My Thought Paper

Dimensions of the Writer: 

    Evaluating Insinuations of Psychosis and Schizophrenia

         As an early writer, I always had it in my head that I had to solidify my identity through my writing, rather than lose it. I had learned about enough writers gone psychotic to know I had to be careful, but careful about what exactly? I wasn’t sure then, and I still am not certain. I was taught in school to become a simplified, definable person, easily categorized and placed into society where I was fit, and I despised this sentencing to a basic identity. I knew that I, like all others, had potential within in me to become something more than just that.
        Writing taught me that “I” was far more complex than I could imagine. Few of my thoughts strewn on paper were visibly connected, yet I knew they were all part of me and could make sense to myself and others if they were reordered or elaborated on; I wondered if I was crazy since I could not seem to forge these thoughts and perceptions into clean-cut pieces of writing. I decided that I probably wasn’t and started to think more carefully about the nature of these thoughts and perceptions, where I guessed they had originated and why they had anything to do with the rest of them. Eventually, I began to note the connections and, in various stages of revision, learned to make my writing more coherent and cohesive as my understanding of the ideas became apparent. I was improving as both a writer and a thinker, made evident by the results of my academic labor. I did not have multiple personalities, I concluded much to my relief, but rather access to a multitude of ideas I could consider outside of my own tunnel vision.
         I realized that my identity, along with everyone else’s, was fluid because of this possibility of differing perceptions and experiences within my own point of view. I was unaware at the time that this idea of a single identity was stifling my ability to process the stimuli the world presented to me. Breaking it down through my explorations in writing and revision started to reveal the wealth of “selves” I had been denying breathing room. In fact, I believe the need for revision signifies that there is no one true all-knowing self, but rather a self contingent upon the selves of all the people one interacts with and accumulates knowledge and ideas from over the course of the writing process. With this in mind, one can imagine how impossible it must be to pinpoint just exactly “who” they are.

        Theorists Walter Ong and Peter Elbow discuss this idea of a complicated collection of identities harbored within one human being. While Ong suggests that these other selves are fictionalized, thereby implying there is one true or base self, Elbow seems to hold that these selves are simply complex social and private dimensions of one’s being. I side primarily with Elbow because I dislike the notion of a fictionalized self; it perpetuates the stereotype of the crazy writer and boxes the writer into an overly simplified, unrealistic identity. Exposure to such investigation of the self was limited for me in my education, as I suspect it has been for most Westerners. The books of my schooling tended to emphasize the negative aspects of writers’ lives, presenting them as neurotic or depressed. We had few exercises allowing us access to other dimensions of the solitary self we assumed ourselves to be, and no explicit lesson that we had this potential to begin with. I think this is the type of education Ong hails from.
        Both Ong and Elbow are skeptical of personal diary-style writing as a solution to discovering one’s identity. They argue that one can be writing to an imagined self, an idealized self, a false self, a self he was, a self he will be, a self others believe him to be, and so on. Thus, the reader, oneself, is asked to “play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (Ong 12). These conflicting identities, discovered particularly through diary writing, suggest a life of constantly altered being rather than a life of stagnant being. One writes to a self that is constantly changing, yet retaining much of its basic components. Therefore our skewed sense of the self, a term used by the Dalai Lama, is what is at fault for the negative stigma surrounding the mental state of the writer, and this lies in our cultural and educational exposure and experience.

