Selected Essays on Writing Processes
There is a famous quote by Neil Gaiman that talks about “the tyranny of the blank page.” Gaiman refers to the difficulty of getting started with writing, and that one of the hardest parts of writing is just getting started. His advice is to just start getting words down on the page, regardless of shape in order to break the blankness and get the process started. This is good advice, and advice all writers should take to heart. However, I believe there are other aspects of the page that can be equally frustrating to writers, and one is the shape of the page itself. Take for example the essay. Most students have come up against and battled the traditional essay many times: the same five paragraphs, the hook, the dreaded thesis statement. First year writing students pick up their assignment sheets and immediately flashback to all the frustrations associated with getting past essays into the same mold. It can feel a lot like trying to get a square peg in a round hole (if you’ll excuse the cliché). The solution? Change the shape and change the form. The readings in this section will explore not just different ways of writing, but different ways of thinking about writing. Through these changes in perspective, it is my hope that students learn to confront, if I may borrow from Gaiman, the “tyranny of the page.”
The obstacle we face in the First Year Composition classroom is engagement. There is nothing inherently wrong with the form of the essay. It is a tried and true means of putting down thoughts and ideas together in order to convey specific purposes, and it has been working for years. The problem is that students have been writing them for years. Writing takes work, and when it becomes monotonous, any type of work becomes a chore. That is when the anxiety sets in, along with the fear and the boredom. The assignment becomes just another obligation put on a student, with all the familiar pains of plunking away at the keyboard to reach that end goal of creating something that will be considered passable by a teacher. The result is not a labor of love, but instead a labor of procrastination, cut corners, and repeated scans of the assignment sheet or attached rubric in order to just meet the bare minimum of requirements. This is not engagement, and it is certainly not fun. This does not access that creative part of the brain where our best ideas and improvisations lie. It doesn’t connect us to our writing, or bring about the joy that writing can elicit under the right circumstances. How can we learn to fully grasp the importance of creating when something feels like everything else? How can we stop from seeing writing assignments as just another grain of sand on the beach of an academic career? One way is reimagining and reconstructing what we think of when we think of writing. We can engage by completely changing tack and rethinking the framework. With enough heat, we can turn that sand into glass.
One word that comes up in many writing classes is revision. This usually comes at the end of a writing project, where the drafting process has already begun and writers are polishing up their drafts to make them as strong as possible. However, revision can be mean so much more. If we break down the word and consider its etymology in Latin, it literally means “to see again” or “to look at again”. This means more than just reading something over again, but instead means to truly try and look at something in a new way. A piece of revision advice some writers swear by is to print out documents usually seen on a computer screen, or to change fonts and font sizes on the document. The idea is to disrupt the familiar so that our brains can break out of the grooves and habits formed by reading the same thing in the same way. This allows us to see our writing anew. That is precisely what I’m proposing we do with our writing in general. We need to revise the way we approach writing assignments so that we can see writing as a whole anew. That is why it is important to break those deeply formed grooves and habits in order to see writing as something more than what we’re used to.
The readings in this section explore different possibilities in how one might revise their way of looking at writing by providing techniques for writers to change their perspective on writing and composition. In “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” by Melanie Gagich, you’ll learn the ins and outs of creating a multimodal project. The reading will explore how composition is not necessarily limited to the genre of the essay or even purely textual, but instead can be engaged through many different modes and genres. This can include the aural, the visual, and other ways of conveying information. In “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web,” Alex Reid discusses their own journey through blog writing and demonstrates the many benefits students may find in blogging. You’ll learn how focus, audience, and attitude towards subject matter can make all the difference in engagement. In ”Collaborating Online: Digital Strategies for Group Work” by Anthony Atkins, you’ll learn how to reexamine your preconceived notions of working on a group project in the writing classroom. Atkins also provides several tips and techniques on how to get the most out of group work while also utilizing digital spaces in order to get the most out of your group members as well. In “Composing the Anthology: An Exercise in Patchwriting,” Christopher Leary discusses a different way of thinking about how we engage with the texts we read. You’ll learn to shift your perspective towards texts by thinking about readings as parts of a larger thread rather than individual texts with no connections. Leary also provides insights on how this approach can help students think differently about how their writing interacts with the writing of others.
The readings in this section should provide you with a new way of thinking about writing, and ultimately help put you on a path to reenergizing and rejuvenating the creative parts of your brain to help inspire that engagement. By taking your writing into new directions, by pushing back against that “tyranny of the page,” your views on writing will change, and the dread of work will develop into focusing less on the task at hand, but rather having fun trying to figure out the best way to say what it is you want to say.
