The Writing Process

I was soooo not looking forward to reading the class blogs.  Not at all.  Which is not surprising see as how it’s 10:14 and I’m finally reading them and writing my response.  But I have got to say, again not surprisingly, that I loved them.  My favorite part was seeing how each person had personalized their blog, through either template, titles of posts, or types of posts.  There was of course a great deal of variety.

My second favorite part was reading memoirs.  I found the first assignments to be more scattered in thought and more distant from the now, and no, not just because it is actually more distant in time, but because I think a lot of us have changed thoughts on the writing process after having been in this class.  So those weren’t as interesting.  And while everyone obviously worked very hard on the third paper and contributed a lot of great ideas, I just couldn’t get into them, in the same way that I had trouble getting into a lot of the readings – most writing theory just doesn’t interest me! Sorry, all…but I did absolutely love the memoirs.  The suppressed wannabe-psych-major in me loved reading everyone’s emotional experiences tied to writing, and I regret having just read them now because I feel a much stronger connection to everyone that I wish I could bring with me to class.

Jocelyn’s memoir was really relatable, as I, too, have dealt with a step-parent who just doesn’t understand you.  And I loved the integration of disclaimers and poetry.  They really beefed it up. 

Lauren’s was fun to read because she put so much effort into it.  Her posts were developed and took the topic seriously.  Very critical, thoughtful, and worked in some hilarious stuff, too.

I’d have to say my favorite blog to read was Margaret’s, probably because she’s the only other non-English major in the class so I felt like a lot of her thoughts and approaches to writing were similar to mine.  And I’m not going to lie – I may or may not have teared up while reading her memoir.  It stirred up a lot of sadness and disgust within me – disgust, not for Margaret, ha, but for ignorant people, especially those who work in an academic capacity. 

Joey’s blog was of course the most hilarious.  It provided the comic relief for having to read pages and pages of reading responses and thoughts on writing theory.  I loved his mock-script part of his memoir.

I guess my third favorite par t of reading the blogs (why I continue to rate these favorite parts, I don’t know) was peoples’ reactions to the article about narcissism.  Most in the class agreed that it was accurate, then immediately defended it (which is exactly what I did, too!)  I had to chuckle out loud at every response because they were so hilariously similar.  

I think having access to everyone’s blog and specifically memoirs was a very intimate experience for me.  I don’t read blogs in general, let alone those that are written by people I know and see in real life.  Perhaps because I feel so self-conscious about my writing I feel as though when I read everyone else’s writing, I’m somehow like tip-toeing around their soul.  I guess I approach it with a lot of delicacy which I think gets me more emotionally invested in the writing and thus, the person.  This paragraph is totally scattered but I guess my point is that I really feel strongly connected to everyone after having read their blogs.  I want to send out a message to everyone who wrote about tough times and say, “It’s okay! I promise! Everything will be fine! I’m sorry you’ve been hurt but if it’s any consolation, you turned out to be super smart and a great writer and I’m so proud of you! Please never feel sad again! Aaaaa!”  It makes me sad we won’t have class together again.

The Disappearance of Creative Writing 

In his book, Peter Elbow teaches the student how to write without a teacher. But, uh, what about the rest of us? Sure, I can relate to the concepts of Elbow now as a near-college graduate, but only because I was introduced to them by a teacher. Writing with a teacher seems to be the more difficult task for most writers out there.  How is it possible for students to feel comfortable creating something expressive when they have been under the influence of teachers who teach nothing but academic writing?  The biggest hindrance to student writers is the focus on academic over creative writing, and this starts early.  Note: Early does not mean year-one of an undergraduate education.  Early means childhood. 

When we are young, we are given few rules. “Write a story about an elephant!” This amount of imagination and creativity is awe-inspiring. I know few adults who would be as thrilled and as able as an eight-year-old to create such a tale. It is my belief that many of the problems writers face when developing their writing, whether it be finding their voice or tapping into their emotional outlet, stems from lack of practice.  I was twelve years old the first time I diagramed a sentence, and from there on out, very little of my academic writing could be considered “creative” or even of the “out of the box” idea.  Curriculums have become so obsessed with producing college-ready academics that creativity is pushed out of the classroom and onto the stage or into the art studio.  Even inside the English class, teachers often say, “make up a small skit” instead of “write a short story.” 

