Portfolio work

Hey all. Please work on portfolios this week. For tomorrow:

1. Bring all your writing so far to work on portfolios.
2. Bring in 3 quotes from Body outlaws and 1 discussion question (we're on reading #19).
3. Make sure you are checking out classmates blog this week. I'll be looking over them all this week.
   

writing prompt for Tuesday night 8/16

1. Describe: Think about your topic in terms of the five senses. What does it look like? What color is it? What does it smell, taste, sound, or feel like?
2. Compare: What is your topic similar to? What is its exact opposite?
3. Associate: What does your topic remind you of? When you close your eyes and think about your topic, what pops into your head?
4. Analyze: Think about the parts of your topic and how they work together. Tell what causes your topic, how it emerges/emerged, what causes or influences it, and how it can be categorized or grouped.
5. Apply: What can you do with your topic? How can your subject be used productively? What good does your subject do anyone?
6. Argue: Take a stand for or against your subject - or both! Think of as many reasons, logical or silly, that you might have for favoring or opposing your subject.

Fill this out as much as you can to bring to class tomorrow. We'll be looking over the most recent drafts and this writing in pairs.

What is Voice?

The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently — by Thomas Lux

is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken,
a voice is saying it
as you read. It's the writer's words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her voice, but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word barn
that the writer wrote
but the barn you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally — some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirr of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows. . . .
And barn is only a noun — no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.


I love Thomas Lux generally and invite you all to check out more of his poetry.

The concept of voice is a difficult one to wrap our heads around in writing. It is abstract because its a metaphor. Text does not physically talk. We can boil voice down to characteristic style, but I think we miss something metaphorically when we do that. Many people know the feeling of not being able to put their voice in their writing, just as many of us know the feeling of being silenced when wanting to speak. It's that emotional connection that the "voice" metaphor catches and style just can't. We struggle in academic writing to adapt our voices to be like the voices of people in our discipline, and we sometimes feel we slip. our impersonation doesn't work. Someone caught on to our home accent. Training our voices to perform in different ways is important to maintaining our sense of attachment to our writing. If we are always feeling like imposters, we will never feel connected to what we write. So we practice. We write in our many different voices and we try on new voices until they can become our own too. But we should resist feeling silenced.

Oh, check out the link to the right on "levels of abstraction." The details we use help us connect to our voices.

Blog response groups

Here are the groups of three that should make sure to respond to each other's blogs during the week. Please feel free to read all the blogs in the blog roll too. If you cannot find a groupmate's blog on the list, email them via blackboard to make sure their blog is listed or not under a different name. If you have made your blog private, you need to invite the rest of the class. Our emails are on blackboard.

1. Erica, Alexis, Meg
2. Whit, Jonna, Alissa
3. Burgan, Clarissa, Lydia,
4. Sam, Kate, Stephanie
5. Ali, Kaitlin, Alex, Nikki
6. Hallie, Sara, Chelsea

Hello Everyone

Just to let you all know, I've posted our schedule of readings on blackboard under syllabus and as an announcement.

So, welcome to the world of blogging if you have not ever done it before.

I am sitting at my favorite table in Donkey Coffee enjoying an iced mocha and hoping to get some writing done.

For those of you who do not already know, I am currently working on finishing a dissertation for a PhD in rhetoric and composition, though my master's is in creative writing/poetry. This writing is such a different experience for me. When I wrote my thesis for my MA, I had been accumulating poems for a couple years, and the thesis was a matter of revision, selection, ordering and introducing. Now, I'm writing a book-length study and trying to conceive of the whole in my mind is really difficult, but also exciting.

Yesterday I had the revelation that what I had thought I was writing as Chapter 5 should actually be a part of Chapter 1, so now I'm going back and reconceptualizing my entire structure (for the umpteenth time). Revising can be an endless process, though I need to keep in mind that at some point, I need to let go and decide its good enough.

I actually really enjoy revising, though. Its like play for me. I move parts around and re-read, and all of a sudden, I have a new manuscript and a new way of thinking about what I'm writing. Of course this is easier if you are writing something you really want to write.

On that note, make sure you all chose a subject you really want to write about for this first draft, since this is what we'll be working with all session. If you are having trouble, try some of the techniques Murray describes in Ch. 1, like interviewing yourself. If you get stuck, take a break and write about Junk for a while, watch TV, then go back to it. Breaks are hard to schedule in a 5 week course, but they are important, even if they are small.

Good luck everyone. See you Monday.