Dr. Allen

English 319

Sep, 20^th

A wise ogre once said, “Ogres are like onions…layers. Onions have layers, ogres have layers, onions have layers. We both have layers.” This seemed like the best way to start off any paper about creative writing. How come you ask? Because it’s creative and because, yes, both ogres and onions have layers, but so do writers. They also both have outside influences pushing down on them and forming them to make them who they are.

Writers are made up of everything around them. The outside influences in our lives from friends, family, and just overall drama makes up who we are. It’s these types of influences that are being suppressed in writing. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I remember being given a picture of something simple and being told to write a story about it. Even though this small writing exercise still had the structure and rules of writing, we were able to write about anything we wanted involving that picture. As I grew up and entered middle school, we were taught the oh-so-generic style of writing of an introduction paragraph, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. I was so used to this that by the time I reached my senior year in high school I had pretty much mastered the mind-numbing format. It was in this year that I took a creative writing class. Our first assignment…to write. Write about what? Anything. I was confused. I was always taught something solid and bland in writing papers, I wasn’t sure how to just write for myself..

It was also in my senior year that I took AP English. I thought I’d have been able to do great in this class with the essays and the readings. I was wrong. My teacher, Mr. Frasier, hated the standard styles of writing. He would actually fail the students if they wrote papers based on traditional setup. It was such a shock when we all got our first papers back. Comments such as ‘where are you in this paper’ and ‘who is really writing this’ flooded the pages of our papers. This became my favorite class once I figured out what he really wanted us to do. Just write. Even on essays on books we had read he required us to put ourselves into the paper.

One scholar, Peter Elbow, believes that this is the best way for students to learn to free write. He feels that students need to not be influenced by the teacher in their writing, but instead they need to connect to their inner selves as an individual to write. He says that students are born with knowledge and that it just needs to be released. Well I agree with Elbow in that free writing in very important in the classrooms. No interference from teachers about structure or topic is a magnificent way to force students to open up. I however strongly disagree with the lack of outside influences. Just like the onion, everything has some type of outside power to shape and mold it.

However another scholar, David Bartholomae, is more my style. Despite the fact that Bartholomae believes more in academic tradition and writing, while I believe in free and creative writing, he makes an excellent argument about outside influences. He says that what makes up a person is everything in their lives, ranging from race to class to education. Everything in life makes up the whole of the person.

Academic writing is important to learn and understand in a person’s life. It gives them a structure to make better points and organization in their writing. Knowing how to write academically will also help students to better analyze other works from other writers.  It’s this foundation and structure that is used to teach in most classrooms. But maybe it’s time for a change. Teachers need to start teaching and working with creative writing and with free writing.

Many teachers don’t use the creative writing approach in their classrooms at all. They don’t feel it to be necessary for students to really learn how to free write. But by teaching students to write freely and to write what they know, their creativity is being encouraged.  And like how Elbow feels about knowledge being with you when you are born, that’s also how creativity is. It’s already there in a person, but it just needs to be let out and not suppressed by the overpowerment of academic writing. Younger students do need to be taught the format of introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs, but the creative side should not be smothered.

Creative and free writing may seem like two different things, but they are often the same. Most free writing is writing a story or just clearing your head. Any form of free writing is creative. Some people, myself included, are able to write their thoughts better in journals or diaries, but when they are told to free write in a classroom setting they begin to panic. This is mainly due to lack of knowledge on how to free write. Whenever a paper is turned in in a classroom setting, the students try and write what they know the teacher wants to read. But in free and creative writing, students can, basically, be free and creative. The teacher doesn’t even have to read what the students write, but just the fact that the students are writing for themselves is fantastic and will help so much in opening their eyes to a more creative side of English. Creative and free writing are also amazing ways to simply clear your head. Just to write what you’re thinking and to write what you feel. Students should be able to express themselves in their writings. This needs to be available in all classroom settings. Everything around a person influences them in everything they do, and writing should be the same way.

