I truly have no concerns of peer review in this way, but if I have to have one it would be that the reader is afraid to be completely honest for fear of hurting my feelings.
I feel this activity is very effective because personally, I do not have a strong hold on grammar, sentence structure, etc., but I do know my own feelings and I know how something makes me feel when I read it and I feel that is very valuable to a writer because they may be able to see where there paper landed and then they can question if that is where they wanted it to land or not.
I truly think everyone embracing it and not be afraid of being 100% honest is how this process can be very effective.
I want to take the feedback I was given and make my paper stronger and since there were somethings that were not clear to my peers, I want to go back in and clarify those items, so my final draft is even stronger.
100% honesty is the most helpful response because then I know where my paper is sitting with my readers and as Murray feels, the writer must earn their audience and that is what I am hoping to do.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Voice—What Does it Mean to You?—2nd Draft of short paper
So, now I have gone in and cleaned up my citations and changed some things in the paper…let’s see how this one works compared to the first!
Voice…a word heard many times, but what does it mean in composition studies? Peter Elbow wrote in Writing with Power, “…we all have a chest cavity unique in size so that each of us naturally resonates to one pitch alone” and for Elbow this is what he called voice, “often referring to something like style or tone—writing with real rhythm and texture” (qtd. in Harris: 24). Joseph Harris feels that voice “implies breath, spirit, presence, what comes before words and gives them life” (24). Personally, voice is something that is very important to papers. When reading someone else’s work I love to look for and listen for their voice to resonate through those words. It is almost like their voice is being heard in my mind, instead of my own. A person’s pain, joy, triumph, love, passion, anger, hate, vengefulness, lust, happiness, peace, etc. can be heard by a reader, but only if the writer allows freedom within their selves to let it come through in their writing.
Why would a student want to write a personal essay, use their Voice to be heard, and allow their emotions to show in their writing? I cannot help but agree with Terry Myers Zawacki when she writes in Recomposing as a Woman—An Essay in Different Voices, “I like its openness, how it pulls from here and there, observing, reflecting, moving through disconnections to make connections…the personal essay does not rely on positions staked out in advance, on straight arrangements, and tightly connected points leading to a single conclusion…differences can be cultivated” (315). To me the personal essay is just that, a personal essay where feelings are allowed to be expressed, views are allowed to be heard, and stances are allowed to be taken.
Joseph Harris in A Teaching Subject Composition Since 1966, speaks about in the 1960s and 1970s how the idea of “centrality of personal and expressive kinds of writing” started to come up again, even though they had as Harris says, “a long tradition of dissent in English to call on; they also had events of their time to respond to” (26). For instance in the 1960s issues with Vietnam were going on, Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking for equal rights, Kennedy was our president for a short time due to assassination, etc., but also open admission programs, community colleges, and financial aid started to allow opportunities for many students who never thought they were going to go to college (Harris 26). One of the strongest points Harris makes is “…we need to see many 1960s expressivist teachers of writing not as fleeing from politics but as engaged in a political defense to the student in her struggles to assert herself against what was seen as a dehumanizing corporate and university system” (26-27). Currently there are so many social struggles, political struggles, and personal struggles going on that students need to be able to assert themselves in the university system. So, how does one allow a student to deal with their personal struggles in the world in a writing classroom? Allow the student the opportunity to discover and use their Voice.
Now the question turns to how do composition teachers teach voice in the classroom? To discuss how to teach Voice in the classroom, I am referencing Donald Murray’s article Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent. In this article Murray discusses taking away the responsibility from the teacher and giving it to the students and as he says, “I do get discouraged, mostly because the students have had no freedom, and when they find their own voice it has not been tempered by experience” (118). He even goes further and believes that because of the “teacher-centered educational system” students are kept basically at a level of adolescence up until and sometimes beyond, them getting their Ph.D (Murray 118). Murray tells us the four responsibilities that belong to the student are: first, a student must find their own subject; second, a student has to document his own subject; third, students must earn their audiences respect; and fourth, students need to practice many forms of writing (119-120). He gives us the four responsibilities of teachers as well: first, create psychological and physical environments where the student can fulfill his responsibilities; second, enforce deadlines; third, cultivate a climate of failure; and fourth, teachers are only diagnosticians, reading only papers students feel they are having problems with (121-122). Currently, and speaking from personal experience, writing classes have been about the teacher or professor completing all of my major writing assignments for me. Murray also resonates this statement, “the composition teacher not only denies his students freedom, he even goes further and performs the key writing tasks for his students” (118).
