By Jackson Davis
In the text “Writing Is Informed by Prior Experience” Andrea Lunsford goes in-depth about how our experiences and interactions shape our writing. She found out through experiments that a lot of people had many negative early experiences with writing which led to their current dislike of the skill. I can relate to that personally because I did not like writing so much during elementary and middle school. The lack of love for the skill has slowly gone away but writing still does bother me at times. She also touches on how writers use previous strategies for new work. For example, a college professor told Andrea about the “gist and list” strategy. This is where students will state something or give you the “gist” and then they will “list” all of their other supporting information. We tend to do this very often because it is something that we are comfortable with and we know that it helps us get our point across.
On the other hand in the text “Writers’ Histories, Processes, and Identities Vary” by Kathleen Yancey, she talks about how writers are all unique in their own way. Yancey talks about how your writing can be very heavily influenced by your cultural background and where you are from. She mentioned how back in the day when school started young boys were the only ones being instructed how to write. Yancey explains how all writers have their own unique identities. This writing has a lot of similarities with the first piece as it talks about how writers have heavy influence from their earlier writing experiences. Going beyond early experiences it talks about our culture and where we are from and how big of an effect that has on our writing.
I think that both of these texts are important for a writing class because it shows us the background of why we think the way we do about writing. I think that teachers need to make writing as positive as possible at a young age to help kids build good habits and think of it as a fun activity. Students need to take in what the teacher is giving them when it comes to advice about their writing. Colleges should provide good resources and feedback on writing for students so that they can have reassurance feel. I think the only change I would make to K-12 is to make the material more enjoyable for students instead of them dreading it.
