Tag Archives: writing

queer theory and the memoir

October 1, 2026 bacaya

Queer theory posits that identity, much like the act of writing, is fluid. Ever-changing. It requires grappling with boundaries and definitions that might have never been under consideration before. If I had any takeaways from this article (with which I struggled—it just felt so heady at times), it was this. I initially started writing this blog post as some way to connect this lesson with the other realizations I’ve had over the course of our class, but I found myself continuously led back to one idea: writing memoir.

I know I’ve made it a habit of including anecdotes with my blog posts. To be honest: I struggled with this one. It reminded me a bit of our first reading from Lauer—a lot of ideas that I agreed with, but did not know what to do with. I did not want to just write about being queer and being a writer, because that did not feel in line with the spirit of the article. I ended up reflecting on part of the memoir I had written in a class taught by Edi Giunta. While the content was about me being bisexual, I ended up realizing that the act of writing it was in itself pedagogically queer.

no annotations bc i did not get time to print this week </3, so here’s the first line of said memoir

If identity is fluid, memoir is the act of capturing your identity at one point in time. Past that, you must decide which identity you are writing from. You may be writing about your seven year old self, but whose voice are you using? The child version of you, or the version of you now, who has experienced more and knows more? How do those identities live in the same piece? What do you do with the inherent tension between them?

Memoir is also an act of grappling with your perceived identity. When you write memoir, it is your perception of who you are and what you have experienced. However, we cannot discount the fact that you have also been perceived and experienced. It is a constant negotiation of truth, and is just one of the many distinct layers of identity and experience we have. If you remember an experience one way and someone else remembers it differently, you have every right to write it as you remember. However, you must always be prepared to have it seen another way. My parents do not know I am queer. To them, I am as straight and cis as one can be. It does not help that my partner is, in fact, a straight cis man. That is the identity I have chosen to take up around them. While writing this memoir—and subsequently having it published online—I had to reconcile with the fact that there were two different spaces for me and my identities, and that there was a very real possibility that they might cross over. Still, I decided it was worth it.

As a genre, memoir is also well-equipped to discover what is possible in and out of its boundaries. “Queer Theory in the Writing Classroom” pulls from Ki Namaste and their argument that heterosexuality must exist for us to be able to understand queer theory. The boundaries of one form the definition of the other. That means we can, as writers, use queer theory and memoir as a space to play and explore. My favorite memoir, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, is a beautiful example of this. Not only does Machado use its subject matter (confronting the lack of domestic abuse narratives in lesbian stories, even though it is a grim reality) to question what is normal, but she also uses form as a way to push against norm. In the Dream House’s chapters are each based on different styles, genres, and tropes (ie., “Dream House as Horror”, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure”, or “Dream House as Famous Last Words”). By acknowledging what is the norm, writers are given the tools to push against boundaries.

My attempt to write about my queer memoir, in the end, was not just an attempt at inclusivity, thank god. There are also so many ideas that we’ve discussed in class that I see reflected in this article: writing as social commentary, the power of discovery, how shame robs writers. It feels good to be able to have a throughline in places I didn’t expect.

Student Blogs

Writing Should NOT Be Intimidating

September 29, 2026 AlyssaR

Hello everyone, I am back from the dead (whatever illness has been plaguing New Jersey right now). Excuse my lateness on this post; I was out sick for a total of six days. Or should I say, I was stuck inside. Today is the first day I see the light of day, and I am very grateful to be back.

How I was looking this past weekend.(Pinterest//ravennarecklesss)

With that said, I wanted to add to the discussion I didn’t get to be a part of in the last class before moving on and posting this week’s blog discussion:

Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product by Donald M. Murray has made me reflect on how I was taught to write, the insecurities that came up because of it, and how I’d like to talk about writing to people who’d consider themselves ‘non-writers’.

