Recollections of a Skeptic

I understand we are supposed to share something that would apply to our students or could be used in our classes that we teach, but all through the reading, I just couldn’t help relating the article to myself (I will surely be coming to this later). I found the article to be an easy, helpful (to an extent) but a cloying read. I discovered a couple of things in the article that I found to be something I could share with my students, to help aid their writing process.  The first thing that I am a strong advocate of is “free writing,” (28) and the notion of  “Recollective Rewriting” that Boise encourages sounds very fascinating. I had a discussion in class this week about what it is the students like or dislike about writing. The following things resonated with what I read in the article:

I had students say that they had a lot of anxieties about formatting and drafting a ‘grammatically sound” paper, and this sabotaged their motivation when it came to writing. I was explaining to them that free writing might be a way to get around it, and “the method of writing whatever comes to mind without stopping to edit (Boise 28),” will help them not let the insecurities about style or grammar get in the way of their thought processing.  

The other thing that seemed to stump many of the students was the difficulty in starting where they left off the day before. Here I think the “recollective rewriting” cue can help out by reinstating the continuity in their train of thought. My classes have a paper that’s going to be due soon, and I am hoping to share these ideas with the students to see if they help them. I do free writing assignments in class as part of the process in writing the paper, and I think “recollective rewriting” is something they can do at home when they continue to work on the projects that we start in class but do not have the time to complete.

Okay, so this was about the students; however, one of the things that I really (and I  mean, really) liked was the “tongue check” exercise. I did not even know that I did that (press my tongue at the roof of my mouth) even when I am reading. I am definitely going to be looking out for that one!

Also, like Anne, I too highly value hypomania. I will comment on that in reply to Anne’s post. I have a lot of my writer friends who vouch for the “brief daily sessions,” but being a hypomaniac (yes, I know it is not a real word), I can’t wrap my head around the bds’. I am definitely going to give it another try (sometime in my lifetime…).

And one last thing, I found Boise to come off a little bit showoff-ish. He seemed a bit prophetic and almost god-like in his judgments about the “poor, unsuspecting writers” suffering from writer’s block.