Blog #5: This probably should have been my post last time

Focus (kinda, there’s other stuff here too): Students from working class backgrounds have different expectations on how language is used than their professors, who are accustomed to standard academic English, which is closest to the language used by people from the middle class and above. This means that the Writing Center, which sits somewhere between the professors and the students, sees language issues related to students not knowing what their professor expects out of their writing. This is especially noticeable at Kean University, where many students do come from a working class background.

Sources: James Gee, “Teenagers in new times: A new literacy studies perspective”, student demographics on the website given in class

I didn’t get very far, but I was struggling just to come up with a focus, so I see this as a triumph on my part. I’m sorry.

Blog #4: WTH are you talking about???

I take issue with this assignment for two reasons:

1) I still don't understand what I'm supposed to do and I've reread the course blog and the assignment sheet like 20 times.

and

2) This assignment seems unfairly biased against students who have not been at Kean long enough to understand the writing culture. I know this is an upper level course, but I'm a transfer student. I do not know what's going on or what professors expect beyond the like 5 that I've had as teachers.

So, I'm not analyizing anything, and I sincerely doubt that anyone's going to be able to help me figure out what I'm supposed to do for this paper since I legitimately just don't understand it at all. I'm posting pictures of what I TRIED to do. Have fun. Laugh at my stupidity. I'm done and I'll take my 0 on this blog.

Blog #3: Another Brick in the Wall

Wow, so you’re looking for an examination of the writing culture at Kean. That might actually be very hard for me, since as a transfer student I haven’t had the opportunity to really get into the culture here at Kean. I figure that I’ll list a few experiences that I’ve had that might actually help me. Names have been removed to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent.

My psychology professor tells me that I cannot use my laptop to take notes in her class because for all she knows I might be on that “myface” thing she’s heard about.

-Besides showing an utter lack of respect for social media, which I believe can truly help people as writers (don’t get me started on using a twitter feed as an exercise in brevity and word choice), I think this shows that the professor doesn’t trust digital media, and may not see it as a valid form of writing.

A professor gave me a paper back with just a grade with no feedback on how I could improve it for a better grade. When I asked him for feedback I was told that I shouldn’t need to ask.

-This shows what professors expect that their students should instinctively know about what academic writing should look like. That might come to be difficult for students like me, who have already acclimated to the writing culture of a different school (and believe me when I say that Brookdale was very different when it came to feedback). Also, I’m still not entirely sure if it was my writing or my ideas that this professor had a problem with, and if it was my ideas it reinforces what we talked about in class about how the ideas of the professors are valued much more than the ideas of the student. The professor “owns” writing, whereas the student is simply borrowing the practice as a way to get judged.

A political science professor told me that I should memorize the six page in-class essay before a test and just copy it straight from that memory.

-That shows that outside of the English department there is a severe lack of knowledge about how, exactly, writing works. Anyone who knows about writing or the way the human brain works to expect someone to memorize an entire essay and copy it back on a test.

One thing that I know for sure is that a lot of students that I’ve met here speak (and write) in a non-standard form of English, and that is not valued here at Kean, or really anywhere. Students end up with the impression that their writing is worthless because it doesn’t sound or look like what their professors expect out of an “academic” paper. When I stop to think about it, I start realizing that it makes me think of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” (the song, not the whole album) and the images from the film that go along with that song. They had a point about how much school pushes students to conform. This push for conformity in writing still exists at the college level, and it is an ingrained part of the culture here at Kean.

Blog # 2: Frizzy, Dizzy, Busy, Messy... or the Writing Equivalent of that, at least.