Feminism and Writing

Although I am a woman and I understand the need for gender equality, I often have a hard time sympathizing with feminist arguments. They may have valid or intriguing points in their essays, in this case Elizabeth Flynn and Kristie Fleckenstein's, but they are filled with contradictions. In the case of the field of composition, Flynn writes that its "foremothers" are abundant and the field "from the beginning, has welcomes contributions from women-- indeed, has been shaped by women." So what's the fuss, I say. When we read Emig's essay, Flower's, Lunsford's, and so on, I was certainly captivated by their arguments just as much as the others. I felt their points of view were valuable to my understanding of the topics in conjunction with those written by men quite equally. Flynn attempts to illustrate a divide between the genders to account for the female-male differences she's observed, but I truly think, although we are a gendered society, all people differ enough for hundreds of reasons of which gender is only one. I found her ideas about the gender-dependent differences in development compelling in relation to her discussion of the student narrative examples in which female students wrote "stories of interaction, of connection, or of frustrated connection" and male students wrote those "of achievement, of separation, or of frustrated achievement." (428) I found it a little simplistic as a conclusion, but nonetheless interesting to consider. In the end though, I felt her whole point of writing was to empower these "selfless and voiceless" women to "reclaim the self" and transcend male writing and power, leading the way to a matriarchal revolution... probably not the best idea.

As for Fleckenstein, what little I could extract from her verbose argument hardly resounded for me. I felt as though she was doing exactly what she was arguing against: trying "[t]o gain discursive authority... to cultivate the voice of masculine privilege--creating a masculine writing figure inside the text by erasing expressive elements or subjectivities that reveal their feminine signature or identity outside the text" (114). I hardly had a sense of who Fleckenstein was, or where she was coming from. Her defensive point of argument lends itself well to this reduction of her identity. She seems to be coming from a scholarly standpoint, adopting the "masculine" form she denies her approval. She writes to counter Bartholomae's points and quotes enough to lose her sense of self she so desperately wishes to inform the academic community exists; yet caught up in the form, I think she is unaware that she gets lost somewhere. Perhaps if she focused less on unnecessary parentheses she would have realized her argument started to fall apart -- well before the bit about female students wishing to fulfill their male professors' sexual fantasies. I found much of her argument irrelevant, and am still turned off to feminism, maybe even more so now.

Inventing the University

David Bartholomae's article was the shortest article we've read, I believe, yet the hardest for me to get through. It seemed to me that he was primarily ranting about how students cannot live up to his academic expectations, and I was reminded of several professors I've had with impossible standards. I often felt my learning was impeded by translating my interpretations of my education into this overly formal language I did not intend to use; I had no interest in joining an academic community, only in satisfying my curiosity in intriguing, coincidentally "upper-level" electives.

Certainly, we need to learn the academic discourse he describes through introductory classes in order to write as a member of the academic community, which, as he states involves a great deal of imitation at the start. We must learn to write in the format that the university demands of us if we wish to think of the university as an institution of learning and reporting to those in that institutional environment. He's correct in this respect, but all too condescending. I felt like his complaints about student essays were nit-picky and too precise for the standards of most professors. I understand that he is committed to academia and wants to engage students in that world, but honestly, I think he expects too much from undergraduate students. I think his arguments are valid perhaps for students preparing for graduate work in a field, but most undergraduates I know do not have any serious interest in permanently joining an academic community. Thus, the hundreds of students he, like so many other theorists, deems "basic writers" are probably mostly good writers. In fact, some of his examples were not as troubling as he made them out to be. I don't like to think of my university education as empowering me with a superior discourse; rather, I like to think of it as enlightening me as to other forms of discourse aside from my natural one. I agreed with his understanding of the undertaking of university discourse and how we grapple with it as students, but I definitely do not agree with the emphasis he placed on its importance. University education is about more than learning how to manipulate language and engage in the academic community accordingly.

Basic Writers and Liberal Education

I was surprised to realize I myself regarded the concept of basic writers quite like the doctors Mina Shaughnessy describes in her first paragraph, who she says look at patients as other and thus separate their own health concerns from theirs. Teachers who regard their students in this manner cannot possibly create a healthy relationship with them if they are looked to as the learned authority figure, rather than a partner in experience. I hate the term "catching up" since it implies one is left behind somewhere in a "normal" learning process; however, I think everyone develops at their own rate due to the complexity of contributing factors from all walks of life so there is thus no possibility for accurate gradation or staging scales. Like Shaughnessy, I believe that instituting impossible standards "radically lowers the standards" (235). Strict enforcement of meeting established standards stifles exploration in those who are excelling while at the same time producing mental blocks in those who cannot quite comprehend the standards just yet. She argues that the "issue is not the capacity of students finally to master" any given aspect of literacy development, "but the priority" being placed on it (237). In a rewards and punishments system, served by ignorance and authority, what do students learn? The rules of an unfair game, not an education in thought processing. Shaughnessy argues that teachers must "dive in" so to speak and engage themselves in the learning process as a student to their students' learning experiences. They must learn to avoid "underestimating the sophistication of our students and ... ignoring the complexity of the tasks we set before them" (238) and therefore enable a better exchange between them.

