Kinneavy, Week of Feb. 18

In James Kinneavy’s article Expressive Discourse, Kinneavy talks about the significance of self expression in writing. He also details the different parts of the “self” – the “being for itself,” the “being for others,” and the “being in the world.” This breakdown helps explain how different parts of the self contribute to our writing and the world. However, what I feel is missing is how we instruct students to achieve the balance between writing “scholarly” and including their own expressive thoughts. Reading this article is reminds me of the different level of styles we teach students. In a low and sometimes mid level style piece of writing our students are allowed to use “I” and can be more personal with what they are talking about. However, for other assignments, we are very adamant that the students need to avoid sounding personal because we say it does not sound scholarly or academically enough. But according to expressive thought, it is very important that writing have some expressive components to it. So how on earth do we teach this to students without compromising what we have already said? Or do we need to completely rethink what we have already taught? Kinneavy details the different parts of the self, but the instructions in this section of the article are directed towards experienced writers how understand the concepts Kinneavy lays forth. In order to get our students to understand this, more knowledge and explanation is needed.

In my experience, what students are doing is they are writing about the how they feel incorrectly for the genre or level of style they should be writing in. They write phrases like “I feel” or “I believe” when they are making an argument about something. When they are writing more personal pieces, they write with too much raw emotion that it sounds like a rant rather than a rational piece of writing. So the issue is something that is right in front of our eyes, students are unsure and/or unfamiliar of how to harness their emotions as they write. It is certainly easier to write a journal or diary entry because all you are doing is writing about how you feel, the difference here is, when you are writing in a diary, you don’t have to be concerned of how it reads, typically you are the only one to read it, but if someone else reads it, they know the conventions of the genre mean that it is deeply personal and rooted in emotion. What is needed then, is students need to learn to write with their emotions in check but still showcase them in an academic matter. The question is, how do we do that?