Muriel Harris, Literacy Autobiographies, and Me

I must begin this blog post by publicly stating how much I enjoyed writing the literacy autobiography.  I had no idea how much I would enjoy this project.  To be perfectly honest, I really couldn’t leave it alone.  I kept returning to it, adding details, noodling my word choice, moving sentences, paragraphs, and fixating on the overall piece.  This noodling was not the outcome of fear or anxiety, but actual joy.  I rediscovered, in some sense, how much I love to write.  I neglected laundry, grading, lesson planning, cooking dinner, and greeting family members.  Who was my audience?  (Dr. Cauthen and my fellow students.  Later, I realized it might also be my sons.)  What was my purpose?  (Examining my own learning trajectory can and will make me a stronger teacher, but I also see emotional benefits from coming to terms with my past.  Is there also a spark of hope somewhere that I could someday be a writer?  I had better not wait too long, if that is true.)

            Writing for oneself is an intriguing and complex thing to do in a class about teaching composition.  I want to be a strong teacher, yet I still have a very personal need to write. I am guessing that many of us are still reconciling those two pulls on our attention and on our heart. I think this is why this project may have been so meaningful for many of us.  We were authors and meta-cognitive teachers of composition at the same time.  Perfect timing then for us to read the essays we did last week.  I can’t help but make correlations here between Muriel Harris’s essay “Composing Behavior of One-and Multi-Draft Writers” (a cumbersome title once again but a strong essay) and my own recent writing journey. 

            First of all, I want to say that this will be a much shorter post than I could write on this subject – or that you may be expecting from me.  I will be writing a longer article analysis later this week on Harris’s work.  I will say that I liked her basic construct – examining the extremes of writers on the spectrum.  From “No, it’s fine.  Good enough!  I’m done” one-draft writers to “I’m exploring the space; I am definitely not ready to write this thing” multi-drafters, Harris says (or rather said in 1989) that we can learn a lot about the teaching of writing if we look at the extremes. 

            In working on my literacy autobiography, I feel strongly that my first draft worked through quite a bit of what Harris called “writer-based writing” (an idea she got from Flower and Hayes).  This was a necessary step for me.  Our connection to reading and writing cannot neatly be thought about or written about without dredging up old business.  Writers are sensitive people, for the most part, and we write because, on some deep, inexplicable level, we really need to.  My literacy autobiography brought up some memories and some questions that I have not addressed for a while.  Writing my early draft and discovery draft, then, were critical steps to take. 

            Next, I had to consider how to turn my prose into something I hoped would be interesting, instructive, or moving to my readers.  To do this, I had no choice but to rewrite.  I played with words, phrases, and paragraphs.  I selected and rejected episodes from my life.  Then, I read my work aloud – first to myself and then to my husband and sons.  Their reactions, verbal and facial, were extremely helpful. Marge’s kind response in class to my rough draft last week made all the difference.  She took the time to send me a thoughtful email.  Without this, I might have lost confidence.

            I am not sure that I have a definitive response to Harris yet, except to say that I worry about the one-drafters I find in my seventh grade classes.  Writing for me is so important to who I am, it is so necessary to me, that I cannot imagine writing many things in a single draft and moving on.  I have to live with a piece for a while.  I have to breathe it in slowly and consider what works, what lasts, what resonates.  And while I always come up with things in the first draft that make the cut, I also find new ways to make something more specific and, therefore, more meaningful. 

            Harris walks a fine line in her essay.  She wants to draw a distinction between “real” one-drafters and those who, for one reason or another, can’t be bothered to revise.  And while I certainly do not in any way advocate the multi-drafter lifestyle, as depicted by Harris, I fall closer to this description.  I like to draft, rework, and play with my writing, but I am also a firm believer in making all deadlines.  The spectrum, for me, may be a bit difficult to envision after all.  There is a big difference between rereading and revising my work and fretting, delaying, and ultimately missing deadlines – Harris’s stereotypical multi-drafters.  Those of us who work and go to school (virtually everyone in our class) know that ultimately all we can do is the best that we can – ponder, consider, write, sleep on it, reread, revise, and turn it in – and we do.