Flynn: Composing as a Woman

In contrast to Fleckenstein's social argument, Flynn takes more of a psychological approach to the differences between how men and women develop language through their separate experiences which, in turn, influence how they write. She claims that women are programmed from birth to identify with their mothers, while men are eventually denied this association, and therefore their "identification processes stress differentiation from others" (Chodorow, 176). Thus their experiences are entirely different, a facts that results in the seemingly black and white differences between men and women.

Examples, hooray! After reading Fleckenstein's article, I appreciated the fact that Flynn presents examples from students' prose to back up her claims of how differences in men and women's experiences are reflected in their thinking and writing processes.

As straightforward and accessible as Flynn's article was, I don't feel like I learned anything that I didn't already know. Yes, we are brought up with gendered identities, and we assume these roles in our lives and our writing styles. Yes, it is important to inform and encourage male and female students alike about these differences and to put them in social and psychological contexts. For me, though, I don't believe she presented any sort of revolutionary ideas about where the problems originated and how to call attention to them in the classroom.

Fleckenstein: Resistance, Women, and Dismissing the "I"

Fleckenstein puts forth in her article an intriguing argument claiming that when Bartholomae offers insight to how writing should be taught in classrooms to the idealized "student," he ignores that people's experiences differ depending on their gendered identities. Fleckenstein indicates one of Bartholomae's key arguments, the dismissal of the writer outside of the text, thereby eliminating subjectivity and allowing the text to stand on its own. However, Fleckenstein says that "a writer outside the text is always embedded within a cultural system that dictates and constrains options for material and rhetoric identity, and women writers are culturally situated in circumstances sharply divergent from men" (110).

If I had never taken a sociology or women's studies course in college, I don't think I would've understood much of Fleckenstein's article. Personally, I understand what androcentrism is and how being a man is the norm, while anything associated with feminism or women is considered "other," but I'm not sure that this article is accessible to everyone, because often she spoke in such abstract terms. There were several times that I found myself desperate for some concrete examples. It rather annoyed me because I think she had some great points, but she definitely needed to back them up to avoid confusion.

I have to say that this article kind of ripped the rug out from under me. I've experienced sexism in all sorts of ways outside the classroom, but I never considered that I was in a subordinate position when it came to my own voice in my writing. Am I just oblivious to my own cultural boundaries? Am I just so used to this role that I play in my everyday life that I fail to recognize the signs of my own limitations? Or, as Josh says in his blog, since I never acknowledged the privileged/subordinate issue between men and women writers, does that make me just a writer?

I suppose the real question here is the difference between how I think about myself in my own writing verses the how other people, either consciously or subsonsciously,make judgments about my writing as they consider that I, a women, wrote that piece of prose.

What would happen if all writing were gender anonymous?

Bartholomae: Inventing the University

In his article, Bartholomae explains how first-year college students attempt to get a feel for the various languages of academia in their writing. He claims that in order to do this, students must imagine an academic audience and "mimick" the language as they begin to learn how to use it.

Ah, the old "fake it 'til you make it" strategy. I remember it well. I was intensely nervous when I got my first essay assignment my first semester at college. I began the paper at least a week before it was due, and I specifically remember spending hours on it, contemplating every word of every sentence in my attempt to elevate my writing to this academic level that I had in my head. It seemed forced and out of place for me to be writing from this place because I couldn't quite grasp the discourse yet, but I had read enough academic writing to understand that this was how I was supposed to write.Needless to say, I butchered my first few attempts at imitating academic discourse.

I'd like to say (or at least, I certainly hope) that my writing has gotten exponentially better since freshman year, and I think it can be attributed to the "fake it 'til you make it" stradegy. The act of imagining an educated, university audience reminded me somewhat of Ong's stance on fictionalizing an audience while you write, but with several key differences. While Ong seemed to be trying to take pressure off the writer by advising that he or she write with the idea that the reader is already adapted to their specific writing style, Bartholomae seems to demand that writers imagine an audience that most likely knows more about the subject than the writer, which I think is a pretty intimidating place to be writing from.

Still, I like the conclusion that Bartholomae come to in the end, how it is better to be writing from a place of creativity, even if it is "muddier and more confusing prose," than to attempt to write a quick and efficient paper, devoid of creative thought. Sometimes, one must lose oneself in compicated thoughts before they can find the right way to express them.

Shaughnessy

I'm not sure why, but I read the first part of Shaughnessy's article very sarcastically. I laughed out loud when she discussed the teacher's initial, inherent need to protect the academy and exclude certain people who are clearly outside of the realm of education, such as the students the teacher first encounters. The teacher conciders the consequences of failing an entire class, as opposed to deciding the best way to go about teaching students who are so far behind. The initial judgments tickled me, though I'm sure Shaughnessy's assessment is not far from the truth. "Converting the natives"...now that's just being racist and condescending. Still funny though.

I like how Shaughnessy's essay focuses on converting the teachers as opposed to the students, because I do think that education is a give and take relationship. Students can only sustain cognitive arguments as far as they are taught to think in such a manner. She says, "For [students] the injuction to 'be more specific' os difficult to carry out because the conditions that lead to specificity are often missing" (238). Students are always taught just to find the answer, but no one seems to teach them how to specify WHY they think an answer is correct, or how to QUESTION the answers they are given, or CHALLENGE what they are taught in classrooms. Isn't that the "point" of education? To inspire original, thoughtful ideas about the world?

