Picture the following: I finish reading Brannon and Knoblauch’s “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response”. I am, to be quite honest, confused. Not on the content of the reading—in fact, I find myself agreeing with many of the points made within the article. I just felt that the article held unnecessary tension between the idea of the “Ideal Text” and what students had to say. Then, I flipped back to the front of the article to see that it was published in 1982, and everything made sense.

I think that I have been lucky so far in that most of the environments I have written in and worked with writers in encouraged the idea of focusing on higher-order concerns. I began my tutoring career with the idea that most of my job would be proofreading and helping writers edit their work line by line. In fact, I was worried. I knew my way around the page, but if you asked me to explain what a comma splice was, I probably would not be able to (I am proud to admit that I can do that now, I think—please don’t quiz me). Even until recently, I would make sure to review Purdue OWL if I saw I had a student coming in for APA. I quickly learned, though, that “fixing” the student’s writing was not the point of tutoring. I was taught to look past the grammar and that which we called a lower order concern. Instead, I was trained to look at the paper as a whole. This made sense. I could sort out what a student meant even if they misplaced a period or used a sentence fragment, but if I could not understand what their point was after looking through the entire piece, something had gone wrong.

Many of my most fruitful tutoring sessions involved me, at some point, asking that student, “So what?”. I found that students have a habit of just giving one third of the full story. Whether that was the evidence, the conclusion, or the idea that linked the two. I’d love to give an example. So: think of a cow. Then think of milk. Lactose-intolerance. Allergies. Trees. Hamster balls. How did I get there? My close friend is, unfortunately, allergic to dairy and most types of nature, amongst a few dozen other things. We often joke that if we ever wanted to have a picnic, we’d have to roll her around in a protective barrier—much like a hamster. If I just gave you a cow and a hamster ball, though, you’d be confused as to how we got from one point to another. That middle part was what many of my students seemed to forget: that their ideas came from something, and that we, as readers, don’t get an all-inclusive tour to their brain. I love it when it clicks for students that we actually want to see their thought process, and that they’re not just spitting out what we want to hear.

Another thing I tend to do with students is to ask them what they want to say—then tell them to say it in the least academic way possible. I find so many of my students trying to put on a voice that isn’t theirs. They think there is only one way to write, and if they can’t figure out how to do it that way, they’re stuck. Something changes, though, when they say it in their words. It comes out fluently. Easily. All there’s left to do is tell them, “And that’s exactly what you write.”

It makes sense, then, that our job when working with students is to take what they want to say and help them say it. That is our “Ideal Text”. Reading Brannon and Knoblauch’s work, though, it feels as if they are pushing an inherent tension between a student’s work and their ideal text. It seemed like they had this idea of all teachers aiming for their students’ work to look like The Great Classics. This made sense, of course, when you put it into perspective that this article was written in the 80’s—as we’ve learned, many of these ideas that we implement in classrooms today were just popping up at the time. I’m sure there are still classrooms that focus on this antiquated type of writing, and I’m sure many of us lived through some of them, but I’m glad to see that now, there is less focus on just “avoiding errors” and more on teaching students to write what they need to.

If I were to take this article and reframe it for today’s standards, I would say that there absolutely should be an Ideal Text: the one in which the students’ work is not only in their voice, but in the best version of it. That might mean foregoing typical conventions. It might mean the opposite: doing a deep dive into the norms for a certain type of writing. It almost definitely means at least some rounds of drafting and revision.

I just think I’m lucky that I’ve been able to experience this way of learning to write.

I survived my sickness guys! Cursed myself two weeks ago to be sick last week. Hope last class went well, but now we get two great presentations in one day!! Yipee!

Anyways. Back to how I normally do blogs.

“If You’re Struggling to Write, Lead with Voice” is up first

“I always thought I should sound different: smarter, more complex, more restrained.” I get like this sometimes. Whenever I hear “write in your voice” I don’t struggle, I do whatever I want. But I do try to sound different for academic writing. Not too different, it still is me. Still gonna be a yap. But I would never do “gonna”, “yap”, “yall”, or my usual way of using “like” before going into an example or further explain my past statement. Like what I did with this sentence. Academic is my voice still but way more professional. I have wondered about sounding “smarter” or “more complex” for my creative writing, which might be why I hate having to write poetry. I don’t write like that. Can’t be something I am not, and I certainly am not someone who writes all serious. I like fun and whimsy, and I will choose that every chance I get. But there is always pressure to be “better”, “smarter”, and “more complex” when making work that gets shown to others. You don’t want to be embarrassed by your peers thinking that, somehow, your writing vocab amounts to your smartness. It don’t, but that is what we believe.