And even when teachers do find ways to encourage students to find expression through writing with voice exercises like freewriting, it is most often in an elementary context; by the time high school comes around when students are more equipped at expressing these ideas, the outlet has disappeared, or rather reformed in extracurricular activities.  While musicians at my high school had chorus, band, orchestra, theater, and even an annual Battle of the Bands, writers had three, more narrow options: Creative Writing, the class (which was never feasible to take since no one could afford to “waste” electives on things other than AP Spanish or AP Psychology), the Yearbook (which really dealt more with layout, photos, and superlatives than writing creatively), and the Newspaper (which, enjoyable as it was, did not really allow for the elephant story). Our school’s literary magazine was impressive, but drastically unread despite heavy promotion, and one infamous case of major plagiarism soured many students from trusting it as a reliable source of poetry and fiction. 

Students need an outlet for personal and creative writing that isn’t their diary.  Creative writing provides a forum for students to explore personal issues or interests in a substantial way that validates the importance of these issues or interests.  When teachers do not encourage this type of creativity, it tells students that creative writing is secret, heavy, and inappropriate for academic people. These may seem like generalized claims with no evidence, but it’s true! According to most English Literature classes, creative writing can be studied, but not replicated. Unless you’re writing Silas Marner or Great Expectations, the creative aspect is not nearly as important as the academic one.  Students are forced to “earn the right” to write creatively, which for most people might never happen.  By the time they have earned the right, many have lost interest and lack the actual training to be able to channel their creative self.  This needs to start earlier. 

Bartholomae says, “There is no writing that is writing without teachers.”  If this is true, then bring teachers into the discussion of academic versus personal, creative writing.  The two are not mutually exclusive.  I promise, any student can write a memoir or a fictional story at the same time as a research paper and not mold the two together. 

Bathlomoae quotes many teachers with saying, “I want to empower my students.”  “I want to give my students ownership of their work.”  Sure, maybe professors are able to do this, but outside of college, what teacher is he talking about?  From my experience, many teachers — or rather, curriculums, since teachers are slaves to them — acknowledge creative writing as important, but deny students the actual time to create it. Understanding how something is made furthers comprehension of the topic. Students who love listening to music are encouraged to make music, and few musicians self-identify as only a maker or only a listener – they are both. So why are readers less encouraged to write creatively? My best friend since first grade reads at least two novels during a normal week, and up to ten during weeks that she is on vacation or lacking in projects. Yet last semester, during her senior year of college, she would break into cold sweats before each Creative Writing class.  How have the interests become so separate?  Because writing is lost for many students by the time they reach puberty.  Specifically, teachers hinder the experience through several standard devices. 

Page limits have taught students that quantity is of greater importance than quality. Anyone who wants to refute this should think back to the four-page paper you were assigned in ninth grade. It doesn’t matter how much your teacher might have liked it — if you had turned in one-page of writing, you would have failed. And any student knows the secrets of changing fonts, margins, and spacing to stretch out their essay that feels complete but is half a page short. Yes, of course, page number requirements are crucial in assessing effort and completion. But this focus on numbers takes away the focus on words.

Traditional education in the United States has brought with it sentence-diagramming, grammar sentences for students to correct, and extensive homework exercises focusing on vocabulary and mechanics.  These are great (well, “great” is probably debatable) ways to teach students academic writing, so why not use these to adapt to creative writing?  Assign a homework exercise that teaches vocabulary and allows the student to elaborate on a topic of his or her choice.  Teachers can use traditional methods of teaching academic writing to incorporate creative writing into the learning process.

One of the best attempts at breaking away from academic writing comes from the countless math and science teachers who assign papers in their classrooms with the disclaimer, “…but this isn’t an English class so I won’t be grading you on grammar, mechanics, or spelling.” In theory, this frees writing from the confines of rules and tradition; it shows students that writing does not have to be regulatory in every context. Unfortunately, in practice, this tactic seems to promote the notion that writing outside of English class is not important or valid, so therefore must not be taken too seriously.  But this subtle action does show students that writing exists in a real form outside of the English classroom.