Patricia Bizzell introduces William Perry's stages of college student development into adulthood: Dualism, Relativism, and Commitment in Relativism. Dualism deals in absolutes, wrongs and rights, questions and answers. Relativism provides a context for individually persuasive argument that allows for some exploration within self-interest and the teacher's interest. Commitment in Relativism is the process by which a student learns the proper judgment for making decisions with consideration for others values and experiences. Because not everyone goes to college and/or experiences these stages of development, because they must be undertaken and do not simply unfold, Bizzell argues that his stages are not necessary to the normal course of development and are instead of cognitive stages, "philosophical assumptions" that can be altered (449). Commitment in Relativism is a stage that arises, she argues, out of liberal education from a basis of pluralism, eventually transcending the stages of Dualism and Relativism. Bizzell believes that Perry's stages do not happen in any specific time frame (Freshman, sophomore, etc.) and may not even happen at all in college for some writers. This is accounted for, she argues, by the gap in students' wide variety of experiences with teachers. If a teacher facilitates a certain viewpoint from one of these stages in an appropriate way, they may encourage a student to move onto the next stage. She warns that we must not try to rush students through these stages of development, though, since she agrees with Perry that an emphasis should be placed on "the function of education as acculturation, not training" (452). This acculturation of students refers to the culture of liberal education, in which teachers are "teaching them to think in a certain way, to become adults with a certain set of intellectual habits and ethical predilections" (452-3). We become persuaded into the liberal academic community as we develop into the Commitment in Relativism stage through our education.

Elbow and Ong: Audience

I decided for this blog I would try out Peter Elbow's "invisible writing" technique, described on page 64, meaning the rest of my writing will be invisible to me in an attempt to remove my self from my expected audience. Once I have written it, I'll of course revise it, rather than edit as I go, and reflect on the experiment. So, onward.

Ong: I was very skeptical at first of Walter Ong's idea that audiences are always fictionalized. I often feel that I am myself reading a book, note, article, essay, etc. and hardly have to make myself into a fictionalized version of myself in order to understand what the writer is saying. But I have to say, Ong did turn me to his side by the end of his argument; and I have to wonder if this has anything to do with his article itself, if I fictionalized myself to make sense of his work. I think this can be true in creative fiction that presents a world from a a character's perspective we aren't familiar with and don't need necessarily to connect to as ourselves. And I think sometimes this can help us to "play the game" Ong suggests all of literacy is in written form.

I thought his comparison of oral and written narrative was compelling in that oral storytellers do in fact have a greater power over their performances as they can directly respond to their "readers," whereas written works rest as they are.  (Two-way vs. one-way in Ong's terms.) I liked that Ong even exposed historical writing as being  "a selection and interpretation of those incidents the individual historian believes will account better than other incidents for some explanation of" historical events (17). Thus the historian only selects and interprets those events that seem "interesting" or "significant" based on his taste, and the reader has a role forced upon him based on this.  I also liked his idea that even letter and diary writing fictionialize their audiences, even though they seem to be easy to write genuinely, being on a personal level. For a letter, one must assume a mood for the reader and structure the letter accordingly, and the reader, he argues, will take on that mood in order to follow it, even if he is not particulary in that mood. As for diaries, the "self" one addresses, he says, is questionable since one can be writing to one of many identities, to an imagined self, an idealized self, a false self, one he was, one he will be, or one others believe him to be... Anyhow, I enjoyed his likening of a reader to an actor in which the reader has to "play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life" (12).

