All posts by Daniel Alcoriza

Student Blogs

Track 06. With Feeling!

In “Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health,” James W. Pennebaker and Cindy K. Chung discuss the health benefits of writing, specifically writing in order to help people work through trauma. They write, “The problem of capturing an experience with language is comparable to the engineering difficulty of defining an analog signal using digital technology,” and I’m very inclined to agree (Pennebaker and Chung 26). I believe that when writing about traumatic experiences especially, people may be initially resistant to put pen to page, making the transference from experience to written word a bit difficult for some. Maybe I just have trouble finding the words, but when it comes to my own journaling, I spend a lot of time trying to get as close as I can to describing or emulating the emotions I felt during the time I’m trying to record; I feel like focusing on doing so is a huge part of what helps an individual process these events in the first place, but the writing of the event often comes after I’ve processed the event to a certain degree. Pennebaker and Chung don’t seem to agree, as they continue, “Once an experience is translated into language, however, it can be processed in a conceptual manner. In language format, the individual can assign meaning, coherence, and structure. This would allow for the event to be assimilated and, ultimately, resolved and/or forgotten, thereby alleviating the maladaptive effects of incomplete emotional processing on health” (Pennebaker and Chung 27). In my own experience, the writing and processing aren’t so clean cut; I believe the act of writing helps with processing, but there is a lot of overlap between the two. I can’t write down my experience until I acknowledge my experience, but in order to do so I need to process it, even in part. I do believe that the strange zone between “experience” and “written” is where healing starts to begin, similar to how acknowledging a change is needed can help facilitate change.

All this being said, I definitely believe there are positive benefits to writing about these traumatic events. I do think that having them committed to writing can help signify a sort of moving on, or at the very least, it gives the writer space to organize and reframe their experience in order to find closure. Additionally, the fact that the health benefits of writing are being studied is something that fills me with hope and gladness, as it verifies the feeling I’ve had for years that writing is a positive, healing force in my life.

This blog post was written while listening to Charlie Parker’s 1951 album The Magnificent Charlie Parker. I went to a jazz bar with some friends this past weekend named Ornithology, and its name made me want to listen to some Charlie Parker for the rest of the weekend.

Student Blogs

Track 05. Feedback!

In their articles “Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment” and “Writing Comments on Students’ Papers,” Peter Elbow and John Bean respectively tackle the subject of writing feedback, specifically in a classroom setting. Elbow greatly emphasizes the need for less ranking in the classroom, while also emphasizing more effective evaluation practices coupled with positive reinforcement; Bean echoes a lot of Elbow’s points, even giving examples of how to actually implement positive reinforcement in feedback.

Elbow explains his reasoning for lessening his emphasis on ranking and increasing evaluation as such: “The crux is no longer that commodity I’ve always hated and never trusted: a numerical ranking of the quality of their writing along a single continuum. Instead the crux becomes what I care about most: the concrete behaviors that I most want students to engage in because they produce the more learning and help me teach better” (Elbow 8). This quote really stuck out to me because it fully embodies what I believe to be the goal that teachers should all strive for: how do I make sure my students learn these skills? When our class discussed the ways we were taught how to write, a point in our conversation revealed that some of us didn’t care for our grades, they were just a means to an end. Pass so you don’t have to do the work anymore.

This sentiment is reflected in another of Elbow’s quotes: “My goal is not to get rid of evaluation but in fact to emphasize it, enhance it. I’m trying to get students to listen better to my evaluations–by uncoupling them from a grade. In effect, I’m doing this because I’m so fed up with students following or obeying my evaluations too blindly–making whatever changes my comments suggest but doing it for the sake of a grade; not really taking the time to make up their own minds about whether they think my judgments or suggestions really make sense to them” (Elbow 9). If Elbow’s practices were more proliferated in the US school systems, maybe we would have been more keen to engage as students. If whole generations of students were taught to write through ranking instead of pertinent evaluations, then we’d have generations of the “blind” leading the “blind,” a feedback loop more akin to the screeching sound from amplifiers than actual cogent critique and suggestion.

