Charney

Ch. 2 Roen, "Teaching Writing as a Process"

"Usually practicing a skill reduces the time necessary to eecute the skill successfully" is is the opposite with writing.

This could be a depressing statement, but it needs to be addressed with students to keep from further depressing moments. There is this thinking that writing should get easier, and that professional writers can just write and it is not difficult for them. The better you are, the more practice you get, the more time the writing will take. Although I knew this, I never saw it stated explicitly.

It's wrong to say it will get easier. Maybe generating ideas will get easier.

Winterowd "Rhetorical Invention"

Well, I feel like ENG 1000 separates invention from composition. I guess that's why I like the two-part composition--with a first year comp class followed by an exposition class.

Induction is more intuitive. If we want students to problematiz, they need to go into an issue this way. They are used to going into research deductively. We stifle our writing and the direction of our research by working deductively.

"heuristics vs prescriptives"

"heuristics are procedures that encourage the writer to walk 'around' his or her subjects, viewing them from different angles."

1973 Young and Roen

"The results of the experiments provide clear support for the proposition that strong personal involvement in an intellectual activity and substantial knowledge of the subject tend to improve the quality of what is written."

Bizzell's "Composing Processes"

Bizzell brings the same point up as Charney that students think that good writers write quickly and get As. "instant text production"

"Instead, students brought their finished products to the teacher for correction and evaluation."

Crowley, "Teaching Invention"

invention helps identify more arguments

"Ancient teachers insisted that students should construct all the arguments available in a given situation, even though they might use only one or two . . . good intellectual practice" (231).

Invention should force them to look at all aspects of an argument.

All of this reminds me of Tom Romano's idea of the multigenre paper in the book Blending Genres, Altering Styles. I think a good invention would be to take a freewriting about an idea for a paper and then look at the people. Write about the issue from the perspectives of different people, using either monologue or dialogue. I say these two genres because I think it would be easier to write, to envision that character as a person and the real issues that he or she might have. This is also a great revision exercise because it opens up possibilities that writers might not have considered.

My three inventions this week are the multigenre, Perl's composing guidelines, Moffett's sensory writing, and loop writing (is this the same as the open-ended writing process? I think it is.)