My notion of writing pedagogy (much vaguer a few months ago than it is after having practiced it to some extent) mostly consisted of informing, and in many ways enforcing, “writing structure.” The holy 5 paragraph essay, or the elements of traditional rhetoric that have been taught to us since well before adolescence. So in that sense, teaching writing seemed fairly straight forward to me. I know that in my own experiences in English 101, as an undergrad, the emphasis of the class was very much on fortifying the compositional methods we already knew, but this time adding in collegiate spice by way of research found on University owned search engines. That added element of extensive citing and academic response to other thinkers is what signaled to me at the time that the writing I was being taught was of a higher tier; which would inevitably lead me to think, right before starting to teach myself, that this is what it is going to mean for me to “teach writing.”

Murray has romantic ideas about writing, but I think this is mostly due to a lofty emphasis on writing for the self, for an almost meditative if not ultimately transformative experience. That’s not to say that those exact same romantic ideas were not what made me fall in love with writing in the first place, because they are. Traditional composition & rhetoric studies, at least under the English 101 lens, are a bit more sterilized than that. While I love Murray’s thought that “We must recognize the aura that precedes surprise the same way [one recognizes] a migraine. It is the sort of thing that can only be learned through experience” (5), I also think that this is a specific mindset that has been detached from institutional learning and can only be really utilized by those who have found their own way to it. Bean, while fighting off objections to exploratory writing, writes that “Students should [free write] for the same reasons professional writers do—for the intrinsic satisfaction. In reality, though, most students need some teacher supervision to remain motivated, and teachers need to read some of their students’ exploratory writing in order to coach their thinking processes” (123). Whether Murray would agree with a necessity to coach thinking processes in this exact way, I’m not sure. However, I do think there’s an interesting thread between Bean and Murray that says that the kind of writing they love, that I myself love, that can lead to surprising revelations in thinking of the self and external forces, should in fact be the cornerstone in how we teach writing.

And so in many ways I’m not sure I ever considered that that unique exploratory form of writing could ever be facilitated side-by-side with traditional forms of composition. Which leads me to hope, especially with the curriculum I’ve been given, that I can learn how to encourage and advance the skill of writing for surprise and self-fulfillment in others, especially those who would otherwise see writing as a sort of objective analysis report that is handed in and weighed on even more objective quality scales. My concern, of course, is just how cemented that sort of mentality is in some of my students by now.