My writing process is difficult for me to explain, because it seems unconventional and I have been told over and over again that the way I approach writing, especially academic writing, is a bad habit that I must break myself of. I write for my classes in one frenzied mess the night before it’s due, editing as I go along to try and make the writing more precise while getting my ideas all out on the screen (I rarely write by hand for academic pieces) in one long session. That’s not to say that I don’t put thought into my assignments beforehand. For weeks and sometimes months before there will be diagrams and quotes all over my walls and desk on note cards, scrap paper, the margins of books and once even on the inside of a booklet that came along with a music CD (I still regret destroying the liner notes booklet to my copy of Linkin Park’s Minutes to Midnight). Along with these notes are doodles and other little things that come to mind. My prewriting process is a mixture of all different forms of chaos, but I rarely actually look at it all while I’m writing, the simple act of writing them and looking at them for days and weeks on end is what helps me. For things that need a little more thought, like long research papers, I will write whole paragraphs on note cards and arrange and rearrange them to get a feeling for the order that works best before I’ve finished. I’m also a fact hoarder and a talker. Before the frenzied night of writing I will talk to anyone or anything that will listen to my long winded discussions of topics that nobody but me cares about, or I will complain about things that confuse me, or the assignment itself, until through my complaints an idea for one of my many crazy notes comes to mind. I think that’s where I would benefit from a coach the most when writing an academic piece, because they’d listen to my crazy ideas on a topic and help me evaluate them logically, without subjecting my mother or aunt to another three hour phone conversation on the life of Elizabeth Bathory and her connection to older vampire legends and my theories on how the truth gets twisted.

Creative writing pieces, especially long pieces of prose, get a lot more careful attention and thought in the actual composing and in the revision. I stew over creative stories for weeks, months, years at a time, carefully plotting things out and using that plot as a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene roadmap to the actual writing. After the plotting, I tend to write it as freely as I can while sticking to that map, not worrying about the on-the-nose dialogue or repetition until I’ve got multiple chapters done. This is because I know from experience that if I read back the work before I’ve got a giant chunk done, none of it will get done and the story will remain in my brain, unfinished. I don’t think that I would even allow a writing coach to see my creative pieces until I was ready for a workshop session, or someone to help me read through and fix dialogue, and that wouldn’t happen until the very end, when the piece is at least 90% written. I’m superstitious when it comes to my creative writing, and I’m afraid that if I let someone outside myself look at it before I’ve gotten it mostly written out, their opinions or comments will dry up any creativity I have, so I think that this is the kind of writing I would go to a coach with for revision work.

The one thing that is the same for both creative writing and academic writing is the influence of music on my ability to write. I find it much easier to get words out when I have some kind of music playing in the background. When I’m writing for school, the music is ambient background noise, usually instrumental pieces from movie scores, because I find lyrics distracting when I’m trying to write into a complex subject. My creative writing process almost always starts with creating playlists. Relationships, chapters, situations, or the whole mood of the piece itself inform music choices. When I’m writing for myself, music is inspiration, a catalyst. When I’m writing for school, music is a way to drown out background noise (like roommates) and keeps me focused on the task ahead. No matter what, music is involved, not that that particularly matters to the subject at hand.

I’d probably be a very difficult person for a writing coach to handle during the manic periods of idea generation before I actually begin writing for class assignments, because they’d have to follow my stream of consciousness babbling about a subject and try to interject with appropriate observations when I’m jumping from idea to idea at warp factor 9, but that’s probably when I would benefit most from a writing center session. When I’m working on creative pieces, I’d probably bring a fully written project for opinions or an idea of what the coach finds enjoyable rather than coming to them earlier on in my process, mostly because of my superstitions, but also because I know what works best for me, and earlier on when writing creative pieces, I’m very secretive.

Blog #1: Please tell me this is enough to get a grade? I still don't understand the grading requirements on these!

Social constructionism is exactly what it says on the tin, the supposition that language is a social construction. What I got from this theory is that language has a social purpose and that writing, as a form of language use, while it may seem to be a solitary action to many, is really always social. This is because most forms of writing are intended for an audience, and the writer must think of his/her audience while writing, making it a social action.

Another thing that the text makes clear is that students have two achievement levels, one that they can reach alone and one that they can reach with the help of someone more experienced. This is because the knowledge is built through the interaction between these two people, be the more experienced party a peer or a teacher. This relates directly to writing centers, because the writing coach takes the role of the more experienced party and helps the student writer reach the higher achievement level. This doesn't mean that the coach gets nothing out of the interaction, because in chapter 2 we learn that when someone tutors another person, they learn more than the person they are helping, so that's an added bonus.

First Post

Hello! This is a placeholder