Going back to Zawacki’s article, she brings up something that I find incredibly important. She speaks of an experience in which she wants to present the idea of a new course where alternative writing could be taught as opposed to academic discourse and to her shock she found out that others did not agree there were other types of writing to be taught in the classroom (Zawacki 315). Zawacki had become very interested in articles about “valuing the personal essay as a mode of inquiry in the academy…particularly interested in articles about the link between the personal essay and feminine forms of knowledge and expression” (315). Now I know you are wondering why I am bringing up the point of feminine knowledge and expression, but it is crucial, in my eyes, because for so long men were the dominating force in all writing, and women had to learn from men and their writing, especially academically. Women were interviewed by Mary Belenky and her co-authors in Women’s Ways of Knowing, about the notion of being able to bring the rational with the emotional and unifying knowledge learned from others around them and as one woman put it, “letting the inside out and the outside in” (qtd. in Zawacki: 315). Zawacki also talks about reading in Elizabeth Flynn’s article Composing as a Woman, and I agree wholeheartedly with this idea, that some of the women students she had finally realized their Voice was as powerful, if not more powerful than the external voices and this allowed many of them to steer towards authenticating their own Voice (315).
A powerful statement made by Zawacki is, “we may have to risk focusing on gender differences if we want to hear Voices which have been marginalized or silenced by our insistence on rational argument as the prevailing mode of discourse in the academy” (316). After reading Murray’s idea of a classroom, Zawacki’s article, and Harris’s chapter on Voice, I believe that if we don’t want to focus on gender differences in writing than we need to give Voice power and maybe use a classroom like Murray’s to allow our students the opportunity to explore and play with different types of form in writing and as Murray says, “…the teacher of composition may return to his important educational role when rhetoric—the art of effective and responsible argument—was the foundation of a classical education” (123). Let the teachers be the guidance, but allow the students to teach one another, and allow people the opportunity to use their Voice in a very powerful way, Writing.
Voice…a word heard many times, but what does it mean in composition studies? Peter Elbow wrote in Writing with Power, “…we all have a chest cavity unique in size so that each of us naturally resonates to one pitch alone” and for Elbow this is what he called voice, “often referring to something like style or tone—writing with real rhythm and texture” (qtd. in Harris: 24). Joseph Harris feels that voice “implies breath, spirit, presence, what comes before words and gives them life” (24). Personally, voice is something that is very important to papers. When reading someone else’s work I love to look for and listen for their voice to resonate through those words. It is almost like their voice is being heard in my mind, instead of my own. A person’s pain, joy, triumph, love, passion, anger, hate, vengefulness, lust, happiness, peace, etc. can be heard by a reader, but only if the writer allows freedom within their selves to let it come through in their writing.
Why would a student want to write a personal essay, use their Voice to be heard, and allow their emotions to show in their writing? I cannot help but agree with Terry Myers Zawacki when she writes in Recomposing as a Woman—An Essay in Different Voices, “I like its openness, how it pulls from here and there, observing, reflecting, moving through disconnections to make connections…the personal essay does not rely on positions staked out in advance, on straight arrangements, and tightly connected points leading to a single conclusion…differences can be cultivated” (315). To me the personal essay is just that, a personal essay where feelings are allowed to be expressed, views are allowed to be heard, and stances are allowed to be taken.
