September 5th

After reading the articles int the Graves book, I was struck by how drastically teaching writing has changed over the 15 or so years that I have been attending school. I remember teachers, and adults saying things like 'you can either write or you can't' or 'some people have it and some people don't.' I was not always a confident writer by any means and I want to say that I am a big fan of this new paradigm that writing can be taught. The problems that I ran into personally were similar to the conflicts described in the Hairston article. Teachers tended to focus on the finished product rather than the process. Once I reached high school there was more and more focus on the process and lucky for me I never lost interest in writing and was able to adjust to this new style easily. I knew it worked because I liked my finished product more and more as I got older. I find it easy to think of writing as a process if I compare it to composing music. It's really easy to come up with a melody, but a song really takes shape when extra harmonies and transitions are added. When writing, your idea is the melody onto which you have to construct supporting harmonies, and solid rhythm. You have to be able to look at your writing as the raw material through which you realize and refine a concept.

I really liked the quote from the Smith book in which he states that "Writing is a form of language and not...simply spoken language written down" (11). In a way, learning to write is like learning a new language. Ways that effectively communicate what we are thinking and feeling when we talk often times look like gibberish when we write it down and inversely, a well constructed sentence that encompasses a large idea can turn out to be a real tongue twister when someone tries to read it aloud. This gives more support to the statement that just because an individual can't write doesn't mean they are unintelligent. I think an effective way of teaching different students how to write would be to find out what they read and what they find easy to understand when they read. Trying to inject these styles and devices into their own writing might make the whole process easier for the student.