Matalene, Carolyn. “Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues.” Eds. Edward P.J. Corbett, Nancy Myers, and Gary Tate. The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook, 4th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 180-190.
Precis:
Carolyn Matalene, in her essay “Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues” (2000), argues that writing teachers must get over their fear of feeling and allow students to start with personal writing that moves to “personal writing about public issues” (190). Matalene briefly discusses the general argument about writing from experience before moving into an analysis of 24 students’ papers from a college writing course and drawing conclusions from that analysis. Her purpose is to show college writing instructors that when teachers focus on evidence and argument, students’ writing suffers from a loss of a real voice. Matalene has an informal tone when discussing student papers (both lamenting and celebrating) that invites the reader.
So that was my first real precis that I have ever written, and I feel it is stilted and sucky. Oh well.
More authentic. What I liked about this essay:
Use of Bakhtin (“Speech Genres”): no writer has complete freedom, all our words are linked to previous words, and a really good writer has talent at keeping own freedom yet joining the academic conversation. (182)
“The worst excessees of bureaucratic prose are committed by insecure writers who try to sound iimportant by using big words, long sentences, passive constructions, redundant modifiers, and abstract nouns as agents.” (182)
Harris: “Rather than privileging either experience or information as sources of subject matter, we should encourage students to use both. It is, I believe, this purposeful combination of experience and information that produces the most effective discourse.” (Harris 166-167, quoted on 185)
generalizing voice is called “Centripetal voice” (186)
“And to pretend that this is not so, to suggest that we can draw a line between public and private writing and keep the personal in one compartment and teh impersonal in another is not only bad writing instruction, but also immoral.” (189)
From her works cited:
Bakhtin, M. M. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. U of Texas P, 1986.
Elbow, Peter. “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues.” College English 53 (1991): 135-55.
the thought and feeling of the comment is shared by Chinese people. Chinese people thinks personal experience and feeling are very important. They would seek the peace of mind whatever the circumstance is. Sometimes this lead to inactivity. They just accept the world or society as it were. Sometimes to a degree: though I am poorer than you, Yet my ancestor is richer than you. on the other hand, the feeling of chinese is very subtle and rich. people set store on learning classics to regulate not only their behavior but also their feeling.
But China is also changing in an unprecedented way very quickly.