I am so excited yipee yay Adamari is presenting! (no hate to the rest of you at all, I just had soooo many classes with her that is why I am excited and why I get to call her a rat. She is not a rat, she is amazing, I am so happy to see another one of her presentations, they are always so well done)

Imma do “The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (and Why We Need to Resist) first cause I opened the other link and got an ad for Cowgirl by Isa Beniston and it reminded of me mummy joe, so I will save the fun for later.

“I am busier than ever visiting high schools and talking to teachers about teaching”. I know it is the whole point of the readings we are doing, but man oh man do so many people not know how to teach writing. Obviously, we are getting all the papers about that, so it isn’t a great statement to say no one knows how to teach writing, but it surely seems to be a big issue. I never thought about how poor some teach writing before this class. The whole red pen scare didn’t usually sacre me as I love getting feedback. Unless, like those in the Rat Summer know, it says “See me after class”. That is scary. But yeah, lots of people not knowing how to teach writing it seems, which is crazy cause people do indeed be teaching writing without really knowing how.

“But don’t worry, I am not about to rehash diatribes against the five-paragraph essay. In fact, I do not believe formulaic writing is the actual villain in this classroom drama”. Interesting take. I would say teaching writing like a formula is a problem, especially when everyone has different expectations of the formula. I think writing is too subjective to be standardized and put into a formula, so I am interested in seeing where the drama is. Espeically when we mentioned hating the five paragraph essay and how it was just made for easier grading.

“A CD is any kind of specific detail such as facts, evidence, examples, proofs, quotations or paraphrase, or plot references. The commentary is the writer’s analysis, interpretation, insight, explication, personal reaction, and so forth. The ratio of 1 CD to 2 CMs must always be maintained in the writing students produce so that they internalize this basic pattern. Body paragraphs must have at least two chunks and be a minimum of 100 words. Introductions and conclusions must be 40+ words, with the introduction containing at least three sentences and a thesis somewhere in the first paragraph, while conclusions must contain all commentary and provide a finished feeling to the essay”. Okay so this is a very interesting set up. I think this is fine for high school, getting them used to writing. This is a similar structure to some English 1030 classes I see at Kean. I still feel like having such a formula will set them up for failure later on. If they go into academic writing that is. Good set up for now, writing does usually follow this sort of set up. Topic sentence, quote, explain quote, and then concluding sentence. I think someone later on will need to tell them to break this formula though, as college professors do now by telling students to break the five paragrah format. I am pretty sure this is just a standard thing to teach, I don’t think anyone teaches a different way to do a paragraph for high schoolers.
Later on, there would need to be the idea of a synthesis introduced. Your topic sentence is the theme of the paragrah, quote one from author one on the idea, explain, quote two from a different author on that topic, say how they connect, quote three from author three, say how it connects, maybe a “and so on” but usaully it is a conversation between three authors. College/academic writing usually wants a conversation between multiple authors in a single paragraph WHILE you also say your ideas. It gets way more complicated than this, which is why teaching writing is so hard. There are way too many unique settings at play.
I also feel like those intro and conclusion ideas are mid. Intros are always thought of to be so short but I would argue they should be a decent size. You gotta introduce your paper along with the ideas presented in the paper, if we are to do the writer thing and assume that the reader ahs no idea what we are talking about. This sets things up later for context/backgrounds of research papers where the intro is the abstract that is a summary of the entire paper. Conclusions, first of all I hate that word. Nothing is ever really concluded. But they should be some sort of takeaway or to do. They shouldn’t conclude, shouldn’t be a finish. I would argue they should leave the reader with a task to do or thoughts to have, it isn’t a story that wraps up with a finished feeling. There should be more.
I am yapping far too much, sorry Adamari, especially with this probably being for high schoolers. But I fear that the set ups are fine, the issue is no one telling them later on how things have to advance. Everyone has to start somewhere, no need to do reading synthesis at high school unless required and no need to do a research paper at the college level, but I would argue the set up isn’t the issue. It is that we hold the high school set up as if it sets us up for life, but this set up would not pass for a college/academic paper (depending on the professor).

“Prewriting activities, for instance bubble and spider diagrams, serve as
graphic organizers for getting students started in setting up a main idea and finding topic sentences and concrete details”. Okay I might just be hating today, but not the spider (monster) outline. When people say prewriting activity I do have a certain idea in mind, I know we discussed that basically everything you do before writing could count as prewriting. But I feel like brainstorming/organization should be in its own category. I feel like prewriting should be some sort of prompt or thinking activity that gets students to be able to do the brainstorming/organization task. Perhaps I am wrong. But I would classify this stuff as something else.

“Rubrics reinforce the basic format by having students check for proper ratios
between CDs and CMs; having them count the requisite number of words, sentences, and paragraphs; and making sure all parts fit the pattern”. Ain’t no way. Sure, I will check that you explain the quote in some way. Don’t just put in a random quote with no set up or explanation. But checking the word, sentence, and paragraph count is a bit much. Let them write what they feel. What, am I gonna be throwing a fit if there is one word less. Too much nonsense. I am a big hater of this it seems.

“Teachers can simply refer to this rubric in responding to student writing, making the task of evaluation much simpler and uniform and less time consuming”. No. Bad. We literally just talked about how we should hear from the students about what direction they wanted to go in and judge the writing based on that. We should, sorry teachers, but we should get away from grading quicker just to grade quicker and move on with lives. Teach the fricken kids man. I get how hard it is to check 20+ essays, especially as a yapper. Dr. Sisler called me out day one in the spring, some of yall were there for that. Trust me, I know how the English department loves/hates to see me coming. I get how much work it is. But it is work that is worth it. Students got stuff to say, let them say it. Help them say it. Teach them how to say it. Funneling things down to an easier grading system does not seem like the way to teach writing, it seems like the way to help teachers have less work to do. This quicker grading thing will only hurt them in the long run, proof from all of us.

“With teachers and students agreeing on what counts most in an essay, teachers do not have to spend a lot of time writing terminal comments to justify a grade, which is often the purpose of our teacherly remarks on student work”. I am a hater I am a hater. I am having issues with like every sentence. I think grading them on word count or if they have the right amount of CMs is so silly. I get this is a quicker rubric, to simply see if they have the right number of stuff in the right places, but it feels so icky to me. It feels like learning just to help out the teacher and not learning to help the student write better. Learning to fit this format that college professors won’t use. Icky. Nasty. Big hater of this article I miss the Cowgirl ad.

“Even though Schaffer admits her method is formulaic, she claims that teachers should not worry that students will become dependent on the formula. Yet she does not explain why this is the case. She says, ‘The formulaic nature of this unit does not bother us because students may leave it once they understand it. Some
students leave the format early in the process; others choose not to leave it at all because they like the structure and say it helps them know what to do with a blank page'”. I dislike this person. Stupid to think students won’t become dependent on a formula. Do you tell them they can leave? Do you leave things open for them to explore? Do students really leave this. Be honest. Cause I have a feeling they won’t. I know sooooo many people who want to get things right and would never leave this format if they know the teachers are looking for it/expecting it. You think someone will be brave enough to step away from this? What if the teacher grades them worse because they aren’t following the format? I have been in classes with people who ask 50 questions about an assignment because they want to get it right, aka want to do what the professor wants. But the professor would go “I don’t have the answers, it is up to YOU to pick the topic. Whatever you want to write about”. And people still freak out. Ain’t no way the good students who could step away would be the ones who step away. The trouble makers or silly kids might do it to see what will happen or because they don’t care enough to “get things right”. But this is such a dumb idea. No student will willingly step away. We are all proof of that. I was doing five paragraphs till a professor told me just to write, and the yapper was released. Unfortunate for the English department. But it needed to be done. Booo formats. Boooooo

“This possible dependency is a point I will return to later; for now, I want to emphasize that the virtue of the Schaffer approach is that students acquire a rudimentary schema for what can pass as an acceptable academic expository essay, an accomplishment not to be trivialized”. The vocab in this sentence… We randomly locked in hello. Language got crazy there for a second.

“Students first need to develop ‘writing fluency,’ she argued, not simply learn how to fill out a form”. I am no longer a hater. I have been healed. I hope the rest of the paper is more good ideas. Boooo filling out a form. Booooo

“Teachers, while acknowledging that students must move beyond the Schaffer method if they are to continue improving, were nevertheless left wondering
what to do next. Unfortunately, there is no next in the Schaffer approach.” Now. I hope we learned our lesson. This is why I take quotes as I go. Was I right or was I right. They would not be set for life and have issues with what is next. This is why formats suck. People get stuck. We literally said we should ask the students what their goal was and see if the paper did that. Boom. No formula there. This paper making me a big hater I am so sorry Adamari for my ratness. This paper angers me.

