Nearing the end of high-school senior year, the before-departing English assignment was to select three experiences, assignments, or persons who contributed the most to my budding understanding of the subject. This required a detail their contribution, specific moments of breakthrough, and time frame if applicable. The paper accounted a field trip to Hemingway’s Key West home–invigorating a practical application of writing (a living can be made), a short-story I had written in elementary school about a dog lost on a raft out at sea, and Mrs. Feldborg, whose praise, criticism, and very-used donation of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye  showcased the sensitive, nurturing, and revealing nature of literature. Most of this was bullshit. I’ve never been to Hemingway’s house and the story written in elementary school was terrible and done out of obligation. I got an A, but didn’t feel any closer to understanding my understanding. This was because I approached the assignment with the same obsessive adherence to the prompt I always did–give one experience, assignment, and person that stands out under associations with Literature–and that was that. “One of the common assumptions of…composition…is that at some ‘stage’ in the process of composing an essay a writer’s ideas or his motives must be tailored to the needs and expectations of his audience” (Bartholomae 9). The “Why” had been buried in anecdotes and there was no reason to dig.

I’d figured out exposition. I knew how to write to keep my teachers from  frustration and that was enough. Students new to college-level writing, whose literary efforts haven’t expanded beyond personal accounts and obvious narrative, have learned the same thing. The concept of argument, of proving something, is foreign. Argument, in this way, is the discourse awaiting appropriation, and it’s a monster in importance and introduction. College writing require a pushing of the self–the main staple of high-school argument–to the edge of consciousness in favor of assertion, evidence, and discussion. It’s an uncomfortable place for a centerpiece.

As I brought it up in class, my advertising boss told me to give up my baby (any piece I wrote) the second I gave it to him for review. Even though I was supposed to churn out misogynistic adverts on motorcycles, each rejection hurt me on some level because for me, it was a rejection of my creativity.

And we discussed in class that perhaps the students are not that invested in the essays they turn in but they do have some form of attachment as it does bring them a grade. I have had so many students come to office hours and complain at how they were AP students and this grade ‘offends’ them. A lot of my students who received bad grades have had similar reactions. This gives me the impression that writing, in any form does come attached with a little bit of the self that wrote it.

“How can we grade writing in which the writers have laid their lives on the line?”

Then, thinking about this and the process of grading, I feel that the minute you show your writing to anyone, you are opening yourself up to judgement and criticism. You are willingly turning over your baby over for review. Even a Facebook post is open to judgement, comment, and criticism. Our students have no choice in this matter, BUT they are writing something specific that they know is going to be judged and criticized.

Maybe I’m talking in circles but mulling over all this has made me realize that the process of grading somehow does not feel as intrusive as it did earlier.

I had a thought last Friday during class about the recurrence of this idea of invention in writing; the notion that we have to reintroduce creativity and inventiveness into teaching writing by means of a heuristic model, etc. After re-reading Lauer and trying to figure out what the fuck I was really trying to say in class, I saw that I was reiterating something she had already said in her piece. Essentially, the narrative form has been the driving force behind writing since the beginning. To get rid of the inventiveness of storytelling is to diminish the purpose of writing. I think Lauer would agree with me, and she would say that a heuristic model could help to re-introduce the idea of creative/inventive writing into academia, furthermore giving it a “gauge-able” (that’s not a word) quality. This has all been summary so far, I think.

HOWEVER, I started to look at the heuristics and the emphasis on prewriting – “the art of ‘what to say'”, “the stages of creativity” – and I think the emphasis is being misplaced. Why are we spending time trying to figure out how to teach creativity? Shouldn’t we be focused on how to teach the results of creativity? This is probably a revisionist philosophy. I guess what I mean to say is, if we tell our students “Hey, be creative by doing this and this and this…” aren’t we essentially destroying the nature of their creativity? I’m suggesting a more minimalist pre-writing philosophy and a more  productive post-writing philosophy.