Audra Varilek

ENG 319-023

Dr. Allen

WC: 1,546

Just For Me

“When Reginald was home with flu, uh-huh-huh,
The doctor knew just what to do-hoo.
He cured the infection
With one small injection
While Reginald uttered some interjections...

Hey! That smarts!
Ouch! That hurts!
Yow! That's not fair givin' a guy a shot down there!

Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.”

Simply enough…my love for English and for writing began with this easy to remember song from School House Rock. My entire childhood I knew that I either wanted to grow up and become an actress or a teacher. An actress seemed to be the norm for an adolescent girl with big dreams in a small town. But a teacher…well it runs in the family. English on the other hand was something that appealed to me with just the simple words of ‘interjections show excitement’ and ‘conjunction junction, what’s your function”. Throughout my life I had many terrible experiences with school and especially with English. One day I’d love it and the next day I’d hate it.

I used to love to dance and sing and be on stage and I used to love school. It wasn’t until middle school that I quit caring about everything I used to love. I no longer liked to be watched and I no longer cared to read. I used to make straight A’s but it was around this time that I simply quit caring. My grades dropped quickly.  My parents said that puberty kicked in and that I had become ‘too cool’ for grades. I had become ‘too cool’ for books, or homework or even my parent’s authority. When I reached 7^th grade I didn’t think it was possible, but I actually cared less about schooling. My 7^th grade English teacher was the one that brought me back to academia. Her name was Mrs. Ryder. She was new and young, but she made English interesting for me. She started the long process of re-kindling my love for English and for literature and for writing. Mrs. Ryder was later on named teacher of the year in Colorado in 2007.  She was the second step for me on my way to the wonderful world of English.

When I entered high school as a freshman I was thrilled because I was to be taking an English Honors class. We would be discussing Shakespeare, especially the comparisons between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, as well as covering one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird. I was excited and enthralled in the lessons and the books until the realization hit me that my teacher was the reincarnate of Hitler, but was also somehow rather boring unless she was yelling at me or somebody else in the class about something irrelevant. It was heart breaking for me that she ruined English once again. I always found books and writing in journals as a way to escape and English just always made sense to me, but this teacher trampled it all once again.

I soon stopped reading again…I hated being told what to read and I hated being forced to read something I didn’t want to. If I read at all it was books that I wanted to read on my own time by my own choice. When sophomore year rolled around I had become excellent at making things up about stories I had never read. It was a talent almost. I was scraping by with the bare minimum when it came to quizzes or tests over the books. I simply didn’t care anymore and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t force myself to care about my grades or anything of the sort involving school.

When my junior year began I’ll admit my excitement increased when I thought about the English teacher I was going to have. His name was Mr. Fridrich. I had heard wonderful things about him and I was hoping that he would not crush what was left of my love for English, but would instead renew that passion again. My hopes were thin, but they were present, which was something I hadn’t felt in many years. I’ll never forget that first day of class. No syllabus, no rules. He brought a bag of Hershey kisses to class and asked us questions. Questions like, ‘who had the worst job this summer’ or ‘who has the most embarrassing story to tell’ and the winner was given a Hershey kiss. For the first day of school, which is always rules and regulations, this class was out of the ordinary. It was different and exciting. At least that’s how I felt until the end of the period when Mr. Fridrich made the statement, “Everybody is starting off with an F in this class. If you want a grade, you’ll have to earn it.” That was one of the worst statements possible in my opinion at the time. Yet somehow I wasn’t panicked or scared, but I felt ready for a challenge. As the weeks passed I quickly realized that Mr. Fridrich was eccentric and random and completely crazy. It was great! He actually drew pictures on our graded papers. Often there were drawings of squirrels running into trees or jumping off of cliffs donning the tops and sides of my papers. Mr. Fridrich showed that we could have fun in class while still struggling with the dilemma of actually earning our grades.

