To Write Is To Fight

“You’re only supposed to have three ideas, right? How can I write a thesis statement with four or five? You’re only supposed to have three body paragraphs, so I’ll have to mush all of my ideas together, and then I won’t get a good grade because I’ll have too many sentences and too many ideas. I don’t know what to do.”

    When Michelle Kenney talks about the hyper-stressed Erica and her worries about keeping to the tight structures of a formulaic essay, I felt the pain. Why is it so difficult to write a five paragraph essay when other kinds of writing flow so freely? As demonstrated in the clip above, writing is not so easy when you have to write 800 words on what not to do at a stoplight and you've already procrastinated on it for four days. Spongebob meticulously goes into overdrive just to get a single word on the page. Writing that first word to start filling up the space is always the hardest part because the other words will follow (if you're interested and knowledgeable about the topic that is). For me, the whole essay feels like writing the over and over and over and over again. The wheels are spinning, but nothing's moving because using paragraph formats isn't authentic writing. Schools change the names, but the concept is the same: dread and dullness. For me its name was T-BEAR. They wanted to give it a cute name so that we'd see it as being a friend when I just saw it as training wheels. 

   

     In my experience, I had to petition constantly for my ideas because there was always somebody challenging them. Oftentimes I would notice that I got a much lower score than someone else in my class even though I wrote a better paper because I didn't follow the format. On standardized testing I never earned high marks on any writing portions because the techniques I used didn't "lend themselves to speed grading." I was once accused of plagiarism without proof because my teacher did not think a 9th grader could write what I had. Another teacher asked me why I like to "color outside the lines" and she made that seem like a shameful thing. Certainly in the educational system as it stands there is such a thing as being too good. My experiences with formal school writing were almost always negative because it was so dry and lacking in anything substantial. Even when I really did feel like I was onto something, the fruit of my labors would often go unrecognized because I was bad at writing thesis statements. That was all that mattered. Firstly. In addition. In conclusion. They're all dirty words to me. 

While reading the Christensen chapter I went, "Hallelujah! It's the song of my people!" As she said, teachers often scoff at the idea of writing "little stories," but believe that literary analysis is important because that's what college-bound students need to know, but I ask you would you trust a doctor that's diagnosing from a description? Would it be okay if the person making your coffee has never made a single cup before today? Would anyone trust a seamstress that can't thread a needle? The best way to understand writing is to do it yourself. Can not emphasize this enough. 

     I liked how she called it genre-apartheid because it's true. No one writes in a vacuum and narrative is the essence of good writing. She talked about highlighting writer's tools and blocking. There were plenty of strategies that I can see being valuable in a classroom. Christensen shows how she applies her narrative criteria by addressing her students. "Look at your paper. If it's not full of colors, you haven't used all of your writing tools. This is how you revise on your own. You see what color or what tool is missing and you add it. i want those papers to look like peacocks when you are finished," (65). I think this is just brilliant because students can see the elements of writing in a real context, it helps them map out what they've done well and what needs work, and it gets them on the path to revision.

The formula writing is a corset for the brain. It doesn't allow a student to breathe and think naturally outside the bounds of what their assignment is. I know it can look like a good idea, but the long term impact is so negative that the results aren't worth it. Sometimes they just have to do that in order to get the content that the teacher is looking for. They can then trim that down to where it needs to be, but they do that on their own. They don't need a teacher lacing them up and crushing their organs in their rush to move on to the next child. 

      I don't think formulas are completely useless. Certainly they can help struggling writers get a feel for structuring their rhetoric and it simplifies the ideas so they don't get overwhelmed. If a student really needed something basic to follow to support their growth, I would not say no, but there can't be this dependence on outside structuring or they will never learn to do it themselves. They'll be like Erica panicking because she can't fit five ideas into three paragraphs. They won't be able to stand on their own because their writing muscles will be crushed, oxygen-deprived,  and atrophied.