Scattered Thoughts

Many of the articles we’ve read, I believe, are expansions of Murray’s question about why and how we teach something as abstract as the process of writing. From this question stem many different and contradicting theories, the most intriguing one I found to be Elbow’s argument for writing without a specific audience in mind, and rather emphasizing the act of freewriting, at least in the initial stages of the process. Often I feel that when I concentrate too much on how audience will perceive my writing, that I will push away certain ideas, and in this way I restrain my thoughts on a subject and direct them only towards what I believe my audience wants to hear. By directing our writing in this way, not only are we actively limiting our thought process, but setting ourselves up for a rather boring piece of writing.
In terms of how to teach writing in the classroom, I think the emphasis should be not on how to construct a sentence or an essay; those things will come with time. Rather, the emphasis should be on putting pen to paper and simply getting thoughts out so writers can visually see where they what they’re trying to say. Refining said thoughts should come later, and this is the core of Elbow’s argument. As he says, “…it’s hard to disguise something while engaged in trying to figure it out.” Writing should be regarded as a process rather than a product; a writer is never really done with a piece of writing, because there is always a new perspective to take, a new way of stating something, a new idea to bring forth. “In short,” Elbow says, “ignoring audience can lead to worse drafts but better revisions.”
Still, I find myself going back and forth about which method is the most effective when it comes to teaching students how to write coherent and concise academic papers: is it better to allow them to forget audience and write what they know, allowing the technical skills to come later? Or
The question that I may want to explore in my longer paper is how to change the way students view their writing process in the classroom. I want to theorize on the how and why students should view writing as a means of self-expression, rather than as a way to prove themselves to an outside (often intimidating) audience, like a teacher. I think back on Ong’s example of how teachers have students write the generic essay, “What I did on my summer vacation,” when I consider how writing is taught now. The only occasion students can give for writing this essay is “because the teacher told me to.” How can a young person find joy in the creative process of writing if teachers insist on removing the creativity?
I think teachers have the power to either hone their students’ creative skills, or turn them permanently away from them. The trick is to get students to understand the beauty of writing, which is that one has the freedom to say whatever comes to mind, and then to go back and edit one’s thoughts, an aspect lost in verbal communication where, once an opinion is stated, it is much more difficult to change or take back. If teachers can achieve that initial value of writing within students when they are at an early age, we would see many less “basic” writers, or students who truly feel as though they have “nothing to say” on a subject later on in their academic careers.