After reading the chapter in The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing on exploratory writing, I feel much less stressed about our upcoming assignment. Since I’m already filled with questions regarding teaching composition, this assignment will help me pinpoint the most urgent question, dwell and research on it, explore and discover, and eventually become less uncertain about it. It’s something I’d like to do anyway, so the assignment will not feel like a burden.
It seems what separates assignment from being enjoyable is usually the sense of imposition it carries. Once students do not feel imposed upon and recognize the relatedness between writing and life, they will probably be less reluctant and more enthusiastic about their assignment, and an exploratory essay will then be truly exploratory.
The logic of exploratory essay can actually apply to all kinds of writing, whether creative or academic. All writing starts with a motivation, which oftentimes is the desire to understand something. We write to orientate ourselves, to search for direction from both inside and outside. The inside searching is contemplation and the outside is research. Then we make what’s outside inside – internalize.
But whether we’re enthusiastic or not, writing always involves work. Boice’s advice for us is to write with constancy and moderation. Like A&B Guide, he emphasizes on writing as a process. Jot down ideas, pause, reflect, jot down more ideas, form mental pictures, outline, pre-write, free-write... Work is thus spread out into the flow of everyday life and does not loom in front of us as an obstacle.
I agree; I'm looking forward to using this assignment as a way to wade through multiple ideas about teaching to find the thread that I'm most eager to pursue. Who knows? Maybe this exploratory writing will become such a great way of sorting through our thoughts that we will not only be able to integrate it into our writing processes but will, as you say, use it to "spread out into the flow of everyday life" the work of writing, making it seem much less like work after all.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that you said how “we make what’s outside inside – internalize.” I never thought about writing in this way (probably because this transforming process is too internalized to be detectable). It is inspiring to think how writing blurs the line between what’s outside and what’s inside.
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