Bartholomae says we need to highlight the classroom as a real space, not an “idealized utopian space.”  How does expressive equate to utopian?  Self-expression is by no means (necessarily) idealized, nor is it false or not real.  It is a huge misconception that creative writing lacks in actual substance.  It is this mentality that causes students to classify creative writing as “weak” and academic writing as “strong,” and no American student wants to be considered “weak.”

But ultimately the debate of academic versus creative writing is a silly one.  Like any two-sided dilemma, the answer is both.  Academic writing teaches students organization, grammar, and rhetoric.  There is a lot to be said for any curriculum that can teach this to students.  But creative writing carries a lot as well.  Non-academic writing encourages self-discovery, word experimentation, and creative risk-taking.  Why not take five minutes out of every class for students to freewrite?  “Write about an elephant…who is fifteen and just got dumped by her boyfriend.”  Bring the student to the forefront.  If students are being forced to write creatively for ten minutes every day for twelve years of schooling, the emphasis on the importance of this type of expression would drastically change.  Not only would students become less intimidated by their personal interaction with words, but they might be more willing to accept academic writing if they know they also have an outlet for creative writing.  The structure and discipline of academic writing are not bad things – we just all think they are because we’re tired of it!  Creative writing has a place in academia – teachers just need to trust it.  

I have been meaning to comment again on discourse communities but never got around to it until now I suppose.  I was thinking about the immense power of discourse communities, something we never really got into, as least deeply, in class.  My girlfriends and I have a forum on Facebook where we post messages that all six of us receive.  We’ve known each other since middle school, some from elementary school, so we very much speak the same language.  Every now and then, one of the six of us will become (jokingly) paranoid that some internet hacker in Montana is going to break into our conversation and know all of our secrets, all the things we share with one another, all the rude things we say about other people we know, all the things no one is meant to know but the six of us.  But re-reading the forum, I daresay no one could know if they wanted!  So much of our language is specific to us and our upbringing that I honestly question how much an outsider would understand.

One time we were all hanging out and a friend of ours, a guy, John, stood up and said, “I have to leave.  I don’t understand a DAMN WORD you guys are saying.  You speak in code.”  We used to joke that we, the six of us, are like sextuplets who have telepathy.  What almost looks like telepathy is really just such a powerful discourse community that we appear to read each others’ minds.  I know exactly how they will respond to certain jokes, comments, innuendo, tones, everything.  Our language bonds us so strongly that we have kind of become one mind with six bodies.  It’s like each one of us is a different self, like from Miller.  Haha, just kidding, that’s a stretch. 

I’m sorry — I hate to a be a bore, but if I’m really honest about it, the most pivotal moment in my writing life was not when my grandfather died or on September 11, 2001 or even out of classroom setting — it was my ninth grade English class.  I know.  How dull!  I wish I could attribute it to a family crisis or a worldly experience, but no, it was simply at the time when everyone’s writing is supposed to change from bad to good, from childish to scholarly, from jumbly-bumbly to grammar-perfect.  And so that’s all.  I went to this class, and I learned how to write well. It was a joint class. 

Like many high schools, mine had the bright idea of creating a class that the catalog should have just called “The Hell Class.”  It was history and English combined into one, which initially sounded pretty good to me as a natural-born “history and English person.”  Going into it, I had no idea that the work load would be so great.  But I also had no idea that the English part of the class would be taught by a woman who would come to be known as simply The Devil to some, and merely the Queen of Rigidity and Bitchiness to others.  (To most others in the world, though, she was known as Ruth Covella.)  But even those who hated her learned how to write.  Even the most static, frigid, and unmotivated student would write when Mrs. Covella told them to.  And even the most prodigal and pretentious of students grew and changed with her teaching.  I don’t know where I fell on that scale, but somehow her lessons made sense to me.  I clung to the rules of grammar, and I felt proud that I could master such a task.  My good grades in the class brought me attention and respect from my father, the former professor, and my mother, the perfectionist nurse.  

