According to Elbow, we should try to distinguish writing in its own category separate from academia. From the start of this article, I was full of questions. Firstly, I wondered what a writer actually is and does, according to Elbow. How can you express ideas externally from the confines of culture, history, etc? Are our minds that our producing this writing not totally and wholly developed and defined by our history and our culture? I don’t see how we can disconnect one from the other, and in turn, how we can disconnect our academic mentality from our writing. Isn’t academic writing just focused, specific forms of expressing cultural, historical, and scientific ideas? Just the same way we write about our lives, we’re writing about an author’s life’s process when we analyze his or her work. Similarly, when we write about a specific research project in the field of chemistry, we’re looking at processes that we are only able to learn and understand, at least initially, by somehow making connections and comparisons to our own lives and experiences.
Oct 152015