“The idea of one “authentic voice” also doesn’t make sense to me in terms of a writer’s process and life. If a writer happens upon that so-called authentic voice, does that mean the previous voices were false or impostors?” I disagree with this in the sense that I would argue my blog posts are my authentic voice but my academic writing isn’t. It isn’t false, or an imposter, more that it is a forced voice. I wouldn’t have that writing style or that voice if it wasn’t expected of me. If I had the choice, I would write like this blog academically. I think it is fun. I have a great time explaining things like this, I enjoy it. It is way more my authentic voice than my research papers. Not saying my academic self is false or an imposter in any way, it just isn’t as me as me could be. It is a version of me, but it isn’t one I would use if I had a choice. I feel like I am talking in a circle but also that I didn’t explain this well, so. Hope you got what I mean but I am gonna move on.

“Bakhtin also believed in and wrote a lot about the fact that a piece of writing could have “many voices” even when written by a single author; he coined the term heteroglossia to describe this phenomenon.” I feel like this is a no duh moment, but I could be wrong. In academic writing, you have to use quotes, thus there are other voices. Even here, I am using quotes, other voices.
When telling a story, you usually have other voices.
For example:
My family watched Toy Story 5 this weekend. There was a scene where Duke Caboom and Bo Peep leave Woody to help the toys at Bonnie’s.
Bo Peep goes, “Girls night!” while leaving with Duke Caboom.
Angel commented, “Hey, it is like Boys Lunch!” (Something I do weekly with my friends Anne and Virgil).
That was more quotes as other voices, but you can also have characters have internal thoughts and then their speaking lines be in different styles. Many ways to have different voices in writing. You could also try to copy other people’s styles or paraphrase their ideas. So many ways to have more than one voice, it is kinda a no duh for me.

The ads on this page keep moving the words around and it is bothering me. I hate when the words on my screen be moving without my say.

Anyway, “I named that voice Pain Woman.” Interesting. I never considered our different voices having a name. I mean it makes some sense, you have different identities you can give those different identities different names. But, I feel like the different parts of me are all so similar I don’t really have a need to name them something different. I also find it interesting that the pain gets a whole voice and name. I mean we all have periods of time with different emotion. Usually I think of those periods by the event that happened. Cause we feel emotions all the time, it is easier to think of the event and then remember the feelings felt during that time period. But I guess if you feel pain for the rest of your life you would get a pain voice instead of having that one event to tie memories and voice together. I just never considered my different styles being so different they get a name, but it makes sense that different identities have different personalities and styles.

“I have some confidence in this odd choice only because I have heard myself teaching over a number of years, and this voice has been honed as my body and voice and expression developed in conversation with other writers.” If you have this many different voices, good on you. I truly do not think my voices are all that different to get different names and to feel differently about them. How many times can I write different.
Do I hate the academic voice? Not really. I don’t even give it thought. It just happens. I know the assignment I have to give and that voice just happens. This is what I prefer to write in, and I find the blog voice more fun, but I wouldn’t really name the two other than academic and casual voice. They can kinda flow into each other, as my acadmic voice doesn’t too crazy with the vocab. I would use the terms here too, cause we gotta write blogs on the concepts, so. I don’t really see the different voices I have in the creative way she does. I just be writing, she is doing a little too much to me but good for her. She found herself and that’s nice.

“I believe that that toolbox—all of a writer’s go-to words and phrases and comfortable sentence constructions—is what many writers have meant when they talk about ‘authentic voice.'” Yo. This is why I quote as I go, cause look at that. I basically said the same thing.

This is getting a little too crazy and wild for me. I get the point, but this author going crazy style with what voice is. Just a summarized comment about how this is going overall, just a bit too much.

“It bothers me that many people feel alienated from this essential element of expression, from writing as a way to think and have conversations with our past and present selves.” Only think about writing to myself when I am doing one of those write to future you things. I write for others to hear me yapping. Share my thoughts and feelings on things, tell my story, share my ideas.

“Brenda Ueland writes of this act of discovery in her classic book If You Want to Write: ‘At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.'” Me writing my blogs

I feel like the rest was just repeating stuff that was either mentioned before in the article or stuff I said myself so I didn’t really pull any more quotes. Basically, I agree with a lot of it but this author reaaaaallly likes voices and writing about voices. A fellow yapper it seems. Maybe I am just a hater.

