If
I’ve learned anything from Ken Macrorie’s Uptaught, then I should write this
reading response in an un-dead language—not un-dead in the sense that the
language will rise from the dead, breaking soil with clawing fingers and
dragging its corpse to the nearest source of life to leech its essence, but the
kind of language that, well, isn’t dead. It seems I’m not entirely clear on
what constitutes dead language and un-dead language. Maybe my language should
leech the life from those who read it. Or maybe my language should just deviate
from academic language. Alas, I am in an academic setting, so this is quite a
conundrum I find myself in.
Macrorie
says, “In the Third Way, which I stumbled onto, students operate with freedom
and discipline. They are given real choices and encouraged to learn the way of
experts” (27). In my reading, and maybe I wasn’t reading closely enough, I
haven’t been able to uncover exactly what he means about the way of experts. He
uses a ton of examples of student writing, but none of it is on par with the
sort of expert writing we are accustomed expect throughout academics. I don’t
see where free writing and expert writing intersect within his memoir, or
whatever genre of writing Uptaught is.
I can free-write all day, searching for my
voice, but I don’t know how to put it into practice in all academia. It seems
that what I’m doing at this very moment, blogging, is one of the only places
where my un-dead writing can emerge unscathed by the demands of the academic
setting. Continuing the un-dead metaphor, the soil through which my language
must arise is loose and recently broken in the blog genre. Writing in other
genres, a literary analytical essay for example, the soil has been much more
akin to compact red clay. The language remains dead and the entire plot of land
must be transplanted to transmit that dead and buried language. The whole
process is a lot more work, and the product isn’t nearly as dazzling as a
creeping mass of un-deadness leeching life.
It would be nice if I knew what kind of
writing Macrorie is referring to. From the examples, I glean that he is focused
on personal memoirs, short fiction, and creative non-fiction. These genres
allow for a lot more freedom with language than do other genres. Maybe it’s
more about restoring our authority as students, though. He parallels the
academic setting at his time to slavery and civil rights, so it seems he wants
to give back what has been wrongfully taken from us. I don’t know what has been
taken, but if it’s out there and belongs to me, I want it now.
I talk a lot about putting Macrorie’s ideals,
as I understand them I mean, into practice, but then I puss out last minute and
decide that I’ll edit out words like “puss.” Read closely, y’all, because it
didn’t happen this time. I’m being uptaught, whatever that means. I think it
means revolution, which will, by the way, NOT be televised. The revolution will
be right here on your screen.
Undead writing. I like it.
ReplyDeleteLanguage which leeches the life from those who read it? You're taking me back to all the literature courses I didn't want to take!
Jokes aside, I think many of us were dissatisfied to find that Macrorie did not provide examples of living professional writing. He nearly does on page 116, when describing a student who's stuck in the free-writing phase even though her classmates have "moved on to more planned and crystallized papers." But could a crystal paper be "live and squirming?"
I was in such a hurry to comment and post my blog yesterday that I just realized I never did the final step and verify that I wasn't a computer for the comment I left on this post... doh.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I remember, I basically agree; I feel the same way in that I'm totally just confused about what I should be doing. But maybe that's because we've been told for so long how we should be doing things, in such exact detail, that when we have the opportunity to do what we want, entirely, we just have this big lack because we don't know where to start. But that's not true - it's not that we don't know where to start but that we don't feel confident that someone would want to read it or that it would be worth other people's time. I think then you get to that point of just doing it for the art, just doing it for yourself, and worrying about audience and all the rest of that knowledge that can be so hindering to creativity. We need to "stay in the room" as Carlson says.