Flower Passage, the More I

¶ … 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 I did fared poorly, mainly because the subject matter was a barrier for me. I am becoming comfortable with the process of organizing my thoughts into an outline, reworking that outline until it is complete and capable of supporting a coherent sequence of thoughts, and then building a rough draft from that outline, before finally adjusting the rough draft and developing a final draft from it. I have a tendency to write sentences that are too long and complex, but I am working on that as well.

In my opinion, good writing starts out with having a thesis and building logical arguments and coherent points that support all the different elements of that thesis. Good writing must guide the reader from point to point in a logical and progressive manner that answers questions or addresses issues in the order that are likely to come up in the mind of the reader. Ideally, by the time a reader finishes a piece of good writing, he or she should have a clear understanding of exactly what the writer set out to convey and how each paragraph or section of the piece contributes to a conclusion tat flows logically from those points and leads to the restatement of the conclusion. I arrived at that conclusion by imagining myself as the reader, considering what the purpose of writing is (i.e. To convey a point-of-view), and thinking about what types of writing would be most helpful to me as a reader in that regard.

In my opinion, there are also obvious technical issues that distinguish good writing from bad writing, wholly apart from the logical coherence of the content. In that respect, I have in mind elements such as readability, appropriate use of language and vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. It is difficult to convey even the most logically valid position about anything if the structural and technical elements of writing mechanics are deficient. Writing that is unclear or that requires the reader to re-read passages several times to understand what the writer was attempting to communicate would be barriers to good writing.

On the other hand, I believe that another contributing factor to the difficulty I may have had with writing much earlier in my academic career (i.e. In grade school) was a function of the overreliance on the technical descriptions of the parts of sentences. That is not to say that it is not important to construct sentences properly; but I am not sure that the best way to teach students to do that, (especially young students), is to spend so much focus on describing subjects and predicates and so forth. In my opinion, that approach to teaching writing reduces it to memorization and does not necessarily help the process of learning how to write as much as exercises in reading and writing that emphasize those same ideas but impliedly instead of explicitly.