This course is truly fostering my ability to question the ways in which I interact with the writing process. I am older than the average college student, and in many cases, the ways in which I was taught the writing process varies greatly from those that are younger. I do not remember much about there being any specific model of the writing process in which to follow. I remember beginning with three paragraph essays and then moving to five paragraph essays. I don't ever remember being taught that reading and writing were a parallel process either (Kucer & Rhodes, 1986). I never learned how to do an outline until reviewing for regents exams in high school and I remember that if we were required to do an outline because it would count toward our grade, I would often throw one together after completing the essay or writing assignment.
I know that much of my learning to write came to me as being the "great imitator" where I could replicate and/or apply what was being taught when given a solid and tangible reference or model. Until graduate school, I was still very much reliant on examples and modeling to support my own writing. I would keep the examples next to me the entire time I would write and compare my piece to the example.
The only time I felt comfortable in creating my own pieces with little to no instruction was when I was given opportunities to engage in creative writing assignments, personal journaling, and subjects or topics of extremely high interest. Choice and inquiry is a major topic mange researchers and was discussed in Hicks, chapter 2, in the beginning of the semester (Hicks, 2009). A recent example of motivation and choice being an important factor in my own writing was when creating the blog entries for this class. For open entries, I found it very difficult to get started and I will have to admit that I often procrastinate because I don't find the process enjoyable. I thought that this was possibly my own personal aversions to not being familiar with blogging, but I created a blog for my genre pieces project, and I can't wait until I have extra time to add to my blog! It is of a high interest topic which supports the theories that motivation is a crucial factor in engaging students in the reading and writing process. Well...I'm a believer!
References
Hicks, T. (2009). The digital writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Kucer, S.B. & Rhodes, L.K. (1986). Counterpart Strategies: Fine
tuning language with language. The Reading Teacher, 40
(2), 186-193.
Given your awareness of the importance of finding a topic of interest Marsha, once you came to this realization why didn't you take the opportunity to find a topic we have discussed thus far to explore further?
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