Teachers Must Know All

I was definitely able to connect with the Romantic Rhetoric theory. I enjoy writing what is real and authentic. To me, expression is what writing is all about. This whole section brought me back to what Peter Elbow was saying about how individuals must find their own voice. Erika Lindemann states, “Good writing is most effective when we tell the truth about who we are and what we think.” This quote makes perfect sense, because people enjoy writing that they can somehow personally relate to. It does not matter if something is fact or fiction, but the reader has to be able create meaning from it. The book explains how personal writing is more interesting to read than academic writing. Clearly, this is why most people prefer to sit down and read a novel, opposed to scholarly articles. The freedom of expression is essential to producing something original and meaningful. I believe writing is primarily an art, because it is so personal and expressive; however, it depends what type of writing you are doing.

Even though Romantic Rhetoric speaks to me, so does New Rhetoric and Process. In most of my English classrooms in school there were signs that said, Prewriting, Planning, Drafting, Revising, Editing, and Publishing. This is basically how I was taught to write, even though I didn’t always use the process. Writing really is a very gradual process that requires a lot of steps to reach the finished product. To me, Prewriting is kind of like Free writing, as discussed in Peter Elbow’s book. If someone is writing a research paper or an essay I feel like this approach is very effective. Unlike creative writing, research writing demands a lot of planning and organization. I suppose I just realized that the process of writing depends on what type of writing you are doing. I definitely have different methods for the types of writing that I do. I guess that is why learning about rhetoric really helps to teach students how to write. It all boils down to options and variety in writing and approaches to writing.

As New Rhetoric explains, grammar does not improve writing abilities. However, even though it has been taught from third grade until high school, it is still something I second-guess myself with. I liked when teachers marked on my papers grammatical errors that I made, because then I realized what I was doing wrong. No it does not help the content of my writing, but it still improved some elements of my writing. I do enjoy the idea of focusing on content, but I don’t think it is important to forget about grammar, which is what all of the readings are kind of suggesting. Maybe they are not trying to forget it, but they are looking at it as less important. I think both are very important. However, grammar must be last when writing a paper.

I do think the more you write, the better you get. Therefore, I enjoyed reading about WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum). There are so many different kinds of writing, and I think it is impossible to teach everything in solely an English class. Plus, some people are better at different types of writing. Therefore, maybe they won’t say I hate writing, but I hate creative writing, or some other form. The most important aspects of this reading is there are many different types of writings and many different approaches to teaching writing that are crucial, in order to produce better writers.