Every morning was the same:  I’d come into class about 90 seconds late, just enough time for most of the other students and both of the teachers (one for history, one for English) to notice.  “You sure smell an awful lot like cigarettes there, Claire,” my history teacher Mr. Fitzpatrick (Fitzy, as we called him) would say.  He’d had my older brother two years earlier so he’d understand when I’d tell him that Peter had been smoking in the car on the way to school, which was the truth, but always felt like a lie for some reason. 

Flustered and a bit embarrassed, I’d toss my backpack and books onto my desk, scrounge for a pen in my bag, and frantically rip out a leaf of notebook paper, worried that whatever grammar sentences Mrs. Covella had put up on the overhead projector for us to correct would disappear before I could read them — Mrs. Covella always made us work fast.  Three minutes would pass, and they’d ask for a volunteer to come up to the projector and make the grammar corrections.  My arm would tremble in indecisiveness — do I raise my hand and show the class how a true Grammarian would do it?  Or do I sit quietly and watch my peers fumble around dangling modifiers, feeling more and more positive about myself and my retention of the rules of grammar?  I almost always chose the latter, so maniacally obsessed with my own sense of regulation and control that I didn’t need to flaunt it to the rest of the class.  I was confident in my perfection.

The timing of Mrs. Covella’s arrival was perhaps the most perfect part of this perfect obsession.  My mother didn’t physically move out until the end of my freshman year, but the divorce had been such a long time coming that its effects had hit me well before she left.  Prior to freshman year, my writing had been softer, less argumentative, and certainly less rigid.  I had always accounted for the rules of grammar when writing papers for school, but never to the extent that I did after Mrs. Covella entered my life.  From there on out, I was bound to grammar’s rules.  I was a grammar Spartan, out to endure anything for the sake of proper word placement and punctuation.  No instant message of mine would ever use “u” for “you.”  No “r”s for “are”s.  No “c”s for “see”s.  And never, ever any “2”s for “to”s.  Words were spelled out in full; even a contraction could get me in trouble.  How trashy, I’d think, when a friend would send me a “how r u?” instant message, not seeing the question behind it.  Like the bulimic who thinks she can control nothing but her eating, I was a grammar-holic, lost in the chaos of the impending divorce of my parents and convinced that perfection was the only option if I wanted to maintain my family.  I was arrogant and brash, unwilling to indulge in the notion that poor grammar was not an indication of poor character or poor control.  My world at home was erratic and unpredictable; grammar was structured and reliable.  Home was madness; grammar was regulated. Rules were not made to be broken, I would tell myself.

Unfortunately for my emotional state, my obsession with grammar and rules was rewarded: I was an A+ paper writer.  In January, Mrs. Covella (and Fitzy, though he hardly counted as a teacher — he functioned more as a lovable and mischievous uncle than an educator) assigned us a five-page paper in which we had to argue for the most important invention prior to the year 1500.  This paper counted for more than a grade — the three best papers in the class would move on to a regional competition, History Day.  I worked meticulously, throwing in perfectly-placed appositives and adjective phrases.  Oh, no, a misspelling?!  How could this be!  Click, click, click, my computer would say, deleting the error with its head hanging in shame.  No linking verbs.  No passive voice.  No flaws.  And certainly no sleep until perfection.   Nearly two months  later I turned in my paper on the importance of Gutenberg’s printing press, and not so much to my surprise, I made it in the top three.  I went on to get Honorable Mention at History Day, and boy oh boy, were my parents proud.  They were proud, and they were happy, though I’m sure their faces were aching later, their muscles not used to smiling so much.

By junior year at age sixteen, I was rebelling like a madwoman, and this time it was real rebellion.  I got caught sneaking out and drinking with friends.  When I got my license, I sped on the highway.  I even failed tests and skipped class.  But I never skipped a paper, and I never got a bad grade on one.  I later competed again at History Day and won Third Place — my father flaunted that paper around his office for years, beaming with pride and self-worth, I’m sure.  But from every stupid rebellion or rejection of my parents rules (usually just out of spite), I’ve found new levels of maturity and understanding within myself.  So why has it been so hard for me to rebel against Mrs. Covella?

