Personal Investment

From Pre-Writing, "We described the entire activity called 'writing' as a person's transformation of the events of his life into experienced conceptual structures revealed in language for the sake of his own self-actualization and for communication with other persons through commonly shared patterns of meaning."

I believe in structure in a writing curriculum. Structure is your foundation. It's what you build first, so that later your creation won't come crashing down around your ears. Grammar is important because it is a method of expression and also a connection between a writer and her audience, and therefore deserves time and attention. I also believe in pre-writing and the outline. Structuring an argument, providing argument support, and ensuring logical execution are easier to visualize as new writers with structure supporting it. So yes, I like structure, and rules, and form.

But once your foundation is built, you enter less certain territory. Rhetoric, creativity, and theory in writing require human evaluation. We can tell our students what to think, and that may stick for an hour, 3 weeks, or years. But what we really should be doing is encouraging that human evaluation from our students. We should give them the critical thinking skills to take those areas of thought on writing and learn to deconstruct them for the tools they need. Then, using rhetoric, creativity, and theory along with their own experiences and beliefs, they can build their own creations in which they are personally invested.

A structured argument will always be important because it’s the discourse most often used in daily life, and education should have a practical application. However, I think it’s important to expose students to a wide variety of textual forms, not only to make them aware of the ranges of human expression, but also to allow them opportunities to find their own expression. A balance of structure and free-form writing allows a range of expression while providing stability to that foundation. In short, I think balance is important.

Essentially, all these elements are used to give students the tools they need. But the experience and insight they each bring to the table personalizes the writing process and makes it unique. Whether they are writing for scholarly recognition or to tell a story they need to be invested in the final product and not just regurgitating rules and structure. At this point I don't know exactly how you do that, yet. But I'm personally invested in figuring it out.