Joseph Harris in A Teaching Subject Composition Since 1966, speaks about in the 1960s and 1970s how the idea of “centrality of personal and expressive kinds of writing” started to come up again, even though they had as Harris says, “a long tradition of dissent in English to call on; they also had events of their time to respond to” (26). For instance in the 1960s issues with Vietnam were going on, Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking for equal rights, Kennedy was our president for a short time due to assassination, etc., but also open admission programs, community colleges, and financial aid started to allow opportunities for many students who never thought they were going to go to college (Harris 26). One of the strongest points Harris makes is “…we need to see many 1960s expressivist teachers of writing not as fleeing from politics but as engaged in a political defense to the student in her struggles to assert herself against what was seen as a dehumanizing corporate and university system” (26-27). Currently there are so many social struggles, political struggles, and personal struggles going on that students need to be able to assert themselves in the university system. So, how does one allow a student to deal with their personal struggles in the world in a writing classroom? Allow the student the opportunity to discover and use their Voice.
Now the question turns to how do composition teachers teach voice in the classroom? To discuss how to teach Voice in the classroom, I am referencing Donald Murray’s article Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent. In this article Murray discusses taking away the responsibility from the teacher and giving it to the students and as he says, “I do get discouraged, mostly because the students have had no freedom, and when they find their own voice it has not been tempered by experience” (118). He even goes further and believes that because of the “teacher-centered educational system” students are kept basically at a level of adolescence up until and sometimes beyond, them getting their Ph.D (Murray 118). Murray tells us the four responsibilities that belong to the student are: first, a student must find their own subject; second, a student has to document his own subject; third, students must earn their audiences respect; and fourth, students need to practice many forms of writing (119-120). He gives us the four responsibilities of teachers as well: first, create psychological and physical environments where the student can fulfill his responsibilities; second, enforce deadlines; third, cultivate a climate of failure; and fourth, teachers are only diagnosticians, reading only papers students feel they are having problems with (121-122). Currently, and speaking from personal experience, writing classes have been about the teacher or professor completing all of my major writing assignments for me. Murray also resonates this statement, “the composition teacher not only denies his students freedom, he even goes further and performs the key writing tasks for his students” (118).
Going back to Zawacki’s article, she brings up something that I find incredibly important. She speaks of an experience in which she wants to present the idea of a new course where alternative writing could be taught as opposed to academic discourse and to her shock she found out that others did not agree there were other types of writing to be taught in the classroom (Zawacki 315). Zawacki had become very interested in articles about “valuing the personal essay as a mode of inquiry in the academy…particularly interested in articles about the link between the personal essay and feminine forms of knowledge and expression” (315). Now I know you are wondering why I am bringing up the point of feminine knowledge and expression, but it is crucial, in my eyes, because for so long men were the dominating force in all writing, and women had to learn from men and their writing, especially academically. Women were interviewed by Mary Belenky and her co-authors in Women’s Ways of Knowing, about the notion of being able to bring the rational with the emotional and unifying knowledge learned from others around them and as one woman put it, “letting the inside out and the outside in” (qtd. in Zawacki: 315). Zawacki also talks about reading in Elizabeth Flynn’s article Composing as a Woman, and I agree wholeheartedly with this idea, that some of the women students she had finally realized their Voice was as powerful, if not more powerful than the external voices and this allowed many of them to steer towards authenticating their own Voice (315).
A powerful statement made by Zawacki is, “we may have to risk focusing on gender differences if we want to hear Voices which have been marginalized or silenced by our insistence on rational argument as the prevailing mode of discourse in the academy” (316). After reading Murray’s idea of a classroom, Zawacki’s article, and Harris’s chapter on Voice, I believe that if we don’t want to focus on gender differences in writing than we need to give Voice power and maybe use a classroom like Murray’s to allow our students the opportunity to explore and play with different types of form in writing and as Murray says, “…the teacher of composition may return to his important educational role when rhetoric—the art of effective and responsible argument—was the foundation of a classical education” (123). Let the teachers be the guidance, but allow the students to teach one another, and allow people the opportunity to use their Voice in a very powerful way, Writing.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Voice; What Does It Mean to You?—1st Short Paper
I am going to be flat out honest here…this is a draft. I need help with citations…just warning you! Otherwise here it is!