It wasn’t until I got to college that I finally realized good grammar doesn’t equate to strong writing.  All those years I had won awards, I was winning them as a teenager whose writing was formatted and prescribed, making it easy for me to succeed by throwing in a few phrases of impressive grammar.  Classes I’ve taken at college that rely more on creativity than research skills or format have brought me shockingly low grades on papers.  Other times just the opposite has happened: I’ve thought I’ve shamed myself using dreadful grammar in a paper written while in a sleep-deprived stupor, only to find that though my syntax was poor, my content was commendable, and my grade reflected it.  I’ve let go of other grammarisms, too: if I still thought that grammar was in any way linked to character, well, then I’d be alienating myself from a lot of intelligent and compassionate people.  But I still can’t text message a friend the letter “u” when I mean “you.”  And even now, I cringe at the thought of a dangling participle.  And hey, ultimately, that’s O.K.  The two aren’t mutually exclusive anyhow.  I just wonder what it will take for me to be able to unlock the box and allow myself to write without any limitations or fears.  Now at 22, I would like to think I’ve learned enough about myself to feel unrestricted by something as structured as grammar.  And I would like to feel as though my writing is free from the burden of obsession.  Yet I still can’t shake it.

My parents have been living separately for seven years now and have been divorced for five of them.  My need to create a perfect environment for them obviously couldn’t stop them from splitting up.  Years of group therapy, family meetings, and self-help books have patched my wounds and released me from my fear that my behavior was somehow linked to their ability to stay together.  Both of my parents are happier in their new lives than they ever were in their old ones, and seldom these days do I ever even think about the tough times of my adolescent years.  The uneasy, resentful feeling in my stomach is gone; I am at peace with the divorce.  But the changes in my writing still linger with every paper I write. 

Mrs. Covella’s diligence and structure clung so tightly to the mind of my fifteen-year-old self that it has become a part of me.  I am hoping that recognizing this wall to my true inner writer will help knock it down, even if the bricks have to fall slowly, one at a time…or maybe this sense of control is O.K.  Perhaps it’s possible that I’m still looking for perfection in my need to let go of my obsession with grammar.  But I don’t have to be perfect — I can have a flaw.  I can accept that my structure is my flaw.  After all, writing and grammar do no damage to my physical body, nor do they encourage a negative mental state (anymore, at least); there are worse obsessions in the world than mine with grammar.  So, I guess I’m going to try turning off my spell and grammar check on my computer, and I’m going to explore free writing as much as I can in the hopes that such practices will help retrain my mind to see meaning over revision.  Maybe I’ll even text a friend, “how r u?”  But I’m not going to obsess over it.  I don’t have to be perfect. 

Procrastination generally tends to imply laziness, apathy, and boredom. As the daughter of motivated parents and as a student of a fast-paced, goal-oriented pre-collegiate environment, I was always made to believe that my incessant procrastination was rooted in my lackadaisical attitude, my lazy and unmotivated mentality, and my ambivalence towards school. Indeed, I always agreed with this notion, and I still do. So imagine my shock when seeing “the fear of failure often causes people to procrastinate” in my computer’s dictionary. Could this be true? Could there be something deeper to my procrastination? Am I not just a lazy, apathetic writer, but an emotionally tortured insecure wreck of a writer as well? Does my fear of failure paralyze my inherent and phenomenal writing abilities? Can it even be as simple as this? Like any habit, my writing procrastination can’t be summed up in one final statement — it is a mixture of a variety of behaviors and fears.

As a self-proclaimed “slacker,” I know that the most obvious reason for my procrastination in writing is the same as my procrastination of cleaning, car maintenance, and correspondence: laziness and poor time management. While many reward their hard work with leisure, I preface mine with leisure so as to delay said hard work. As a senior in college, few activities motivate me to plan ahead, especially those having to do with academic writing which requires effort, critical thinking, and of course, time. The amount of energy needed for academic writing is often so foreboding that I feel tired and stressed just thinking about it. Procrastination acts as a time-saver that allows me to get done what I deem more important than academic writing (also known as everything else in my life) but still produces a decent end product to turn in to my professor.  

