The Lea Guide To Composition

James D. Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135672782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Basic text for freshman composition courses. Draws on the most significant theory, strategy, and techniques in composition studies. Emphasizes writing as a vehicle for learning.

Personal Writing

The LEA Quide to Composition is not just about the act of writing, although this is, of course, its primary focus. It is about using writing as a vehicle for Learning—learnig about the world, about the academy, about oneself.

Chapter One
Personal Writing

Language is paramount. We use it to define who we are and to shape our place in life. We use it to learn, to socialize, to dream, to think. Throughout history, language has served as a bond to bring people together into single societies and to preserve their customs, culture, laws, and stories. In fact, some people argue that we could not even have society without language.

We also use language to get things done. For this reason, we can say that language in general and writing in particular are social actions. The way people use language depends on their goals and intentions, but it also depends on situation, which is inevitably social. For example, the language you use when talking with friends is less formal than the language you use when talking to a professor.

Most of us don’t have to think about adjusting our level of formality from one situation to the next—it is an awareness that we acquired when we were children. With writing, however, we usually do have to think about how we use language, perhaps because the level of formality is so much greater in writing than in speech. Much of this book is designed to help you better understand the goals and intentions that influence how we use language, but it also aims to help you explore the situation-specific factors that govern what and how we write.

Conventions

If there were rules for writing, composition would be easy. You simply would learn the rules and apply them whenever you had to write. Unfortunately, there aren’t any rules. Instead, social conventions govern language use. Conventions are expectations that people around you have regarding the way you use language. For example, these conventions dictate that we speak softly in a library, that we offer condolences when we learn that a friend has suffered a loss, and so on.

Conventions also govern how people use written language. Because most of your writing will be in response to social demands at school or on the job, the situations that prompt your writing will determine which conventions you will use. These conventions consist of expectations that the audience has regarding subject matter, format, standards of proof, tone, word choice, and a host of other factors. Thus, if you have to write a psychology paper, your teacher will expect you not only to write about a topic in psychology but also to use the conventions associated with writing in the social sciences in general and psychology in particular. Of course, if you don’t know what those conventions are, you have a problem.

Writing conventions are different from social conventions in that many of them are the result of conscious decisions that people have made about the way texts should appear. Psychologists, for instance, decided as a group that writing in their field should have certain distinctive characteristics. After agreeing on what those characteristics would be, they published a guide for anyone writing psychology texts, titled the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. (This publication usually is referred to simply as the APA Guide.) This guide proved so popular that is was adopted by nearly everyone working in the social sciences. People in other areas have produced their own guides. Those working in literature developed the MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, which is widely used by those working in the humanities. Personal writing, unlike academic and business writing, applies a set of more general conventions that are not in a special guide.

Personal Reflection

Centuries ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates exhorted his students to know themselves if they wished to attain true knowledge. Education hasn’t changed all that much since the days when Socrates loitered in the Athenian agora urging young people to look inward. Teachers today encourage students to reflect on their experiences and to use them as a bridge to the world of academia.

Success requires an investment of time to figure out what one’s personal experiences mean. Writing about personal experiences is understood to be one of the better ways of reflecting on life because putting words on paper or a computer screen is slow and ponderous—the time it takes provides ample opportunity to think.

Successful personal writing is challenging. It is also an invaluable part of becoming a better writer. Periodically throughout this book, you will find prompts intended to encourage you to keep a journal in which you can reflect on your experiences. Reflection of this sort can help you find meaning in a busy life, and it also can help you become a better, more thoughtful writer.

Journal Entry

Reflect on how you change your language on the basis of situation. What are some factors that influence the changes you make? Also consider your writing. Have you consciously thought about how different writing tasks call for different conventions? If so, how have the tasks you’ve performed and their associated writing conventions differed?

Features of Personal Writing

Good personal writing is like fiction—except the events are real. For example, both kinds of writing do far more than simply narrate events. They present problems that the people or characters involved must solve. On a deeper level, they allow readers to share experiences that, one way or another, give them insight into their own lives.