This leads me to Bizzell's essay. I agree with Caitlin that by the time college rolls around, students should not be looking to teachers for all the answers, but rather should be actively participating in their own education by actively participating in what goes on in classrooms. I do think that in many ways, college has helped me become a much more critical and analytical thinker. I no longer just take what people say as fact, but I have the ability to challenge and BACK UP my claims. While I'm not sure if that's just me being overopinionated or more mature since I was in high school, but I think college has had a lot to do with why I now think this way.

Elbow & Ong: Audience

I found myself agreeing with many of the things Elbow had to say in his essay. Often when we concentrate too much on addressing our language in our writing toward a certain audience in our heads (or an audience who we know will eventually be reading our work, like a teacher), it becomes difficult to work out what we are trying to say because our concentration is not in the right place. As Elbow says, "[Writers] are actung too much like a salesman trained to look the customer in the eye and to think at all times about the characteristics or the 'target audience.'" Elbow argues that, at least in the initial draft, writers should forget about who they're writing to, and instead write for themselves. His theory is that the best way to figure our what we're trying to say is to forget about how readers will receive the writing; otherwise, the writing has a tendency to become thin and contrived. The writing becomes much more genuine when the writer doesn't settle for taking what they believe to be the reader's point of view, but rather attempts to make the reader see from their perspective.

The paradoxes that Elbow mentions when it comes to teaching writing in school were intriguing. While it is important for students to "try harder" in their writing, they also must "just relax" and forget about who they're writing for. This paradox reminded me of the girl who claimed to have nothing to say about Catcher and the Rye in Mirskin's essay. Students often mistake not being able to sustain private discourse by forgetting about audience with having nothing to say.

Ong takes a slightly different view about how writers should consider their audience. He claims that the best way for writers to succeed is for them to imagine an audience that has adapted to their writing style, as opposed to thinking about the people who will actually be reading their work. Ong also takes on the idea that the readers must take an active role in becoming the type of audience that the writer is writing for. Readers must learn "how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read, or at least how to operate in terms of these projections" (12).

Overall, I think both Elbow and Ong have some original ideas that break away from one of the golden rules that writers have always been taught: to think about the audience to whom they are writing. By freeing ourselves from the mental constrains of writing to anyone in particular, we allow our best ideas to come forth without any regard for how anyone else might receive the information.

Mirskin: Writing as a Process of Valuing

I found that Professor Mirskin's essay related very directly to Tuesday's discussion of how we internalize conversation with others and use that to form our own thoughts and opinions. In this way, we come to understand our own values through social context. Mirskin states that "...because others' language language comes at the world from a valuative perspective, our own language use naturally inflects value as it functions within that dialogic arena" (391). Because of this understanding of shared values, often we have to go no further than stating "It's sunny out today," because it implies that the sun being out is a good thing.

When writers are composing, they are constantly meditating between their own and society's system of values and applying it to their work. I found it interesting that often we do not apply this process consciously, but rather we have learned through our social development to do this in conversation, and therefore we are able to transpose it to our writing style. No matter what kind of writing I'm doing, whether it be poetry, a personal essay, an expository essay, or a simple email, I am acting on either an understanding of shared values between myself and my reader, or the notion that I must try to convince my reader to share what I value. If I cannot find a way to allow the reader to understand my stance, even if they don't agree with it, then I have ultimately failed in my process.

I found the "Catcher and the Rye" reference at the end of the essay to be very interesting. The girl who claimed she had nothing to say about the book really meant that she didn't agree with aspects of the text. The key, then, was not changing her value of the book, but rather finding a way for her to express her attitude through her writing. In the end, it turned out that the girl had plenty to say about the book, it was about "knowing how to elaborate one's own process of writing" (410).

Bruffee:Collaborative Learning

I would certainly agree with Bruffee's overarching argument that students learn better when they work in groups, as opposed to when they work independently. First of all, unlike Lumsford's rather codescending tone in her essay, Bruffee argues that students, though somewhat inexperienced, are never COMPLETELY idiotic, but rather always have something useful to bring to the group, simply by having been involved with other things in their lives, which they use indirectly in their learning process. I appreciated Bruffee saying this, and it certainly gave him some credibility in my book.

As my education at Ithaca has progressed over the years, I've experienced more and more individual/group work in the classroom, as opposed to class discussion, in which the professor guides the direction in which students should be thinking. I think this gradual lead into more group-directed learning certainly has had a positive impact on my own education, though I cannot speak for anyone else.

Although I've never done any formal tutoring, I have helped friends with their papers before, given them feedback, edited, made grammatical corrections, etc., as I've done in numerous writing classes in which we workshop our fellow students' written work. Each time I gie feedback on work, I feel like I'm consciously beginning to realize things I already learned how to do, but was never aware of until that moment. It's strange, but I have experienced first-hand just how effectively the collaboration of two or more inexperienced students can help to spark a productive, intelligent conversation.