“They must also learn to make choices about genre, content, structure, organization, and style; and they must learn to hone their judgments about the effects of the choices they make as writers”. As “boring” as it seems, this is why I loved English 1030 and helped tutor it many times. Same essays every time, but I loved seeing students learn different essay styles. It is so important to know one type of writing works for that one time of writing. I think too many times students get into writing course and think all the writing will be the same. No, you sometimes will get asked to write personal stories or more research type papers, or maybe traditional essays. Soooo many different writing styles and eventually, if you go far enough in English, you gotta make the call on what to do. For a research paper, will you give historical context or a background on the event. It is a call you have to make based on your research. How much of your topic do you have to explain? How many methods will our research paper have? Research papers have a lot of stuff up to the research being done. Creative writing also has sooo many aspects up to the writer. Maybe with essays you have more to say than four paragraphs, there was too many things in the prompt to get all the thoughts out in that limited space. There is no real formula for writing. It is only really if you met the goal you wanted to complete. Did the reader get what you wanted them to out of your writing?

“Formulaic writing of the kind Schaffer advocates forces premature closure on complicated interpretive issues and stifles ongoing exploration”. So true, it does limit exploration. It is like that saying of giving a man a fish instead of teaching him how to fish. There is a limit on thinking for themselves with these formulas, it is just filling in the main parts to get the paper done. So, is it even real learning? It seems to just be learning the formula and nothing else.

“Structure, we are telling them, has no ‘inherent relationship to ideas, since just about any idea can be stuffed into the same form'”. Yo. Bring in more of these other people I love what they be saying. So true. They are just learning that any idea can be meshed into the same one formula. They just got to ask what their peers are doing to see that everyone is fitting their ideas into one mold. These other people be so smart.

“What is the inevitable result when students never get beyond the formula and cling to it as a life raft from which they never want to disembark?” What I said about students not wanting to leave but in a more creative way. Is this article just bashing on this one scholar, cause I think that is so funny. It could have been writing from the other perspective, using those smart people to be like “here is what we should do in high school” instead of showing how wrong this one person is. I hope Schaffer died before this article came out cause if not that is crazy. Someone just tearing your teaching idea apart in a paper. Yipes. Adamari best never do that to me. Unless I die first then she can post whatever she wants on how awful my work was. But being alive when someone disagrees with your stuff this much would be crazy. Beefing in the academic space… I hope to never have to live that. Beef with my work in silence, without me knowing, cause this is so much “this person had terrible ideas”. I would rather you somehow contact me first, give me a chance to better myself/my work, than I wake up one day to some article going over how my ideas were terrible. Truly a yipes moment. Disagree in a more chill way than blasting me in an article man.

“These are the practices where teachers make all of the important decisions, and students simply find material to satisfy what they eventually realize is “what the teacher wants'”. Guys. I am so smart. I said this too. Earlier, but with “what the professor wants” cause I think about college more than high school. Sorry Zach to discount you in a way, but I don’t teach high school. Haven’t been there in a minute. But look at me go, thinking where the article is going. Lovely.

“A familiar argument in support of formulaic writing is that many struggling writers really need a simple format to follow so that they can achieve some immediate success in their academic writing. There is some merit to this argument”. I laugh every time an article is like this. “Insert idea here”… “This idea is wrong” or “This idea isn’t fully correct”. It is so funny. It is the way it is said too. Every time I see it in such a fun way. “some merit”. When you hate something but there is some truth to it, so you gotta agree.

“the same material that has bored them semester after semester and which they perceive has no relevance to their lives”. Yipes. Getting a little depressing there dang. I mean I guess doing the same formula would seem like no relevance to someone’s life, but like that is still a bit far no. Maybe I just love writing too much and can always find some joy. Every new writing prompt gives me new ideas. But yeah doing the same thing is indeed boring. Love changing things up.

“By solely using the formulaic approach to writing, the real winners will be the students who always win anyway.” Now what student is winning. What does that even mean. What kind of student “wins”? Is this like, getting a good grade? Is that a win? Is learning the idea a win? What does this mean. I never once considered myself a winning student, I never even heard of it said this way. I guess this is a better way of saying a good student, as we don’t wanna really say students are bad (even though there are some “bad” kids out there). But winning students is crazy, what is a win.

“teachers are under increasing pressure to produce students who can write
essays that pass proficiency exams and who can score sufficiently high enough on standardized tests to save schools, and entire school districts, public embarrassment and possible censure and, in some cases, to garner monetary reward.” HELLO? Public embarrasment!? What is going on. I remember my fourth grade teacher was crying over our journals and some other rando teacher had to come in and explain that our teacher can’t teach us for the rest of the day as she was so upset we ALL failed the standardized test. It was a really crazy wild day. She was one of my favorite teachers too, one that my martial arts students had like ten years later and went “Petersen! We saw your Netflix work in class today!” First of all, ain’t no way I ever did a Netflix assignment. I had a Netflix account in high school, I remember cause I watched Stranger Things and Voltron. So. I most definetly did some sort of favorite show assignment not Netflix. But, point is, that teacher loved my work so much she held on to it for like ten years. So, at some point, the work WAS good, but standardized testing is stupid. I guess it is important to know if we are in some sort of education crisis, but clearly it is dumb. Some kids just are bad test takers. Or the tests aren’t as standardized as they might think. You do good work in one way but it won’t hold up in the stupid tests if they do some other random form, which is why formula writing isn’t the best form. But standardized testing being this much pressure on students on teachers is crazy when everyone hates it and sees the harm they do. Dumb, get rid of it.

“The formulaic approach would make their writing sound mechanical and
simpleminded”. Look at that, having a voice would be important there. Having a unique style would help with not being so mechanical. Everything is connected guys.

Okay no more comments on that, I think I said all that needed to be said at the moment (this is already long and we got Cowgirl to get to).

Idk if yall saw the same ad for “How Remix Culture Informs Student Writing & Creativity” so I will show you so I don’t seem crazy and you can enjoy.

This is what I was talking about, finally, after all that yapping you find out what I was talking about. It brings me much joy. I hope the article is the same.

Here is mummy joe, what the art style remined me of. Check out mummy joe, great stuff.

ANYWAY, back to real content.

“Let’s get something out of the way: pretty much anything you or your students are making is a remix.” We are off to a great start. I agree. Even this blog is a remix. I am taking the quotes and yapping on them. I added in mummy joe. My memories. Other things I don’t know it cause it ain’t finished. I think we have done remix projects before, I know Dr. Friend and Professor Ali love them. Taking past work and reviving it. It is such a fun idea I love it. Lets get INTO IT

“Writing is also an important, accessible way that young people are remixing today: from fan fiction based on their favorite author’s worlds to retelling of a popular story from a new perspective—on a vlog, podcast, or on paper—remixing is, intentionally or not, part of the process.” I am invested. Yes. Fan fiction is so remix. It is a made world with the authors spin on it. Oh how I loved I picked this article second. Adamari you genius. I can’t think of one work that is truly orignial. We all take bits and pieces from stuff in our writing. We are social creatures after all. We “copy” what we love without realizing and put it into our work. How many times has Adamari seen/heard the rat behavior presentation. Oh I turned that thing into everything I could, to the point a friend joked I should just make a rat bible. We remix everything all the time. Yall see those Tik Toks on people having quotes from media in their daily conversations? Like trendy sayings or stuff they can’t get out of their head, they bring it up? We remixing all the time of the things we experience and love, I truly love this idea and stand by it all the way. I am unoriginal and I know it. So sad, I know. If I am not original, the Siege, who can be. But it is true. You basically all took a photo of my all time famous quote “I do whatever I want”. No clue how that will be remixed, but it will be now. The Spider-man meme from Alyssa is always in the remix somehow. We love to see it.

Not the history lesson on what a remix is. I wanna skip but I probably shouldn’t, I never know what will be my next best quote.

“In the halcyon days of social networking—the late 1990s and early 2000s—remix was something of a fringe culture: individuals with the savvy and time to utilize digital technologies could share in UseNet groups”. I am far too young bro what. What is a UseNet.

“To be clear, remixing was popular in music and film production long before the Internet, and musicians often release unofficial “mixtapes” today, even if they are never offered on physical media (let alone a cassette).” I know what a cassette tape is, okay not that young. I am cultured in that way. I also think it is funny to say that remixes happened before the internet. I just now realized with this that I listen to remixes all the time. I like mixes of songs, I think sometimes they are better than the original. Sometimes it sucks cause then I do hear the orignial but want the remixed version. I listen to a lot of girl pop remixes so if you hate the pop genre do not ask for my remixes. I actually found some nice Kpop mixes but haven’t found a decent Sabrina Carpenter mix yet. I know I know so sad. But I love her songs too much that the remix gotta be godly for me to listen to it. Otherwise I get too bothered by the slight imperfections of the random YouTuber.

Poor Adamari reading this for content and getting a random CJ yap. Anyways back to content.
Sorry back to not content. “A hip-hop mixtape often finds a rapper sharing rhymes over popular beats already on commercial airwaves.” Anxiety song, you all know that or no. That song pissed me off so much. I wanted the orignial every single time. “Somebody That I Used to Know”. Anxiety, bad remix. You disagree begone. I can’t with you. Original or nothing for this and I stand by it hardcore. I just said I usually like remixes but I take it back for that one song.

