after you acknowledge that?
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Hannah,
ReplyDeleteDowns was talking a lot about paradox during our first discussion of Uptaught, and it seems you've discovered the greatest paradox of all: Macrorie's book is meant to inspire and encourage voiced writing, but in a strange twist his book rather causes stagnation. I feel the same anxiety about my writing after reading Macrorie. I wonder if academics could ever really accommodate the kind of writing that he advocates. I wonder if my voice can ever be found beneath the flaking dead layers of academic voice that has been imposed on me.
-Aaron
What if Macrorie's students weren't being honest, either...but instead were giving their professor what he wanted to hear (well, read) in a different way?
ReplyDeleteAnd what if I, personally, I found most of the quoted free-writing exercises intensely boring? (Although I did think his wider critique of education systems themselves rather interesting.)
I feel as though writing papers which reflect my true opinions has been hard throughout college, too. But on a happier note...with luck, all of us will improve our skills enough in the future that we can retrospectively see whatever documents we produce now (honest or not) as "stepping stones" used to attain greater skill. I may not be pleased with everything I've written since my freshman year, but I know that my abilities have improved for having at least tried to succeed within the system.
I wonder ... how much "skill" does it take to say what one thinks? (And how would that be different from the skill it takes to say what one thinks *well*?)
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