A section of Elbow’s article that I enjoyed immensely was the section on Liking. Elbow writes, “But it’s helpful to uncouple the two domains and realize that it makes perfectly good sense to say, ‘This is terrible, but I like it.’ Or, ‘This is good, but I hate it’ (Elbow 13). I enjoy this so much because it reminds me of how I review and give feedback to my writing peers. We all very obviously admire each other’s work, so its very easy for us to give that positive reinforcement to each other; no offense is taken because we know that its all in order to help each other grow. The One Most Inextricable from My Soul and I often send (or show) each other what we’re working on in order to get perspective on our writings, and because of the rapport we’ve built with each other over the years, we’ve become more effective sounding boards for each other. This rapport also allows us to give each other criticisms that might seem harsh to some, but instead for us is the most helpful. Maybe if a teacher and student build enough rapport, the liking will come naturally, and the teacher’s evaluations will hold more weight for the student.

Bean also mentioned something that reminded me of the revision section I presented on. He wrote, “It thus helps to establish a hierarchy of concerns, descending from higher-order issues (ideas, organization, development, and overall clarity) to lower-order issues (sentence correctness, style, mechanics, spelling, and so forth)” (Bean 322). This is incredibly reminiscent of the revision operations and systems of change in Sommers’ article, if not just exactly that. To me this really just emphasizes how important feedback is to the act of revision, and reminds me of how Emily said she’d ask her partner to read her work aloud in order to find places to improve. Another’s eyes or voice can be irreplaceable in the revision process. It also reminded me that Ava purposefully stopped speaking during the discussion because she didn’t want to move onto the topic of feedback just yet. I’m looking forward to her presentation on this section!

This blog post was written while I listened to the original soundtrack for the film Look Back (2024), composed by Hakura Nakamura! I saw it this past weekend after finally finishing a move, and I loved it as much as I loved the manga! It feels like an ode to everyone who makes art, and I know I’m going to watch it at least as many times as I’ve read the manga!

Student Blogs

Track 03. Trust the Process

Peter Elbow’s campaigning for the utilization of more low stakes writing assignments in schools correlates with the way I feel I actually “learned” how to write. In High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing, Elbow posits that “Low stakes writing helps students… find their own language for the issues of the course; they stumble into their own analogies and metaphors for academic concept” in a way that “is saturated with sense or experience” (7). I’ve received all sorts of passing grades during my life as a student, but the ones that come to my mind whenever I think of assignments that I’m proud of are ones where I was allowed to add my sense of humor or a creative twist to the assignment; it sort of speaks to this idea that a student doesn’t view their writing as their writing until a part of themselves is actually in it, and its no longer just a paint-by-numbers recreation of whatever the teacher had them study. To that point, after class Maya and I walked to the parking lot with the One Most Inextricable from My Soul, we continued talking about how we learned to write, and Maya made a distinction that struck me; she made a distinction between her personal writing and her academic writing. I myself make that distinction often, but hearing another writer bring it up casually made me realize how ingrained the disparity between how we’re taught and how we actually learned can be for some of us. We, intentionally or unintentionally, other our academic writing instead of consider it integrated with the writing we do for ourselves.

I also enjoyed Elbow’s sections on how to respond to student’s writings. He writes, “Even when we write clear, accurate, valid, and helpful comments, our students often read them through a distorting lens of resistance or discouragement—or downright denial” (8). Of course, such a reaction is to be expected when helpful comments are directly tied to a decreasing score; they seem a lot less helpful and a bit more punishing. His later mention of “[avoiding] an impersonal ‘God/truth voice’ in [his] comments” actually makes me reminisce about an educator of mine who would use those constantly; I fondly remember “Wrong!!” and “Incorrect!!” or even just “!!” in red ink all over my essays for two marking periods during my senior year of high school (13). She would even yell her heavenly judgments out during presentations if you misunderstood the presentation topic; although I ended up thriving in her class, I definitely understand why so many of my classmates dreaded 2nd period. If she was a bit gentler, maybe we all would be in graduate writing programs.

As for Donald M. Murray’s Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product, the first quote that struck me was his use of the word “autopsy” to describe how educators teach literature (3). It made me smile pretty wryly because its a very apt descriptor for many classes I’ve been a student in and, regrettably, many classes I’ve been a teacher in as well. I also like Murray’s statement that “you don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it” (20). It seems like it can be reductive, but in my experience the best way to learn the process is to practice the process; it’s certainly more engaging than just “autopsying” a piece and holding up its parts for show hoping your student can recreate it by their next due date.

This blog post was sonically powered by John Coltrane’s 1958 album Blue Train. I was in a Coltrane mood this morning, but wanted to try something other than A Love Supreme (which I love; I just needed a bit of variety today).