Murray describes the traditional, scapegoat way of writing as literary analysis. Literature is not necessarily the problem. Reading and analyzing literature whilst growing up, academically, shaped the way I perceived others. I distinctly remember having to read books like The Outsiders, The Giver, The Great Gatsby, and The Catcher in the Rye, all of which made me more curious about the human mind, community, and how we should interact with the world. The problem is using renowned literature to teach kids who still don’t know how to use their own voice:

“Most of us are trained as English teachers by studying a product: writing. Our critical skills are honed by examining literature, which is finished writing; language as it has been used by authors. And then, fully trained in the autopsy, we go out and are assigned to teach our students to write, to make language live.” (p. 3)

Published literature, at the end of the day, is finished. It’s like trying to encourage an aspiring architect in school to try to build his own version of the Empire State Building. When does our writing, or even better, when did our writing become merely mimesis rather than our own products brewed from the process that authentic writing is supposed to be?

Bring back authentic work.

We’re performing “autopsies.” But what about living writing? The writing that is still breathing. I do not want to only read and then compare myself to writing that has gone through hundreds of revisions and different editors. I do not have an editor; I only have myself. I think that’s why it is so important for us to share our “shitty first drafts,” the scribbles on the page, the thoughts at 2 am in our notes app.

Maybe that’s why published journals, like Slyvias Plath’s Unabridged Journals, are so personable. They’re still alive. Imperfectly human. Even poetry can be shared this way: Tupac Shakur’s “A Rose That Grew from Concrete.”

Instead of this structured way of teaching writing, Murray suggests writing as an experience of three parts: prewriting, writing, and rewriting, all with an emphasis on learning, finding voice, and creative autonomy. I think I’ll think of his theory in every writing practice I do, whether teaching or participating. Writing should not be intimidating. It should be accessible to all.

Student Blogs

Education as a fire that never goes out. Writing a process to find one’s voice & identity.

September 24, 2026 Nathaly Lopez

After reading Bell Hooks’s Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, I couldn’t help but say this woman is on fire. In this week’s reading, I was able to acknowledge not only a teacher, writer, and intellectual scholar, but also a woman anchored in justice and deeply committed to the healing power of education. Hooks is so real. So raw. Her voice is like a flame that refuses to go out. She leaves you wanting to read more. She writes with such sharpness. As I was reading, I felt the urgency in her voice, the urgency of someone who refuses to accept a world where learning is anything less than liberating. More than just an academic force, education became a weapon for Hooks—one she used to trespass the oppression of a white‑dominated society and transgress not only intellectually, but emotionally, mentally, and socially.

One of the sentences that struck me was: “School was still a political place, since we were always having to counter white racist assumptions that we were genetically inferior, never as capable as white peers, even unable to learn.” This line captures Hooks’s political and emotional truth about her learning experience. At the beginning of her academic journey, she lost her love for school because of discrimination and marginalization. As Hooks explains, obedience to a white‑dominated system was expected from Black students, limiting their practice of freedom. How could a Black student learn if the system had already decided their place within white society? Regardless of the opposition, hooks was relentless and kept pressing forward.

Education was a political struggle for Hooks. But I also feel that her struggle ignited an unstoppable fire inside her, leading her to view learning as a form of liberation. Even though she had painful experiences with marginalization, she believed that education was enabling. Focusing on the academic aspect, Hooks also didn’t have the best pedagogical experiences in some of her classes. She said she felt bored and that the banking system didn’t interest her. Her experiences led her to dissect different ways for students to experience learning as liberatory.

The brilliance of Hooks’s article is in the blueprint she developed for her own pedagogical practice. Her negative experiences didn’t stop her from pursuing education. Quite the opposite: her experiences led her to realize she didn’t want to be the kind of professor students dreaded. Hooks mentions that Paulo Freire became her mentor in radical pedagogy, inspiring her to teach differently than she was taught. Another important figure who influenced her was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who emphasized the teacher as healer. I had never in my life heard of such a thing, or of a pedagogy that emphasizes wholeness. This made me realize that I had experienced this type of learning back in high school. For all four years, I had the same science teacher who regarded his students as whole humans. And now that I think about it thoroughly, I see him through the lens of “the teacher as healer.”

I will never forget him—Mr. Randle. He was my teacher, but he was also a mentor for many students. Mr. Randle supported my mental health throughout high school. I looked forward to his class because I knew it wouldn’t be just a lecture. I knew his class would be filled with life lessons and words of wisdom. As a class, we all felt like we were his children. Someone we could really count on. He even helped one classmate who became homeless get out of that situation.

