blog week sept 3/5

When I was enrolled in EDUC 322, I once said to a friend of mine, "One of the textbooks that I'm reading says that you can teach people how to write, how the hell do you do that?" He said, "You don't, writing is something that you have or you don't." I agreed with him at that moment, but both Smith and Hairston disagree. In the Hairston article, it talks about the vitalist attitude and writing. It says, "The assumption that no one can really teach anyone else to write because writing is a mysterious creative activity that cannot be categories or analyze." What is funny is that I got that book used, and there was a note in the margin that says, "I kind of feel this way." So I guess I am not alone in thinking that it's difficult to teach somebody to write.

In reality, I guess I don't believe that you cannot teach somebody else to write. You can teach them that it's a process, the mechanics of it, how to not bore your readers, and how to be coherent. Even with creative writing like poetry, we can teach people that a poem does not have to rhyme and every word has to count. With that said, I do not believe that you can teach somebody to be the new Shakespeare or for that matter the new Stephen King. Stephen King is a master story teller. Kurt Vonnegut’s writings are brilliant, case in point, I despised the story Breakfast of Champions but his actual writing is genius. These are things that I don't think you can teach because it is art. You can't teach somebody to paint Michelangelo so why would we assume that we can teach people to write like Shakespeare.