Chantelle did a really great job of keeping her writing interesting. The first paper was great because it added that creative element at the beginning and every paper after that kept up the same energy. The discussion of Mel Gibson and Kenneth Branagh in the second paper was a great point that I wouldn't have ever thought of. The third paper kept up the creativity and it was really fun to read!

Helen's writing was interesting to begin with, but it got better and better as the semester progressed. Her third paper was definitely my favorite; it was incredibly easy to get a sense of Helen's voice in her memoir. I knew I would be interested in what I was reading when her first paper started with a Boy Meets World reference. I enjoyed reading from paper to paper to see how her writing progressed and ending with her excellent memoir.

Amanda's first paper was great. The revision was excellent and I loved the use of (Take Two) at the end of the title. Her second paper was great with the first line "It always seems like voice is the evil in writing." I was hooked and interested after I read that line. Amanda wrote in her "About Me" section that she didn't feel like she had a great vocabulary and talks in circles in her writing, but I thought it was great! I especially loved her memoir.

As far as my own eportfolio goes, I do feel like I've grown as a writer this semester. It was great to see how everyone else writes academic papers and memoirs and let those things influence me in my writing. When I read through each draft again, I notice how much additions and subtractions that ended up in my final papers helped. Adding a few sentences here and taking out a few there made each of my papers much more cohesive and full.

John Holtzman

Paper #3

December 5, 2008

WC: 1,908

Scared to Write

I, like many others, enjoy looking for a scare. My first experience with Gilbert’s Grove came one night when a few friends of mine decided that instead of sitting around town with nothing to do we would head west of town and walk around in Gilbert’s Grove with flashlights. Several legends about Gilbert’s Grove have told stories of a single body hanging from a tree while others have told of a baby wailing from inside a stroller. We drove out to the grove with the excitement that can only come from being terribly nervous. In the three miles it took to get to Gilbert’s Grove from the middle of town, we talked about how long it would take for someone to find us if we were all murdered. We speculated that it could be several days, which is certainly possible considering the rumor that several people who work at the dump are frightened of the grove because of the noises they often hear.

As my friend pulled into the grove, we noticed several dirty mattresses, a baby carriage, ropes on the trees, and trash that had been scattered by the wind. The grove was large and filled with dead and dying trees. We walked around, pretending to lose each other and all realizing that the others were doing just that, and while the excitement remained the whole time, the fear did not. We pushed aside tree limbs that scratched our arms and pretended our flashlights were dying. As we shined our flashlights, they revealed very little to frighten us; there was the occasional raccoon who would stare at us and then turn and run and the hoot of a single owl who seemed to want us out of his grove. For the most part, our panic was only heightened when a car drove by and we had to turn out our flashlights because we were terrified that we would be found sneaking around in a place we were not really supposed to be.

Hippie House, on the other hand, was a different story. The first time I went, I was with two girls. They were both juniors and had already been to Hippie House a number of times; I was a freshman in high school who was extremely terrified of all the stories I had heard about Hippie House. As we headed to the east of town, we talked about all of the terrible things we heard had happened. Was it the place Charles Manson actually conducted satanic rituals? Had he murdered people in the house? Would we find his writing scribbled on the floor? Was there, as was the rumor, going to be blood on the walls? As it turned out, I didn’t find out on this particular trip. After all of the talking, we were too frightened to even get out of the car. I did notice as we shined the headlights onto the house that the walls inside were a deep red. As we sat there discussing what could be inside the dirty white house and the broken cellar that was connected to it, we saw something move in the overgrown, but very dead grass.

We left and decided that in order to make the evening a little bit scarier we should take the dirt roads home and drive by an old cemetery on the way. It began to rain, and as we passed the cemetery, we noticed some sort of light. Frightened and unable to breathe, we all agreed that it was a candle.

I maintain to this day that there was a candle burning. In the rain.

I have gone past that cemetery a number of times since the night we saw the candle burning and have not seen anything similar even during the day.

A few weeks later, after having heard my story of the red walls and the burning candle in the cemetery, my fellow Gilbert’s Grove adventurers and I decided to head back out to Hippie House and see what we could. We got up the nerve and drove out with our flashlights in hand. As we got out of the car, we turned on our flashlights and paid no mind to the sign that assured us that we were violators and yes, we would be prosecuted. We opened the door and the first thing I noticed was that the walls were now white. Had someone painted them since my last visit or were the red walls I had previously seen a mere trick of my imagination? I’m still not entirely sure. My colleagues in crime and I made our way to the basement at which point bats flew from the rafters and seemed to surround us. Startled, we hurried back upstairs and out to the car when we realized the bats had only been birds.