Often Mr. Fridrich and I would pick on each other in class, not over anything mean or hurtful, but just over silly things like who had more power and why we should have certain assignments and not others. Every few weeks we had to turn in portfolios, but the trick was that each portfolio had to have a different theme that we created on our own. My favorite portfolio was one with the theme of fairy tales. This particular portfolio focused mainly on the books, The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men and Fallen Angels. I compared the three books with three different fairy tale characters. The Old Man and the Sea became the wicked witch from Snow White, Fallen Angels became Aladdin and Of Mice and Men became Alice in Wonderland. I put so much effort into this portfolio. It took me awhile to understand why, but I know now that it was because I chose something I absolutely love, fairy tales, and applied it to something I was really interested in, English. Mr. Fridrich was the complete and final turning point for me when it came to English. He showed me a whole new side to writing and reading. He became the best teacher I ever had, not because he was a complete screwball and not because he would draw pictures on our papers and not because he treated his students like equals, but because he cared. He knew the mentality of high school students and knew how to reach them on a different level. He knew how to connect with us. Mr. Fridrich, in a way, forced his students to succeed but he did it with a gentle push here and there.

This was the first year ever in my school history that I actually read all of the assigned books. I read stories ranging from The Great Gatsby to The Crucible. Mr. Fridrich even made reading responses entertaining. For The Crucible, we had to write a type of sermon in a similar style as the time period of the plot of The Crucible. We used the same word choice and when we read it aloud in class we even had to use the proper ‘priest’ voice. It was little assignments like this that once again showed me a much more amusing and exciting side of English. This class opened my eyes to the sort of talent that I could lay down on paper.

We did a creative writing unit during second semester. The papers we had to write ranged from a horror paper to sonnets to an autobiography. I love to write poetry so that was my absolute favorite part. In-between papers, we were allowed to write whatever we wanted, just as long as we were writing something. My friend and I each began a story. We were characters in each other’s stories and we used people from our lives as characters. My story got to be about 150 pages long before the year ended. I never wanted to stop writing when the bell rang for the end of class. I often continued with my writing into the next class period. It wasn’t until my freshmen year of college that I once again found that story in one of my old notebooks. I reread it and realized that I loved to free write. I loved to write on my own and for myself. It didn’t matter to me that nobody would probably ever read my story or that I would probably never finish it, but I didn’t care. I remembered how great it felt to simply just let the words flow from my brain to the end of my pencil and onto a clean sheet of paper that was there just for me.

Audra Varilek

ENG 319-023

Dr. Allen

Just For Me

“When Reginald was home with flu, uh-huh-huh,
The doctor knew just what to do-hoo.
He cured the infection
With one small injection
While Reginald uttered some interjections...

Hey! That smarts!
Ouch! That hurts!
Yow! That's not fair givin' a guy a shot down there!

Interjections (Hey!) show excitement (Yow!) or emotion (Ouch!).
They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point,
Or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong.”

Simply enough…my love for English and for writing began with this easy to remember song from School House Rock. My entire childhood I knew that I either wanted to grow up and become an actress or a teacher. An actress seemed to be the norm for an adolescent girl with big dreams in a small town. But a teacher…well it runs in the family. English on the other hand was something that appealed to me with just the simple words of ‘interjections show excitement’ and ‘conjunction junction, what’s your function”. Throughout my life I had many terrible experiences with school and especially with English. One day I’d love it and the next day I’d hate it.

 I used to make straight A’s but it was around this time that I simply quit caring. My grades dropped quickly.  My parents said that puberty kicked in and that I had become ‘too cool’ for grades. I had become ‘too cool’ for books, or homework or even my parent’s authority. When I reached 7^th grade I didn’t think it was possible, but I cared less about schooling. My 7^th grade English teacher was the one that brought me back. Her name was Mrs. Ryder. She was new and young, but she made English interesting for me. She started the long process of re-kindling my love for English and for literature and for writing. Mrs. Ryder was later on named teacher of the year in Colorado in 2007. 