(Science labs were never boring in Mr. Randles’s class)

The reason I’m mentioning my former science teacher is that I can relate to how Hooks envisioned a practice of radical pedagogy, which is exactly how I felt in Mr. Randle’s class. Classrooms should be places where professors and students have collaborative relationships with one another.

-ME VISITING MR. RANDLE YEARS LATER AFTER HS GRADUATION BECAUSE I NEEDED HIS MENTORING

Hooks argues that we need an education that heals an uninformed, unknowing spirit. Many of us have had classes in the past with no excitement—just boring lecturing—and the banking system was implemented (and most of the time, we don’t even remember the teacher’s name). The concept of self‑actualization is very relevant because teachers and students must understand that learning is not just in the mind. As Hooks explains, self‑actualization is the process of becoming fully alive, a learning process that requires all aspects of a whole person, not just the intellectual. Hooks’s writing is always a self‑reflective practice that enlightens me not only intellectually, but spiritually and mentally. My biggest reflection from Hooks is that education is a form of liberation. Education is transformative. Learning is blooming and evolving.

Murray’s article, “Teach Writing as a Process, Not a Product,” leans more toward the pedagogical aspect of writing. I really like his idea of teaching the writer instead of correcting the writing. His argument is that students need to be taught writing as a process, rather than through the usual methods some English teachers use, such as grading grammar, focusing on errors, and critiquing structure. Sometimes it almost feels like teachers compare students’ writing to professional literature. I reflect that teachers shouldn’t respond as judges; instead, they should respond as readers to help students (the writers) clarify meaning. Murray’s argument is very relevant because it inspires students to develop their own writing process and voice. Hooks’s and Murray’s ideas connect because they both view learning as a living process. They both believe it’s a process that involves humanity, discovering our voice, and growing not only academically, but mentally as well. Hooks and Murray reflect on the complexity of being a student in a world where learning is shaped by expectations rather than a process to find one’s voice.

Student Blogs

the one in which i forget (and rediscover) common sense

September 23, 2026 bacaya

I must admit: when initially looking at the titles of our readings this week, I was under the impression that their content would not mesh. It was not like the pairing was an issue to me; I had faith that there was a reason we were reading them now. It was just a small act of noticing. Perhaps I had this idea that the teaching of craft would stay focused on just that—craft—and that the idea of liberation and social justice in the classroom were separate issues. I cannot tell you why I thought that. In hindsight, I was wrong.

First, though, I would like to examine Murray’s idea of the writing process as “discovery through language”. For most of my life, I was under the impression that we should only write what we know. It was advice I had heard both online and in creative writing classrooms—how could you write about what you don’t know? Oddly enough, the time I learned to do the opposite lines up with the time I really began to learn how to write. In a class with my mentor, Edi Giunta (there will be no shortage of her appearances in my blog posts, I apologize in advance), I was told to write what I don’t know. It was an idea I struggled with at first. It feels shameful to have to admit you don’t know something. For a while, I resisted this advice, and came into class with the idea that I knew what I wanted to write about, and that I would not stray from it. I told myself that I had been wanting to tell that story for so long, and I would tell it, memoir best practices be damned. In reality, that piece of writing had already been turned over in my head over and over again. The narrative was set in stone, so to say. I now know I had to dip into the unknown to be able to come back and tell the story as faithfully as I could.

Even in non-academic writing, the process of discovery is irreplaceable. While reading, I was reminded that the course titles for English 101 and 102 at NJCU were not just titled something along the lines of “English Composition”, but rather “Critical Reading and Writing”—emphasis on the critical. I look back on those classrooms now and see Murray’s implications of teaching process all throughout them. I think about the ways I’ve encouraged my students to just write—to not worry about the assignment, to just get their thoughts on paper. The way I’ve been taught to let them grapple with not knowing. To not jump in and try to guide them a certain way. To, as Murray so eloquently puts it, just shut up. It is beautiful when it works.

