Instead of a unified post this week I’d like to just toss out several short reactions to the readings, and if I’m lucky I’ll try to work in some thoughts on technology that might find their way into the final. (Actually, after writing the whole thing I realize the ideas fit together pretty well. Hmm - there might be a lesson there.)

The Miller & Shepherd piece first made me realize I need to do more reading on genre theory as it might fit well with my overall research focus. More to the point for this class, though, was their comment that one of the two self-expressed themes of bloggers was “self expression.” M & S link this to Elbow and Foucault (is there anything that doesn’t link to Foucault?), but what struck me was how this fits perfectly with the process model discussed by (among others) Hairston, in which writing is invention. Blogs aren’t about recording ideas; they are about creating ideas. This also ties in with Macrorie’s suggestion that freewriting is an excellent means of getting to an authentic self (though I kind of hate this emphasis on authenticity (how does a teacher have any right to grade on this?) so I’d change it to an original or well-considered idea).

Atkinson offers a tiny snippet of a comment that challenges this process-is-everything approach. He argues that one of the key objections to process instruction is that the assumption that all students will intuitively get things might unfairly favor those with stronger educational backgrounds. As I see it, the question is if we as instructors are just pretending there is no customary structure and so choosing not to teach it, while still expecting the product to adhere to conventions (conventions we haven’t taught). I would note that there is a strongly Socratic element to this approach—a belief that the answers are already in all students, and it’s our job as instructors to draw them out. I like process instruction, but this objection succinctly explains my resistance to giving up all traditional-formalist teaching of structure. I wonder if some happy medium might be found in offering students lots of sample writing and seeing if they could pull the structure out themselves.

Finally, Durst is loaded with information, but I’ll just focus on two small points. First, he discusses early research in collaborative work that “stressed the benefits of paired and group discussion in helping writers figure out what they wanted to say and how best to say it” (p. 1669). This is a lovely pairing with Miller and Shepherd, I think, and suggests to me that the prewriting period of my class should be dramatically expanded, and during this time students should develop and complicate their ideas through writing and through discussion of that writing. However, they quote Nelson (1993) who points out that students want a compact writing process and so tend to subvert or avoid process-oriented steps designed to require more complex thinking (p. 1659). (There’s that underlife again.) What this suggests to me is that these complicating process steps should (must?) occur in class, and indeed this should be the purpose or pre-drafting classes. This also ties in to the dual nature of writing: it is a lonely process that involves (for me) a lot of silent time in front of a computer, but the product is innately social and designed for others’ eyes. And, of course, the stuff I write about is social as well, arising from my interaction with other people (either directly or through their writing). So perhaps the class can serve as a place for the social aspect of writing to be emphasized.