When I entered high school as a freshman I was thrilled because I was to be taking an English Honors class. We would be discussing Shakespeare, especially the comparisons between Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, as well as covering one of my favorite books, To Kill a Mockingbird. I was excited and enthralled in the lessons and the books until the realization hit me that my teacher was the reincarnate of Hitler, but was also somehow rather boring unless she was yelling at me or somebody else in the class about something irrelevant. It was heart breaking for me that she ruined English once again. I always found books and writing in journals as a way to escape and English just always made sense to me, but this teacher trampled it all once again.

I soon stopped reading again…I hated being told what to read and I hated being forced to read something I didn’t want to. If I read at all it was books that I wanted to read on my own time by my own choice. When sophomore year rolled around I had become excellent at making things up about stories I had never read. I was scraping by with the bare minimum when it came to quizzes or tests over the books.

When my junior year began I’ll admit my excitement increased when I thought about the English teacher I was going to have. His name was Mr. Fridrich. I had heard wonderful things about him and I was hoping that he would not crush what was left of my love for English, but would instead renew that passion again. My hopes were thin, but they were present, which was something I hadn’t felt in many years. I’ll never forget that first day of class. No syllabus, no rules. He brought a bag of Hershey kisses to class and asked us questions. Questions like, ‘who had the worst job this summer’ or ‘who has the most embarrassing story to tell’ and the winner was given a Hershey kiss. For the first day of school, which is always rules and regulations, this class was out of the ordinary. At least that’s how I felt until the end of the period when Mr. Fridrich made the statement, “Everybody is starting off with an F in this class. If you want a grade, you’ll have to earn it.” That was one of the worst statements possible in my opinion at the time. Yet somehow I wasn’t panicked or scared, but I felt ready for a challenge. As the weeks passed I quickly realized that Mr. Fridrich was eccentric and random and completely crazy. It was great! He actually drew pictures on our graded papers. Often there were drawings of squirrels running into trees or jumping off of cliffs donning the tops and sides of my papers. Mr. Fridrich showed that we could have fun in class.

Often Mr. Fridrich and I would pick on each other in class, not over anything mean or hurtful, but just over silly things like who had more power and why we should have certain assignments and not others. Every few weeks we had to turn in portfolios, but the trick was that each portfolio had to have a different theme that we created on our own. My favorite portfolio was one with the theme of fairy tales. This particular portfolio focused mainly on the books, The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men and Fallen Angels. I compared the three books with three different fairy tale characters. The Old Man and the Sea became the wicked witch from Snow White, Fallen Angels became Aladdin and Of Mice and Men became Alice in Wonderland. I put so much effort into this portfolio. It took me awhile to understand why, but I know now that it was because I chose something I absolutely love, fairy tales, and applied it to something I was really interested in, English. Mr. Fridrich was the complete and final turning point for me when it came to English. He showed me a whole new side to writing and reading. He became the best teacher I ever had, not because he was a complete screwball and not because he would draw pictures on our papers and not because he treated his students like equals, but because he cared. He knew the mentality of high school students and knew how to reach them on a different level. Mr. Fridrich, in a way, forced his students to succeed but he did it with a gentle push here and there.

This was the first year ever in my school history that I actually read all of the assigned books.  Mr. Fridrich even made reading responses entertaining. For The Crucible, we had to write a type of sermon in a similar style as the time period of the plot of The Crucible. We used the same word choice and when we read it aloud in class we even had to use the proper ‘priest’ voice. It was little assignments like this that once again showed me a much more amusing and exciting side of English.

We did a creative writing unit during second semester. The papers we had to write ranged from a horror paper to sonnets to an autobiography. I love to write poetry so that was my absolute favorite part. In-between papers, we were allowed to write whatever we wanted, just as long as we were writing something.  I never wanted to stop writing when the bell rang for the end of class. I often continued with my writing into the next class period. I slowly realized that I loved to free write. I loved to write on my own and for myself. It didn’t matter to me that nobody would probably ever read my stories or that I would probably never finish it, but I didn’t care. I remembered how great it felt to simply just let the words flow from my brain to the end of my pencil and onto a clean sheet of paper that was there just for me.

