Writing Is Hard, And Other Things I Sort Of Know

For me, one of Macrorie's most striking realizations is the sheer difficulty of writing. He seldom comes outright to say it, but all of his examples of poor  creative writing display the same problem: fiction is as prone, if not more so, to the pitfalls on Engfish. Vague, stilted writing is everywhere in fiction, particularly in young writers searching for their unique voices. As a writer searching for my own voice, a solid 98% of what I write is Engfish. Not all of it is irreparable, and I am a much better editor than composer, but the act of composition is still largely an exercise in imitation.

The poem he referenced on page 125 reminds me of poetry I read, and wrote, in high school. It sounds like genuine emotions that the writer was struggling to express by using someone else's form; the author did not yet have the craft for originality, so s/he used a pre-existing form as a vehicle for authentic feeling and in doing so reduced those feelings to trite cliche.

In those passages of Macrorie's where he gets at this struggle, at what I think is the heart of his arguments, I can truly empathize with the students he writes about. It ties in beautifully with my own Capstone project, in fact, as I was working on the early pages of my novel draft as I worked on finishing Uptaught. It was painful. When I write I feel like I am unlearning clunky, outdated style with every sentence. Sometimes it takes me a page to find a tolerable vein in which to continue. Sometimes it takes until the final paragraphs. Writing is an excruciating practice for me, where the pride of composing a series of pages that say exactly what I mean just barely outweighs the incredible frustration of failing over and over to get even the most minute details to come across with any subtlety. It is a level of communication for which I was not trained and which I have struggled to master alone.

As for the book as a whole, I found its frustration with the university system to be a clarifying experience for many of my own frustrations but ultimately unhelpful as a guide towards better teaching. Macrorie's class structure was innovative for his time and clearly worked well, but it sounds like every other advanced composition class I've taken. Macrorie never seemed to explain how his system would benefit other writing classes and disciplines. My main (and really only) complaint about this book was that Macrorie seemed more interested in venting his anger at the system than in finding a multi-lateral solution, if one can even be found. He talks about his early text book attempt critically, recalling how he uses a half-baked system with no successful examples to defend his methodology, yet here he advocates for a system that shows success, but only in one field. He offers ideas, such as examining the assignment's constraints before blaming students for awful papers, that could easily be expanded, but the methodology he focuses on (having students write for themselves) is difficult to work into specified writing curriculum such as tech or P.R. writing. I feel like Macrorie has an excellent system who's full reach is underdeveloped in this book.

Other thoughts on Uptaught:
I don't know how I feel about the racism metaphors. I feel like no matter how horribly teachers treat students they will never approach the systematic rape of culture that was (and in some ways still is) racism in the U.S. Macrorie was stretching with this one.