Narratives and Arguments...

      This week’s reading came at a good time, as I am just getting reading to start teaching argumentation in my classes. Elbow’s article, albeit being long, was an interesting read. Elbow emphasizes the importance of innovative writing order and emphasizes the importance of not getting too caught up in things like thesis statements and logic. He also emphasizes the importance of narrative in writing. I have noticed that in my classes, students enjoy writing narrative essays so much better as they feel less inclined to get too caught up in what they call “formal” writing, which sometimes makes papers too redundant. I have stressed the importance of narrative in the exploratory paper that they are working on, and I hope that by providing sample papers for them to look at, I have made it clear what I expect when I say narrative. It is also amazing to see how students don’t think that narrative based papers are academic. They are so used to writing the same types of five paragraph papers with thesis statement in the beginning, no use of “I’s”, three supporting paragraphs and a short conclusion, that when a paper that requires narration on their part is assigned, they get bewildered. They are not sure how to go about it, and a paper that should otherwise be an easy task or at least a fun task becomes this behemoth mission. Elbow’s article gives a huge importance to voice in writing, and I feel when I wrote the first draft of my own exploratory paper, I was missing that. I had to considerably revise my paper in the next week, and one of the things I did was included a lot more narrative. Kroll’s piece “Arguing Differently” caught my attention, because I am looking for different ways to teach arguments and I thought the reading had some good practical examples. I do think I can use some of the examples that he gives in my classes, when I teach argumentation.