I liked how Murray started the
chapter off with immediately saying how writing is “Hard fun, but fun because
it is hard” (pg107). I was one of those students who didn’t like writing all
that much in high school because I didn’t like the effort it required to meet
the standards I thought the teachers held for us students. If I was writing
about something I knew about or was interested, however, I enjoyed the challenge
of trying to find more out about it. I feel that by mentioning the difficulty
of writing right off the bat like this, Murray allows us to think about how to
make this challenge into something our students will accept with an excitement
to tackle. The process of writing should be, as Murray puts it, experimental.
The suggestions that Murray gives
for activities were great. My favorite was that we should do the activity we
assign so we can give input and examples. If we, as teachers, show that we aren’t
just plopping assignments on our students’ plate, they may be more likely to participate
and try to come up with their own ways of successfully completing the task. I
love the idea of doing the assignments along with the students because it gives
you an opportunity to experience any portion that the students might have
questions about or difficulty with. If I can help the students through the
stalling point by explaining what I did to get through it, along with ask others
if they had a different method, maybe those struggling will be able to feel
more comfortable pushing through the next obstacle to see if they can overcome
it themselves.
The different exercises given in
the text kind of took me for a loop. I hadn’t thought about several of these
activity prompts to stand alone, but to be mixed with others within the
examples. For instance, I had always considered Point of View and Voice
to be relatively similar and connected. However, after seeing them laid out as separate
prompts, It is very clear how they are individual ways to write.
Out of all of the activities given
as examples, those listed under that of Distance
struck me the most. More in particular was the first possible exercise focusing
on the “zoom lens” to see which aspects of writing would be left out if looked
at from a certain perspective/closeness. I hadn’t ever thought about focusing
on one aspect and “zooming in and out” to describe the different aspects in the
way of significance. The other aspects under that topic also caught my eye. The
third suggestion—that of focusing on an important aspect and moving from a
detached to an involved tone—could be used in so many situations and the
responses would all e so incredibly different that I feel the students would be
able to complete that activity without too much difficulty.
The portion of the chapter about Making a Writing Text Inviting gave me a
lot of different ideas as to how to help my students understand the writing
process. Although we’ve talked in class about showing the different steps of
the writing process to our students, It hadn’t completely clicked with me how
to best do so until reading this portion of the text. By reading, “The
principle text of any writing course is the students’ drafts” (pg 125), It
resounded more with me that even though we’re looking for a complete and
thoughtful final product, understanding out they got there is the most important
part of writing assignments/activities. If the students know that their drafts
are important and hold weight, they might be more inclined to focus even more
on the content. I love how Murray puts everything on the page so understandably
and in great context for teachers.
I already knew that I planned to
keep all of my textbooks from my content area courses here in college, but this
chapter seems to be one of the most useful resources I have come across for my
future classroom. I want to be able to help my students enjoy the difficulties
of writing as well as learn from it all. By having so many examples of possible
activities for students to work on, I feel like I am already well on my way to
having a well supplied arsenal of exercises for my students to use to further
their writing abilities.
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