At this point, Evan, the driver of the car, informed us all that he could not find his keys. To make matters worse, as we debated what we should do, cars began to drive past and we had to kill the flashlights. Scared and in the complete black that is the country at night, we saw red and blue lights that could only be the lights of a police car. Fortunately, the car was miles away and drove past Hippie House, probably doing nothing more than pulling over a speeding car. We continued to shine our flashlights and eventually found the car keys on the ground. As we headed back towards town, Evan confessed that he had thrown the keys on the ground and into the tall, dead grass when we got there because he thought it would be scary. It was.

Upon returning from these adventures, I began to notice that school was a lot less interesting than it had been before. Before our weekend excursions, I’d had no problems with school. Sure, some of the stuff we were learning in school was boring, but up until that point, I had never cared so little about the things we were reading in English classes (despite the fact that English had always been my favorite subject). Until then, I had gotten a lot of excitement from reading stories and novels, but regardless of what we read, it just couldn’t match the level of exhilaration I felt when my friends and I were exploring the haunted places surrounding our town. Yeah, I liked reading Lord of the Flies, but even when that book was at its scariest, it didn’t even come close to the level of excitement I felt when I was exploring the haunted places on the outskirts of town. It hit me the hardest when I got back a reaction paper to Lord of the Flies. D. Not good.

The English teacher who had given me back a D on my paper even took me aside and mentioned that he noticed that I didn’t seem to have much interest in what was happening in his class. Of course, Mr. Ginapp was fully aware of both Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House; he knew all about them and the legends that came with them. He also knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t usually distracted in school.

He knew this because I grew up around his two kids; my grandma babysat for them when I was young and my grandma’s house is where I stayed when my parents were at work. Needless to say, the Ginapps and I saw a lot of each other.

Knowing how cool Mr. Ginapp was, when I got to high school, I immediately signed up for one of his English classes. When it was time for the school play, I signed up because I knew Mr. Ginapp would be directing. I ended up taking at least one class from Mr. Ginapp each year I was in high school and I acted under his direction in nine different plays and musicals during the school year and in the summers.

Anyway, back to that terrible D paper.

Having known Mr. Ginapp for much of my life even before high school, it was easy to tell him that instead of paying attention in his classes and reading the books he had assigned I had been daydreaming of visiting Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House again. When I told him, his suggestion was to write about it. Get it out of my system. Let go of it and focus on it on the weekends. I didn’t think it would work, but I trusted Mr. Ginapp fully by this point and I decided I would take his advice.

What I wrote then is very similar to the first few pages of this memoir. In the eight or so years it’s been since I wrote about Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House, I haven’t had much of a problem staying focused in school. Now when I seem to be losing my motivation for school, I write. I take Mr. Ginapp’s advice and write about something that’s interesting to me. I write about something that I don’t have to write about for school. I write about work or music or even about school.

By taking time out of writing for school, I’ve found that it helps me to write better when I do have to write a paper for class. That’s why I’ve taken poetry classes here at UNC. I will readily admit that I’m no poet and even though most of the stuff I write for poetry classes is terrible, I continue to do it. I like reading poetry and I like writing it and in doing that, I find that it keeps me from getting into the rut of letting my voice be strictly academic. Sometimes my academic voice finds its way into poetry and other things I write for fun and sometimes I find that a more conversational voice works its way into the things I write for school. After all, academic writing is academic writing for a reason; people often read poetry for enjoyment, not to have something taught to them.

So I try to break it up. When I am working on a research paper and I just can’t write anymore, I take a break and write a haiku (Cool, I know). Or a poem. Or a short story. Or some creative nonfiction like this. I write that stuff because I really enjoy it and it keeps me from hating writing.

It was Mr. Ginapp who first pointed out to me the idea that writing could actually be fun. It could actually be something I could use to my own benefit. It could be something that would help me to relive the exciting moments in my life.

In the end, it’s thanks to my adventures to the “haunted” places surrounding my little town that I am interested in writing. If I hadn’t gone to those places, had those experiences, and lost interest in other things, I wouldn’t be writing today. I would be sitting angrily at my computer, loathing myself for choosing to be an English major and detesting having to write research papers.

But I’m not angry.

