A Question MARK


I don't really have a question; I am simply running out of "mark" puns to use as titles. Perhaps this one missed the mark.

I found Goedde's article, "Lorraine's Story," to be a powerful insight into both the tutoring experience and the complicated balance among cultures, be they personal or academic. At its core, "Lorraine's Story" expertly demonstrates the classic style that Goedde is trying encourage in his student. The narrative is engaging and concise, offering enough detail and insight to make each character a protagonist in their own right. I find myself rooting for both Lorraine and Brian. Goedde also alters the environment often, flirting between the table in our Writing Center and a frank discussion with the reader. These shifting perspectives welcome the reader into the situation, an unseen eye, as it were.

The strength in this style is its openness to application elsewhere. The empathy I feel for each character is one which I feel welcomed to apply in my own tutoring experiences. "Lorraine's Story" affords me agency about what to take away from the encounter. I think that despite our appetite for data in the academy, at the end of the day, writing is a human act, and it changes based on what humans are involved.

As a side note-- I think "adjacent" is the perfect word for Lorraine's description. I like how "d" and "j" are squished together, both sonically and physically.

Comments

  1. Bethanny SudibyoApril 7, 2020 at 11:41 AM

    Hi Mark,
    To start off, I really enjoy your puns. Hoping to see more :)
    "I think that despite our appetite for data in the academy, at the end of the day, writing is a human act, and it changes based on what humans are involved." I really appreciated this sentence. We do love our data in academia, but I think it was refreshing to read this article because of the empathy aspect of it. I also appreciated the conflicts--the push and pull between tutor and student--that we read in Lorraine's case study.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. KathApril 7, 2020 at 2:31 PM

      Mark,

      I second Bethanny on the wordplay--keep em punning. I haven't taken a creative writing class in a long time, but one thing I do remember my teacher emphasizing is that "it's your time, your page--play around with it." You make an excellent point about the strength of the story being in part how it "affords me agency about what to take away from the encounter." A perspective-based narrative creates a different expectation of/welcomes different interpretations of the text, whereas a study lets you interpret the data--you can certainly interpret it to learn something, but Lorraine's Story gives the reader open questions that are not resolved at the end of the piece--the conclusion remains open-ended.

      Delete
    2. Carol SeverinoApril 8, 2020 at 2:26 PM

      I was glad Goedde had Lorraine say at the end that she still liked academia "way better." Otherwise it would have been a Hollywood Pedagogy Narrative of him converting her to the joys of creative non-fiction. That kind of conversion would have made him a lot less likable as a character, arrogant even. I think it's also somewhat hypocritical for him as her tutor to put down academic writing as he is pursing an advanced degree in academia and reading plenty of academic writing, both as a Rhetoric instructor and as a non-fiction student-- literary criticism of non-fiction--e.g. essays on the essay.

      Delete

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