Student Blogs

Track 02. Left Behind

One of the first things in Janice M. Lauer’s Rhetoric and Composition that struck me during my reading was just how young rhetoric and composition is as a discipline. I think that despite rhetoric and composition “only recently… [becoming] a full-fledged discipline within English studies,” Lauer’s historical survey of the discipline helps show just how much the field has blossomed over the years (3). Surely, looking at the variety of options of study that we have in the Writing program here at Kean already speaks to how much has evolved and blossomed from this research, and it definitely helps recontextualize my place as a scholar amongst all of these big names and changes; it gives me the idea that although rhetoric and composition’s roots are ancient, there is still a wealth to be studied and discovered in this field, and that the more unique perspectives get introduced to the field, the more we’ll uncover together.

Another, more personal thing, that struck me while reading was how “in early composition classrooms, students received little advice about revision until after their papers had already been graded, assuming that this advice would carry over to the next papers” (12). This stuck out to me because it’s incredibly reminiscent of a majority of my education, even up until college. I always felt short-changed when I received revision advice after I received my grade, but I never knew that this had been an issue that researchers and educators had reckoned with decades before my birth. It makes me wonder why those newer ideas on revision were never implemented in my time as a student. Did my teachers miss the memo, or was it just because all my districts adopted “the product-based pedagogy of the ‘current-traditional’ paradigm” (12)? I think its interesting that we had research in this field but I don’t recall anything outside of that current-traditional paradigm being implemented at all in my own education. Maybe the teachers just got left behind with the children.

On a similar note, the final thing that really struck me while reading this was that, “In 1974, an important document was published by the Conference on College Composition and Communication, supporting the legitimate use of social dialects in students’ writing: ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language'” (14). Another aspect of my education that stood out to me was that many times I had classmates or friends who wouldn’t conform to American Standard English in their writings, and their grades suffered for it; despite this, when it came to in class discussions and group work, their understanding of the material was undeniable. This also reminds me of my brief time as an educator, where many of my students understood the material and had unique perspectives on it, but would give up on writing essays because conforming to American Standard English was too difficult for them. Even as an educator, I had no idea that there had already been a push decades before my time to accept and incorporate these different Englishes for the benefit of students, but again there seemed to be no push to actually incorporate this into the classrooms. It makes me think about how many students have failed because of this, and how it would make them disbelieve in their own voice and uniqueness, despite their understanding.

This post was written while listening to Bobby “Blue” Bland’s 1961 album Two Steps from the Blues. The instrumentation on each track is perfectly moody and atmospheric, and Bobby’s performances are electric and heartfelt.

Student Blogs

Track 01. Intro (Remix)

The most appropriate introduction to myself would be to talk about my life as a writer. To be quite honest, I don’t really have any professional ambitions for my writing; I’m simply in the program because I love writing, and I want to understand more about and refine this skill with people that understand and share that love. Although I consider writing a skill, its also so much more than simply that to me; its communication, reflection, critique, adoration, sensation, inspiration, edification, education, the list goes on and on.

As a child I was always entranced by the worlds shown to me in movies, cartoons, comics, and video games, and soon realized that a unifying truth about all of these different forms of art was that they all had writers that helped create them. This knowledge and appreciation was strengthened when I realized that people who made songs and music were writers as well. I noticed just how integral writing was to these things that filled me with so much emotion and made me so curious about the world around me, and I couldn’t help but want to emulate that feeling. I found the most success in doing so with poetry, and over the years found myself writing more and more poetry until the time I first started my undergraduate studies. Although I wrote even less consistently during that time period, its when I met the people who inspired me to write the most, including (but not limited to) The One Most Inextricable from My Soul (who is the reason I am in this program today). I stopped writing after undergrad, but during the pandemic and my subsequent years of employment, I realized that I needed to write in order to make sense of my self and my life. While at my last job, I slowly found myself writing more and more during my downtime, and during a subsequent year of unemployment, I started frequently writing in a journal. It was during this time that I was again encouraged to join this program, and so I finally acquiesced to the person who kept telling me to join (the aforementioned One Most Inextricable from My Soul).

This post was written while listening to The Isley Brothers’ 1977 album Go for Your Guns, which I played during the end of a mini road trip I took this past weekend. “Voyage to Atlantis” hasn’t left my mind since, and so I’m playing the whole album now in deference to the groove and the Isley’s talents.