I’ve enjoyed my time as an English major; I’ve enjoyed learning how to write. And when my life gets difficult in the future, I know that sitting down and writing something that no one will read will keep me from going crazy.

John Holtzman

Paper #3

December 1, 2008

WC: 1,582

Scared to Write

I, like many others, enjoy looking for a scare. My first experience with Gilbert’s Grove came one night when a few friends of mine decided that instead of sitting around town with nothing to do we would head west of town and walk around in Gilbert’s Grove with flashlights. Several legends about Gilbert’s Grove have told stories of a single body hanging from a tree while others have told of a baby wailing from inside a stroller. We drove out to the grove with the excitement that can only come from being terribly nervous. In the three miles it took to get to Gilbert’s Grove from the middle of town, we talked about how long it would take for someone to find us if we were all murdered. We speculated that it could be several days, which is certainly possible considering the rumor that several people who work at the dump are frightened of the grove because of the noises they often hear.

As my friend pulled into the grove, we noticed several dirty mattresses, a baby carriage, ropes on the trees, and trash that had been scattered by the wind. The grove was large and filled with dead and dying trees. We walked around, pretending to lose each other and all realizing that the others were doing just that, and while the excitement remained the whole time, the fear did not. We pushed aside tree limbs that scratched our arms and pretended our flashlights were dying. As we shined our flashlights, they revealed very little to frighten us; there was the occasional raccoon who would stare at us and then turn and run and the hoot of a single owl who seemed to want us out of his grove. For the most part, our panic was only heightened when a car drove by and we had to turn out our flashlights because we were terrified that we would be found sneaking around in a place we were not really supposed to be.

Hippie House, on the other hand, was a different story. The first time I went, I was with two girls. They were both juniors and had already been to Hippie House a number of times; I was a freshman in high school who was extremely terrified of all the stories I had heard about Hippie House. As we headed to the east of town, we talked about all of the terrible things we heard had happened. Was it the place Charles Manson actually conducted satanic rituals? Had he murdered people in the house? Would we find his writing scribbled on the floor? Was there, as was the rumor, going to be blood on the walls? As it turned out, I didn’t find out on this particular trip. After all of the talking, we were too frightened to even get out of the car. I did notice as we shined the headlights onto the house that the walls inside were a deep red. As we sat there discussing what could be inside the dirty white house and the broken cellar that was connected to it, we saw something move in the overgrown, but very dead grass.

We left and decided to take the dirt roads home and drive by an old cemetery on the way. It began to rain, and as we passed the cemetery, we noticed some sort of light. We all agreed that it was a candle and I maintain to this day that there was a candle burning. In the rain. I have gone past that cemetery a number of times since the night we saw the candle burning and have not seen anything similar even during the day.

A few weeks later, after having heard my story of the red walls and the burning candle in the cemetery, my fellow Gilbert’s Grove adventurers and I decided to head back out to Hippie House and see what we could. We got up the nerve and drove out with our flashlights. As we got out of the car, we turned on our flashlights and paid no mind to the sign that assured us that we were violators and yes, we would be prosecuted. We opened the door and the first thing I noticed was that the walls were now white. Had someone painted them since my last visit or were the red walls I had previously seen a mere trick of my imagination? I’m still not entirely sure. My colleagues in crime and I made our way to the basement at which point bats flew from the rafters and seemed to surround us. Startled, we hurried back upstairs and out to the car when we realized the bats had only been birds.

At this point, Evan, the driver of the car, informed us all that he could not find his keys. To make matters worse, as we debated what we should do, cars began to drive past and we had to kill the flashlights. Scared and in the complete black that is the country at night, we saw red and blue lights that could only be the lights of a police car. Fortunately, the car was miles away and drove past Hippie House, probably doing nothing more than pulling over a speeding car. We continued to shine our flashlights and eventually found the car keys on the ground. As we headed back towards town, Evan confessed that he had thrown the keys on the ground and into the tall, dead grass when we got there because he thought it would be scary. It was.

Upon returning from these adventures, I began to notice that school was a lot less interesting than it had been before. Before our weekend excursions, I’d had no problems with school. Sure, some of the stuff we were learning in school was boring, but up until that point, I had never cared so little about the things we were reading in English classes (despite the fact that English had always been my favorite subject). Until then, I had gotten a lot of excitement from reading stories and novels, but regardless of what we read, it just couldn’t match the level of exhilaration I felt when my friends and I were exploring the haunted places surrounding our town. Yeah, I liked reading Lord of the Flies, but even when that book was at its scariest, it didn’t even come close to the level of excitement I felt when I was exploring the haunted places on the outskirts of town. It hit me the hardest when I got back a reaction paper to Lord of the Flies. D. Not good.

