Essay on "Flower Passage, the More I Realize"

Essay 4 pages (1285 words) Sources: 0

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Flower passage, the more I realize that I have a mixed reaction to it rather than agreeing with every part of it equally. I would agree that writing is a thinking process and one that involves problem-solving skills and techniques. However, I am not as certain that I agree that good writers necessarily have a "great deal of knowledge" simply because it is possible to be a good writer without much substantive knowledge about anything. It is possible to write beautifully about subjects that the writer knows very little. Perhaps I am being too literal, but I suppose the issue is that Flower does not adequately distinguish between writing skills and substantive knowledge, which may have no relation to one another. Conversely, it is quite possible for a person to possess a great deal of substantive knowledge but comparatively poor writing skills.

In fact, the failure to make the distinction between substantive knowledge (or subject-matter fluency) and writing skills may be one of the reasons that my previous experiences in classes where I was supposed to be learning how to write undermined my confidence about writing. In most of my previous writing classes, the skill (or process) of writing was taught almost exclusively in the context of responding to assigned English literature readings. The problem with that approach, (at least for me), was that I was not particularly interested in the assigned literature and I was not a very strong student in that course because I did not relate very well to the reading assignments or genre.

Now that I am becoming a little bit more confident in my writing, I realize that it is largely because I have never before had the opportunity to work on my writing skills as part of a formal course of study in which the substantive matter of the course (such as English Literature) was not provided as the framework for practicing my writing skills. Certainly, my teachers tried to teach writing skills by providing critique and constructive criticism, but in almost every assignment in which writing was being taught, I encountered a barrier in the form of my lack of genuine interest in the lesson material that was the focus of all of our writing. Now that I have had the experience of working on my writing without starting off with the disadvantage of being disinterested in and having problems understanding the substantive course material, I realize that my negative self-perceptions about writing may be more attributable to the background of my previous opportunities to practice writing more than they were related to "writing" per se.

In retrospect, I spent a lot of time struggling over writing and I experienced considerable frustration from writing assignments, but much of that struggling and frustration was about not knowing what I wanted to say about the assigned (Literature) topics and not necessarily about not knowing how to express my thoughts. In my opinion, it might be important for educators to make a clear distinction between the substantive and the process components of writing, precisely so that students (like me) who might have potential writing ability do not become discouraged by the fact that most of our writing assignments involve subject matter that completely overshadows the process of learning how to write unless we happen to be interested in and comfortable with that subject matter.

The more opportunities I have to practice writing without worrying about the literary themes of works that do not interest me in the least, the more I realize that I am a much better writer than I ever thought I was. I am becoming comfortable constructing coherent sentences and my grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary might actually be quite good. One might never have figured that out just by reviewing my string of C. grades in courses where most of the graded writing… READ MORE

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