The advertising anecdote that Murray used in his essay reminded me of something similar that I faced. For the first TV commercial I wrote, my boss kept asking me to ‘clean up the script’. After the sixth revision, I got really annoyed and I handed him a blank sheet of paper, “Is this clean enough?” He looked at it and then told me what he thought should be changed.
It makes for a funny story but I feel that those revisions where I didn’t know what needed to be changed/removed/added just frustrated me and made me doubt my creative process. And that brings me back to what we discussed last week; about writing being one’s baby. Criticism directed towards the piece of writing seems to be then targeted at the person who wrote it, not the piece itself. I mean sure, I did revise it to what I thought was wrong but I never really knew what was wrong till my boss sat down with me.
But Murray lets the students arrive at their own conclusions!
Murray’s style of teaching sounds highly appealing and somehow like a utopian concept. One-on-one writing advice? Hell yeah, I’d take some of that please and add fries to that. But, his students display the desire to learn, the desire to correct themselves. Sure, I had it the first time I was revising and maybe the second time but after that, I was just pulling my hair out and dreaming of the weekend.
I don’t see that desire to revise in my ENC 1101 students. They don’t want to do this. They don’t care about conferences or pre-draft workshops. Maybe Murray’s students do exist, but certainly not in freshmen composition classes. It sounds like an urban college myth, the perfect class where each student is curious enough to explore on their own and only use the teacher as a sounding board.
Thus endeth the rambling session.