This particular English teacher even took me aside and mentioned that he noticed that I didn’t seem to have much interest in what was happening in his class. Of course, Mr. Ginapp was fully aware of both Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House; he knew all about them and the legends that came with them. Having known Mr. Ginapp for much of my life even before high school, it was easy to tell him that I had been daydreaming of visiting these haunted places again. When I told him, his suggestion was to write about it. Get it out of my system. Let go of it and focus on it on the weekends. I didn’t think it would work, but I trusted Mr. Ginapp fully by this point and I decided I would take his advice.

What I wrote then is very similar to the first few pages of this memoir. In the eight or so years it’s been since I wrote about Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House, I haven’t had much of a problem staying focused in school. Now when I seem to be losing my motivation for school, I write. I take Mr. Ginapp’s advice and write about something that’s interesting to me. I write something that I don’t have to write for school. I write about work or music or even about school.

By taking time out of writing for school, I’ve found that it helps me to write better when I do have to write a paper for class. That’s why I’ve taken poetry classes here at UNC. I will readily admit that I’m no poet and even though most of the stuff I write for poetry classes is terrible, I continue to do it. I like reading poetry and I like writing it and in doing that, I find that it keeps me from getting into the rut of letting my voice be strictly academic. Sometimes my academic voice finds its way into poetry and other things I write for fun and sometimes I find that a more conversational voice works its way into the things I write for school. After all, academic writing is academic writing for a reason; people often read poetry for enjoyment, not to have something taught to them.

It was Mr. Ginapp who first pointed out to me the idea that writing could actually be fun. It could actually be something I could use to my own benefit. It could be something that would help me relive the exciting moments in my life.

In the end, it’s thanks to my adventures to the “haunted” places surrounding my little town that interested me in writing. If I hadn’t gone to those places, had those experiences, and lost interest in other things, I wouldn’t be writing today.

Paper #2

December 3, 2008

Substance as Voice

Part One: What is voice?

Is it what one says or the way one says it that makes voice voice? Well, right now I’m going to say that voice is substance. After all, isn’t what you say at least as important as how you say it? Yes, personality is often important and even vital to the voice of a text, but it is absolutely crucial that first and foremost a writer says what he or she intends to say while focusing on the content of that writing.

Let’s look at academic discourse as an example. For me personally, reading literary theory and criticism was more than a chore. Many of these literary theorists attempted to add some kind of voice (usually in the form of large and mystifyingly intense words). The writings of the majority of these people, more often than not, only served to confuse me beyond the point of sanity. It was only in class when those readings were broken down that I understood the actual intentions of the writers. To put it another way, I began to understand what they were saying, but I could not begin to grasp the way they demonstrated their points or the reasons they had for writing in such a way. In other words, I could not even get past how these writers were writing. It became a serious chore to try to decipher what would have been clearer if they had just said what they were trying to say.

The voice of many texts attempted to establish the beliefs and ideas of the writers and upon discussion of the texts, the true voice of the authors was revealed. I began to see a voice of sorts in what they were saying when I realized that once all of the flashy language and the large and complicated words were taken away, the heart of their ideas was exposed. It was then that I also understood that through this realization of voice as substance, the style of the authors mattered much less.

If these authors had just gotten their points across in ways that were accessible, there would have been no need for the multiple rereadings of several paragraphs. Oftentimes, particularly in literary theory and criticism, what is being said can be buried by style; when voice is substance, it can be much more easily read and the material can be more effortlessly absorbed. After all, getting something across effectively is much more important than making sure something sounds cool.

Part Two: On Truth imitation

To make the argument that voice is substance a bit more clear I will imitate a portion of Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Truth. At this point of Frankfurt’s book, he argues that joy basically equals love. To do the same, I will take a piece of Frankfurt’s writing and, using my ideas and his style, I will show how what is being said is much more important than how I say it.

If one understands joy and realizes that joy is the thing outside of him or herself- in other words, if one sees another person or an object as the source of his or her joy- Spinoza says that the person in question loves that thing. Spinoza comprehends love as our reactions to the cause of our joy. According to Spinoza, then, one must love anything that is accepted, to them, as a cause of joy. That person consistently loves the thing they think assists a continuation to turn into him or herself. It seems that Spinoza is headed in the wrong direction. Several classic examples of love show basically a different model than what Spinoza describes: many people love something that does not necessarily give them joy, make them happy, or bring them a sense of accomplishment.