Voice…a word heard many times, but what does it mean in composition studies? Peter Elbow wrote in Writing with Power, "…we all have a chest cavity unique in size so that each of us naturally resonates to one pitch alone" (as quoted in Harris) and for Elbow this is what he called voice, "often referring to something like style or tone—writing with real rhythm and texture" (as quoted in Harris). Joseph Harris feels that voice "implies breath, spirit, presence, what comes before words and gives them life" (p. 24). Personally, voice is something that is very important to papers. When reading someone else's work I love to look for and listen for their voice to resonate through those words. It is almost like their voice is being heard in my mind, instead of my own. A person's pain, joy, triumph, love, passion, anger, hate, vengefulness, lust, happiness, peace, etc. can be heard by a reader, but only if the writer allows freedom within their selves to let it come through in their writing.
Why would a student want to write a personal essay, use their Voice to be heard, and allow their emotions to show in their writing? I cannot help but agree with Terry Myers Zawacki when she writes, "I like its openness, how it pulls from here and there, observing, reflecting, moving through disconnections to make connections…the personal essay does not rely on positions staked out in advance, on straight arrangements, and tightly connected points leading to a single conclusion…differences can be cultivated" (p. 315). To me the personal essay is just that, a personal essay where feelings are allowed to be expressed, views are allowed to be heard, and stances are allowed to be taken.
Joseph Harris speaks about in the 1960s and 1970s how the idea of "centrality of personal and expressive kinds of writing" started to come up again, even though they had as Harris says, "a long tradition of dissent in English to call on; they also had events of their time to respond to" (p. 26). For instance in the 1960s issues with Vietnam were going on, Martin Luther King Jr. was speaking for equal rights, Kennedy was our president for a short time due to assassination, etc., but also open admission programs, community colleges, and financial aid started to allow opportunities for many students who never thought they were going to go to college. One of the strongest points Harris makes is "…we need to see many 1960s expressivist teachers of writing not as fleeing from politics but as engaged in a political defense to the student in her struggles to assert herself against what was seen as a dehumanizing corporate and university system" (p. 26-27). So, how does one allow a student to deal with their personal struggles in the world in a writing classroom? Allow the student the opportunity to discover and use their Voice.
Now the question turns to how do composition teachers teach voice in the classroom? To discuss how to teach voice in the classroom, I am going to look at Donald Murray's article Finding Your Own Voice: Teaching Composition in an Age of Dissent. In this article Murray discusses taking away the responsibility from the teacher and giving it to the students and one reason is because as he said, "I do get discouraged, mostly because the students have had no freedom, and when they find their own voice it has not been tempered by experience" (p. 118). He even goes further and believes that because of the "teacher-centered educational system" students are kept basically at a level of adolescence up until and sometimes beyond, them getting their Ph.D. Murray tells us four responsibilities that belong to the student, first, a student must find their own subject, second, a student has to document his own subject, third, students must earn their audiences respect, and fourth, students need to practice many forms of writing. He gives us the four responsibilities of teachers as well, first, create psychological and physical environments where the student can fulfill his responsibilities, second, enforce deadlines, third, cultivate a climate of failure, and fourth, teachers are only diagnosticians, reading only papers students feel they are having problems with. This is a huge difference from the way our classrooms are ran at this moment. Currently, and speaking from personal experience, writing classes have been about the teacher or professor completing all of my major writing assignments for me. Murray states, "the composition teacher not only denies his students freedom, he even goes further and performs the key writing tasks for his students" (p. 118).
