In Response to “I You, and It” by James Moffett

I always love it when someone, like Moffett in this case, points out something that people do automatically all day long without even realizing it, it’s such a wonderful ah ha moment for me every time. Moffett discusses the concept of telling one single story in many completely different ways based on who the audience is, the medium of the audience also makes a difference (are they in person, reading it, listening to it ect. This is something we do every day but never realize it. I would never tell my classmates a story about my sister Kimber in the same way that I would tell it to my mom; first off my classmates don’t know anything about my sister so things that make perfect sense to me and my mom would be really confusing to my classmates.

Last semester in my Intercultural Communications class we discussed this very topic. We talked about how the bigger your audience the more diverse your audience is, meaning you have a lot of different kinds of people you have to try and get to relate to you and buy into your message. I remember specifically talking about the president of the U.S. and what a large challenge him and his speech writers have—he has to find a way to make 303,146,284 people relate to what he has to say. Can you imagine having to write in a way that allows every type of ethnicity, gender, and age understand and relate to what you are saying? It’s mind blow


In Response to James N. Britton’s “Now that you go to School”

I have to apologize in advance, I read the articles in a different order than the rest of the class so my views and ideas are biased based off the order I read the articles. I read Emig’s article before this one and I couldn’t help thinking what she would say about Britton’s concept about children writing the only way they know how at such a young age—writing speech. Emig says that writing is not just written talk, but Britton suggests that that is the only way young kids can write because they only have speech to pull experience from. What do you guys think? Whose side are you on? I am pulling for Britton personally.

In my intercultural communications class and in my phonetics class last semester we talked about how language is embedded in us as well as culture from the moment we enter the world. Kids learn the rhythm and stress of their language starting at about 8 months, it’s no wonder they try and write like how they talk, as Britton says language is all they know. One of the biggest problems I ran into when teaching writing was trying to get kids to write in a different way than they talk; they just couldn’t understand the difference of formality between speech and writing or they just didn’t know how to write formally, but who could blame them? Why do we write differently than we talk? When did it start or evolve? Just a few questions to ponder.


In Response Janet Emig’s “Non-Magical Thinking: Presenting Writing Developmentally in Schools”

First off I have to say thank you to Janet Emig for writing this article in a way that is easy to read and understand. I have a hard time being sympathetic to writers who want to start a revolution of some sort, but yet write their articles in such a manner that you need a dictionary by your side the entire time just to grasp some drop of meaning. Thank You!

The topics and concepts she addresses are some that I have never read anything about before; this may be because I am going to be teaching high school, not elementary and her ideas are more aimed towards the younger learners and writers. However, her points are worth discussing even for the older students.

Some main points I got from her article:
Teachers of writing must be writers themselves.
Writing is and can be a natural act.
Symbolic representation in play will eventually become written language.
Writing is not just talk written down.

The idea that teachers of writing must be writers makes complete sense. As a teacher it is very difficult to teach something you are not currently doing yourself. Just think how distant and out of touch you can become. I personally think you would loose sympathy and understanding for your student’s woes and issues if you weren’t also stumped trying to figure out how to start your own piece of writing.

I don’t know if I completely agree with Emig when she says that writing is not just talk written down. I know what she means, that writing is more deep and personal than just mere words that come out of your mouth, but I think that talk can also be defined as any idea or concept you think of out loud or inside your mind. Whenever I get a student that is stumped in his or her writing I ask them to just tell me what they want to say just as if we were talking on the street. This always helps, they can think out what they want to write.

Emig quotes Benjamin Singer’s five conditions that are conducive to nurturing fantasy play in children:
1. Opportunity for privacy and practice.
2. Playthings.
3. Freedom from interference of peers or adults.
4. Adult role models who encourage make believe.
5. Cultural acceptance.
My question is, most of these things can only be done in the home; how are we supposed to harbor these five conditions in our classrooms? Especially those of us teaching high school?


In Response to “What Right with Writing” by Linda Rief

Overall, I really enjoyed this article and found it to be more refreshing than most articles along this topic. My favorite part is on page 37 where Rief goes paragraph by paragraph explaining and answering the question “What do our students need to help them write well?” She explains that students need time, choice, models, and response.

After reading Lane’s chapter on conferencing and phrasing positive criticism just the right way and reading Rief’s paragraph on constructive response I am a little nervous. It clear now that a lot is riding on our comments on our students work. I know you should always say a nice comment with a not so nice comment, but now I realize that some of the “nice” comments can be bad as well, for example Lane talks about how only saying nice things about one paper can make the student think that they need to keep writing papers just like that one and not try to be creative. Basically I am getting more and more scared about this aspect of teaching, especially the whole conferencing concept; I never had any teachers really conference with me before so I don’t have any experiences to pull from. Does anyone else feel this way? Does anyone have any good advice about commenting and conferencing student’s work?