Eng 319-023

Dr. Allen

Defining Voice

Voice…What Is It Good For

Voice in writing. Is it style or substance? Well if voice were substance then the opinions and the voice of the writer would not matter just as long as the argument had valid points and had a message. The message is important but without an opinion or a voice, whether it be humorous or depressing, the paper lacks feeling and emotion. The writer could use lots of big, scary words to sound big and important, but that is just word fluff to sound important and to intimidate others to believing that you actually know what you are talking about when, in all reality, you probably have no clue and no care about it at all. Without a real opinion there is nothing. Therefore the voice in writing would be style because voice is the right to express an opinion. Voice is what gives the paper its style. Without this style of voice, papers would sound bland and boring. The voice of any paper gives the paper its life, its heart. Without a heart, the paper simply does not live.

In Harry Frankfurt’s book On Truth, he brings up the opinion of a man named Spinoza and his opinion on love and what makes joy in a person’s life. Spinoza believes that joy and love come from outside and material items that make you happy. But no, real love is not from material items. Real love and happiness come from relationships that you create with other people. From friends to lovers. What if a friend or lover makes you unhappy for a brief amount of time? You’d still love them afterwards because of the loving relationship that you have. Real love is something special that is shared with others. Real love is there for you when you cry, when you hurt, when you are happy and when you are sad. Real love is not given but is felt. To protect your belongings from other people is safe but can also be selfish. Love is trust. You shouldn’t have to be selfish with your belongings. Don’t love someone based on what they give you materialistically, but what they give you emotionally.

When writing this imitation on what love is, I started to notice that despite my own heartbreaks in life, I still felt very strongly about love and what it means to me. The only thing I’ve truly believed in my entire life has been love and what it can do for a person. In Frankfurt’s On Truth, Spinoza makes a good argument about what love is to him, but based on the fact that I’m writing this paper in my voice and with my own style and my own opinions, I’m able to manipulate what he said and make it my own. My voice is my style is my opinion. Every person has different points of view and different opinions. That is what makes us human.

By rewriting Spinoza’s section on what love is I felt that I was not only stating my own opinions on love, but also making his wording and points in this section slightly more comprehensible. Voice is a representation of who you are and what you believe. Maybe my voice in my imitation was preachy or whiney about what love is to me, but that was not my intention. I’d hoped that my imitation would’ve left my audience with a good, loving feeling. Or maybe a realization that applies to a person’s own love life. The power of someone’s voice is truly amazing. The voice just needs to be brought out and shown because it is a representation of who you are and what you believe. Just like trust helps create love in your life, voice helps create a heart in your paper.

Variation of the Pattern: Muttering to himself that they could all go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it, he quickly went through the narrow alley of the Temple Bar.

Alternate Expressions: As he went quickly through the narrow alley of the Temple Bar, he muttered to himself that they could all go to hell for he was going to have a good night.

Imitation: The girl stood in the small room, cold from the fear of the dark and shaking with deep despair.\

Model: He went through the narrow alley of Temple Bar quickly, muttering to himself that they could all go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it.

Imitation: They stood outside on the crowded streets of New York, waiting for their ride which hadn't shown up when they had called.

Model: If one must worship a bully, it is better that he should be a policeman than a ganster.

Imitation: Since he gets so aggressive, it is best to relax him than to punish him.

Dr. Allen

English 319

Sep, 20^th

WC: 1,039

A wise ogre once said, “Ogres are like onions…layers. Onions have layers, ogres have layers, onions have layers. We both have layers.” This seemed like the best way to start off any paper about creative writing. How come you ask? Because it’s creative and because, yes, both ogres and onions have layers, but so do writers. They also both have outside influences pushing down on them and forming them to make them who they are.