However, I am cognizant that this ideal practice might not be realistic—at least, not yet, and maybe not for a long time. While reading bell hooks, I thought about the kinds of students and classmates I had. On one end, I think about my high school classmates. Many of my classmates, including myself, were the top achievers during our middle and elementary school years. Many of them came from families who could afford to put money into education and extracurriculars. If we committed ourselves to education, we were all but guaranteed placements in Ivy Leagues and prestigious internships. School was a chance at power. This, however, meant a suffocating school environment. Advanced placement was expected, not exceptional. If you were not staying after school for extra classes or resume-ready extracurriculars, you were falling behind. You did not, could not, think of school as a place where it was safe to discover.

On the other end of the spectrum are the peers I had in undergraduate. I think it is safe to say that college was also their chance at power, albeit of a different kind. If my high school classmates had the privilege of time to dedicate to their studies, in college, time was a resource often stretched too thin. I am cognizant of the fact that NJCU was seen as a “safety school” to many. Most of our students attended because it was cheap, or the school was nearby. Our demographic is very different from the kinds of people I knew in high school. I had many students who believed they had to conform to the traditional path: go to college, get a degree, get a high paying job. However, many of these students also faced additional outside pressures. They were the breadwinners of their family. They had siblings or parents to tend to. They were the first to attend college. Because of this, school was just something they had to do. Their focus was the degree at the end of it all. I had many conversations with students who wished they could take the time to sit down and do the kind of learning that would help them, but more often than not, schoolwork—and discovery through writing—was last on their list of priorities.

In class, we talked about new writing technologies—generative artificial intelligence. Generative AI allows learners to skip the process, the most liberating part of education, in favor of the product. What is so disappointing is that I can see students from both ends of the spectrum falling victim to this. When you have been told your entire life that you must go to school to better your social standing rather than to learn, it is easy to justify cutting out the parts of the journey that don’t seem to support that goal. The unfamiliar is scary. Why should I risk being vulnerable when I can just plug in a prompt into AI and go? It gives me my time back. It ensures I turn something in rather than nothing. It is safe.

In an ideal world, everyone has experienced the joy that I’ve been able to experience in the classroom. Everyone has the resources to go to school for the love of learning, rather than out of necessity. Everyone is free of pressure, free of fear of vulnerability. At the beginning of my reflection, I wrote about my initial confusion about the two articles. I now assume I must have known somewhere in my subconscious how they were connected: through the idea that the ability to deeply pursue the craft of writing is intrinsically tied to the state of the human being.

Student Blogs

Rhetoric… Composition… English Studies

September 17, 2026 Adamari Peralta

I find it shocking we fared so far from incorporating, or even acknowledging, rhetoric. Mainly because it was such a prevalent discussion topic during my time as an undergrad. How could it be that those lessons I had on rhetoric—so influential to my to my writing today—weren’t regularly discussed in classrooms pre-1960s?

It makes me think back to my elementary school experience. The work, or what I mainly remember of the work, was focused mainly on not writing run-on sentences, getting the distinction between there, their, and they’re right, and using correct punctuation. I don’t remember practicing prewriting-writing-rewriting beyond using an outline and reading out loud. And, as discussed in the chapter, high school’s english classes only really ever focus on the literature end of what we know as english studies (writing and lit).

Now, to move the lens a little, I wanted to talk about prewriting. Prewriting has alwaaysss been an interesting part of the writing process for me. Not only because there are so many ways to approach it, but because for so long (K-12) the concept of prewriting was encompassed solely on the process of outlining. So… that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t exactly a good way to get students to acknowledge the power in effectively using language to get a point across. Not addressing it, and all the ways it may be approached, limits writers from finding their voice (which is so detrimental to their quality of expression in any discipline: creative, historical, research, etc.).

And to go even further, secondary education doesn’t really pin down students purpose as more than something to appease a teacher’s expectations. Most of my undergrad I worked towards rewiring my brain to stop writing for my professor and to start writing for my intended audience. And most of that is hard to do when you’re writing an outline that you’ve very conscious hits all the expectations written on an assignment sheet.

…

It’s funny how something so impactful to someone’s writing identity could have been put on the sidelines for that long. Look at what we uncovered (in vast disciplines and modes) when we focused less on the mechanics of our writing and focused more on rhetoric.

Adamari 9/17/2026

Student Blogs

Rhetoric and the Engfish

September 17, 2026 Zach Martin

So this week’s read was quite the mixed bag, Dear Reader. On one hand, it was really enlightening because it was so relevant to my career field. On the other hand, it was painful because it was so relevant to my career field.

