Blog Post #8 - Brittany Means


Brian Goedde’s case study of his writing center student Lorraine held a lot of significance for me as a Mexican American. When I was in middle school and high school, I also tried to separate myself from the image of a culture stigmatized in the United States. The difference for me was that I tried to deny that part of my identity entirely, causing me years of grief. So this was a difficult reading for me. But I felt pulled to a discussion of academic language as a tool for assimilation into a white world. I agreed with Goedde’s description of academic writing as “wordy and tedious.” Academic writing gets on my nerves, upsets my brain, and often takes too long and too much to say not very much at all. But my complaints with academic language go beyond that. The devices inherent in academic writing—removal of “I” statements, formal/“standard” language, no room for sensory description—effectively attempt to remove all subjectivity. To be unbiased, universal (essentially, to be affluent, white, and educated). I just don’t think this is possible, and an attempt to do so is an erasure of the fact that everyone is writing from a relevant positionality. I think removing an “I” from something, or any kind of recognition of one’s placement in the world. I am not interested in writing that wants to be removed from humanity.  

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 23, 2018 at 8:22 PM

    It's interesting, because even as recently as the beginning of this semester, I discouraged the use of "I" in academic writing, but I think as I've reentered academia and reexamined some troubling implications of how longstanding academic operations, I'm coming around to agreeing with you, Brittany. I'm currently at a place where I wouldn't insist on a person using "I" in academic writing, but I also now believe that to insist a person NOT use "I" feels narrow-minded. The elimination of "I," as you point out, eliminates subjectivity of experience, which I think is the very thing academia should be fostering.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ian Post #5

Maybe this is an odd tangent to pursue as a blog response, but one aspect of Phillip's writing that I wish Brice had gone into further detail about (assuming she had access to the information) was WHY Phillip got a B- on his assignment. From what I read, Phillip's personal story sounded endlessly interesting, and I thought his decision to structure this tale of his life using the narrative tradition (the four-act structure) of his culture was ingenious/appropriate, a merging of historical form with modern content. So, even if the writing of Phillip's piece wasn't perfect (Brice notes his control over the piece wasn't universal), it sounds both entertaining and heartfelt, and what's more, conceptually ambitious. Basically, knowing nothing about the professor in question, but given the loose, informal-seeming tone of this project, and given Phillip's obvious enthusiasm for the project (he wrote 12 pages when only five were expected), I was really surprised to ...
Read more

Ian Post #9

I think it's important for WC staff to perform research because, as Bedford points out, WC tutors have to compel their students to improve their writing even when we don't always know how best to compel them. Further research will hopefully continue to clarify how best to tailor a session to every student's individual needs, but for now I feel swaths of information are still missing. I feel this particularly acutely with my PhD statistics student. I've talked about the difficulties of working with a student who is producing a type of writing that feels fundamentally different to the writing I normally work with (so, writing that revolves around mathematical formulas instead of language analysis), and I'd be interested to see research conducted on how to best serve the writing of mathematicians. Although I'm trying my best with this student, in my heart of hearts, I cannot believe that I am truly helping her "grow" as a writer - each week I think I'...
Read more

Warren #9

Q: How important do you think it is for writing center staff to pursue writing center research? Why? What sorts of research could we propose for IWCC? I feel it's important for writing center staff to pursue research because research can be beneficial for tutors (and sometimes students). It has the potential to help tutors understand new pedagogical approaches and strategies, and develop ways to improve a writing center, to name a few. One of the challenges in conducting this research, particularly for those who are fairly new to writing centers, is to come to understand what areas of research are relevant. On the one hand, this can be accomplished by comparing the scholarship on writing centers with one's own tutoring experiences. On the other hand, tutors may want to come to their own understanding first of how a writing center functions (or doesn't function), and then search for those issues in the scholarship to see if they've been addressed. In either scenario, I...
Read more