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Monday, October 04, 2010

Response to Classmate's Journal, Week 6

This comes from Randie:

After helping mentor a genre poetry class with editing and finding their signs, I found that adjusting to different people and different writing styles becomes an important aspect to teaching a writing intensive course. What helped the most with working each student, I believe, was opening the dialogue with the poem they are working on to find a specific element in the poem through such dialogue. Helping the students was quite similar to how we have discussed sign inventories in class, yet at, perhaps, a different level and perspective as many of the students were new to studying and understanding poetry. The signs I discussed with the students varied as some often jumped to interpretation while others named more than one sign to work with so I was then able to focus on several ways of approaching the mentoring process.


That is an interesting take on mentoring, and something I've struggled with in the writing process. Being a journalist for many years has been a struggle as I transitioned back into graduate school. My writing style has been straight forward for years, and it's a hard habit to break. Working with writers that have different strengths can be very helpful, but it is something that very painstaking. Writers have to be willing to change their style, but it is an important step in the writing process.

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