The True Experience?
In searching through some books for “teaching of writing” ideas, I came across this quotation from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story:
“From the first I thought that to teach writing was to teach my students how to keep on reading until we all saw as clearly as we could what was driving the writer. What, we would ask of the manuscript, was the larger preoccupation here? the true experience? the real subject? Not that such questions could be answered, only that it seemed vital to me that they be asked. To approach the work in hand as any ordinary reader might was to learn not how to write but—more important by far— why one was writing. In these classes both I and my students discovered repeatedly that this was more than half the battle.”
It takes some coaxing to get my students to see the why beyond the requirement of the course or the need to please the teacher. Still, perhaps students, reading their assigned readings and reviewing their classmates’ papers, might find some comfort in investigating, probing, and discovering “the larger preoccupation” of these words on paper.
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