Another reason for my procrastination is as simple as disinterest for the process of academic writing. Growing up, I always loved to write, both in school and in diaries. I even won several awards for writing when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it — I enjoyed writing research papers! But over the years, the tired and rigid format of academic papers has dulled my vigor for writing, even academic writing. In an attempt to create and preserve a standard, the academic community ended up turning the writing process into a dull, static exercise instead of the explorative and quasi-rebellious activity that it can be. The confines of this standard add levels of stress and boredom not found in much non-academic writing, such as citations, annotated bibliographies, abstracts, and of course the five-paragraph form. I actually do understand and respect academia’s interest and investment in scholarly writing — I just don’t want to do it! By procrastinating, I will have to experience the boredom of academic writing in only one session of writing instead of over the course of several sessions during which I might brainstorm, map, or plan.  

Scholarly papers, though lifeless and uninspiring, are at least relatively easy to produce because of their prescribed form, and if I fail, all I’ve lost is a good grade. Creative writing is a much larger and more intimidating battle — if I fail here, I’ve lost not only a good grade, but I feel as though I’ve lost part of myself as well. When a professor reads my writing, they take my words with them, but usually those words are quotations, paraphrases, and scholarly ideas that I cannot claim as originally mine. When a professor reads creative writing by me, they take not only my words, but my ideas, opinions, and voice as well. One of my most dominating fears is appearing unintelligent, which is probably rooted in my parents’ obsession with knowledge and intellect. In any case, with this amount of pressure to appeal to my reader (most often a professor), I begin to doubt my abilities and my fear sets in.  

Procrastination alleviates my sense of doubt by providing me with an excuse for my creative writing. If I finish my work ahead of time with a plan and then receive a poor or mediocre grade on it, I know it is because of poor writing. But if I procrastinate, then I can blame a mediocre grade on my poor planning instead of perhaps accepting that I am not as strong of a writer as I would wish. I rationalize all behavior surrounding this procrastination as well. I lie to myself and insist that the strongest writing is rushed, pressurized, and thus, completely natural, as if it will just pour out of me given the right ticking time box. Planning ahead appears impersonal, dispassionate, and boring. Preparedness kills the intensity of spontaneity and the rush of the eleventh hour. Preparing ahead of time has become such a daring, vulnerable move for me as a writer that I will say anything to myself to prevent feeling potentially untalented or unintelligent.

So where does this leave me? I procrastinate because I’m lazy, bored, and insecure? Maybe it is that simple. Maybe it is that clear. Maybe it can but summed up in one final statement…but the true irony of my exploring the topic, “why do I procrastinate when writing?” is that I have procrastinated in writing this exploration. This self-analysis could perhaps be more thoughtful, more thorough, or more developed. There is no doubt that I could have found deeper insight to my questions if I have simply planned a bit more. And in my rush, I failed to truly test the boundaries of form that were permissible for this assignment and instead opted for predictability: the five-paragraph structure. But if I procrastinate writing this paper, I will not have to feel embarrassed when a room full of English majors tear apart its inconsistencies, flaws, and lacks. I can justify, rationalize, and explain! It is not my best, but I procrastinated! I feel frightened! I feel intimidated! …Or maybe I am just being lazy today. 

Miller conceptualizes the self as a dynamic chameleon, never tied to one voice, style, or pattern.  Her idea is that when I write an essay for my writing class, that’s one self; when I write an email to my girlfriends, that’s another self; and when I write a book review for my history class, that’s yet another self.  Honestly, I’m actually glad I forgot to post this blog by class time because of something another student said that changed my perception of Miller.  I was definitely on the “Miller Team” after reading the article — I enjoyed the idea of reinvention every time I write.  But then another student brought up the idea that Miller was essentially trying to take all the responsibility off the writer by saying writing is different every time we write.  I had taken Miller at face value, not really seeing that idea.  And I like it because I do think it’s a little bit of a cop-out.  I don’t think it’s as sinister as the other student made it out to be — I think Miller feels the pressure of having to write a certain way and wants to be relieved of that pressure, but it still takes away the responsibility if a writer knows that every time they write, it will be a different self, and that maybe they don’t even have a lot of control over that self…a little flimsy, no? In terms of Bazerman and the notion of the writer’s “spot,” I think it’s kind of similar Miller’s notions of self.  Miller defined herself as a writer because she said she “had to write,” as in for school, for jobs.  Bazerman says how we approach the spot determines elements of our writing.  And this difference in approach or response to “having” to write is almost like Miller’s idea that every time we write it will be different — every time we approach writing differently, the writing will be different.  It is mentality and environment that determine what we will produce as writers, and what we produce as writers could be different every time.   