Now “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response”

“… an assumption that its author intended to convey some meaning and made the choices most likely to convey the meaning”. People have said some deep things about my work sometimes, and ya know what so true. Did I mean it that way? no. No I did not. But thank you for thinking I had these deep meanings and messages. I will take it. If you find some deeper meanings, reasonings, messages, or whatevers, power to you. Never intended but yeah sure we can go with I meant it that way. I always find this concept funny, that authors always mean their writing to be so deep. Nah man. I just be writing.

Discourse mention! Love discourse.

“But whatever the reason for our grant authority, what we are conceding is the author’s right to make statements in exactly the way they are made in order to say exactly what the writer wishes to say”. I mean that is the hope. I don’t always get to write however I want. But so true, yes, I do be wishing to write these words, and I be writing them, in this order.

“This claim can be so powerful that we will tolerate writing from that author which appears to be unusually difficult, even obscure or down-right confusing” I have never done this. Only confusing stuff I read is for classes. I also have never uped my writing to be confusing. Is this a thing to do. Write so much you can truly do whatever and thus you can write confusing on purpose because you reached that level in the writing community.
Do you guys give me authority to do that or… (just kidding I would never. I like writing like this)
But this is a cool thing we can do for each other. Play around with how we know each other and give authority to each other.

“not rewriting from the author”. Wrong. I think that last author did too much and I would not want to work to read from that again.
For confusing things I read for class, I wonder why in the world academic langauge be like that. Just write. Just say what you mean. Why we gotta be confusing. Write things simply please.
The amount of stuff I read where ten pages in they go “basically____” and summarize their nonsense in a sentence that did indeed explain all of the garbo I just read so well I got it all. So, why not just do that. Why all this nonsense. Just do that good one sentence that you do anyway. All these fancy words and examples for who. For what.

“Hence, the teacher more often than the student determines what the writing will be about, the form it will take, and the criteria that will determine its success”. So true. I have always hated when teachers go “don’t write to me” because more often than not, they are the ones giving a grade on the writing. My first 100 paged paper reached 100 pages cause the teacher was confused on my subject. We did get to choose whatever discourse community we wanted, but she didn’t understand gaming at all, so it took 100 pages to get an understanding.
It is also places you submit work too as well. You pick what to write within what they give you. Do we ever really write for ourselves then, if there are always all these rules to get things accepted? Even these blogs have to be about the readings. There is always some sort of rule.

“Denying students control of what they want to say must surely reduce incentive and also, presumably, the likelihood of improvement”. Okay, I was hating a bit for the whole rules thing. But I do like when I am given a prompt and can choose something within that prompt. I like having a check that I am on the right track, that I fit that prompt. Yes, this is in a way, controlling what we write. But, consider that some people are weirdos and would write about some nonsense. Like if we gave kids the choice to write about whatever, first off how many would even write. Secondly, how many would write some stupid gen alpha garbo. Not all writing ideas are that great guys. Some thoughts are meant to be thoughts. College kids I feel like are fine to write whatever, cause it is college you are paying to do your nonsense. But kids need guidance. Might kill their creative spirit but oh well, their creative spirit scares me nowadays. Okay I know that was pro silencing voices, but truly the kids are scary.

I love the random “We asked students to write an essay on the Lindbergh kindnapping trial” after the intro was about writers getting authority. What do students know about a random kidnapping, hello. What the heck is this subject coming from. Out of all the topics to choose…

See now I do not know enough about trials cause I thought the emotion was correct. I thought you would want to pull at the jury’s emotions. Seen that in TV shows. Guess it is wrong. But, funny enough, I did read it as satire. Maybe cause I am a silly guy I read John as the same. I just imagined some class clown doing this whole big speech thing in a classroom set up like a court, with some students playing the jury. Cause I have done things like this and it wasn’t a kidnapping, it was some silly crime we had to write/act out, so people had FUN. It was FUN. I thought John was being a silly fun guy.

So I was right and wrong. Right about the emotion…. maybe still wrong on if he was being silly? Idk what is going on if I am honest but I like doing fake court stuff it is fun.

Got it in the next sentence, know the context or goal before you judge the piece.

I feel like we don’t need to put this all on the teacher. Yes, have conversations about what the student meant to say. Good. But that can be done with the peer review stuff. Have students actually read other students work by getting them to write the main idea of the writing, say if it was effective, what worked or what didn’t work, stuff like that. I always figured stuff out from peer reviews like that. Mostly, how little people actually read my work as they just wanted to get the assignment done. But, those who really read it, I got to see how they interpreted my work.
Problem is that everyone interprets things differently. I mean we see that with these blogs all the time. So, keep in mind that people will read things differently. If the main idea is similar enough, the writing did its job.

