Writing: A Rollercoaster of Emotions

As I was reading the Emig piece for this week, I cannot say enough how much of a rollercoaster it was. Emig attempts to shed a more comprehensive light on writing and its relationship to learning, and, in the process, she also covers a lot of ground. Writing seems to be everywhere at once. Likewise, my reaction to what writing was varied drastically, from feeling alienated by writing’s artificiality (124) to exhausted by writing as the “fullest possible functioning of the brain (125) to appreciative by writing’s adaptability to the way and pace I learn best (126). By the end, I am not entirely sure I had fully comprehended all of Emig’s information, but, I believe, her basic argument still took hold in its effect.

In the article, Emig uniquely parses out the function of writing, enabling readers, like myself, to gain a greater appreciation for its diversified, yet malleable structure. I undoubtedly had a moment where I said to myself, “So this is why writing is so difficult! I must be crazy for trying to make a profession out of it.” However, with this same idea, I began to think about how extraordinarily difficult teaching writing was and is.

And, it is from this position that I want to respond to Emig’s article. While I took a lot away from Emig’s piece, I am still struggling with its practical application in the classroom. While, for Emig, activities of analysis and synthesis engage all “three major tenses of experience” (127), I am curious what other ways we can incorporate the lessons of this reading into class. Is it merely a matter of structuring our class, conference, and workshops to include more conversational elements, where speaking and hearing are engaged as much as writing? Or should the assignments themselves take on an element of the spoken and/or aural as a way of engaging our sense of pre-writing? Or, is it that we already do pieces of each, but we fail to places these lessons in conversation with the other, where the talking/hearing portion is followed up by a reading/writing activity?

Having said all of that, I am not entirely sure I have provided a complete response. Rather it seems as though I have raised more questions…but, here, is to hoping some of you might have an answer or two.