Writers are made up of everything around them. The outside influences in our lives from friends, family, and just overall drama makes up who we are. It’s these types of influences that are being suppressed in writing. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I remember being given a picture of something simple and being told to write a story about it. Even though this small writing exercise still had the structure and rules of writing, we were able to write about anything we wanted involving that picture. As I grew up and entered middle school, we were taught the oh-so-generic style of writing of an introduction paragraph, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. No more creativity, no more free writing. Everything was the same. I was so used to this that by the time I reached my senior year in high school I had pretty much mastered the mind-numbing format. It was in this year that I took a creative writing class. Our first assignment…to write. Write about what? Anything. I was confused. I was always taught something solid and bland in writing papers, I wasn’t sure how to just write for myself. Just write. No topic, no discussion, no editing. Just write.

It was also in my senior year that I took AP English. I thought I’d have been able to do great in this class with the essays and the readings. I was wrong. My teacher, Mr. Frasier, hated the standard styles of writing. He would actually fail the students if they wrote papers based on traditional setup. It was such a shock when we all got our first papers back. Comments such as ‘where are you in this paper’ and ‘who is really writing this’ flooded the pages of our papers. This became my favorite class once I figured out what he really wanted us to do. Just write. Even on essays on books we had read he required us to put ourselves into the paper. This class opened my eyes to a brand new side of English.

One scholar, Peter Elbow, believes that this is the best way for students to learn to free write. He feels that students need to not be influenced by the teacher in their writing, but instead they need to connect to their inner selves as an individual to write. He says that students are born with knowledge and that it just needs to be released. Well I agree with Elbow in that free writing in very important in the classrooms. No interference from teachers about structure or topic is a magnificent way to force students to open up. I however strongly disagree with the lack of outside influences. Just like the onion, everything has some type of outside power to shape and mold it.

However another scholar, David Bartholomae, is more my style. Despite the fact that Bartholomae believes more in academic tradition and writing, while I believe in free and creative writing, he makes an excellent argument about outside influences. He says that what makes up a person is everything in their lives, ranging from race to class to education. Everything in life makes up the whole of the person.

Academic writing is important to learn and understand in a person’s life. It gives them a structure to make better points and organization in their writing. Knowing how to write academically will also help students to better analyze other works from other writers.  It’s this foundation and structure that is used to teach in most classrooms. But maybe it’s time for a change. Teachers need to start teaching and working with creative writing and with free writing.

Many teachers don’t use the creative writing approach in their classrooms at all. They don’t feel it to be necessary for students to really learn how to free write. But by teaching students to write freely and to write what they know, their creativity is being encouraged. Nobody can be taught to be creative. And like how Elbow feels about knowledge being with you when you are born, that’s also how creativity is. It’s already there in a person, but it just needs to be let out and not suppressed by the overpowerment of academic writing. Younger students do need to be taught the format of introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs, but the creative side should not be smothered. They need to be able to just write. Write about what they want and just let the thoughts flow.

            Creative and free writing may seem like two different things, but they are often the same. Most free writing is writing a story or just clearing your head. Any form of free writing is creative. Some people, myself included, are able to write their thoughts better in journals or diaries, but when they are told to free write in a classroom setting they begin to panic. This is mainly due to lack of knowledge on how to free write. Whenever a paper is turned in in a classroom setting, the students try and write what they know the teacher wants to read. But in free and creative writing, students can, basically, be free and creative. The teacher doesn’t even have to read what the students write, but just the fact that the students are writing for themselves is fantastic and will help so much in opening their eyes to a more creative side of English. Creative and free writing are also amazing ways to simply clear your head. Just to write what you’re thinking and to write what you feel. Students should be able to express themselves in their writings. This needs to be available in all classroom settings. Everything around a person influences them in everything they do, and writing should be the same way.

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