Blog Post #8: Lorraine's Story



"Where academic writing requires intricate argumentation, creative writing demands risk and finesse."

 I felt that this conclusive statement to Lorraine's story well-encompassed the struggle I see in both my rhetoric students and writing center students when it comes to individual strengths and weaknesses in specific writing genres. I believe that if I were to instill an awareness of this quote's idea deeper into my teaching mindset, it would help inform my methods during tutoring. For example, I have a student in my rhetoric class who is phenomenal at filing out a research paper outline to great detail. But any creative elements of the paper itself -- from including personal anecdotes in a conclusion paragraph to choosing an original topic to write on -- is incredibly overwhelming to her. She has even requested office hours for every paper or speech topic selection because she feels crippled by, what I can now identify as the "risk and finesse" that creative elements of a paper require. This case study on Lorraine was incredibly helpful to this capacity.

Comments

  1. Carol SeverinoMay 3, 2020 at 10:50 AM

    For those of us who love to write about ourselves (bringing to mind the joke about what was overheard at a party of non-fiction writers--"Enough about me. Let's talk about my writing."), it's hard to fathom students who have more difficulty using personal anecdotes than using outside sources since most student writers are just the opposite. Some writers who don't like to write creatively and personally (they aren't synonymous, I know) also don't like to read those genres either. My husband, for example, can't stand news stories and National Geographic features that use the first person and describe the authors' experiences and impressions ,whereas those qualities are exactly what attracts me to a piece.

    Goedde does a good job of discovering why Lorraine feels as she does about creative writing, but your student's reasons are probably different from hers. My husband, I believe, thinks that the first-person viewpoint makes a piece fluffy and less reliable, believable, and rigorous. He'll never persuade me of his point of view and I'll never persuade him of mine; we can only strive to understand the reasoning and emotions behind the beliefs. I find first person impressions and descriptions convincing as long as I learn something about the author, the topic, or myself, and as long as they are not cliched.

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