“The soul classics I grew up with, the furry-footed denizens of Middle Earth that I read about as an adolescent,” the what now. The what. What in the world begining sentence…
Another Tik Tok thing of going “we are running out of original sentences” when hearing something crazy. How did we get to Middle Earth, what just happened. Where did I get transported to. What does “furry-footed denizens” mean.

DO NOT LOOK THAT UP OMG. Do. Not. Look. That. Up. Save yourselves. Furry foot porn showed up for me. So, I am still clueless on what that sentence means but for all of us I am MOVING ON. I pray yall read this TED Talk first and got the warning to not look it up.

But also there was one photo in the mist of furry content of the Star Wars Ewoks, so. Maybe it meant that…

Anyways now that I am terrified for the rest of this article. “While one refrain of remix culture is that it is allows underdog success stories (anybody can attract an audience), large media conglomerates, from Sony to DreamWorks to Random House, are also extraordinarily savvy at remixing media”. This reminds me of that terrible Wish movie. Disney loves including their characters in other projects of theirs, like the seven dwarves being remixed into this movie.

“Remixing is a two-way street. As part of the business-as-usual approach to marketing, it can reinforce traditional, problematic portrayals of women, people of color, and LGBTQI individuals.” Oh, are we about to lock in? Randomly getting into deep lore.

“Remix can turn troubling messages to offer analysis and reinterpretation. It can also involve primary sources that may be offensive and triggering for some audiences—a fraught process in terms of the images, sounds, language, and ideas conveyed.” Not exactly the deep dive I thought we were going to get. But yes, remixes can help turn terrible messages around. It might make things easier to digest or help people analyze harmful content. But it can sometimes be harmful for minorities. I know when a Batman story has a character that has a history of being white be a different race, the internet throws a fit. However, soooo many comic book people are white. Remixing the story is helpful in getting more representation, but also puts visbility spotlight on minories and then the news can get flooded with hate on the characters being remixed.

“Looking at the Tumblr community’s remixes of Hermione from the “Harry Potter” series as a black character (long before a black actress was cast in the forthcoming Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) illustrates how individuals are allowed to see themselves in remixes.” oooh not the Harry Potter. Now, see, I did just say how remixing can be helpful, but I forgot to mention we do need to be careful when remixing. For example, if we want to add more diverse characters to a white cast, maybe consider making the main character switch things up. Far too many times the female in the group also becomes the person of color, and the white male stays that. A bit of a problem. If too many side characters get swapped, then we get the story changing in some interesting ways. Like making Snape from Harry Potter become a person of color changes how we see his childhood bullying. Instead of it just being he was an awkward kid, now it can be seen as racism, which adds a different layer to the story, as it might add the idea that Harry’s dad was a racist. (This is all stuff I have seen people saying online by the way, feel free to disagree or say I am crazy for saying these things, I didn’t come up with this Snape being a person of color is a bad idea. People pointed out how things changes the story a bit and I am just pointing out how things could get complicated the more you switch stuff up). Gotta be careful with the remixing as it changes the story in interesting ways.

“Likewise, online fan fiction and video remixes of Star Wars: The Force Awakens casting rebel pilot Poe and reformed storm trooper Finn in a romantic relationship offer a counter-narrative to the heteronormative assumptions most viewers make of the film. Remixing can be a liberatory act.” Oh how I love remixing things to be queer. One of my favorite things, queer ships that totally should exist but don’t. I got a whole list but not now. Yap for another time.

“Written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton and its nearly all-black and Latino cast illustrates contemporary messages that ours is a nation built by (and for) immigrants. Meanwhile, the music makes numerous nods to hip-hop history and its own founding fathers.” For this I would say it is still very important to teach how history was, as I saw some people on social media forgetting/finding out the founding fathers were white. Lets not forget how racist history was now guys. Lock in.

Anyway, yippe yay you reached the end of my yap! Hope you didn’t accidentally traumatize yourself during the second article like I did! My search history is messed up now. But yay so excited to talk about these ideas in class!!

So this is like 40 pages… Yeah I am gonna limit my yap guys. I will be reading but instead of pointing out every single quote I like Imma save it for the really special ones this time. Maybe it was less of a yap this time, I don’t know yet I didn’t read/write it yet. We shall see what happens.

“As we lay out in this chapter, there is reason to believe that when people transform their feelings and thoughts about personally upsetting experiences into language, their physical and mental health often improve.” Not it taking three pages to finally get something that makes me go “oh that is why we are reading this”. The before was so much medical terms I kept checking to see if I was reading the right thing, cause nothing was mentioning writing, English, reading, or language till now.
But this paper gotta do a lot of convincing cause I think this is an iffy idea. I guess maybe afterwards the event is better on the mind? But when currently writing out the trauma it never makes me feel like my mental health improved. Sometimes the writing it out actually made things get worse as the event causing stress increased because of the writing. It depends on many factors what counts as mental health improvement.

“However, an increasing number of studies indicate that having people write about traumas can result in healthy improvements in social, psychological, behavioral, and biological measures”. Biological? Hello? Do I want to know what that even means. I get how psychologically it improves your health, thus your social life or behaviors improve, but biological? How in the world does that even happen man.

“By the mid 1980s, investigators started to notice that upheavals that were kept secret were more likely to result in health problems than those that could be spoken about more openly. For example, individuals who were victims of violence and who had kept this experience silent were significantly more likely to have adverse health effects than those who openly talked with others (Pennebaker & Susman, 1988).” Now see, here we get into a whole other issue. How can people speak out about certain things when society silences them? Women don’t report abuse for many reasons. Maybe it isn’t safe to do so, maybe they know there is a chance they won’t be heard, maybe they know there is a chance nothing will get done and things will be worse for them. It is important to note that when people are silent things don’t work out as well for them, but there are sooooo many factors people are silent. Might even be as simple as they don’t have anyone to tell or don’t think about telling these stories. But that is a whole thing about society being set up in some evil ways.

“Even though a large number of participants report crying or being deeply upset by
the experience, the overwhelming majority report that the writing experience was valuable and meaningful in their lives.” Me. If Alyssa makes us do some deep stuff I may cry, so even though it is her topic she better not. She makes us do some deep stuff things are gonna get real and I kinda want a chill Thursday. Love yall, but not enough to do a therapy session in the middle of class.

“He also found that longer intervals between writing sessions produced larger overall effect sizes, and that males benefited more from writing than did females.” This reminds me on how society expresses men to hold in emotions more and then that YouTube video where the woman goes “and who set that system up?”. Cause truly why do men tell other men to hold in emotions to the point where they get more out of deep writing. Let those emotions out men, let them out.

“Self reports also suggest that writing about upsetting experiences, although painful in the days of writing, produces long-term improvements in mood and indicators of well-being compared to controls. Although some studies have failed to find clear mood or self-reported distress effects, Smyth’s (1998) meta-analysis on written disclosure studies indicates that, in general, writing about emotional topics is associated with significant reductions in distress.” Real. This does seem like a painful thing to be doing. Also, not sure how I feel about all this self-report stuff. People be liars and I think about how people may think they are doing good but they lying to themselves. I want some more evidence other than all this self-report stuff.

“As researchers, we assume that, say, the diagnosis of a lifethreatening disease is the most important issue for a person to write about in a cancer-related study. However, for many, this can be secondary to a cheating husband, an abusive parent, or some other trauma that may have occurred years earlier”. HELLO?? Are people good. If I get asked to write about trauma, I will bring up the thing I am currently dealing with, if there is one. Like the diagnosis, I would bring up that, before going into the other nonsense. That is about me, my stress, my trauma, forget the other garbo. But me right now does not have some sort of cancer so I would indeed write about my mother or my father. My mother being a jerk to me or my father losing his leg in a stupid way. Those are the traumas I talk about, my go to being to hate on my mom cause the dad thing was suuuuper scary to go through. But like, ignoring your disease to vent about a cheating husband is wild to me. Forget that man. Rude rat. I was gonna note with the job loss example I was like “no duh people hate losing their job” and then it mentioned kids and stuff and I was like “…. oh right. People get married and have kids”. I do not be thinking about that. So it is wild of me to be thinking about some cheating man, but also to be thinking about kids, even though both are understandable. It would make sense to have concerns about loved ones in your life. Me causally forgetting how bad it can be for people to lose their jobs.

“provide sufficiently open instructions to allow people to deal with whatever
important topics they want to write about.” I do not know how to feel about this. I do hate prompts in general. I get why people need them, to bounce off ideas to start writing. But truly sometimes I got nothing. When Dr. Z asks us to write and then asks who wants to answer, I am like 90% sure every time I didn’t answer I had nothing. I wrote down the prompt and went something like “…. I do not even have a response for this”. I feel the same with the picture check in. Every single time those photos don’t really speak to me other than being pretty or something. I am making up some random connection every time cause they do not speak to me. Do I like writing? Yes, I can always come up with my own yapping. Clearly. But for some reason prompts just lock me and I just think and think and think about the prompt with nothing coming to mind. So if it was just a “write about your traumas” I can go OFF. A generic prompt would help me for this case. However, my not knowing how to feel about this despite my hate for prompts is that I would probably say a lot of stuff but not go too deep. I think a prompt that asks for a feeling, as much as I HATE when prompts want us to get a specific feeling, would probably get more out of people. Generalizing this cause who wants to get deep right off the bat. Asking more deep questions would get more lore out of people, thus making it worth it. For if it stays at surface level, it might not be all too helpful.