Now it goes without saying that there are a lot of issues with the way that we teach, because I want to be as broad as humanly possible, English. Despite the fact that this piece was written in 2006, it aged startlingly well. While there would have been no possible way for McComiskey to have known the absolutely earth shattering, pedagogically shifting, classroom breaking, shifts that we would face in the forms of: the rise of social media, the fall in media literacy, and the utter monstrosity that is Artificial Intelligence. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There were a couple things that definitely stood out to me.

Issue #1: Teachers don’t know the content

While, I do think that it is pretty funny that they say it so bluntly, there is a really depressing truth to it. In all of the classes I have taken, both while I was majoring in education and my alt route courses, they never really focused on rhetoric. If I am being completely honest, those classes only really focused on lesson plans and Danielson. It is expected/implied that we will learn rhetoric in our content specific class, it rarely happens like that. It’s one of those things that sounds really good on paper or at a board meeting but it doesn’t happen like that in life.

Education majors are still people.

If it is easier to pass a children’s lit class than a rhetoric class, 9 times out of 10 *Not actual statistics* the educator to be will take the easier class. I have coworkers that never needed to study rhetoric, despite its relevance to the curriculum.

It’s a sad truth of the profession; due to complacency, many teachers can’t provide the instruction they should.

Issue #2: Grammatical correctness and grades

So I’m going to expose myself a bit. I used to be one of those “Erm actually…” grammar police people. Now, I did it because I was a know-it-all brat; however, now that I’m a teacher, I see the real time impact of enforcing grammatical correctness.

I’ve had plenty of students who can convey their thoughts and ideas verbally. They don’t care about following norms. They don’t care about punctuation (mainly because they aren’t writing). They don’t care about any of that.

The only thing that matters is getting their point across.

One of my best/most verbal students was one of my lowest scoring students. While she struggled with certain aspects of writing, she could convey her thought like no joke. She would also pick up on themes and ideas unlike anybody else’s business.

I think that by focusing on grammatical correctness, we deter students from interacting with not only the text, but also with their classmates.

There is also the issue of grades.

I hate grades, and I hate grading. Point blank, period.

Whenever I give an assignment that will be graded, students will do whatever they can to find the straightest path to 100. They don’t feel a need to go above and beyond. They don’t think outside the rubric. They just check boxes. The amount of times I’ve heard, “Mr. Martin, I wrote [X] words but my story isn’t done, what do I do?”

What do you mean, what do you do?

Keep writing.

But it is easier to squeeze blood from a stone, than to get a student to complete more work than the rubric asks.

And, again, one of my best students, pretty regularly, scored low. A lot of students, had they been in her spot, would have just given up on themselves. Why put in effort if I am only going to fail?

Again, I hate grades.

Both of these also tie into academic writing, which clashes with the student’s normal voice.

Issue #3: Engfish

That is all.

Until next time, Dear Reader.

Student Blogs

My brain after reading Lauer: Enlightened

September 17, 2026 Nathaly Lopez

Photo Credit: Pixabay/Gerd Altmann

Rhetoric & Composition by Janice M. Lauer made me realize that, although I had taken classes that explored rhetoric studies and pedagogy, it wasn’t until this article that I gained a deeper understanding of the foundations of rhetoric and its impact on English and writing studies. Rhetoric became an evolving disciplinary study in the 1960s that broadened pedagogy for writing scholars, teachers, and students. Lauer emphasizes that over the past thirty years, “rhetoric and composition” has become a full-fledged discipline within English Studies (Lauer, “Composition”). According to Lauer, composition was once considered only a teaching practice, and contingent faculty typically taught writing. Over the following decades of the 1960s, rhetoric and composition saw an explosion of theory-building (Lauer, “Composition”). Before rhetoric became a full-fledged study, it seems to me that writing and English teachers had a monotonous and limited way of teaching writing because that was what they had learned in the past. Before the emergence of rhetoric, students and writers were limited to their own ideas and could not explore their writing processes. The emergence of rhetoric opened the door to new theories and features of writing that impacted not only an academic field across the country, but also created social change.