Going back to Zawacki and her article Recomposing as a Woman—An Essay in Different Voices, she brings up something that I find incredibly important. She speaks of an experience in which she wants to present the idea of a new course where alternative writing could be taught as opposed to academic discourse and to her shock she found out that others did not agree there were other types of writing to be taught in the classroom. Zawacki had become very interested in articles about "valuing the personal essay as a mode of inquiry in the academy…particularly interested in articles about the link between the personal essay and feminine forms of knowledge and expression" (p. 315). Now I know you are wondering why I am bringing up the point of feminine knowledge and expression, but it is crucial, in my eyes, because for so long men were the dominating force in all writing, and women had to learn from men and their writing, especially academically. Apparently many women talked about the notion of being able to bring the rational with the emotional and unifying knowledge learned from others around them and as one woman put it, "letting the inside out and the outside in" (p.315). Zawacki also talks about reading in Elizabeth Flynn's article Composing as a Woman, and I agree wholeheartedly with this idea, that some of the women students she had finally realized their Voice was as powerful, if not more powerful than the external voices and this allowed many of them to steer towards authenticating their own Voice.
A powerful statement made by Zawacki is, "we may have to risk focusing on gender differences if we want to hear Voices which have been marginalized or silenced by our insistence on rational argument as the prevailing mode of discourse in the academy" (p. 316). I bring this quote to say that after reading Murray's idea of a classroom and Zawacki's article, I believe that if we don't want to focus on gender differences than we need to give Voice power and maybe use a classroom like Murray's to allow our students the opportunity to explore and play with different types of form in writing and as Murray says, "…the teacher of composition may return to his important educational role when rhetoric—the art of effective and responsible argument—was the foundation of a classical education" (p. 123). Let the teachers be the guidance, but allow the students to teach one another, and allow people the opportunity to use their Voice in a very powerful way, writing. As stated earlier, "Voice implies breath, spirit, presence, what comes before words and gives them life" (Harris, p. 24). Now give that Voice permission to fly freely and have life in what you have written, so others may understand the pain, joy, triumph, love, passion, anger, hate, vengefulness, lust, happiness, peace, etc. that you have to share with the world.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Aspasia: Rhetoric, Gender, and Colonial Ideology by Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong
Ok, so I thought it would be fascinating to read this article first, simply because it is about Aspasia and I have studied her in the past and love her; however, I have not read this article before and struggled reading this article. I am grateful I have a background in Rhetoric due to my History of Rhetoric course; otherwise, I would have been a little more lost! Anywho…
To start this article off, there are three questions being posed by the two authors: "Did Aspasia exist? If so, can she be known? And then, is that knowledge communicable? (p 9). They also tell us how they are going to go about covering these questions. The one thing I do like is how they state, "a visual representation of Aspasia illustrates the multilayered operation of historiography in another way" (p 9). Personally, I agree with this statement very strongly. For us to even be able to discover anything about a woman who is teaching a man and writing speeches for a man in 5th Century B.C.E Athens is absolutely incredible. What makes this even more incredible is the fact that she is not a native of Athens, but instead is from Miletus. However, during this time in Athens aristocratic women were highly watched, everything they did, every move they made, etc. was extremely restricted, to the point that they were confined to the house except during religious festivals.
As much as this talks about the historical aspects of rhetoric and the importance of making such a discovery, I find it to be a little drier than the other pieces I have read on Aspasia. I understand that the Jarratt and Ong are looking at how others view Aspasia and the importance she plays in this history, but I guess I did not like the sources they used, because if this is someone's first contact with Aspasia and with History of Rhetoric it is more complicated for them to read.
One of the other parts of this article I enjoyed is the very last paragraph. "Aspasia, perhaps the first female orator in the Western tradition, attracted not only the admiration of Pericles and the fascination of Socrates, but also the critical attention of a Plato intent on rereading the rhetorical world to which she gave voice" (p 22). How powerful is this. Aspasia is truly a fascinating woman and she is the reason scholars and researchers alike are doing more research into Feminist Rhetoric, because obviously there are more women writers out there that wrote our history, but are yet undiscovered because they have to be hidden behind a man. I am just glad works were discovered to pinpoint her as a writer for Pericles.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
My, oh my! Christopher Burnham opened my eyes in just the first page!
