Yancey!

Most of my life, I’ve had an appetite for reading but not so much with writing. I’m not a “creative” type so I’ve always turned away from expressing myself in a written manner. On the odd occasion I would journal, especially online at the turn of the 21^st century (MySpace, anybody??), when putting things on the internet for all to see was still relatively quiet and not as hugely popular but I gave up on that quickly because I wasn’t able to fully process my thoughts, feelings, etc., in writing. Guess what? I’m still not a creative writer who enjoys writing. I enjoy analyzing. However, when I do write, I can succinctly pinpoint my arguments, prove them with textual evidence and compose a paper worthy of any Professor. But how can I do this? According to the reading by Yancey, “Attempting the Impossible,” we write to convey understanding not to develop knowledge on a subject, quoting from Applebee and Langer, “’Give the constraints imposed by high-stakes tests, writing as a way to study, learn, and go beyond—as a way to construct knowledge or generate new networks of understandings…is rare’” (326). I am a Native Texan. I have gone through the school system in Texas, and I work in the school system in Texas. I have always been taught that writing is a way to convey your understanding and unfortunately it is taking me a little while to overcome this falsehood. Writing is an art, that some people do just naturally come by but for others, they cannot form the thoughts in to a coherent, organized paper, and THAT IS OKAY! It takes a bit of work. Yancey has advocated for this, Redd advocated for this (last week) and the idea by Breuch in her article about “Post-Process” has no place in my compositional pedagogy ideology. Her thoughts on writing being something that cannot be taught goes against what I am more inclined to believe by Yancey because she says, “It is important, in a Vygotskian way, that the assignment asks students to revisit an experience of their own choosing so as to make meaning of it for others” (326). To put her into context she is describing 4 advantages for beginning a FYC Course with a narrative style paper, and this allows the students to 1) connect to prior knowledge, 2) challenges their school-based learning (which is the hardest part of growing up, am I right?) 3) validation of their experiences through validation of their writing about those experiences and 4) helping students to see new ways of approach and organizing material. This process will help connect the students not only to their paper but they’ll have something to look back on to judge their progress against, they’ll have the affirmation that what they are saying makes sense, or at least how they can eventually make it make sense, and gives them the opportunity to build a process unique to their writing style and way of learning. We are not factory made, regulated human-bots. Every person is different, every writer is different.