One key factor I reflected on in this article is that it outlines the foundations of rhetorical theory and its influence not only academically but socially as well. Rhetoric was overseen in the past because the study of composition was prioritized. With its metamorphosis into a full-fledged study, scholars were able to see the relevance of rhetoric in communication and social circumstances. According to Lauer, rhetoric didn’t become a field of study because universities suddenly established it overnight, but because struggling professors needed it. There was no academic foundation for scholars to teach writing before. Professors lacked research in the field of writing because its origin—rhetoric—had been set aside until a group of scholars interested in written discourse paved the way for rhetoric to emerge in universities.

Through Lauer’s article, I’m able to acknowledge the importance of recognizing rhetoric as an interdisciplinary, multimodal, and transformational study because no single field could fully explain or compare to how writing works, as it’s intertwined with many other fields. Rhetoric comes from Western studies (the time of the ancient Greeks), crossing the fields of anthropology, history, and philosophy. Since its emergence in writing studies in the 1960s, rhetoric has crossed with many other fields such as linguistics, psychology, sociology, literary studies, and, prominently, has developed new cognitive theories of writing. For instance, Lauer mentions the development of a cognitive model of writing designed by Linda Flower and John Hayes based on experienced writers. The model consisted of writing features that were goal-directed to reshape the writer’s cognitive process. The study of rhetoric reshaped the writing and cognitive processes of writers and scholars in ways that allowed them to find new pedagogical methods.

Another key point in the article is rhetoric’s social impact outside the classroom. The study of this field extended beyond academic institutions because there was a growing focus on technological writing when computers emerged. Rhetoric and composition influenced theorists to study the relationship between technology and writing (Lauer). One of my biggest takeaways is that rhetoric becoming its own independent field was one of the first milestones for writers to be seen as thinkers rather than just students. Writers gained the freedom to explore their writing processes through new research. I feel that students experienced a sense of freedom in writing to diverse audiences once rhetoric was implemented as a study because they were no longer limited to directing their papers to just one audience (teachers).

I could say much more about what struck me in Lauer’s article, but I would end up writing twenty pages. What I want to emphasize is that only writers can truly feel and understand the impact of rhetoric in our writing. We can say that through writing, we can explore tone, style, genre, and direct our work to specific audiences. Because of rhetoric’s emergence, we can choose to study writing and have access to a plethora of research from scholars who devoted themselves to studying rhetoric and composition. And for that, I am forever grateful.

My thoughts on the highlights emerging from our first two classes are that I feel at home here. I feel rooted in this community because we are all so alike yet so uniquely and beautifully different. We all share a passion for writing, and we have transformed our life experiences into insight. Since the first class, I have felt it was a safe space, and I genuinely enjoy coming. I love the writing exercises, and I feel we can truly express our thoughts here through writing. So everyone, thank you for being a lovely class, and thank you to Dr. Zamora for making it a great one

Student Blogs

The Reemergence of Rhetoric

September 17, 2026 AlyssaR

I don’t know if anyone else had the same experience, but I was somewhat shocked to read that rhetoric had a reemergence during the 1960’s. In the practice of ‘good’ rhetoric, I took a page from Kyla Wazana Tompkins. Though she isn’t discussed exclusively in this reading, chapter two of Rhetoric and Composition by Janice M. Lauler, I still found some overlaps between the two:

“This brings me to another exercise I do in class, which is to actually write out the model that I learned as an undergrad across the top of a blackboard (Wollstonecraft then Friedan then National Organization of Women then Radical feminism then Women of Color feminism etc etc, an obviously reductive and flawed genealogy) and then underneath to chart out other revolutionary timelines…” (p. 5, “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know”)

That brings me back to my initial shock of rhetoric in the 1960’s. The first revolution that came to mind to chart out was, the civil rights movement. Never in my educational career did it even come to mind that both sides, those for and opposing civil rights, used, studied, and analyzed rhetoric. Take, for example, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963, written at the height of the civil rights movement, which heavily “persuaded” the masses of the injustice of Jim Crow segregation.

If Rhetoric and Composition are now synonymous with one another, then why am I learning about it just now?