“In another study, students were asked to write about traumas in the standard way”. There is a standard way to write about traumas? Since when. How does one write about a trauma standardly.

“Similarly, in an unpublished project by Lori Stone (2002), students were asked to write about their thoughts and feelings about the September 11 attacks.” Usually I do not factor in the year of things but oh my gods. Hello. We getting crazy in this article. I mean I figured when the paper said “for two decades” it was old but bringing in a 2002 year study talking about 9/11…
And this is why dates are important cause jeez.

“Most studies comparing writing alone to talking either into a tape recorder (Esterling, et al., 1994) or to a therapist in a one-way interaction (Murray, Lamnin, & Carver, 1989; Donnelly & Murray, 1991) find comparable biological, mood, and cognitive effects”. I know I said I would pick important quotes but this sounds so fun. It is like all the old shows/films or shows/films set in the 80s or something where a character goes around talking into a tape recorder. That is so fun. Just yapping to yourself in a tape device. I would not yap about trauma though, that seems like a “yap about ghosts or murders in the town while you investigate things” type of activity. Though, there is also 13 Reasons Why so. What do I know about tape recordings.

“Rather, reading or discussing one’s traumas in a group format after writing may pose unexpected problems. Clearly, additional research is needed to help understand this process.” Not this 40 pages paper telling me more research needs to be done. You doing all this yapping and more research hasn’t been done yet? Also, yes. It is more stressful to yap to a group about your issues. People like to vent and keep things quiet. They need to get their thoughts out, clearly as the paper already discussed it is not good to hold things in. But telling random people your deep lore is a not fun activity.

“One possibility is that writing by hand is slower and encourages individuals to process their thoughts and feelings more deeply.” I agree. As a yapper, I hate writing by hand. I like the feel of both typing and writing, but writing takes so long. Also, while I do tend to keep my papers, hand writing stuff gets put away in folders that may not be seen for a looong time. I bookmark most if not all my writings on the computer, so they are easier to access. Better to revisit and revise if needed. I like typing more for organization and speed, but hand writing has its charm.

“In both cases, we found that people talked with one another at very high rates in the first 2-3 weeks. By the 4th week, however, talking rates were extremely low”. The timing gotta be mad low nowadays. I feel like we see so much now that we are always talking about the next bad thing and never really giving any bad moment its time to “shine?” Shine is probably a terrible word to use, but my point is we move very fast now. Does anyone take any time to process anything?

“However, if another person disagrees with their thoughts and feelings about the movie, the participants are more biologically around on a second screening – even though they are watching the movie alone.” This paper is starting to lose me so bad. What in the world are we talking about right now. I get we are now yapping about how great it is to yap to others but when in the world did movies get like this. “biologically around”. What in the world does that even mean. Do I not know what biologically means? I felt like I did but the more this paper brings it up the more I question my sanity. I truly am so lost. This movie example did not do it for me I am so confused on what this even means. What does it mean to be biologically around even if you are alone. What does that mean. Do people biologically watch movies? Clearly I am doing movies wrong cause what.

“Some people who don’t tell others about an upsetting experience may never think about the event and others do” Now how do we even know this stuff. How do you get people to talk about something they do not think about. If they don’t think about it, wouldn’t they not know to mention it, thus they wouldn’t mention they aren’t thinking about a thing they aren’t mentioning? Maybe I am getting too tired for the second half of this paper but I feel like I entered the Twilight Zone.

“The answer is no.” Brother. I can’t with this paper. All this yap to go “no” every now and then is crazy. I mean, so true. Sometimes your thoughts turn up with nothing. But it keeps happening and like are we even saying anything anymore. So much stuff to get rid of all the yapping to say “no”. So much back and forth with this paper I am losing it. I am like “oh okay yes I am following along” just for it to go “no”.

“suggested that once an individual attempts to translate a picture into words, it changes the memory of the picture. Most experiences are like pictures”. Already lost. We gotta stop with these examples man. What do you mean changes the memory of the picture. Do we not look at pictures to put them into words? Why we memorizing. And then it just moves on. We keep bringing in these exampls to think I get it, I don’t but the paper just moves on.

“The problem of capturing an experience with language is comparable to the engineering difficulty of defining an analog signal using digital technology”. Brother, now you KNOW I do not know what in the world you are talking about. Hello. What are these examples. Who is this paper for. Is this an inside joke I don’t get? I thought when giving examples, the examples are for people to better understand the topic. What engineer is reading this. What random niche inside joke did I just read? I mean maybe this is the point, I am to not understand the example. As someone who does not engineer, oh yeah it surley is hard to define an analog signal only using digital technology, hardest thing ever guys. I thought analog signals would be helpful with computers but maybe I am thinking of the wrong digital technology. Maybe other technology is better.

So. Reading the next lines. I was most definetly wrong on what I thought that line meant. I thought digital as in computer. Did digital mean finger. What is going ON in this paper bro. I for sure thought someone would be like “no CJ, you did understand the paper. Stop stressing”. But… did digital mean finger guys…. Cause … I most definitely did not get that example if it did indeed mean finger.

Okay moving on from that section cause I got that we need to label emotions better, but the examples are so confusing for no reason.

“Individuals who use very few negative emotion words or who use a very high rate of them are the ones most likely to remain sick after writing, compared with those who use a moderate number of negative emotion words.” I feel like we gotta factor in more stuff. Do these people have the vast vocab to use all these different emotions? Cause I know of the basic emotions, I wouldn’t be able to get too into it. I feel like being better equipped with terms might change results when writing out your feelings. Also, how do we know the levels of sickness? The paper keeps mentioning health, but who got doctor seeing money. Do we factor that in, the availability to see a doctor? Consider other things going on in the person’s life, other stress factors? I feel like there are too many variables with this sort of thing.

“Although most therapists would agree with the importance of shifting perspectives, the difficulty for a researcher is in devising a way to track this shift.” I feel like all of this was super hard to track, as so much of it was based on what the person said about themselves. But what do I know. I mean if you got the time you could see how the writing shifts with time, if the emotional words used get more positive or negative. That could be one way to track things.

“Specifically, the more that people oscillated in their use of 1st person singular pronouns (I, me, my) and all other personal pronouns (e.g., we, you, she, they), the more people’s health improved”. How in the world did people write in different point of views. How do you not yap in first person. Those some creative people not gonna lie. Being able to transform a lore drop to a different point of view must take mad skills.

“Be cautious in interpreting these findings”. This paper keeps saying things and then being like “jk ignore all that”. Hello. What are we doing. I am trying to learn here and every time I go “got it” it is a prank.

“We still don’t know for whom it works best, when it should be used, or when other techniques should be used in its place.” Crazy thing to say after all this. Overall this article was saying a lot of something and nothing at the same time. Kept presenting all this data or questions to go “there isn’t enough research” or that the study proved no difference between the data sets.

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.

Yep. I spoke it into happening. Monday night I was feeling like a cold COULD be coming, but I was like “nah… it won’t..”

It did. It sure did. Tuesday is usually my day off, which is great! So great!
Cause that is when I plan to do homework!
Guess who still went over the page limit despite being sick and wanting to be done with homework!

Today, well not today anymore it is 2 am as I write this, Wednesday was now my “writing the paper and making the presentation” day. I skipped chamber meeting and Guitar’s class cause I was sick. I couldn’t keep my head up.
Found out hours later I could work laying down. So many hours later. Like at 10 pm when I started at 4pm.
I also apparently did half the notes and didn’t read the other half the article Tuesday, so. I had to make this a huge work day.
And honestly, I have been up and rocking since. But, laying down. So. Who knows if I will actually be healed to give this presentation or if I will forget all the great stuff I feverishly thought up at 2 am. Cause right now I think what I have is great, but watch. Tomorrow I am going to look at all this and go “…. what in the world was this guy on…”

Dayquil. Powerful stuff man. Laying down? Do it guys. Cause I LOCKED IN once I gave up on sitting up.

Bring me back to Monday when I was functional.

Bring me back to last Thursday when I jokingly said “you guys are never going to see me again”. Oh those were the days.

(Wash your hands, stay safe, people are DROPPING out here, the sickness is coming, you have been warned).

Also, lucky for all of you, you DON’T have to read a CJ yap! Instead you MIGHT (if I can manage to not die) get a CJ presentation!!!! Yaaaaayyyy!

I felt like this creature all day

But either I am a creature of the night, or laying down is the most magical thing ever, cause I did indeed get it all done. By 2 am. Yaaay! We love this guys.
I may be healed by tomorrow? Let us hope. But, I mean, a CJ presentation is great and all, but it sure is not worth getting everyone sick over.

Stay strong soldiers. We shall maybe hopefully survive this.

