Blog #4: Affective Dimensions of Writing

Ernest Hemingway is attributed to have said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Writing can be a beautiful way to express one’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Or to write one may answer the question, “What would your eyes say if they could speak?” I believe that everyone has something to say and that it can be said by some means. Some people can perfectly capture their sentiments with the right words. Others, myself included, sometimes struggle to find the right words. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” -Mark Twain I am sometimes a writer, but not always. Sometimes I am an athlete, at other times I am a musician, a painter, or a photographer. Ideally I think I like to steal other people’s expressions to express my own. It is probably why I like reading and quotes so much. As a child I don’t recall writing often for my personal pleasure, but I did begin to keep quotes and sayings that I enjoyed. I have grown from a word robber to an occasional blogger, if I have something exciting to blog about. Exciting to me generally revolves around three subjects: adventures, pet peeves, or food. I probably have a more intimate relationship with food than most people, so maybe that is how I communicate. I am definitely not a journal writer, but I probably should be. Sometimes I am too quick with my words and it would probably improve my non-edible relationships if I vented through writing before being so quick to open my mouth and say the first things that come out of it. In lieu of journals I write emails to my family. I’m sure if I changed the beginning to “Dear Diary” I would have a very nice collection of journals but I never save these emails. I guess I don’t journal because I don’t feel I have the time and most things feel so trivial and I feel that I waste too much time going into detail, yet if it is not detailed I feel that it was boring and pointless to even mention. Do you see my struggle? I don’t twitter and I try to keep my Facebook addiction to a minimum, so I don’t post updates on Facebook very often. I also go on tangents (if you didn’t notice) which may be another reason I don’t write a lot. Tangents are a hard habit to break. I am making progress though (I wrote a tangent but decided not to add it, but I suppose telling you about the tangent I didn’t add is a tangent in itself). I have a few very memorable writing assignments. One was for my sophomore English teacher, Mr. Talley. Mr. Talley had us do some creative writing and write a story. My imagination soared with this assignment and I enjoyed the positive feedback I received about my story. I always like writing assignments that feel easy or that I have good ideas to write about or how to write it. Another writing assignment I enjoyed was a persuasive essay for my college English class. My instructor gave me permission to write this essay in the same style as Swift's A Modest Proposal which I loved. I enjoyed the satire and irony in writing about shipping off country music fans to Australia (see- a pet peeve!). Writing assignments that I dislike are long, boring, tedious, and hard. I had one French writing class and I hated the teacher because she would never give out high grades because, "A paper can always be improved upon." Bah. It is already hard enough to write in French, never mind writing the "perfect" paper. It took me a long time (I'm not sure if I am still there) to come to terms with writing in French overall. It is a terribly difficult thing you see, the whole language is different and some American ideas, words, and phrases, just don't work right in French. One of my mentors in France, Annick, taught me that I needed to take on a different personality to be able to successfully write in French that was not my own. I feel that this is important for all language learners to know, you aren't going to be able to say things quite how you want to, but you can figure out how to work around it and basically say what you want to. Another influential theme that should flow throughout any writing assignment is the ability to be creative and the validation of outside ideas. This is an excellent way to get students to connect to writing, but letting them write how (and possibly what) they want to. I think it is finding that balance between having some guidelines (we all secretly like boundaries, you know) and freedom to create. I guess that means being able to write outside the box? :]