This article was fascinating to me in so many ways…
Christopher Burnham opens the article's introduction talking about James Berlin and something he says hits me really hard; "…any single approach supports an underlying set of values while questioning others" (p 19). I truly agree with this simple yet profound (in my eyes) statement from Berlin because I truly believe that anything we deal with, especially while learning to earn a degree, we should know that there are several approaches to everything we do, every way we think, and if we close our minds to only one way of thinking, means we are truly missing some other values that are associated with the subject. Bringing this back to composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric, this in my eyes is why there are so many conflicting views and so many different theories out there. There is not a single view to look at any of these fields, while I may strongly agree with one theory or another and I support those underlying values, but it leaves the values of other theories being questioned. How does this affect my teaching, the quality of my teaching, the style of my teaching?
I also enjoyed how he explained "voice." Burnham talks about it as a presence and calls it ethos, goes on to talking about this being a key factor that expressivists look for when they are evaluating papers. I find this funny because this is how I have always looked at papers and never knew there was a word or for that matter a group of theorist out there who identified this. I also enjoyed the definition he gave for expressivism by using Berlin's triangle method. Basically using this method the writer is in the center and is able to articulate theory and develop a pedagogical system that assigns the highest value to the writer and their imagination, psychological, social, and spiritual development and how these development influences individual consciousness and social behavior, leading to the presence or voice (Burnham 19).
I do agree with bell hooks and that there is a "great value and responsibility on the teacher as well as to the writer" (Burnham 19) and also find it interesting that she would be such an ally to expressivists, even Burnham says that allies are from "sometimes conflicting ideological backgrounds" (p 19) and boy, oh boy is she ever from a different ideological background! hooks is such an awesome feminist who stands for so many different things, but what I find so fascinating about her is the fact that she is a teacher and takes what she believes into her own classroom and uses them, which to me says she practices what she preaches and that is incredible.
All in all, I feel in love with this article just after the first page of reading, of course that is only the introduction, but it says so much about this article and where this article is going to go and say.
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Feminization of Rhetoric and Composition Studies? Janice M. Lauer
Yes, I know last week I wrote on Lauer's other article, but I am so fascinated by her writings.
I enjoyed reading this article because it really talks about the struggles of Composition Studies in the beginning and continuing, plus it talks about why it may be considered "feminized." I find it so interesting how at the end of the article she goes into great deal how this field of study could be consider feminine. She talks about how she and colleagues would conduct summer rhetoric seminars and year-long NEH seminars, plus doctoral programs (which she felt was gutsy during this time due to them stepping out and saying that this is an okay area for graduate students to study in were "feminine" because "[they] helped[ing] to release in others unexplored resources and transformative powers." Earlier in the article she was talking about feminine traits and one caring for another's development. She even furthered the idea of this being women's work because rather it was a man or a woman overseeing program development, dissertation direction, and letters of recommendations pay raises or a lightened teaching load were very rare "rewards." Lauer goes on about other disciplinary acts that would continue the tale of feminization, such as bibliographic works and journal and encyclopedia editing, but yet these "feminine" acts are what shaped this field from the 1960's to the 1980's.
This article really made me stop and think about why do I love the field of composition and why have I become so drawn to it? In some sense I wonder if it is the sense of "feminization" that is involved in this field. When I look at the list Lauer uses as feminine traits I very much see myself and it pushes that urge and desire even more within me to do my graduate work in this field because the idea of watching someone grow and change excites me, like it excited her. I like the statement she uses before the list, "…will foreground some "feminine" traits that have been 'deliberately chosen and enacted critically by women and men, not essentialized features derived from marginalization or oppression'." I find this statement incredibly important because so many people, especially women and extreme feminists feel that having feminine traits are oppression to women; however, if women will embrace this idea of feminine traits, it will not be oppression or something that holds us back. I also feel that if teachers and professors, especially women teachers and professors, take this into their classroom, their writing classrooms, they will find their peace and place. So many women teachers and professors have tried to become like the men that teach around them, but some students crave that feminization trait, that is how they are going to grow not only academically but also as a person.
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