Friday, April 16, 2004
Spring Colds
Spring colds are the pits. Sinuses blocked equals a sluggish mind. Runny eyes and nose are uncomfortable and unattractive; (my mate got it first and gave it to me!)
Monday, April 12, 2004
Others - Learning to Write
So I was talking to a friend yesterday and mentioned my thesis being about how to write, and referred to how I learned to write - joined printing and having to get "good enough" to get a straight pen and ink, and what a struggle that was. She related and began talking about how discouraging her messy-looking handwriting was when she was struggling to learn. Then, without a word from me, she said "What did they expect? All the written work we saw was in books and looked neat and finished." Exactly. My point. As children learning to write, we were immediately diminished and discouraged by our inability to achieve what we thought was the standard, something that looked like the books we were asked to read.
I was not the only one feeling this way! In fact, my wanting to have my writing look like a book may have been the norm!Think about it, when you are taught to cook, you are supervised, do it slowly and simply, but end up with food, something edible. The same thing when you learn to knit or sew, or build or repair. What you end up doing as you learn is create something that, while perhaps not up to a high standard, is never-the-less recognizable as close to a product in daily use.
My friend and I shifted into talking about our late-teen, early-twenties daughters, both of whom have their own blogs and spend hours online. The text they practice and the text they see have a unity and connection that ours never did. They read books too, but I suspect they don't hold them in the reverence that we did/do. They use and see text as part of a communicative system that they are tightly tied into, and that gives them a real discourse community, a far better learning situation than the required writing that always seemed inadequate both because of its appearance (not a book) and because it was observed as a performance where style and correctness mattered more than meaning.
I wonder how the increased amounts of time in casual "texting" will affect how they write in more formal situations?
I was not the only one feeling this way! In fact, my wanting to have my writing look like a book may have been the norm!Think about it, when you are taught to cook, you are supervised, do it slowly and simply, but end up with food, something edible. The same thing when you learn to knit or sew, or build or repair. What you end up doing as you learn is create something that, while perhaps not up to a high standard, is never-the-less recognizable as close to a product in daily use.
My friend and I shifted into talking about our late-teen, early-twenties daughters, both of whom have their own blogs and spend hours online. The text they practice and the text they see have a unity and connection that ours never did. They read books too, but I suspect they don't hold them in the reverence that we did/do. They use and see text as part of a communicative system that they are tightly tied into, and that gives them a real discourse community, a far better learning situation than the required writing that always seemed inadequate both because of its appearance (not a book) and because it was observed as a performance where style and correctness mattered more than meaning.
I wonder how the increased amounts of time in casual "texting" will affect how they write in more formal situations?
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