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ENGL 607
William Gribbin
Running head: JOURNAL ENTRY 1
JOURNAL ENTRY 8
When entering any course or learning environment I always look for something to challenge me. This can be anything from an argumentative teacher/student, learning something I do not already know – which there is a lot of thing I do not know – or my personal struggle in overcoming my procrastination and getting things done in a timely manner (I never win here). Regardless of how I find a challenge, my goal is always to seek one out in order to make the material interesting to me. Let me clarify first before continuing on that I am not a combative person, but I do like engaging in debates on things I am passionate about.
The first thing that I feel challenged me, and these will be the focus of this entry, is the two videos from week 2. I really enjoyed these videos as they challenged both my way of thinking and my opinions on the subject matter. In Best Practice and Writing in the Classroom, there were several points that immediately caught my attention and sparked the brain into action. I loved the reminder of the important of audience. I know in my personal writings I tend to only focus on what I know and neglect to remember that the writing should be geared towards the specific or generalized audience. While I may be writing something that I enjoy and for myself, others that read it need to be able to understand my language/forum and the overall message should be able to be understood by the audience and not just me.
The points prewriting and authenticity also hit home. For the former, I always err away from some good practices like prewriting and possess a bit of bravado and pride in my work and I rarely ever do drafts or prewriting; this also stems from that procrastination I mentioned earlier. Prewriting is an essential fundamental necessary to all good writing. In reference to the latter point, writing should absolutely be authentic which is paramount to creating something people want to write about. There are many times I hear my peers or other students dread at the thought of writing in an English class; rightfully so for them or even myself especially if you have no control over what you can write and thus will not build an investment in it. Being passionate about what you write makes the student bond with their work in a sense and creates an overall better product.
Now what I do not agree with for the first video is that work should not be graded. I am a big believer in feedback and feel that one cannot grow in this type of environment without the critiques and feedbacks of others. Grades put stressors (good stressors) on us to perform to a standard and help us grow by seeing the areas where we fail to meet said standard. You cannot be a good writer by simply thinking that you are. Writing is always critiqued and should always be critiqued to help the writer grow through feedback.
Finally, the last insight that really resonated with me was from the Robert McKee video. His thoughts on writers thinking that they do not want limitations but in reality, they do in the form of traditional confines like setting and narrative was really thought provoking. When you look at it, we as writers absolutely indulge this illusion of freedom that we do not want confines. No matter what the topic is, a writer will always look for some kind of boundaries in order to figure out how they want to write about something. Even in the classroom we do this, at least I know I do this, when given the chance to pick my own topic. I immediately look for some manner of guidelines in order to focus my thoughts on what to write – still struggling on the teaching topic. Confines are not necessarily bad and can be helpful at times.