Story Time with Boice, Rodgers and Me

I will open with an admission: I am a fan of prewriting activities and think they are crucial in order to generate a imaginative paper. In that same vein, I will begin with a story. Enjoy...

Once upon a time there was a young student who went to study at a pretty old university across the pond. While there he participated in a strange academic ritual called the tutorial system. In this system he was often given a rather open ended question and was told to, in a week or fortnights time, arrive at an answer in a written form (usually around a dozen pages in length or so). The student would then be asked to read that paper aloud in front of his tutor over the course of an hour or so, wherein the tutor would comment and question the student on what he had written. This, as you can imagine, was terrifying. Coming from an American system filled with staunch page limits and thesis driven arguments, this question driven system at first felt overwhelming. How could he come up with answers to questions he could barely understand in the first place? How would he even start to find the resources needed to answer these open-ended questions? At first he tried to rush towards the answer, utilizing only the primary source (the only source that was given to him), but quickly he found that this alone was insufficient. Trying to rush to an argument failed to create any answers that were strong enough to be read to these dons. Despite how much time was spent trying to write a prose response, nothing that was generated seem to be of worth.

So, it was with great reluctance that the student began to rework his prewriting process. Instead of rushing strait into writing, he decided to instead spend up to half of his time (which was still only a few days as he had a week to write each paper) simply reading and questioning what he read. With the keys to one of the oldest and largest libraries in the world, he realized anything that had been written about the question he was given was at his disposal, all he had to do was find it and read it. He soon discovered that the act of reading was not enough though and he began to take notes. But even this became overwhelming. With the amount of notes being taken each day growing ever larger, he realized the importance of the simple act of taking time out of each session to organize his notes into some sort of easily discernible structure. As he wrote new responses week after week in the basement of a rotunda older than the country of his birth, he found his prewriting habits growing ever more nuanced, and as they grew so did his confidence in writing each paper. The student learned a tremendous amount that year about himself and about what it meant to be a writer, and in the midst of that self-discovery he learned quite a bit about the importance of prewriting.

Wow, I tell my students to never right the “moral” of the story in a narrative, but here I am breaking my own rule. So it goes I guess (this hardly constitutes a well-written narrative anyway).

I digress...

Back to the importance of prewriting in promoting imaginative writing, I will say that I find prewriting far more important in my academic writing than I do in my creative writing. In academic writing prewriting is simply indispensable, but in creative writing I believe it is only useful to an extent. At a certain point I believe the writer must allow his story to be shaped by his or her characters. If the writer is unable to feel the push and pull of the characters’ will on the narrative or poem, then I simply believe the end result will be worse for it. An overabundance of prewriting can, in my experience, get in the way of those character driven moments,, and I find those moments to be the most interesting moments of all in narrative based writing (be it fiction or creative non-fiction). But, that being said, I have written far fewer creative pieces than academic ones (although I believe academic writing can and should be highly creative as well), and I believe that prewriting and academic writing is inherently linked. I actually found Boice’s second chapter to be pretty spot on, and while he does seem a bit wordy for relatively simple concepts, I did appreciate the content. I really liked the idea about two-column note-taking, a technique I utilized when I was younger but since discarded. I think I might try to have my students employ that technique when we begin diving into our reader here soon.

When I looked at Carol Rodgers article, I was struck by the impressive disection of what it means to be reflective. I am encouraged by the reading to spend more time with my students (and myself) reflecting on the significance of what we are doing in class in order to “make meanings.” I think this Friday, the last class period before we turn in the first paper, I want to take some time to have my students reflect on what we are doing in class and draw some connections between what we have experienced thus far in class and where we are going. I think I will assign chapter 1 from the book for Friday in order to help facilitate that discussion, looking at how the literacy narrative pushes us towards a more open ended approach to writing, even while breaking us away from more common forms like the dreaded five-paragraph essay. I also like the ideas presented about the importance of reflecting in comunity. Coming out of the second section that stressed a more scientific approach to reflection (which I am a little resistant too), I like that Rodgers discusses the more organic role that peers have in promoting reflection. I just performed an activity with my students where they were put into groups and told to read aloud their papers to each other. This activity promotes community in the classroom by asking them to share stories with one another and then give thoughtful comments about what they heard. I think the sessions went extremely well and I was encouraged by what I saw. Taking time to create activities like that are extremely beneficial, and I appreciated that Rodgers raised that point.