For Dr Z: (or any of yall rats who want to be spoiled)

Reflection paper:

Presentation:

The title might not be accurate, I have to do the title before reading cause usually I write so much I just hit publish and sometimes forget a title if I don’t do it at the start. This is the vibe I got based on the titles of the readings, but if my writing goes a different direction you now know why.

“Teach Writing as a Process Not Product” is up first.

“Our critical skills are honed by examining literature, which is finished writing”. This is interesting to me because what exactly counts as “finished”. I know so many books that come out with more editions, or articles that get edited to fit with what happened in the news, or even historical stuff that changes based on new information. Can writing ever really be finished? I would say it is just the published version at (insert specific time). But I would say nothing is ever really finished. Maybe this blogs per the website, as I think if we edit our blogs they remain the same on the class website, but we still CAN edit them. It might not show up that way.

“Our students knew it wasn’t literature when they passed it in, and our attack usually does little more than confirm their lack of self-respect for their work and for themselves; we are as frustrated as our students, for conscientious, doggedly responsible, repetitive autopsying doesn’t give birth to live writing”. What in the world is going on here. I do not know why we are saying the students are passing on literature. I don’t know what others classify as literature, but writing for a class will never be literature to me unless it is a creative writing class, where the work COULD be published into a book of some kind. Like a poetry book, short stories book, not necessarily the work being the book itself. This is because in literature classes I would read stuff published in some sort of book. Never some random essays. Maybe stuff not published but it would be done by some famous writer in history. But my essays? Nah man those are essays. I never thought of them as being literature. They are just my writings. Maybe I don’t know what literature really is, maybe everyone has their own definition, but I feel like students aren’t normally TRYING to pass off literature. I feel like they are just writing to pass the class. If you write because you have to for a class, and there is no passion or heart in the writing, does it even count as trying to pass on literature? I say no.
Also, yes. Students don’t have much respect for their own work. A lot of people have self doubt, but students as a whole might not respect their work for just trying to pass the class. Or because they know they need to workshop it a bit, learn more, grow more as a writer. There could be many reasons, but I do think the professor plays a part in how much respect people have. If it is one of those “give a good faith effort and I will help you” courses, they might have more repsect than a “you just get a grade” course.
I appreciate hearing you are just as frustrated as your students, that is nice to know. We all struggle together. But live autopsying is the start of writing. I am still unsure about this dying and living writing, writing can always be edited even if the person is dead. Writing can always be changed and also be interpreted in different ways, so I say it is always live. But, going deep into some works is how you learn to write. You see what works, what doesn’t, and can figure out the way you want to write your story. I like writing my version of other stories as I feel like some people don’t write the characters as well as they should be written. Some stories lose the plot if they go on too long or don’t write to the full potential. Going into readings is how you figure all this out, so I disagree.

“The product doesn’t improve, and so, blaming the student-who else ? we pass him along to the next teacher, who is trained, too often, the same way we were.” What a crazy thing to admit. That you don’t help them and then blame them. I do know some professors do thing they are in the right and that the students are the ones not learning. Like maybe you didn’t instruct them the way you thought you did? If the students missed the mark, maybe your prompt didn’t cover what you thought it did? Students can’t read your mind, you sometimes gotta say the same thing in 50 different ways for them to understand exactly what you want. So, admitting to blaming the students and not working with them is crazy to say but is a common thing. It is also common to just keep the train moving, not stopping to correct but to keep letting students make the same mistakes as they were supposed to learn by now. Sometimes they need a reminder, or a quick refresher on what the task is, so slowing down and teaching is important. I do appreciate the exposing truthful information being presented.

“they do not help the student since when we teach composition we are not teaching a product, we are teaching a process” I like this line. Idk what a teaching product really is, but I know how writing is a process. Teaching a process can be hard, as it is up to the student to figure out how they want to do each step. There is no one way to prewrite, everyone finds a different method. No one way to edit, everyone points out different things to fix. Every step can be done in various ways, so the process of steps can be taught but how to follow through is up to the student.

“It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world”. There is a lot of our own thoughts/feelings in writing. With math, you don’t really get to insert yourself in the work. But with writing, it is about our own thoughts on the piece or how we view the world. Like we all got this reading but all of our blogs on this reading will be different. I just liked the comment about being what we feel, what we learn about the world, and how we communicate what we learn as we do that with the blogs every week. It is the clearest example I can think of because each blog is truly what the person makes of it. Essays typically look the same, but these blogs all have a lot of us in them.

“He uses language to reveal the truth to himself so that he can tell it to others”. More quotes on how we show how we see the world through our writing. Our writing shows our personality and we use it to tell others about ourselves.

“The writing process itself can be divided into three stages: prewriting,
writing, and rewriting. The amount of time a writer spends in each stage depends on his personality, his work habits, his maturity as a craftsman, and the challenge of what he is trying to say. It is not a rigid lock-step process, but most writers most of the time pass through these three stages.” This right here is why I comment on quotes cause I feel like I pointed this out earlier in my own way. I agree that this is the jist of writing and I already said everyone does each step differently. Bam zam, thinking the same thing as this writer, but now you can clearly see how we both said the same thing in different ways.

“Prewriting may include research and daydreaming, notemaking and outlining, title-writing and lead-writing”. I have never once thought of daydreaming as prewriting. That is so interesting. I guess it is true, you gotta dream it or think it in order to write it. But I just never considered that. So, then yeah writers do be spending a looot of time prewriting. Research takes me a while but I always thought I didn’t do much prewriting for creative work. Once you get the story, for me at least, it just flows. But if we count daydreaming, then yeah it is more prewriting than anything else.

“It may take many times the hours required for a first draft, perhaps the remaining fourteen percent of the time the writer spends on the project.” I would just add that rewriting might never end. You might always be going back to the same work over and over, thinking of new things to edit. With my stories, I am always thinking of new lore to add to make stuff further along in the story make more sense. You might think you are done, but you can always go back (even if it is published, you can still fix the work just for you).

“First by shutting up”. lol so true

“When you give him an assignment you tell him what to say and how to say it, and thereby cheat your student of the opportunity to learn the process of discovery we call writing”. First of all, the “he” business is crazy. I was letting it pass at first but it is a little wild we just keep using he/him. Defaulting to a man for why. That is a whole other converstation though. Anyway, I disagree with this as not everyone is a writer. I know many science/math minded people that need to know what you are asking of them. I get the whole idea of seeing what the students do, not giving too much instruction, having them learn. But some get so lost with no guidance. Panic sets in on grading or how they will complete it, some people need to know what is expected of them. And if this is to learn the processes, help can be given as they learn and not just throwing them to the wolves. Maybe just drop grad students off in some place, but those learning the process need help.

“The student uses his own language. Too often, as writer and teacher Thomas Williams points out, we teach English to our students as if it were a foreign language. Actually, most of our students have learned a great deal of language before they come to us, and they are quite willing to exploit that language if they are allowed to embark on a serious search for their own truth.” I said this in the last post, but I think that is an interesting idea, to have students write in their own language. You might not understand it if you don’t speak that language, but for them to get their ideas/thoughts/feelings/vocie out it is important. Some important stuff might be said if people just wrote however they wanted to.

“The student should have the opportunity to write all the drafts necessary for him to discover what he has to say on this particular subject. Each new draft, of course, is counted as equal to a new paper.” Good idea in theory, but classes do have end dates. As the semester gets closer to the end, the amount of drafts have to be limited in order to get the work on time. For the start of the semester, I say go for this idea, it is great.

A lot of these other points I feel the same about. That it depends on the class (for some classes do need to teach specific writing skills in order for the students to later be able to write however they want), it depends on time and classes do have limited time, that students might need some help in figuring out how they write, etc. Since I still gotta get to the other reading I will just leave that summarized.

“Teaching to Transgress”

What the heck is up with the highlights. I being highlighted so much for why.
“I was haunted by dreams of running away-of disappearing-yes, even of dying” So we going extreme right off the bat. I can’t wait to figure out why this is bad. Usually people dream of ending up in these high positions, why are we fearing.

“You never wanted to be a teacher. Since we were little, all you ever wanted to do
was write”. Opposite for me. As a little kid I always wanted to teach. Was my favorite thing to do to my stuffed animals and action figures. I didn’t enjoy writing as a kid, because I yap too much and back then everything had to be hand written as laptops in class were not a thing. So I hated it in the sense that I wrote too much and hurt my hand, but now I can easily yap as much as I want (sorry all of you who have to read this yapping). Teaching has always been my goal, but writing got more and more a hope as time went on. I wish I could be a creative writer, but that is not a realistic job, or one that pays well. I would love to write a book, film a TV show or movie, but that probably won’t happen. So, this quote was interesting as I feel like we can all relate in some way. Being forced to teach since writing doesn’t pay, or being forced to write academic papers alongside teaching.

“To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone.” I do indeed love learning. It is why I love Guitar classes, cause that man always twists my mind in new ways. His classes are a lot of work, but always good for being changed or challenged by ideas. I do also see how learning comes with risks of home life. I have family members agressively republican, to the point I do not dare let them know about my queerness. Trying to figure out ideas at home, by communicating what you learned in class that day, does come with great risk.