Both kinds of writing also have a similar structure. The beginning of a short story and the beginning of a piece of personal writing set the scenes for readers. The middle portion of personal writing describes how the writer overcame or failed to overcome the problem. (Not every piece of personal writing is about success in solving a problem.) In many instances, the middle will develop themes that wind their way through the work. It also may provide a chronicle of inner changes that give the writer new and deeper insight. The ending not only concludes the experience but also offers a message to readers. It may link the writer’s inner change and insight to the message offered readers.

Still, the idea of a problem is very important. Personal writing without a problem can be fun, but it may not strike readers as particularly meaningful, which is why the writers of the samples below generally deal with hardship of one type or another. I elected to include samples that reflect individual struggles with life because such writing shows the strength of the human spirit and offers powerful lessons for us all. Personal writing without a problem may be interesting and entertaining, but rarely is it edifying.

Personal Writing Entertains and Teaches

Personal writing involves an important assumption—that people read it because they want to, not because they have to. Personal writing, therefore, is challenging in part because of the need to be interesting and entertaining. There is no question that much of the appeal of personal writing lies in its ability to give readers glimpses into the private lives of others. But it also teaches. Readers can recognize in the stories of people’s lives important lessons that they can apply to themselves. Writers can recognize in their work the bonds that tie them to others. We are all much the same. Indeed, the most meaningful lessons seem to be those that remind readers of their common humanity. The teaching function of personal writing therefore means that your work must be generalizable to readers. It should allow them to see something of themselves in your work.

Identifying personal experiences that others can relate to is a fundamental requirement for success. Simply sharing something about life is not sufficient. For example, if I wrote a short paper merely about a trip to the market and how I bought a carton of milk, I would be sharing an experience, but not one that means anything. Anyone reading my paper would ask the question that is deadly for any piece of writing: “So what?” In addition, really good personal writing does something more, something hard to define and even harder to teach: Readers will find it inspirational, moving. Touching readers’ emotions is the most powerful and worthwhile goal of personal (as well as fictional) writing.

Linked Assignment
Sharing an Experience

This activity gives you an opportunity to begin planning for a shared experience. It is linked to the writing assignment on page 10. Consider the experiences in your life that are special to you. Select two or three and write a short summary for each. Then respond to the following questions for each experience, discussing them with students in your class, if possible: (1) What happened in the experience? (2) What did I learn? (3) Why do I consider it to be special? (4) Why would anyone else find this experience interesting? (5) What is meaningful about the experience? You’ll use these experiences later in the chapter for other exercises and writing assignments.

Two Methods For Conveying A Lesson: Direct and Indirect

Even people who have thought long and hard about their experiences find it difficult to convey to readers the lessons they’ve learned without sounding pedantic, like a little professor. They know that the lessons must be linked to the narrative, but how? There is always the temptation simply to tack a moral to the end, but that approach is not effective. Many writers rely on two methods to convey their lessons. The first I call direct. Writers describe their experience, outline their problem, how they overcame or failed to overcome the problem, and what they learned. Writers may state something as simple as “I learned….” The passage presented here written by Michael Nava uses this approach.

The second method is what I call indirect. Writers tell readers very little; instead, the lesson emerges from the narrative. Stated another way, the writers show rather than tell. The second passage, written by Richard Selzer, uses this approach. The indirect method makes personal writing seem more like fiction because fiction also shows rather than tells. I admit to being partial to the second method. It seems that in the very best personal writing, the lessons emerge out of narratives about shared experiences. Some writers, of course, combine both methods in their work.

As you read the passages that follow, pay close attention to how the writers convey their lessons. Many writers stumble when they reach the edifying part of their work, and the passages below serve as effective models that you can use for your own work.

Diverse Voices

Not all cultures place the same value on the ability to write well. Even within a given culture, writing ability is often viewed in different ways. In the United States, for example, members of the working class generally value writing ability differently from members of the professional class. What value does your culture place on writing ability? Does it differ from what you have experienced in the United States?

Michael Nava

Michael Nava received a law degree from Stanford in 1981 and went on to work as an attorney for the City of Los Angeles before turning to writing full time. He has published several mystery novels, including The Little Death, Goldenboy, and How Town. The following passage describes part of his childhood in Sacramento, California, during the 1950s and 1960s.