Mucklbauer first supports his claim that imitation hasn’t been killed by romanticism by addressing the idea despite their outward opposition, creativity and invention are secretly controlled by imitation since the Romantic imitates his own image, therefore imitating himself and God’s image.  He goes on to say that many scholars don’t see opposition between imitation and invention — imitation is a learning process and has very little to do with the actual object of imitation, but more with the inventive process of imitation; basically when we imitate, we simultaneously invent because we are influencing the object of imitation with ourselves….at least I think this is what he is saying.  This article was kind of hard for me to understand so my interpretation may be skewed.

What a great article.  And study, for that matter.  My immediate reaction to this article was “yes, dead on.”  Everyone I know knows someone who believes the statements, “I like to be the center of attention” and “If I ruled the world, it would be a better place.”  But another one of my reactions (which essentially proves the point of the study) was “but it’s not my fault.”  I cannot ignore the fact that I was raised by parents, a school system, and a society that had adopted the “I Am Special” mentality in the early 1980s.  But I realize that’s not a very good argument.  Defending my generation’s narcissism is not only pointless, but narcissistic in its nature.  And as upset as Gen-Yers could be by reading this article, no one can deny its truth.  Facebook and MySpace ARE phenomena, and how many politically active or “civically oriented” (as the article puts it) friends do most of us (Gen-Yers) have?  Very few, especially in relation to those of past generations. 

It is interesting that Dr. A assigned us this article to read because just the other day, a group of friends and I were having a discussion about one specific friend who we take issue with.  We were complaining about her sense of entitlement — the fact that she feels her emotions hold more weight than anyone else’s; that if she’s having a bad day, she does not have to live up to her obligations and that it’s okay.  I think the idea of entitlement is a quality that many have without even realizing it.  Blatant self-loving and self-obsession can be blinding qualities — entitlement can be more subtle, and in my opinion, is more common.  

Most people I know of my age (including myself) would agree that they have the right to be whatever they want to be, say whatever they want to say, and live the life they want to live.  The American idea of “Freedom of Speech” has kind of been blown out of proportion for most of us.  And having grown-up in a legal-crazed society has not helped either.  Think about “Clueless” (which came out in 1995 when I was 9 and susceptible to all kinds of crazy stuff): the main character argues her way from a C to an A, and this trait is seen as admirable by her lawyer father.  The “anything can be manipulated” mentality has greatly contributed to the general sense of entitlement (and thus, narcissism.)   

This is not to say it’s not our fault.  As a budding adult, I have a responsibility to work hard for my successes and acknowledge that I am NOT entitled to perfection and ease — I have to work for it.  I think it will be interesting to see how we make out as a generation.  Those born in 1982 are 26 this year, which is still very young.  As we get older I’m sure the self-loving attitude will either fade or, more likely, have severe consequences on our relationships with spouses, employers, and children.  Eventually the narcissistic Generation Y will realize that it’s not working out…and hopefully the U.S. won’t suffer too much for it.

Corbett advocates imitation because he saw the benefits of it as a student of a teacher who forced his students to copy writing of others. The effects of imitation were almost immediate. It had a strong effect on his diction, sentence structure, and organization. It proved to be a very powerful learning tool for Corbett himself as well as other students. Corbett’s warning is definitely warranted, appropriate and even necessary. I have noticed before my inclination towards speaking in a certain way after reading a lot of one book or one author. It changes my physical voice to that author’s style. As fun as this impact can be, it ends up making me a cheap rip-off of the author. It seems very dangerous to become too aligned with a certain author. In fact, I’m even surprised that this form of imitation is actually used to encourage the writing process. It seems a bit shaky to me. It is just asking for plagiarism. And it seems too addictive — knowing how strong the impact is, I think I would take advantage of this practice if I were more inclined towards writing.