I agree with Berlin that ideology plays a large role in rhetoric; ideology is behind everything and it is a strong force in every culture. I have seen the role ideology plays in the classroom. When my students first started talking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I first realized the role ideology plays in what we teach in composition. One of the ways my students came up with combating the AIDS epidemic is a long-debated method: needle exchanges. Needle exchanges, most common in larger cities like New York, are places where drug users can exchange dirty needles for clean ones, thus decreasing the likelihood of the transmission of HIV. This is deeply rooted in ideology and has been widely debated in American politics.

Furthermore, today in class, we talked about LGBT rights and watched several It Gets Better videos. My students responded very well to the videos and they opened up a good discussion of LGBT issues. They opened up about their experiences with bullying in middle and high school and issues adolescents face in general. All of this discussion is steeped in ideology and how Americans think. This ideology will be further translated into student writing and rhetoric.

Peter Elbow states that in order to write effectively, one must ignore audience, or at least for the majority of the writing. When I first started to read this, I couldn’t imagine how he could be right. In academic writing, one must always know the audience and whom one is talking to, whether it’s a friend, colleague, or professor. Audience is a crucial part of writing, something I have told my students over and over again. A student can’t write a formal academic paper to a friend and expect it to be polished and professional. It just will not happen.

I then started thinking about my creative writing side, however, and realized that Elbow is on to something I had never really thought of before. Writing, for me, is stream-of-consciousness and I write what I think. I write everything, even if it doesn’t make sense. But the audience is just me so it’s ok. Elbow states, “By doing this exploratory ‘swamp work’ in conditions of safety, we can often coax our thinking through a process of new discovery and development. In this way we can end up with something better than we could have produced if we’d tried to write to our audience all along.” Perhaps Elbow’s theory can work in some types of creative writing but not formal, academic papers. I’m going to explore this idea more.

Murray’s approach to teaching writing is similar to my own. I think that we as teachers have to show our students not just how to write but how to think of writing as a process. Writing doesn’t just happen; it is an experience (arguably good or bad, depending on your viewpoint) that is underrated, under-taught, and underappreciated. I have told my students many times to plan out their essays and thesis statement before writing. I believe planning is essential and can come in many different forms. Several of my students have showed me their prewriting with bullet points and little thought bubbles and I think they are good approaches to the essays.

I think Murray is a little off the mark when it comes to his assumptions on how much time students should spend on prewriting, writing, and rewriting. He states that prewriting should take 85% of the writer’s time, while writing and rewriting should take 1% and 14%. Even as a graduate student I have never spent that amount of time prewriting my essays. I think he’s really overshooting on this point. I think that writing should take the majority of the time, with prewriting taking the least amount. It is important that writing remains the writer’s focus.