“they continued to nurture black students even as their efforts were constrained by the suspicion they were favoring their own race”. Not saying it is right, we all have a bias. And it is hard to work against that. Favorite students might be the quiet kids who listen better, and thus they might get treated differently than others. They might then learn more. Teachers might migrate towards certain kids without realizing, maybe favoriting them due to mutual understandings. Just some thoughts to consider about bias and teaching.

“During my undergraduate and graduate school years, only white women professors were involved in developing Women’s Studies programs.” This is interesting, as on the first day of class someone asked Guitar how he felt about writing on topics he wasn’t a part of. The class is Gender and Language Communication, and Guitar has focused the class a lot on the feminist perspective. He has done a great job expanding our minds and getting us to see different perspectives, but from the start we had people questioning him as he is a white straight man talking about gender and sexuality. Can you write or teach subjects you aren’t a part of? Does it lessen your credit? Or does it show that you are trying to include others in the converstation? Like, would you look bad for only writing about subjects you are a part of? Lots of questions around this, as I know to trust Guitar based on many classes I have had with him. I know he puts in a lot of work trying to break norms. But I can see how others might not trust him to teach this class.

Skipping ahead as most of what was talked was good things we see Dr. Z doing. Getting to know us, making learning exciting (while I might not be excited at the start of every class, our side conversations/egg time and jokes always get me excited), and learning as a community.

“We communicate best by choosing that way of speaking that is informed by the particularity and uniqueness of whom we are speaking to and with.” I love this idea so much, that everyone speaks differently in different settings. I have talked about it so many different times. Love discourse communities/knowing your audience.

“Students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach” I knew about the students not wanting to learn, but didn’t know how bad the teachers not wanting to teach was till getting to grad school and having teacher friends. Shout out to all of them (Zach the only one of them that might read this), but they all truly opened my eyes to how awful education can be at times.

“Engaged Pedagogy”
My bad everyone, I didn’t see it was intro AND chapter one, thought the intro was 22 pages long and went “it seems to be wrapping up, how are there ten more pages”

Sorry sorry for the yap I will try to summarize. Lots of good things to think about though.

“to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.” Yes yes, I agree. I like just learning things and growing as a student. Information can always be looked up or relearned, but some greater lessons stick with you when it isn’t just memorizing information.

“that approach to learning that is rooted in the notion that all students need to do is consume information fed to them by a professor and be able to memorize and store it.” Had a whole theory class with Guitar, remember not one theory. But, I remember the assignments he made us do and how to do them. I probably won’t remember every theory exactly here either. Some things will stick based on the fun memories made here. Just memorizing things doesn’t work, you will always forget that stuff. Using the lessons, having them be taught in a fun way, that works.

“Despite this shift, many students still seek to enter feminist classrooms because they continue to believe that there, more than in any other place in the academy, they will have an opportunity to experience education as the practice of freedom”. Interesting concept I never thought about. That people might feel more free based on the class topic. I don’t feel more free in gender learning classes, I know I will be challenged a lot and see the world in more evil ways. But I can see how the topic of a class might make people feel more freedom than a typical writing class. This seems like the type of class to share ideas and thus people feel more free than a literature class. I can see that.

“This meant that whether academics were drug addicts, alcoholics, batterers, or sexual abusers, the only important aspect of our identity was whether or not our minds functioned, whether we were able to do our jobs in the classroom.” Okay so I was like kinda skimming cause there was a lot of body and soul stuff (I am not really into all that)… WHAT WAS THIS?? This is such an insane idea hello. What is happening. I would say that is not the only important aspect. I think all that “bad” stuff (some things like alcoholics isn’t that bad, maybe to the body and if you take it out on others, but sexual abusers is very bad. didn’t want to lump it all into being bad but…) is important to note because it does impact the mind. Hunter brought this up in the AI class last semester, that the way the author thinks is important in the work they do, because it does influence in some way. If we put ourselves into our writing, if it is our truth, then all those things mention do show up. Also, “minds functioned” crazy statement. What does a functional mind even look like. We discounting a lot of people here. This overall, is an insane line to just throw in after talking about mind and soul. Whiplash. Double take. Like what the heck happened to all the chill stuff.

No quote this time, shocker I know, but do these scholars know they were wrote about? Did they get told that this author was going to be reliving the memories of their classroom? Do you ask someone to do that? If it is your memories, can you just write about other scholars in this way? Are these fighting words? Like if I write about Dr. Z and she hates it (I would never, this is just an example) what happens? Does my stuff get published if the higher scholar doesn’t agree? Something I am just now asking, even though I have written many research papers that I interpreted other scholar’s writings. You never really get to ask people if they are okay being used for your research, so do we just have to let people write whatever they want about us? Crazy. They could be misunderstanding our message. That is kinda how things are though right, everyone has a different meaning of everything.

“Not all students interested in Freire have had a similar experience.” Me with Dr. Guitar and Dr. Friend. Some people be hating on them and I be loving their classes.

I read all these highlighted things in a different voice as they seemed important (due to being in yellow), but I do not think I put any of them here. One, who the heck highlighted these lines and who are they to decide what I should think is important. Two, I did not care for many of them. Like yeah they might have said something cool, but I might have already said that or didn’t want to be persauded on thinking it was important because it was already yellow.

Anyways, the rest was just about engaging the students in learning so we can skip all that (this is probably longer than anyone other than Dr. Z is reading). I shall end it here, as the rest didn’t really interest me other than a “so true, I agree” type of thing. Or a possible question on how truthful these writings on enjoying the professor are, as the names are kinda known. Might just be hype to get in the book idk. But yes! Ending it so you no longer have to read a fourth thing for class (I am joking that my blog is a whole other reading, but it actualy might be no clue. Seems fine to me but I will look at the class website and see everyone else to a paragraph or two).

For those new here, I take quotes and comment on them as I go.

“In high school, most students in English classes read literature, and some may write research papers, personal narratives, and book reports.” I don’t think I ever did a research paper in English class. I know history had us research a specific time or event and do a paper on it, but English class for me was always some sort of essay on the readings or personal narratives on the topics presented on the readings. Though, in two of my grade levels in high school, there were options to not write papers but present instead. I presented as I figured it would be less work for me (the one who writes too much), and I was always one of the only presenters. So, truly, high school is a free for all. The teachers in the class probably know more than what I remember from six or more years ago.

“From these experiences, most students conclude that the field of English studies entails the study of literature and, to a lesser extent, the teaching of composition. In most cases, if students decide to major or even to do graduate work in English, they assume they will be studying literature.” I did think for half my degree that English was just reading passages and writing essays on those passages, as that was all I have done. But then I switched majors to English writing and hardly ever had to just write about a passage again. I semi miss getting books for class (I loved being able to say I read more and more classics, hated having to read around five books per class). But after the switch I truly learned so many different writing styles and ways to write I did not think grad school was more passage reading. Glad I had my past experiences, as they seemed to really help out with this grad school journey.

“But only recently (in the past thirty years) has “rhetoric and composition” become a full-fledged discipline within English studies, with its own professional conferences, journals and monograph series, and graduate degrees and undergraduate majors.” I know this book is from like 2006, so this information isn’t recent, but I still find it super cool to learn about the history of this subject. Cause I have heard it said so often together that I didn’t realize there was a time they were separate (makes sense, as one thing has to come before the other). I also think it is cool there was a time when rhetoric was even more involved with our learning (though, I feel like I hear about rhetoric all the time now).

“Rhetoric and composition scholars conducted the above studies from a new perspective based on issues pertinent to the emerging field, examining such matters as whether writing constructs or only transmits knowledge, whether writing is social or individual, what the province of rhetoric is, who can be a writer or rhetor, and what the relative importance is of ethos, pathos, and logos today.” I like that rhetoricians expanded the field to include further studies, and expanding questioning. I will say a lot of the stuff brought up in this section, like questioning who is a rhetor and ethos, pathos, and logos, I have done in multiple classes. So, I can confirm Kean is good at the combining of rhetoric and composition, as I reconogize/know a lot of what was just brought up.

“Now in the new millennium, a Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition includes over seventy-four programs. The discipline has become extremely complex and networked with other organizations in which members conduct research on writing.” 74 is a crazy amount of programs. I think it is cool to note it expanding into conducting research on writing. The discipline already got a crazy number of stuff going on and now it just expands to include research. I need an updated book to hear how crazy things have gotten since this book was released. Did we keep growing or are things standing still now.

“Little, if any, attention was paid to helping students get started, investigate ideas, consider readers, receive feedback on drafts, or revise.” I could never. Feedback and revising is like my favorite thing to do. Ask Dr. Friend. If he gave feedback, I always fixed up the essay based on that feedback. Why not?
Well apparently people were rude rats back then. No feedback? Now, that is crazy. Way crazier than 74 programs. How does one not do feedback. No one thought to tell the people what was up with their work? No one conversed? That is crazy. No fixing up work? No working with each other? Little learning was done back then.