Okay got to the part in the reading (page 6) where it was giving questions, I did a similar thing. See. I know what I am doing. I also said to ask questions.

Oh by the way I stopped doing quotes cause the article wasn’t copying and pasting right and I didn’t feel like typing all that stuff out so I am summarizing things. You’re welcome. Less to read. Still a yap from me though. But I think I got the point. Don’t need to comment on much else as the rest was more examples of understanding what the writer meant to say by talking to the reader, then implementing possible feedback to get things to match up. We haven’t done too much of that. Maybe in thesis class we can do some of this. I mean, whenever we talk to each other I do get new ideas. I get new ideas on the readings when I read your blogs. So, I guess the point of this is how important feedback is. Make sure people know what your writing is about in some way, get others to see your work, cause your stuff might be a bit confusing. Not wrong, just needs to be workshoped to be understood. That is the way we should think about our writing.

It is why I love egg time, sharing out our different ideas. What we noticed. Gets us to know if people understood our blogs but also to see how the readings sparked so many different ideas. I am always interested in seeing how people read things differently. Fascinating to me.

This was good to note as someone who wants to be a professor, cause I have had feedback before that didn’t make sense to me as I felt I did that task. But now I see the importance of talking things out and making sure we communicate our intentions of our writing.

Today was special. We didn’t have a lot of students, but we still had a good experience. We talked about what is an unexpected thing that has brought you peace or joy recently? To my surprise, everyone talked about how fall came in so quickly. We all shared our fall experiences, and what fall meant to us.

My love for fall was cold weather “Sweater Weather”. The enjoyment of crawling up to watch “The Goonies” while drinking hot chocolate. I enjoyed listening to everyone’s love for fall experiences as well.

We passed the egg and covered the two readings: Murray and Bell. as we made shout outs to each other.

We also did free writing, which I always enjoy.

We watched a video “The Danger of a Single Story: In what ways are stories and narratives related to empathy and bias.

We also talked about the presentations coming up. C.J. will be the first presenter

In reading Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom, I found an immediate connection to Donald Murray’s article “Idea that writing should be taught as a process rather than a product”.

One question in this article sparked my interest. “Can an esoteric theory such as queer theory really have an impact on daily interactions with first year writing students? Before this question could be answered, students must have a clear understanding of what Queer Theory means.

As I read the article, I found it to be important to the pedagogical writing process. Creating a framework to assist educators to produce a step by step journey of writing as a process rather than a product. It allows students to think, research, and understand the meaning of what they’re writing about. Generating ideas, brainstorming, building background knowledge, planning and organizing, draft writing, revising, editing and proofreading, and reflecting.

As an educator, I think these practices enhances the pedagogical strategies of scaffolding each step in the writing process, by using organizers, charts, and other instructional strategies that can help students connect and organize their thoughts.

Jonathan Alexander an Michelle Gibson’s writes that their goal was to create a curriculum that challenged students to think critically about how personal stories are told, how complex issues are represented, and how compelling lives are mediated through the process of writing about dramatic, traumatic, and transformative experiences, and how a master writers explores difficult issues through narration and exposition, and how, in the process of writing, the writer comes to empowering insights about herself, the nature of family, and the construction of identities in the interaction between the two.

To approach this goal, they incorporated Dorothy Allison’s “Bastard Out of Carolina, as a primary text for both discussion and writing assignments. I strongly believe that this approach can open up students minds to critical thinking. The idea of this was to show dramatic trauma, using a narrator’s voice. I think this is an excellent teaching approach. I think it will allow students to think and write about their own personal experiences to practice writing exposition so readers can understand their story.

I believe this is a great strategy to introduce Queer Theory in the writing process to challenge students to think critically how personal stories are told about themselves, family issues, and their own identities.

This article connects to my own personal experience. I started a girls club in the after school program. We talked about hygiene, responsibilities, and boys. I had a total of eight girls. To my surprise, six out of the eight girls were all gay. I would have never knew. Because I formed a personal group, we became very close and developed a sense of trust. As the girls became more comfortable with me and with one another, they began to open up and share their personal stories and experiences. Some learned to accept their sexual identity, while the others were still hiding. Some shared why and how they chose to be gay. Some were molested, some were engaged through their own community and upbringing. The list goes on. I asked them if their parents knew. Some parents knew, and some suspected. I didn’t know how to handle this situation.

