My Weekly Rant Posted on the Internet

I enjoyed the Fulwiler article because it really provided a clear purpose for revising. It gave activities to help generate a productive environment for students at this stage in the writing process and I also liked that it showed several papers written over the course of three or four drafts.

However, I feel like some of these articles on multigenre, or creative expository writing are getting a little Freedom Writers-ish on me. By that, I mean they are becoming somewhat cliche and over dramatic. Talk about ironic. In their desperate attempt to plead for their case in expressing the inner student writer, they have become what they are struggling to fight against. The problem with this, of course, is that it shows that all forms of writing may become redundant and overdone, regardless of the style. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great if teachers can promote a creative way of telling a narrative, and encourage this. But I can see how this may get old as well. You will still be limited in the techniques that you teach the student, and thus, the student will only be able to produce so many different creative styles. In a decade, there will be a shift back to the bland and personality-less writing that is to the point and spares the details...maybe.

Anyway, I think there are some issues regarding this article that are clearly avoided, but really need to be addressed. First, the samples were all college level. Motivation in high school and college are very different. I think there are very few students willing to spend as much time on one piece as the students were in the article, much less is there time to actually do so in a realistic setting. Second, I still think there is a difference between creative writing and expository writing. I feel like this was an unfair article because a narrative is considered both creative and expository. In an argumentative and research paper, it is much more difficult to use "descriptive" language. Third, and most importantly, this kind of writing will not likely pass a student on the MCAs or GRAD...or whatever they are called now. I think promoting this writing may work in a class after these tests are administered. But until then, I think it will be difficult to teach this writing and then back track to a basic essay format. Students will not understand why this is necessary and the government will not want to listen to why your students are so smart for forming such complex essays.

Finally, I don't think the problem of summarizing the essay in the introduction is purely that of essay writing. Look at the young adult fiction we are encouraged to read. After reading the book Speak, a young adult novel I actually liked, I read the back cover out of curiousity. It states in a neat little paragraph what happens and how her life has changed since the event. I kick myself for actually reading the entire book when I could have read that one paragraph. The film industry is much worse. I hate watching most movie previews because they give away so much of the plot. The movie industry wants people to be sure they will enjoy the film so much that they give away the best parts in the previews. People are trained to want to know the ending before they see it. Worse yet, is the summarizing at the end of a book or movie. I love the movie Bridget Jones' Diary...until the very end in which she has to spend two minutes summarizing the conflicts of her life and what they have made her see in herself and other men. My skin crawls at that part. If the writers, creators, directors, or whoever, feel that this is necessary by the end of the movie, then the movie is not good enough to represent an artistic statement. I strongly feel this is why Napoleon Dynamite is looked at as a pointless movie. There was no introduction to the characters, and there wasn't a concluding summary about them. People are not able to see how this is a story of a lonely boy coming of age unless they are explicitly told. Students are exposed to this formulaic writing not necessarily because it is taught in school, but because they are raised in a society that believes art does not stand on its own without some sort of explanation.

Overused, I know, but my resource link this week is OWL. It has a lot of paper writing suggestions for all parts of the writing process. The link takes you directly to the revision section.


On a side note, I have been listening to a lot of Mika, which is ridiculously happy music, so perhaps my attitude will change in the near future.