Okay let’s do this! We’re about halfway through the semester and I want to make sure you all have ample opportunity to practice writing in genres you’ll be asked to do in different classes.
This Work In Progress is meant to be messy. It’s meant to be like a draft, my interest is not in the finished product. This assignment is two-fold; I really want to redefine writing and shift away from the polished text-centric document that most of your professors expect and call “writing” to something that is more fluid and acknowledges all the points of labor that it takes for you to create that final submission piece. And of course the second part of this is just practicing the act of writing because we build fluency with practice.
And to quote Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs “But I am not outside this process. I am inside these repeatable practices. I am becoming something else. We are becoming something else. Which is why we need a ceremony.”
Consider this assignment a ceremony, a way to get to know yourself better. In Composition and Rhetoric we call it metacognition, being able to identify what you know.
This best done in Google Docs if you can, or any word processor that will allow you to add notes to what you’ve written. The content for this assignment will come again from an academic article of your choice. You can either use the article you already looked up on arxiv or pick a new one. I want you to then choose a section to “write” that you want to practice. Maybe you’ve been struggling with the Methods section on your lab reports and you want some practice with writing that segment. Try using the moves and steps that we have already checked out.
The metacognition part is that I want you to then make margin notes about places you’re struggling, or places that are you’re finding easy to write. Do you get into a flow? Does it all feel like pulling teeth? Where is it in your body? Are your shoulders tense? Are you remembering to breathe? We’re collecting data on your process that you will then have as something to look back to for your own personal reference.
Our ceremony is learning ourselves so that we can enter these academic spaces with more personal information that allows us to feel grounded regardless of what assignment comes your way.