Michael Nava
Gardenland, Sacramento, California

I grew up in a neighborhood of Sacramento called Gardenland, a poor community, almost entirely Mexican, where my maternal family, the Acunas, had lived since the 1920s. Sacramento’s only distinction used to be that it was the state capital. Today, because it frequently appears on lists of the country’s most livable cities, weary big-town urbanites have turned it into a boomtown rapidly becoming unlivable. But when I was a child, in the late fifties and early sixties, the only people who lived in Sacramento were the people who’d been born there.

Downtown the wide residential neighborhoods were lined with oaks shading turreted, run-down Victorian mansions, some partitioned into apartments, others still of a piece, but all of them exuding a shadowy small-town melancholy. The commercial district was block after block of shabby brick buildings housing small businesses. The city’s skyline was dominated by the gold-domed capitol, a confectioner’s spun-sugar dream of a building. It was set in a shady park whose grass seemed always to glisten magically, as if hidden under each blade of grass were an Easter egg.

Sacramento’s only other landmarks of note were its two rivers, the American and the Sacramento. They came together in muddy confluence beneath the slender iron joints of railroad bridges. Broad and shallow, the rivers passed as slowly as thought between the thick and tumble of their banks.

A system of levees fed into the rivers. One of these tributaries was called the Bannon Slough. Gardenland was a series of streets carved out of farmland backed up against the slough. It flowed south, curving east behind a street called Columbus Avenue, creating Gardenland’s southern and eastern boundaries. The northern boundary was a street called El Camino. Beyond El Camino was middle-class tract housing. To the west, beyond Bowman Street, were fields and then another neighborhood that may just as well have existed on another planet for all I knew of it.

What I knew were the nine streets of Gardenland: Columbus, Jefferson, Harding, Cleveland El Camino, Peralta, Wilson, Haggin, and Bowman; an explorer, an odd lot of presidents, an unimaginative Spanish phrase, and three inexplicable proper names, one in Spanish, two in English. It was as if the streets had been named out of a haphazard perusal of a child’s history text. There were two other significant facts about the streets in Gardenland; they all dead-ended into the levee and their names were not continued across El Camino Boulevard into the Anglo suburb, called North-gate. Gardenland’s streets led, literally, nowhere.

Unlike El Camino, where little square houses sat on little square lots, Gardenland had not been subdivided to maximum utility. Broad uncultivated fields stretched between and behind the ramshackle houses. Someone’s “front yard” might consist of a quarter acre of tall grass and the remnants of an almond orchard. The fields were littered with abandoned farming implements and the foundations of long-gone houses. For a dreamy boy like me, these artifacts were magical. Finding my own world often harsh, I could imagine from these rusted pieces of metal and fragments of walls a world in which I would have been a prince.

But princes were hard to come by in Gardenland. Almost everyone was poor, and most residents continued to farm after a fashion, keeping vegetable gardens and flocks of chickens. There were neither sidewalks nor streetlights, and the roads, cheaply paved, were always crumbling and narrow as country lanes. At night, the streets and fields were lit by moonlight and the stars burned with millennial intensity above the low roofs of our houses.

The best way to think of Gardenland is not as an American suburb at all, but rather as a Mexican village, transported perhaps from Guanajuato, where my grandmother’s family originated, and set down lock, stock, and chicken coop in the middle of California.

My cousin Josephine Robles had divided her tiny house in half and ran a beauty shop from one side. Above her porch was a wooden sign that said in big blue letters GARDENLAND and, in smaller print below, BEAUTY SALON. Over the years the weather took its toll and the bottom half faded completely, leaving only the word GARDENLAND in that celestial blue, like a road sign to a cut-rate Eden.

By the time I was bom, in 1954, my family had lived in Gardenland for at least twenty-five years. Virtually all I know of my grandf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• BRIEF CONTENTS
• DETAILED CONTENTS
• GUIDE TO READINGS AND WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
• PREFACE
• Chapter 1 Personal Writing
• Chapter 2 Building Bridges
• Chapter 3 Writing at a Process
• Chapter 4 Reporting Events
• Chapter 5 Reporting Information
• Chapter 6 Interpreting Events
• Chapter 7 Interpreting Information
• Chapter 8 Evaluating Event
• Chapter 9 Evaluating Information
• Chapter 10 Argumentation
• Chapter 11 Persuasion
• Chapter 12 Interpreting Short fiction
• The Handbook
• Index
• Selection Credits