Raise or Raze?

I feel at odds about the best way to respond to the question of describing good writing in general because I don’t feel qualified to be able to answer this – just yet! I feel that I am currently developing an answer to this question as we speak, but I am in no way finished forming my opinion.

I think good writing can be looked at in terms of the reader(s)/audience. If the reader of the writing is not able to understand the text, then it cannot be considered good writing. As our textbook, Informed Choices by Lockhart and Roberge quotes from an  article by Fulkerson, there are four basic ideas about composition that should be present: 1) knowledge about text and text structures; 2) the role of the writer; 3) the context, or real world that the writer is writing in; and 4) knowledge about the role of the reader.

Student writing always seems prescriptive to me, at least in a K-12 setting. The older the students get the freer they are to experiment with various writing styles. Statistics show that many college freshman enter college not knowing how to write good essays and often they needd extra help on their writing. I was a TA at Merritt College in Oakland during the Fall of 2014 and I saw many examples of ineffective writing there. More than 70% of the students are not able to write a college-level essay. So for these reasons, I think of good student writing as: being able to follow the provided guidelines to write an essay; participate in the writing process,etc.

Because this sort of question is extremely personal, and in order to answer it fully it is necessary to reflect on my own process of learning to write, I feel that I should share some of my own story.  I finished most of my elementary schooling in a very small Northern New York village. The year I began at the middle school was the year that my parents divorced and I was shipped off to California to live with my mother. This was a very very traumatic experience for me and I spent the rest of my K-12 days in a daze, not really learning anything, and falling further and further behind. I finished my first year in downtown Sacramento, the next year I attended a middle school in Sacramento, Sutter Middle School. I don’t remember much of anything there – I don’t remember learning to write, I don’t remember writing, and I certainly don’t remember doing any homework. Home life was tough to say the least and I withdrew deeper and deeper into silence.

My second year of middle school was spent at yet another school in West Sacramento. During the late 70s, the schools here were pretty dismal.  Not only that, I was placed in a Special Ed English class! How this happened I will never know; it isn’t like school administrators ever come and talk things out with the students. My mom never came to the school; I was at the mercy of being told what to do. I remember my 8th grade teacher doing a round robin reading of King Lear and when it came my turn to read, I read clearly and correctly. I didn’t realize why everyone in the class turned around to look at me (of course I sat in the back!) but my teacher asked me to stay after class to have a word.

Teacher: “You actually speak and read English?”

Me: “Yes”

Teacher: “Well I was told you were from some Eastern European country.”

me: “I’ve never heard New York called that before.”

And that was the end of my interaction with any teacher or administrator about my misplacement in Special Ed!!! In case you’re wondering, I was not removed from the class.  I didn’t communicate much with anyone and so none of the other students ever asked me about anything.  Ninth grade was a blur at yet another school, and then it was on to high school.  I hated my English teacher because he never taught me how to write and I really wanted to know how to write.  All he did was mark up my papers with “D” grades and never offer to show me how to write. Here I had made it all the way to high school without knowing anything about writing. I switched to Journalism (a friend suggested it) because it counted for the English requirements and I spent the rest of high school writing for the school paper and having fun.

How in the world did I ever get into UC Berkeley? Well, that’s a story for another time.