There are two bad ideas about writing being focused on in this essay, Writers Are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged and First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing. These ideas not only doesn’t help students with writing, but it also hurts them in their journey to become excellent writers. So a better idea is to throw these ideas away and one, Think about writers as a realistic career, and two, better realize the potential of the first-year writing.
“Writing” by jjpacres is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In Teri Holbrook and Melanie Hundley’s essay, Writers Are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged; they explore the representation of writers in popular media such as television shows, films, books and why these depictions of authors and writing paint them in a harmful and reductive picture of writing. To a point where both young writers are disincentivized in pursuing writing as a career and writing itself is believed to be effortless, causing it to not be valued in a labor sense and downplaying non-individualized work that goes into writing. The two authors instead show a good idea of realizing that these stereotypes of writers in media are not always to be sought out or even something that’s bound to happen and that writing is a realistic career that works like many other careers.
“Watch Eye TV” by CJ Sorg is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
One of the sources Holbrook and Hundley had was Jane Piirto’s work on the Roeper Review, Themes in the Lives of Successful Contemporary U.S. Women Creative Writers. Piirto’s article focused on the similarities of successful female writers and life. Many of these themes include unfortunate family situations, great teachers, and early reading habits, along with many other things(Piirto). The data makes the writers seem grounded but some of these themes may make people think that these things are ways that make writers different than others. However some of them could be said about how they’re similar, and it may seem that Holbrook and Hundley used this for their essay. For example, feeling like an outsider is a common theme for some of these writers but also something that many people all over suffer with. The data also show how writing is not much of an isolated job as some would say because getting an agent is helpful for building a successful career as a writer. These themes also help if anybody truly wants to be a successful writer, because as Holbrook and Hundley say, “analyze common themes circulating about writers and then strategize ways to combat them”(Holbrook and Hundley).
“Civil Discourse” by Chirag D. Shah is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
But there are also arises a bad idea with how the public believes of how education teaches about writing, and that idea relates to first-year composition. Tyler Branson’s essay talks about this idea, “First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing”. In his essay, Tyler explains how limiting people’s perception of first-year college writing is done, holding it to an old fashion way of mostly improving grammar and spelling. This outdated idea of the way first-year college writing teaching is done limits what could be taught in the classroom and doesn’t help prepare students for the academic writing that entails for them in the rest of their college experience. Tyler introduces the idea of the great potential of using First-year Composition as a way to develop a student’s use of language and their use of civil discourse.
In the process of this idea, Tyler uses Joseph M. Williams’ article, The Phenomenology of Error, which is located in the College Composition and Communication book. In the article, William puts the focus on the differences of how “errors” in papers are evaluated and how rules of grammar are enforced to and from different people. There is a point in the article where Williams takes an example from many writers’ published papers and took sections of text that had an error of some kind and yet no one, even the writer themselves noticed these errors. Williams even says that “if we read any text the way we read freshman essays, we will find many of the same kind of errors we routinely expect to find and therefore do find” (Williams). It seems that Tyler used Williams’ text to further emphasize the point of the value of teaching correction in first-year comp. It’s not much of a thing most people consciously look for when reading a paper. It’s a great skill but not something to put much focus on in academic writing.
“Academic Writing” by Max Choong is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Simply put these bad ideas are not good enough for these young writers. If people want these students to succeed, they would have to understand what these authors said and understand a better idea. That writing is a realistic career and better using writing opportunities that are introduced to students in the first year of college.
Work Cited
Holbrook, Teri, and Melanie Hundley. “Writers Are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged.” Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, Digital Publishing Institute, 2017, pp. 53–59, textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf.
Piirto, Jane. “Themes in the Lives of Successful Contemporary U.S. Women Creative Writers.” Roeper Review, vol. 21, no. 1, 1998, pp. 60–70. Crossref, doi:10.1080/02783199809553933.
Branson, Tyler. “First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing.” Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe, Digital Publishing Institute, 2017, pp. 18–23, textbooks.lib.wvu.edu/badideas/badideasaboutwriting-book.pdf.
Williams, Joseph M. “The Phenomenology of Error.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 2, 1981, pp. 152–68. Crossref, doi:10.2307/356689