This article has given me a greater insight. It helped me develop a better understanding of how to teach the writing process of “Queer Theory” .

Quick Disclaimer: For everyone who saw the blog post about me pirating articles, no you didn’t.

And if you really insist that you saw it—

it was AI—

not me confusing my blogs.

Now go on about your business.

I actually wanted to start with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” When I first started teaching, in the heat of the 2024 election race, I actually used to play this video for my students. I did a few things with this video:

1. First off I used it as an introduction to our narrative unit. My students were expected to write college essays. I used this video in an attempt to shift the impression the students had of college applications. While the resume and transcript tell one story, they have an entire life of stories that affected those two documents. I tried stressing the importance of the college essay to counter any obstacles their transcript or resume might create. “Oh, you failed a class, well you lost a loved one the month prior.” “Oh, you’ve never had a job, well you had to take care of your siblings.” “Oh, you never participated in a club, well you had to work to support yourself because your parents kicked you out.” I think this video did a good job segueing into these conversations.
2. I also juxtaposed this video with twitter posts, and a video of a certain P*dophile, claiming that immigrants were eating dogs and cats. Using the context of “The Danger of a Single Story,” students were able to see the real world implications of what Ngozi Adichie was saying.

All this to say, I have a history with this video.

It was pretty refreshing to watch it again and I liked the side-by-side of it and the “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” article by Jonathan Alexander & Michelle Gibson.

While I try to be a very inclusive teacher, I never considered the difference between inclusion and criticality. While I do try to pull diverse text, like All Boys Aren’t Blue; however, I didn’t think about acknowledging how the excerpts are impacted by the unique perspective of the author.

It’s the same thing with the way the students are learning to write. Some students have certain mannerisms, or use certain vocabulary, that are frowned upon by Engfish (Callback ftw.)

I think, going forward, I’m going to have to reanalyze the way that I include LGBTQIA+ literature in the curriculum, especially since were going into memoir/college essays again.

Until next time, Dear Reader.

I found this week’s read, Queer Composition(s): Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom by Jonathan Alexander and Michelle Gibson, a very interesting read.

I’d like to start out by restating what was said in one part of this article: Why do we accept and validate identity rather than try to uncover how identities were constructed?

There’s this kind of notion that says to educators and students that our personal stories aren’t any good in an academic context. In other words, saying they don’t matter. Or they have nothing to do with this.

By why are we really avoiding doing the more difficult thing?

Instead of overlooking these personal experiences, we should try to understand what our identities (& how they were constructed) say about social structures and how it manifests in our writing. It definitely adds to the transgressive approach to pedagogy as we explored when reading bell hooks last week.

Which brings me to this quote: “a pedagogy that uses the vantage point of the social margin,” said by Malinowitz (pg. 13).

By looking outside borders of this kind of pedagogy field that slyly advocates for the protection of the status quo, we can instead gain a deeper understanding by taking a step back and looking at everything that constructed these almost oppressive frameworks. No matter how radical that might sound. In fact, our stories matter so much, so much so that it makes us even better writers.

“…students are asked to consider lesbian/gay experience in the context of heterosexist and homophobic American culture.”

This is so important and is something being touched upon in my identity of racial and ethnic identity class too. To put it simply, there is a reason why everything exists and moves the way it does (gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, etc.), and a lot of those explanations are hidden behind what is told is appropriate to talk about (especially in the classroom). And as for something I found myself agreeing with:

”…it is better to acknowledge and grapple with the political within the pedagogical than risk teaching from unaware and uniformed ideological biases.” (pg. 1).

P.s. I enjoyed how this article very clearly taught me the timeline of how queer theory came to exist within English studies. It gives me a gauge of how far the field has come, but also how much more there’s left to do. (Also, did this make sense?)

adamari 10/1/2026

The (kind of nonsensical outtakes): Which is so obvious but so overlooked at the same time. Like, of course exploring our identity and understanding that we must always continue to do so because it’s fluid and ever changing with whatever happens in our personal lives is important. Gaining that understanding in turn makes us better writers. That’s why so many of our worlds respected writers were known to have journals (franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, etc. ). It’s us processing ourselves to then come to the table with a clearer mind of why what we’re writing about matters and how we are going to uniquely approach it.

(oh! Which sort of connects to the single story podcast. These writers weren’t magically great writers, they explored their 4dness.)

(happy October!)