As I am re-reading this article, what strikes me most is the difference between the kinds of changes the students made in their poetic writing versus the kinds of changes the students made in their transactional writing. Dix claims, “the writers revised their poetic writing more often. They appeared to have greater ownership and flexibility to make choices concerning language and sentence structure so that they could experiment with words to create a desired image or effect.” What I’m wondering now is:
- Why is it that students feel greater ownership over their poetic writing? It seems intuitive that it would be so. I know I feel more ownership and authority when I’m working on a poem than when I’m working on a cover letter. Is it because poetic (and I’m assuming she’s using James Britton’s definition of poetic here) genre’s have built into them the idea that the writer has this authority?
- Assuming that students do feel more authority over and, therefore, more confident in revising their poetic texts, how do we facilitate an extension of that ownership to the transactional context? I wonder if teaching students to investigate genres might help here. Maybe if they figured out the “rules” of a genre for themselves, they might gain ownership of that genre. Further, if they had this ownership, might they feel more confident in “breaking” those rules?
- As a composition teacher, how might I build poetic writing into a course in order to facilitate that ownership without giving short shrift to the transactional writing I’m supposed to be teaching?
I too comented on this part of Dix's article; however, I do not think it's the fact that students feel they have authority over their texts that makes them more likely to revise poetry than other types of writing, I think it's the way we teach poetry that makes them think this. We teach poetry telling the students it's all about word choice and mixing and switching images and sounds, we don't do this with our other writings. Kids feel ok with revising their poetry because they think that's how you write poetry, so we need to find a way to get them to believe this how we do all writing.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think students have their own styles of learning.
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