Freedom of Thought Processes

 Writing in today’s world of higher education is a systematic array of composition assignments. Our ability to analyze these assignments and their goals for educational purposes is what allows us to break down the system that we have developed for composition education and to reform it. Patricia Bissell discusses in "Cognition, Convention and Certainty" that our desire to understand writing is what originally lead us to creating composition courses in the first place, so why are we now subduing that desire. The writing assignment in analysis here is a personal assignment that I received which was a scene writing assignment for a 3000 level Fiction Technique course. The Assignment was to write a 2-3 page scene for a short story from a first person narrative. The character who narrates the scene was supposed to have a distinct personality and have an idiosyncratic way of describing/confronting his or her world. The assignment’s goal was to work on character development, narration and to be able to personify a character and bring them to life through basic narration and constant action throughout the scene without dwelling too much on the character’s internal thought process.

 The scene that I choose to create for the assignment was a scene about an old man teaching a young boy how to trap animals for the fur trade business in Northern Michigan. I choose that scene because I thought it would be plausible to use the actions of the two characters in the scene to help portray my narrator “Ray” as a rugged and weathered old man. Inevitably I made many errors in the scene in how I went about describing Ray and having a few issues on what details to put in the scene and leave out. I found it challenging to come up with an idea of a scene taking place without being able to just simply describe it. It was hard to think of an action that the character could be doing that would also help the reader understand more about the character. After handing the assignment in in-class we went over as a class multiple examples of scene writing and I was able to draw from that how to write a better scene.

 My professor for the course is a phenomenal teacher and his idea for the assignment is reflective of that. David Bartholomae wrote in "Inventing the University" about how one of the biggest issues many writer's struggle with today is the inability to recognize writing as writing for an audience. This assignment really helped with that, as I wrote with the thought in mind of my teacher not only reading it, but trying to get inside of the mind of the character I was trying to develop. The assignment is very precise in its direction and does not specify exactly what’s expected of the student but has a fairly clear outline what the learning objectives for the student are. The assignment helped on the broader component of fiction writing, which is creating a scene. Yet the assignment’s main focus was to work on improving character development and first person narrative. What I gained from the assignment was improvement in all of the aforementioned areas. However that is where the problem lies. I may have improved my scene writing and character development but it was nowhere near the amount of practice I needed/need with those elements of Fiction Technique.

Although it would be touched upon more throughout the course and in other courses I worry that we do not spend enough time on the individual elements that break down writing to actually master them, which in part help us master writing all together. Also the assignment causes the issue of not working enough on writing from a third person narrative in scenes. This raises the question of whether the assignment itself was too specific in its instruction and intentions or if we do not offer specific enough curriculum all together to create courses and majors to help learn less arrays of knowledge but master more specific and distinct topics and subjects.

This debate plays into the debate that Nathan Crick's article "Composition as an Experience" refers to as the historical clash between constructivism and expressivism.  This meaning a societal battle between educating upon creative tendencies or constructive values. Personally, I believe that we need to reform how we educate our children to the more expressive side of writing. I’m a believer that the less structured and defined writing is; the more beautiful and true it comes through. If we want to inspire students to be the most passionate writers they can possibly be then we need to cater to their interest a little more and focus more on what they wish to learn.

Say I want to write fiction, then my scene writing assignment would’ve held immense value and it would be justified to go further in depth on every subject. It would not make sense for me as a fiction writer to take a higher level non-fiction course. There is obviously knowledge to be gained but it is a waste of time and money to focus your efforts on anything but the most optimal resource, which in this case would be fiction classes. I definitely learned something from the scene assignment but it is impossible for me to say if it made me a better writer without actually practicing it more to compare and contrast the works. You can say that I could write another version at home or on my own but that would be a complete contradiction of the point being made about knowledge gained and improvement of composition from higher learning institutions.

The idea that students should be well versed in everything is noble and I agree with it to a certain standpoint. However to think that all students should know how to do most Math and sciences but not know more than basic writing is abysmal. The constructive mind set would speculate that there is little economic value in writing so therefore it has no value. That is the root cause for lobbying for reallocation of writing resources in funding throughout most education. In my opinion that is foolish, and to not recognize the value in being able to truly convey what you want to say is sad. Why anyone would ever want to live in a world stripped away of arts and personality baffles me. Where do we as people outlet after we have taken away all our funding from writing and it dwindles in popularity to almost a cult status? The value in expressing yourself is truly priceless so to think that it is an appropriate move to cut funding and focus on the arts is diminishing to who we are all as people. 

Since writing is an art and something that is typically done purely out of passion rather than out of ulterior economic motives; then we should cater courses, programs and majors more towards what the students wish to learn. For some people, going swimming means jumping in a set lane and swimming laps doing a set stroke. However that is not what it means for all people. For most people swimming means getting in the water swimming around doing twists and turns, frolicking and doing whatever comes natural. Some people wish to learn to do a hand stand in a pool before they want to learn how to do breast stroke because that’s what interests them and that’s what drives them to get into the pool in the first place. That’s how writing should be; we should feed individual passions and actually go out of our way not to smother them.

If you take that person who loves to do twists and turns in the pool and jump off the diving board and then make them swim laps every day, two things will happen. The first will be they will get better at swimming laps even though they are probably not good at it to begin with. That’s a good thing. But the second thing that could and probably will happen is that the person will start to hate swimming. They’ll hate the pool and see it for something that the used to love, that now just seems like grueling work. Swimming uninspired lap after lap until the love they once had for the pool is dead. 

That scenario can and more importantly does happen with writing, all too often. Maybe more people would enjoy writing if we incorporated it better at a young age. It may seem like getting two birds with one stone when you assign you fifth grade students to write a history report because hey, they are learning both history and working on writing. But what if those boring reports that many of us dreaded as children were really the main reason why most people don’t enjoy writing as much when they’re older. Maybe if we stripped writing away from other curriculum like history at a young age and made students write more independently on things that actually interest them, then we would have more people interested in composition when they got older. Constructivism in writing restricts the thought process and as Nathan Crick says in his article "Composition as Experience" "The difference is expressivism posits a plurality of individual minds while constructivism posits a single ubiquitous mind."