bloggery
“The writer, as he writes, is making ethical decisions. He doesn’t test his words by a rule book, but by life. He uses language to reveal the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others.”Murray, Donald M. "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product." Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Victor Villaneuva, Jr., Ed. Urbana: NCTE, 1997. 4.
Although blogging didn’t come along until 25 years after this essay’s original 1972 publication, these few sentences seem to apply to the concept. Putting your words out into a public forum (the workshop, the internet) is a way to test them by life — to see how they hold up in the world outside your head. Posting my thoughts here pretty much guarantees public nekkidness, yes, but it also creates the opportunity for feedback. What I need is for others to throw their thoughts into the pot, and then we’ll all see what cooks up. (Thanks, Earnest!)
Even when people don’t comment, they sometimes come up to me to discuss a topic, and that helps just as much. I’ve only been doing this for a month, but I can already see that it helps keep the evolution going. If nothing else, the discipline of putting words on the page forces you to organize your thoughts a bit. Surely if I keep talking and writing long enough, all will be revealed.
Comments
The question everyone seems to be hung up on at the moment (or more accurately since the bloging phenomenon took off about a year ago) is what, precisely, we're doing when we blog. The poststructuralists and the comp/rhet folks are (rightly) having a great deal of fun with it.
You're right, too, that we are to a certain extent "nekkid" when we do this thing (I know I often feel that way), but the nekkidness is liberating, too. Or perhaps it's the act of writing itself that's liberating, since we do so in the relative comfort of anonymity (until the all-powerful google starts to turn us up on searches for our names). I think it's interesting, in the end, to think about the political implications of not writing, but instead *speaking*. The not-writing is itself a kind of political and ethical statement, don't you think? The act of speaking, rather than writing, literally places the individual in potential physical harm.
But this isn't what you're on about here. I have to admit that Murray (and Elbow, et al) don't do much for me. It's all too touchy-feely; I always feel like I've been touched inappropriately, and I never can imagine a classroom of mine where this kind of self-exploration can take place in such an idealistic way. These are all my own failings, though. But then, when you teach Freshman Comp, you're often more concerned with students constructing coherent sentences and ideas than you are with the discovery of individual truths.
I suppose in the end that I don't necessarily buy the distinctions Murray always wants to establish: writing is both noun and verb, both action and thing, and both process and product--not an either/or. At some point (the moment you hit "post" or the moment you hit "send") that writing ceases to be a process (barring, of course, the "edit post" feature) and gets sent out into the world and needs to stand on its own.
Golly. I've gone on for far too long. I'll shut up now.
Posted by: Scott | February 4, 2003 12:40 AM