Britton, et. al. (461-466)

Britton, et. al. (461-466)

This essay talks about “shaping at the point of utterance” (Britton, et. al. 461).  The authors believe that having a better understanding of “how a writer shapes at the point of utterance” (461) will lead to a greater understanding of invention.  During speech, we shape sentences as we are speaking them.  We start a sentence, not necessarily knowing where it is going to go but hoping to reach closure eventually.  Occasionally, we pause and think (structure) in the middle of a sentence, uttering “um” or “ah” while we are thinking and structuring.  Another observation made by the authors is that many times a student will come in with a problem and while they are talking to us about it they find the solution by themselves just because they were able to talk about it out loud with someone.  When a writer writes words on a page, it becomes a stimulus to write further, but not to rewrite or revise.

The authors provide some of the views of Barrett Mandel.  According to the authors, Mandel states that he has three steps that occur in his personal writing process.  Those three steps are: 1) having an idea of something to write about; 2) writing anything; 3) look at what is written, judge it, and edit it.  The first step, according to Mandel comes before writing.  It “establishes a frame of mind in which the writing is likely to occur” (463).  Discoveries are made through writing itself.  Britton, et. al. state that when we write, what is written is in part already shaped by how we perceive our surroundings and based on our own experiences.  Perl and Egendorf, according to the authors of the essay, state that when they are observed writing students appear to write “by shuttling back and forth from their sense of what they wanted to say to the words on the page and back to address what is available to them inwardly” (464).  Now that I think about it, it seems that is true in my own classroom.  When I observe my students writing, I can see the pauses and realize they are considering the words they know, what they have written on the page, and what they are trying to say.

The authors also talk about a “presetting mechanism” (465) that can be set up and that, once it is set up, affects the writing as the writer keeps writing.  This mechanism may help a writer find his or her voice when writing a particular piece.