What was most interesting to me was the discussion about the types of grass roots organizations created by black women to fight for their place in this new society while keeping from directly confronting the male power structure. It is important to note that the tricks that were learned during slavery, through necessity, became successful frameworks for the fight to gain gender equality in a similarly oppressive male power structure. It is very obvious through the use of pronouns that the male writers of the Harlem Renaissance gave little credence to the good works of their female counterparts and it causes one to wonder if , because “the masses of Negro men are engaged in menial occupations throughout the working day. Their baffled and suppressed desires to determine their economic life are manifested in overbearing domination at home” (Lewis 73,) they take the opportunity to exercise the only power they feel they possess over their women and children. This economic quagmire that the black male is being held in causes him to become the white society’s tool in keeping his female counterpart down.

The exoticization of black women by the media and white culture creates a tentative atmosphere for female writers of the time, because if they write about sexuality then they reinforce the criticism of the homogenous white society. They are in a sense jacketed by the stereotypes that draw a crude caricature and because of this they are unable to write the prose they may have been capable of. The male patriarchs of the Harlem Renaissance allowed these stereotypes to be perpetuated through their apparent lack of support and coverage of the female writers of the time. Locke refers to the colleges in the south that have all black student bodies and about their professors, but the interesting part of the passage to me is that he refers to a female ex-classmate as the wife of someone rather than saying her name or stating her credentials and in this treatment he asserts that more important than her work in academics is her relation to a man. This system allows for slaves to be free but keeps the female portion of the black population enslaved to the patriarchal structure that is perpetuated by the former male slaves.

I believe that reading works from accomplished writers and getting a feel for the style they use and the literary devices they employ to convey their message has a positive effect on student writing. I explain my position on this matter more thoroughly in my literacy autobiography. I also think that using the concept of process over product in thinking about their drafts is important in freshman writing, because students need to understand that a paper can almost always be improved, either subtly or drastically, and knowing this will hopefully sell students on the drafting process. I take a lot of my conceptual framework from Donald Murray’s article “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” I plan to use the 10 implications as guiding points for how I grade my student’s work. I will try to make the students see writing as a process, through doing group work, analyzing their peers work, and having their work critiqued. This process engages the student because they are involved in making assertions about what constitutes good writing or bad writing and they are forced to thoroughly interrogate the effectiveness of their paper. I believe that by using close reading and extensive reading of outside sources early on in the class, students will have a stronger grasp for what to look for when critiquing peer’s papers or analyzing articles. Duke University has an interesting methodology for close reading that is very clearly stated. I believe the use of this source will allow students to have a framework for how to accomplish this type of critical reading. I plan to use this type of article; because it covers content that I want the student to understand and it is an article that could be looked at critically as a class and in small groups. I have looked at several explanations of the peer writing process but the article by Gloria A. Neubert and Sally J. McNelis discusses important strategies for effective peer critiques and shows many examples of bad and good commentary. I believe that laying the framework for a critical course early, through the use of close readings, focus on process, peer critique, and use of a focus on critical reading of text, will help my students actively engage the subject of composition and become better readers, writers, and critical thinkers.

My father is a big reader and when I would visit him in the summers I would read copious amounts of science fiction and fantasy novels. This experience allowed me to transcend my surroundings and become deeply involved in the narratives. As a result my appetite for reading grew and I began to increase my vocabulary and understand the structures of these narratives where the science fiction books began to seem formulaic; the seeds of criticism began to form in my young mind. I began to form an opinion about what good writing is through my experiences with it.

The first long story I tried to write had ideas that were loosely grafted from Daredevil, a Marvel comic book. My protagonist was the villain Bulls eye who could make any object into a deadly projectile and never missed his target when he threw these projectiles. I remember the story was pretty violent and fast paced but it lacked coherence. I was in fourth grade when I attempted this grand narrative. I wrote the paper using different color text for different characters and different chapters. I also experimented with different fonts. This was my first long story and my first experiences with the modern computer. I thought the resulting story was total crap, I was always a tough critic, but in retrospect it is very post modern, using fractured narrative patterns, experimenting with standard formatting and having no moral to take away and no happy endings.

Middle school was not extremely helpful in my process to become a better writer because I disliked the books we were forced to read and I was an angst and hate filled youth who didn’t want to cooperate or listen to instructions. I only had two years of middle school which past by quickly and I read books that I thought were good, Steinbeck, Hesse, Hemmingway, and Faulkner. There was something about the way that these giants wrote that was intimidating and fascinating at the same time. At the time I lacked the vocabulary and knowledge to truly understand the deeper aspects of these novels. I did learn that the narrative patterns and character development was far different in these novels and the subject matter they employed was entrenched in reality not fantasy.

In High School I had several good English teachers and I learned how to write more coherently and how to use support for my assertions more effectively. I learned how to read a text more carefully and how to write the five paragraph essay to tackle almost any problem. They taught me how to write an introduction that included the main points of the body paragraphs that were to follow and how to write a specific thesis. They also taught me how to support the thesis with the body paragraphs that were internally supported by concrete detail drawn from the text I was making an assertion about.

After High School I joined the Air Force and learned how to fix test, measurement, and diagnostic equipment and how to fire an M-16. This period of time was not very conducive to my growth as a writer, but I was allowed after a year or so to take some college classes at the local University of Maryland annex. I was introduced to a college composition class at the age of 19 and found it to be rather droll. I remember writing a report, argument, analysis, and research paper in this class. I wrote a theory about why there was so much road kill on the island of Guam. I remember everyone in the class did peer critiques and people thought my topic was funny and the writing was good. I continued to take classes when I went to Germany and learned under a professor who had studied with Edward Said in New York while doing her doctorates. There were many discussions regarding what academic writing should look and sound like. I don’t know how much I gained from the classes I took abroad. They seemed more like repetition of the same information that I had learned in High School and from books I had read.

When I came to Texas Tech I was excited to be learning about how to write better and read more critically, but many of my undergraduate courses seemed to be an extension of the same processes I had experienced up to this point. I took a course with Dr. Cristobal Silva and was introduced to close reading as a means to unpack meaning inside of a passage. This process helped me a great deal in my critical writing because it gave me another tool to approach a text with. This process helped me to think more critically and to look closer at what the authors of texts are doing rather than looking at surface level metaphor usage or something like it. In my senior seminar at Tech I took a big step in becoming a better writer. My professor did not have any structure to the course. He pretty much introduced us students to certain texts that he enjoyed and said “I’d like you to write something.” He gave no specifics and this put the burden of what to write about back on my shoulders. This forced me to be creative and got me out of the rigmarole of answering prompts presented by a professor in a five paragraph essay with a given word count.

I am now taking graduate level classes that are structured but also have a great deal of personal freedom in terms of what the student should write about. I have learned how to cite sources differently than I had become accustomed to. I used to quote and then explain the quotes context, meaning and how it supported my thesis or main point. I have since seen that many academics do not use long quotations; rather they will rephrase some of the information presented by the author and then maybe include a sentence long quote. I am learning to cut out filler in my papers so that I do not waste my reader’s time with unnecessary explanations. I am constantly learning something new to improve my writing style and I expect this trend to continue, because even the best writers can improve. Literacy is not something that you just learn and are done with. It is a rigorous process that a person continues to refine their writing in the hopes of approaching perfection.

I think the way that we should utilize process in composition classes is to instruct students to analyze their own methodology and give them information about a variety of prewriting approaches. After the students have been informed about these different methods they should be given a list of thesis prompts to answer using both, their old method and the new concepts. I believe that the approach that students take towards writing has to be an individual one, and more importantly one that works for them.