Again, obviously things had to be invented and come from somewhere. But with writing, some of these things needed to be thought of for students to do is wild to me. And like people had to write papers that introduced this idea or defined it and made it real. Like no prewriting either? I am sure people did that, they just didn’t call it that or get all specific about it. Everyone prewrites a tiny bit. Well, for the blogs I do not. But for papers I always start somewhere. The background lore for creative works come first. Research I always gather quotes on the topics I think I am going to cover, then once I have all the stuff that stood out to me I make categories of similar themes, then I write 100 pages (joke, only done it two times, it is not a standard). Seeing/reading all these things come about is so wild as we all know of these writing steps/do them. Man, writing back then was a whole different beast.

Audience is another thing we are always taught to consider. Super wild to see step by step my lessons coming about.
Yes yes we love hearing about discourse! The different writings of students at different ages, very important to know.
But, something from discourse communites is also here: Genre. That is something unique in writing, that usually genre is like horror, romance, stuff like that but for writing genre is the document. Like essay, resume, etc.
This reading sure is hitting all the notes so far.

“who suggested that students could reach self-actualization, their authentic voices, by using the journal, meditation, and analogy.” Interesting, I never heard about self-actualization or authentic voices. I was always taught to just write in the academic language or “write in your voice” but never really told how to do that other than Dr. Jette mentioning to type it out on your phone first. Angel (my sister) has always said I type in a specific way that it is like I am speaking. I would think my typing is different per device I am on, topic I am writing, or audience, but I think you guys can be the judge. I just be writing and not really thinking specifically on “I must sound like this” unless it is academic. If it is a “write in your voice” I do not TRY to sound like myself, I just type. Say what I want to say. Not worried about being scholarly, just type. I do not journal or meditate, so maybe there is a way to find your voice? No clue, I just be doing whatever. Interesting in the sense I never thought about people having to learn or find their voice.

“responses as aimed at improving students’ abilities and indicating what needs to be done, addressing large-scale problems, taking into account rhetorical processes, and offering comments with transfer value.” I agree with this. Writing is one of those things that can never be perfect. Improvement is always possible. You will always be fixing things here and there, always coming back to work, always finding something to change. Writing needs to live, which sucks cause it also needs to be published to get out there.

“With the introduction of open admissions policies at many universities, students brought a range of writing problems with them to college writing courses. Responding to these needs, scholars conducted research on writing dysfunction and other prob lems characteristic of underprepared students.” Reminds me of the embedded tutors/writing center/LSS in general. They saw students weren’t doing well in 1030 and put tutors in there to help. Kinda crazy how these issues are still happening now. Writing is always in trouble, huh.

“another kind of diversity has concerned the field- second-language writers and cross-cultural literacy”. I do not relate to this, but I always think about it every time we are told to write how we want to write. I always think “well, what if someone writes in a different language?” I always worried how that would be checked, how people might feel like they are better writers in a different language. For Guitar, there was someone in the Chamber whose first language was Spanish. When things got close to deadlines, it was so interesting working on papers with her, cause randomly I would go, “… huh… either it is reeeeally late and I need to go to bed now, or this isn’t English.” Sure enough, she would randomly switch to Spanish in the middle of papers. Sucks for me, I couldn’t understand her amazing work. But, good for her, as she got her ideas out quickly and didn’t worry about translating in that moment, just getting the thoughts down on paper. Guitar would sometimes tell her to just talk to him in Spanish, to get her frustrations out. There would be times all three of us were in his office, and I could tell she was getting frustrated and couldn’t figure out the words. All he had to say was “Spanish”, and she just went OFF. Everything just flowed. She was still frustrated at the end cause Guitar doesn’t speak much Spanish and I don’t at all, so we still wouldn’t know how to help her. She got her thoughts out, instead of having to pause to translate and stopping the flow, but no one really understood her. I always felt bad, that she had so much to say in Spanish but no one would ever hear, and she always had to limit herself for us to understand what she wanted to say. All these papers and conferences, everything in English, I always wonder how many amazing ideas we are missing out on by people having to translate to English. Does everything even translate to English? Do we lose greater meaning by translating, as we sometimes have to find the closest word? How many ideas have been passed on because English wasn’t able to convey them? How many papers have great ideas or lessons that I pass on because I only speak English? (I have found so many articles in different languages while working for Guitar, where the abstract is in English and has everything I would want to use for a source, but the rest of the paper isn’t translated)

“A corollary of social-construction theory that began to enter the classroom was the practice of collaboration. The first efforts involved students in writing groups responding and giving feedback and advice on their final drafts before revising. Later, groups collaborated throughout the composing process.” Now, see, collaborating in general is great. People always bring up new things I never thought of or considered to discuss. But, working together on one thing is hard. Unless everyone gets a specific job. Like you write this section, someone else does that section, AND THEN someone edits it all. Trust me. Someone will need to edit it all. Goes back to voice. If everyone takes a section, it is sometimes VERY clear there were multiple different authors, which isn’t always liked. You gotta make it seem like one, and sometimes the only way to do that is to have one person edit it all to sound like them. Gotta leave one person to edit cause everyone also edits in different ways. Personally, I know I do too much, so I just gotta take an axe to the paper and CHOP A LOT. Others might just have to make simple edits. But, we usually do MLA. Communication usually does APA, so sometimes it is easier to just let people work how they work. Everyone makes their edits. And then someone else makes it all sound the same. I am all for working with others and learning new things, just sometimes gets crazy with everyone working on one doc.

We skipping forward cause a lot of what was next didn’t really describe much about the thing, it was just like “We got this section, it is basically what the title says, find more elsewhere” and moved on.

“The field of rhetoric and composition has also maintained an abiding interest in another context-civic rhetoric, the original emphasis in classical rhetoric. In terms of pedagogy, students have more recently received instruction in writing texts for various communities to which they belong, including neighborhood groups, churches, state organizations, and public media, addressing issues of concern to members of these communities.” Now this is fun. I would wanna know how to do this. It should be a part of some class at some point, cause it is cool to know how to advocate/make change. That is indeed a writing I do not know anything about doing. I mean I learned how to write a podcast and how to write in digital spaces, but I think we should also teach how to write to make change or to talk to various important communities to us.

Ideologies and Methodology was interesting. I never know how else to comment on soome of the things people say. Like “oh… interesting you thought that..” and we just go with it because you managed to get that paper published. Sometimes they some good stuff like that writing repeats the student’s knowledge, yes yes that is good I agree. I mean, some writing is just nonsense. We have all writen something after just skimming the reading and not really having knowledge on the topic, but that still (in a way) shows what knowledge we have. This was a good point.

Then it turns into a “who hurt you” thing cause… “that master narratives of human progress or human rights should be rejected and language should be considered the start of knowledge” what in the world is all this. Everything else was short, but this point was like so long and kinda two points in one. What happened, why did you write the point this way, why are we rejecting things, I am interested. What happened here. This is why I hate summaries sometimes cause what in the world caused this. Langauge as the start of knowledge, to me, feels like a whole different point. That in itself is a whole paper, tell me more, I am interested. But the first half felt like there was some tension. Maybe I just view “rejected” that way and I am just reading too into it, but truly why we throwing things out. I wanna know the story. It be like that when reading the methods of a paper, just randomly see this one summarized line that makes you go “… wait, what was that?” cause it is so out there in the stream of peace it makes you wanna read the paper that made that point, but truly who knows if it was just interpreted that way or summarized. Like what if that paper doesn’t even go deep into language being the start of knowledge and I spend all that time reading a thirty or so paged paper for nothing. I just wanna talk to some of these people to go “now, what did you mean by this, cause I read it this way and I think I am wrong”

And then the conclusion. Well. What does the book on rhetoric from 2026 look like? Cause did things change in twenty years? I mean I could point out a lot of the stuff still happening. I think I would add a section on social media maybe, as that has for sure been a change since 2006. But other than that, not much else seemed to really be all that different if I could relate to a lot of the topics. I could be wrong, maybe new stuff is out there, I do not keep up to date with all this. Very interesting crazy stuff learned here today for sure.

So to not repeat the same yapping from last time, I am going to link the post I made. About CJ blog (from the past)

This way, the new people can get that yapping (if they want), while the people who know me get to know more.

While too much didn’t change about my interests in the last few months (hence why new people should get that overview from the other post), there are some new things going on!

The rats. My lore with rats goes deep, but these rats are new in my life! My older sister Angel took them from her work so they didn’t die. And now we own them!

Nemo has the deformed paw, though that doesn’t stop her. She also has a bonked eye and is the one always trying to leave the cage when it is opened. She is kinda crazy, always running around the cage. But, she lets you hold her and can even go on your shoulder!

Then we have Remy, who is the calmer one of the two. Hates going out the cage/being held, in the sense she scrambles to get back in the cage. She loves to just be napping in the hiding places or blankets places in the cage.

There has also been some changes to my dnd lore.
We had a lack of dms for a while and no one was stepping up. So now, along with being the secretary for the club, I will be dming for the club. I am scared to dm because it is for the club, meaning anyone can join. And there are some interesting players in the club. People who have messed with games in the past. I am really really hoping all the chaotic players avoid my game. I just truly have no clue how to manage all that yet. Just know if I get more stressed throughout the semester, it is either coursework or some stupid stuff happening in my game cause people can be really random.

