MOFFIT AND BRITTON

Friday morning
July 9, 2010
Moscow, Idaho

NWIP SUMMER INSTITUTE:

MOFFIT AND BRITTON

I have to admit, I didn’t get much out of these two old experts until we talked about them in class. And it was then I wondered why we weren’t talking about them in my undergraduate classes. These two old guys were suddenly relevant to what I need to do in my classroom! (Do you see the light bulb glaring above my head?)

The breaking down of writing to the Expressive, Poetic, and the Transactional, or the I, You, and It, makes a lot of sense to me. I gleamed from all of this that I do a great deal of Transactional writing both in and out of class, which utterly surprises me as I don’t typically think I have a lot of “direction” to give or to receive from the students. It’s making me rethink our class assignments and how I need to balance our five paragraph essays of persuasion and ‘how to’s” with some Poetic writing.

But a thought just occurred to me: my personal background is newspaper and television writing – my pieces were covering the school board, the police and fire departments, city, county, and state issues. My writing background has been with facts and getting information out and to the public! If there was “fluff” or “Poetic content” in my work, it was there on accident, because it certainly wasn’t supposed to be there! Interesting reflection. To take it one step further, I have always envied people who write “Poetically” or creatively. Someone once said to me that creative writing was easy, and I argued that nonfictional writing (now thinking of it as Transactional) was easy because you were just presenting the facts, which were right in front of you!

In our discussion on Wednesday regarding the “Writing as a social act,” was bothersome to me. I think writing, in any form, is a personal and private activity. (This does sound contradictory to what I do in class by encouraging peer review, and my one-on-one discussions with them, but I still have this gut reaction that writing is private). But the EALR goes on to explain “the process of sharing...” This actually dovetails with what Moffitt writes in the article. “I also suggest the performance and publication of student works, as frequently as possible…give the student the opportunity to both address a real or invented person outside the classroom and to adopt a voice not his own.” Wow! My kids aren’t going to know what hit them!

Again, I understand this much more after our class discussion of these two articles. The handouts literally and figuratively put this is black and white for me and I am able to make sense of it! Thank you to our NIWP facilitators, Christy, April and Dr. McConnell.