Elbow: I hadn't realized the idea of an audience was so complicated before reading Peter Elbow's essay.  Like he mentions, I was taught like most students that the audience has to always be kept in mind in order to write something worthwhile, and even though pre-writing was taught, it was not encouraged because the audience was not usually of concern at that stage. Not in a long time have I considered simply ignoring my audience, not since the days of innocently writing mermaid stories I knew were only for my eyes. It was a time when I could sit on my carpet for hours, pencil in hand, swaying my body around like Kiara swimming through the ocean. I could feel the stories in me and when I read them once over I think I did so only to know how to continue the journeys. Anyhow I liked Elbow's discussion of the necessity for both more thought about readers at more self explorative writing.  I think it was important to assert that writing can be incredibly public and helps develop our social skills, but at the same time helps us develop our reflective and interpretive understanding in our inner worlds. Elbow too signifies that "the self is multiple, not single and discourse to self is communication from one entity to another" (61).  So even the "self" has its social and private dimensions. Although Ong was more focused on proving that the multiple selves are fictionalized, Elbow uses this fact to show that these selves are not always as private as they seem.  It seems that engaging students in both social and private writing helps one develop in both areas, but both need to be rigorous and full of trusting audiences. And we must also learn to listen our selves with more trust and more awareness of their complex multiplicity.

Brief reflection: WHEW. It was terribly hard to not be able to see what I was writing, but it felt more in my head that way. I felt I owned my thoughts better than normal, switching my gaze from packet to keys, rather than packet to screen, email to paragraph one to that word I misspelled to packet to screen, and so on. Although I made some aggravating and strange mistakes, I remembered my train of thought quite clearly and was able to correct them quite easily. I felt more than normal as though I was writing for the sake of it, and the idea of audience didn't cross my mind very much until I revised. My writing focus was totally on the reflection I was responding with. I think I would do this again.

Mirskin's Writing as a Process of Valuing

Professor Jerry Mirskin discusses the relation of meaning to value in the context of the writing, rewriting, and revision processes. He asserts that "value determines the form and content of what we attend to as it selects from an infinite world and assigns meaning." (389) Thus, if one imposes a value onto something, meaning is thus given to it. Social contexts, he argues, are key for this process of making meaning since attitudes and understanding generally develop from interpersonal content we internalize and negotiate into our own perspectives. I particularly enjoyed the description of the stages of the writing process, especially the first draft as "testifying." (399) I thought after reading this that at least four rounds of revision are necessary to end up with a piece of effective writing, and I realized speech and early drafts just don't cut it. The "activity of writing" needs to continue in order to produce something useful to readers, and cannot occur just as a single "act." (399) And yet, I do see in myself and my peers the same reluctance that Jeanne displayed to do serious revision; we feel as though we've gotten it out, but really there is so much to strengthen and clarify after the foundation is settled. Like Jeanne, I think we learn through workshops that our writing can become even more introspective and profound, as "her process of valuing could be unpacked as a way of understanding how she is constructing the meaning of her experience." (406) New contexts of value we develop in revision allow us to make new, significant meanings for ourselves and our readers, resulting in a more complete piece of writing.

I was inspired to conduct a little social experiment at dinner this evening, having finished reading the article just minutes prior. I was eating with three of my close friends and decided to tell a very vague story with an ineffective ending, followed by a very specific one laden with direct quotations, detailed points, and a heartfelt ending. Obviously, the second one received better response than the first. I think my friends were more able to connect with the story that way, observing something meaningful about it in the value I ascribed to the instance I recounted. They responded thoughtfully to the content and pressed me forward, asking questions and remarking specific points they were engaged in, whereas with the first story the conversation moved on to another topic pretty quickly. I think this was in keeping with Professor Mirskin's findings in his peer review examples. Like the students who reviewed Jeanne's paper, with the hope of "'identifying with,' relating to,' and 'understanding' the significance of Jeanne's experience," my friends were more likely to look for meaning in my words when it was evident I was doing so myself. (405)