Traditional English Teaching

That’s because, as Lauler reveals:

“…teaching also focused on reading and discussing essays, completing exercises on style, and repeating drills on grammar. Little, if any, attention was paid to helping students get started, investigate ideas, consider readers, receive feedback on drafts, or revise.” (p. 7)

All of these aspects are of huge importance when it comes to composition. Without rhetoric, how does a student even begin to form a thought or question that engages and challenges themselves and their readers? Sure, I learned about Martin Luther King; no, I did not learn about his letter and what makes it successful writing. Successful in that it made people think, question, and eventually change their behavior, beliefs, and even racial laws:

He uses ethos by presenting himself as a minister and a scholar, thereby establishing credibility. He appeals to pathos by vividly describing the suffering and injustice faced by African Americans in Birmingham. King writes about the brutality of segregation, the bombings of African American homes, and the emotional toll it takes on the community. These emotional appeals elicit empathy and anger from the readers. King also uses logos by presenting a logical argument for the necessity of nonviolent direct action. He explains that negotiations with white authorities have failed, and waiting for justice is no longer an option. He argues that civil disobedience is a moral duty when faced with unjust laws. King invokes the moral and ethical principles of justice and equality, drawing upon his deep knowledge of philosophy and theology.” (ProfessorCatMaster607)

How can we expect students, or anyone, from that matter to write using rhetoric if there’s still a major emphasis on ‘correct’ grammar (p.20), which, ironically enough, makes grammar worse.

This is written after a nice meal of soup con mi madre. Consider my mind blown and zen.

Student Blogs

like a kid in a candy store, except everything is free and made of big words

September 17, 2026 bacaya

In reading Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition”, I find myself thinking about my experience with the act of writing throughout my years in school. It feels odd to be able to put a name to all the work I’ve done before, both as a student and during my experience as a tutor. The margins of my print-out copy of the reading recall my experiences in the classroom: “i always talk about how students consider themselves ‘bad writers’” and “dr. walters is that you” in response to the idea of revision.

In particular, I found myself reflecting on what Lauer calls the current-traditional paradigm, and how for most of my life, writing was taught to be a challenge with subjective parameters. There was an idea of what good writing was, who did it, and where it could be found. Rhetoric was a two-day unit (vocabulary test included), and feedback from teachers focused on punctuation and sentence counts. This experience with writing often extended past me. When I talk about how people learn to write, I tend to refer back to a student of mine who considered herself a “bad writer”. In reality, her issue was a weak grasp on things like comma placement, something that we were able to fix in just a few tutoring sessions. Her voice, however, was something that seemed to come naturally. She was adamant that she wasn’t good at writing, and for the first half of the semester, was hesitant to engage with our class. I think years of being told writing could only be done a certain way taught her to feel shame in her work. To coax her out of her shell took delicate care and, unconsciously for me, many of the ideologies Lauer covers.

Only in college did I realize what studying English could entail. For the first time, I was able to see English as not just Shakespeare and five-sentence paragraphs. I fell in love with writing as a craft and being able to help others understand it. I know now that this is because of the nature of rhetoric and composition, being a “human science”, as described by Louise Wetherbee Phelps. I found it funny that as I read, I was able to connect ideas with experience: the theories of invention I had come across while generating writing across classes or the factors that influenced my feedback to students I tutored. What a surprise, I thought, that although I was not aware of the science, there exists a reason for the things I learned to do. More than that, while reading about the growth of the field of rhetoric, I was fascinated by the idea that composition had been, “considered only a teaching practice”. To me, it only made sense that the field grew. I was reminded of the saying: “how you do something is how you do everything”. The way we compose—the way we put together our words—is the basis of almost everything we do. It is how we express ourselves, why we write to-do lists, where we get the information to write a report. Of course it is natural that we study it.

*“it is ALL connected” – me, re: writing being interdisciplinary*

I am excited to finally “put a name to the face”, or so to speak, with all I have learned about writing so far. During our check-ins last week, I spoke about how, for me, returning to school meant practicing being more deliberate. The information in this reading is similar. It forces me to look back on my learning experience with a new lens and pick it apart. When was I taught this idea? How? Which of these ideas do I subscribe to, and what experience taught me to think otherwise? Even the philosophical aspects, which I sometimes struggle to wrap my brain around, excite me. It feels like I am about to open a whole new set of toys with which to write with.

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