I am in my class right now, modeling writing while my research writing students write. The English department asks students in the course to write their own definition of research writing which evolves over the course of the semester, becoming more detailed and nuanced, including references to what they learned in class and read.
Rather than engage in other writing of my own, I decided I would contemplate what I am asking them to do - create a personal definition of research writing which references all I have learned in the various courses on writing that have been part of my education.
Students are often amazed when I tell them I struggled with writing when I was their age.
Creative writing was never a problem. Tell me to write a poem, a story, a personal essay, and I could always jump right into drafting. Research writing though... that was another story. (see what I did there?) I could do the reading, find quotes, paraphrase, summarize, but then putting it all together was where I came to a screeching halt. Sometimes literally. I am sure my mother and husband can both recollect times when I knew exactly what I wanted to say, or had some idea anyway, but could not get that from my brain to paper or screen.
It was easier when I approached it creatively, but that would sometimes result in an instructor handing back an initial draft with a B or C in bold red ink at the top, telling me that I needed to write more professionally, more academically, that research was not the place for this voice, this style.
Respectfully, I disagree, my instructors of yore.
While there is certainly a time and place for me to pull out the academic voice buried deep within my head, there is always room for my creative, weird self to come through. After all, this is my writing, right? It should sound like it comes from me.
My students quickly learn that I am weird and that I embrace my quirkiness and put it on full display in and out of the classroom.
And there was the root of my initial struggles with research writing. Teachers, instructors, were asking me to deny myself, to take what for me is an intricate weaving, with all the messy parts on the back, and translate it into a linear structure which is anathema to me. Nothing about my brain is linear. Ask me to write a concept map of what is going on in my head and I will fill every blank part of the page with tiny writing, lines connecting, overlapping, twisting to show how thoughts emerge from odd leaps in logic.
Granted, I did have instructors who embraced my weird, quirky self and marveled at what my brain produced. It was a poetry professor who talked to me about the leaps of logic she would see on the page which were unique and wonderful, like no one else's writing. I have Laura to thank for allowing me to write my Philosophy of Teaching as a poem rather than an essay. Now a colleague, she still remembers that and we have talked about that choice we both made to allow me to express myself the way my brain works.
What works for me? An amalgamation of the creative and the academic, finding joy in data and delving into the rhetorical significance within an interview or in autoethnography.
I am not saying that I see research writing as poetry - or perhaps I am, though in a metaphorical rather than literal sense. There is a delicate dance in research writing, in weaving together my thoughts and their thoughts and new observations and data, of discovery and sharing what so fascinates me. It does not have to be dry and dull, like many of my students expect at the start of the semester.
The most effective research writing expresses passion for answering a burning question. It wedges its way into an existing conversation and yells out, "but what if....?" Research writing has the potential to change the world.
When I became a teacher, that was my goal. I wanted to change the world. I wanted to open my students' minds to their potential to be kind, thoughtful, critical thinkers who could assess information and ask those burning questions. This has not changed. If anything, it has grown stronger, sharpened to a fine pencil point which I can use to sketch out a future unlike the world we now live in.
Research writing and poetry. Creativity and quantitative data. They can coexist on the page. They can take the weird quirkiness of my brain and form a new portion of that ongoing conversation which invites you in to see the world as I do and leap through logic with me.
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