One of the icebreakers last semester was something like “if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go”. Nowhere. I would choose others to go away from ME. Love my family, but in my house I do not have my own space. Angel and I share a room, but she also got the “cat room”. Where we first stored my cats, Luci and Beanie, while they adjusted. It was the “homework room” when we were kids, so it had desks and other school stuff for a while. Angel took over that room. My dad has his office in the dining room cause the dinning room table is used as space for whatever project Angel decides to work on (art, puzzles, Legos, etc), so it isn’t really used for meals. He works from home and is an amputee, so makes sense he takes a room on the first floor. So the both of them get a bedroom and an office. My “office” is also in the shared room, in this awful corner of darkness as it is surrounded by our beds.
I got a break ONCE when they all left for a wedding, and I stayed home, cause I do not like going places with the others if given the chance to have freedom at home from them all. I also hate weddings. You only know like half the people there, if you happen to know your side of the family like that, and I do not remember anyone’s name in my family so heck no I am not going to a wedding.
I got sick during my one week of freedom. So sick I had to get my grandpa to feed the cats, something that doesn’t even take five minutes. Angel, being an older sibling still, to this day, makes fun of me for getting sick during what was supposed to be a great time.

Why am I mentioning all this? Part of knowing me is knowing I am going to yap, but also cause I did take a vacation. Angel wanted to celebrate her birthday by going somewhere.
People over the summer liked my blogs so hopefully I can give a little of that energy here, with this intro blog, before we get more academic (as the blogs will turn into stuff about the readings)
I should have stayed home.
Day one was rainy as what, but kinda fine overall. We tried to go to some IHOP and the place had one waitress, the older people waiting were being rude to her, so we just left and went to Red Robin.
Then walked the boardwalk, which I know I would hate cause Angel is one of those people who likes to walk everything all the time and I like to walk to only the places I know I want to go to. Like in malls, Angel visits every fricken store ever. I go to the ones I know we actually like. She is also a walker that has ZERO spacial awareness and leaves you in the dust. She weaves around crowds never looking back to see if the people she is with could follow.
We entered so many stupidly BAD boardwalk stores. And didn’t get a thing, cause the stuff was so clearly bad. You know where the stores were that we wanted things from?
Right at the start of where we were. We past them all, as Angel wanted to walk the whole thing, just to get stuff at stores at the start. Since we were only there for three days I saw this as a waste, but I got taffy and fudge so I guess it was good. We also saw Peppa Pig, which Angel demanded we take a photo with.

Dinner was seafood, which I enjoyed and knew was going to happen as this was a beach vacation (Rehoboth Beach in Delaware). The other two (Natalia, my younger sister was also here and had her own ways of bothering me) complained about having to eat seafood.

Our hotel was across from a gay bar.

I thought that was going to be cool. We looked it up. It was truly for the men. Shirtless men city up in there. Angel said she would go with me if I wanted, and seeing those crazy photos made me not want to go at all.

Day two was beach day. I must have slept wrong cause for some reason I woke up and my hip hurt, which ruined day three but we aren’t there yet. I only like beach for the ocean. I do not want to be all sandy.
Guess what. The ocean? Not allowed to go in. Life guards kept calling people back.
Luckily, the hotel we were in was like a 30 minute walk. I just walked back once I saw that nonsense. On the way back I stopped to sit at some nature spots so it was still nice for me, but the entire reason we went here did not work for me.

I took a lot of photos of nature or other random things. Like hundreds. My dad (as Angel presented all the photos from the trip to him) said I don’t need to take a photo per second. But this could be the last time I go to this specific place, or the last time it will look this way. Gotta capture what I like. Just saying, there are a ton of photos from this trip, but you will only get a few cause I already am going to make this a whole yap.
The others stayed at the beach till like 7 pm for some reason (we got there around noon). That is so many hours of just existing in hot sun and on hot sand, but they lived so. Good for them.

Day three was also supposed to be a rainy day, so Angel and I wanted to go to the town-specific museum while Natalia slept in. Day three was a Wednesday.
You know what is closed on Wednesdays?

The museum, apparently.
Then Angel decided we should go to one of the nature parks nearby.
She, SOMEHOW, picked one of the harder trails that DID NOT LOOP AROUND.
At some point, my hip hurt, but this was today’s activity so I kept going.
At some point, there stopped being shade.
Those who were there over the summer might remember I wasn’t that cold in HRI.
I have always been warmer than my siblings, something Angel didn’t realize till I was way behind in the trail due to my hip starting to hurt with every step and because of how hot it is in direct sun.
We had to turn around, but due to me being behind, I got to hear from the bikers passing us how much of a bad choice this was.
“Walking this trail? They aren’t going to make it.”
“Wearing black?” (shakes head) “I would never wear black out here”
“Oh no… They still got a long way to go…”
“Black? Yikes.”
“Should’ve rented a bike, those poor souls”
Mind you, I was DYING at this point, so this was NOT GREAT TO HEAR. And yes, Natalia and I were wearing all black.

Despite it saying it was going to rain, it didn’t. And the clouds were not where they needed to be to help ups.
So Natalia and I were dying in the car by the time we got back and Angel kept saying she didn’t know it was going to be that bad, and that she wanted to go exploring some more as we spent 20 bucks to go to this.
Natalia took us to Wawa instead.
Later, after Natalia took a nap and I questioned my life choices, we went to some fake Dave & Buster’s, Lefty’s. It was trivia night so it was, I kid you not, FILLED with old white people. FILLED. We waited like 20 minutes to even see a worker. By the time we sat the last question was going, and right after that they ALL LEFT. It was like empty in that place. Cleared out. Besides the moments we spent chilling in the hotel yapping, this was the best part of the trip as we got to play some arcade games. We could have played more if Natalia was better at the duck claw machine. I wanted a rainbow duck, cause gay. But Angel saw a different duck that Natalia decided she HAD to get for me.

Balloon dog duck. It isn’t red, my favorite color, but it was pretty cool. We got a bunch of random ducks (luckily got the gay one) while Natalia tried for her creeper duck and my balloon dog duck.

We played a couple of other games. Natalia won enough at this random Rick and Morty game. She didn’t know what she was doing, but I figured out the game quick to realize she was actually doing pretty good. No one captured this since it was our last game with our limited credits, but she won us half the credit we used for prizes.

Natalia, since she won us the most, got a sloth thingy (cause she likes animals), cards (maybe because she likes Gambit, maybe she just likes cards idk),and a pirate flag (I jokingly told her to get it because it reminded me of Chloe Price, a character from Life is Strange. We spent most of this summer playing Life is Strange together). Angel got some annoying squeaking pig thing. And I got a red balloon dog, my favorite.

And then we got to do one more activity the day we were going home. An activity I was begging to do.

Mini golf, that was also in mostly sun. It was packed, we kept having to wait for people to play their games. The group in front of us was a kid and his grandma, and when we got hole-in-ones, the grandma cheered for us as we kept cheering for her (the kid was winning). The group behind us had an even younger kid and a dad. The kid was a little cheater, moving the dad’s ball. But, when we would mess up, the kid behind would say “I hope I don’t hit it like that”. The kid behind was constantly talking about what we were doing, which wasn’t as bad as it sounds. It was super funny.
“They didn’t design the game well. She (talking about Natalia) hit the ball so well it should have made it but the walls messed her up”
“They discovered the cheat of the game!” (there was a secret way to go for one of the holes
“I want to hit it exactly like she did” (Angel got a hole in one)
“They are really bad at the game” (Natalia and I took 6 hits on one of the holes”
Both kids got more hole-in-ones than us adults (though the dad was pretty good at the game and probably would have gotten more if his kid didn’t cheat).

I think out of everyone, Angel had the most fun (she also won the game).

Would I go again? Never doing that trail again, that’s for sure. Natalia didn’t want to do many of the activities, and Angel leaves us behind to get where she is going. But, even though they annoy me a lot, I do enjoy my siblings enough that I would do something like this again.
Even though literally everything I wanted to do went wrong in some way (yes, Angel did make many, MANY, jokes about this. Gay bar but for the men. Beach but ocean is closed. Museum, closed the day we wanted to go. Walk, Angel accidentally picked the hardest one. Mini golf, packed and in the sun at times) it was nice to be somewhere else, and bonding with them can be fun at times, even though we spend most of our breaks together cause Natalia also hates our mother.
No alone time for me.

Anyways, this wasn’t really a description like I usually do. I usually just go listing things I like when told to introduce myself. But, since I already did that and gave a link at the beginning of this yap to that, I thought telling a story would be better. It might have been a way to get to know me, though if you are new you are probably confused on why my siblings wanted to get me a balloon dog duck.
Point is, I am a yapper with a lot of interests and will happily explain more, but also wanted to give everyone in the class some new lore. And the vacation, being a new one, was the only real way I could think of to give a sense of me in a more fun way than just listing things I like.

To the new friends, hope you enjoyed your first of many yaps from me.
To my forever friends, hope you learned something new. If not, you better have at least liked the story.