In addition to this, Spinoza attaches an examination of love that seems inexact: “A person who loves unavoidably endeavors to keep that which he loves.” In other words, Spinoza says that the things people love are clearly and inevitably important to them. Their lives, and the achievements and delights of individual legitimacy, depend on these things. Consequently, he argues, that person logically attempts to guard these things to make certain they are easily accessible to him.

Part Three: Analysis

What then is it that the substance of the text tells the reader? It says that Spinoza believes that love is caused by joy.

For the sake of this paper, I chose to say that voice has more to do with substance than with style, but I think it’s actually much more complicated than that. After having completed the imitation exercise, voice seems more complex; sure, my imitation was an attempt at using Frankfurt’s style to make my own points, but I felt my own methods creeping in. I twisted Frankfurt’s words into my own and I still feel like I used some techniques and word choices that define who I am as a writer.

In the end, I think that in attempting to take on Frankfurt in his style but with my ideas, I ended up seeing just how necessary style can be. Substance alone doesn’t make a great read, but at the same time something that is written purely stylistically can be confusing. The marriage of those two elements of voice and finding the right balance between the two seems to be the best solution.

Take films, music, and books for example. In film, it is important for a director to get his or her point across while at the same time making the film he or she envisioned. In music, a songwriter must be able to address a subject while approaching the song with a sense of him or herself. In books, motifs and themes often represent the core of what the writer wants to get across to an audience while the way that person write keeps readers entertained. All of these examples are a combination of substance and style, both of which are important in order to provide entertainment and understanding and not just one or the other.

I still do believe that substance is much more crucial to a voice, but after having completed the imitation of Frankfurt, it is much easier to see that style can play a huge role in what voice is. I understand now that people may want to read something filled with substance and no voice even less than they would want to read something full of style that doesn’t make much sense. After all, it’s not like many people are excited about sitting down to read a book full of straight up fact where the only voice is one that is constantly saying, “I know more about this than you do; learn that what I say is all truthful information.”

After having seen the effects of style and substance individually, it is easy to see that the combination of the two is what can make a piece of writing truly shine and stand out from the rest. For example, I simply could not read many literary theorists due what seemed to me to be an overuse of style. On the other hand, a piece of writing with nothing but substance, while it does demonstrate easily what it wants to get across, can become boring and hard to read. It is only when style and substance are united that a writer’s voice can come out.

Paper #3

November 21, 2008

Draft

WC: 1,518

Scared to Write

I, like many others, enjoy looking for a scare. My first experience with Gilbert’s Grove came one night when a few friends of mine decided that instead of sitting around town with nothing to do we would head west of town and walk around in Gilbert’s Grove with flashlights. Several legends about Gilbert’s Grove have told stories of a single body hanging from a tree while others have told of a baby wailing from inside a stroller. We drove out to the grove with the excitement that can only come from being terribly nervous. In the three miles it took to get to Gilbert’s Grove from the middle of town, we talked about how long it would take for someone to find us if we were all murdered. We speculated that it could be several days, which is certainly possible considering the rumor that several people who work at the dump are frightened of the grove because of the noises they often hear.

As my friend pulled into the grove, we noticed several dirty mattresses, a baby carriage, ropes on the trees, and trash that had been scattered by the wind. The grove was large and filled with dead and dying trees. We walked around, pretending to lose each other and all realizing that the others were doing just that, and while the excitement remained the whole time, the fear did not. We pushed aside tree limbs that scratched our arms and pretended our flashlights were dying. As we shined our flashlights, they revealed very little to frighten us; there was the occasional raccoon who would stare at us and then turn and run and the hoot of a single owl who seemed to want us out of his grove. For the most part, our panic was only heightened when a car drove by and we had to turn out our flashlights because we were terrified that we would be found sneaking around in a place we were not really supposed to be.

Hippie House, on the other hand, was a different story. The first time I went, I was with two girls. They were both juniors and had already been to Hippie House a number of times; I was a freshman in high school who was extremely terrified of all the stories I had heard about Hippie House. As we headed to the east of town, we talked about all of the terrible things we heard had happened. Was it the place Charles Manson actually conducted satanic rituals? Had he murdered people in the house? Would we find his writing scribbled on the floor? Was there, as was the rumor, going to be blood on the walls? As it turned out, I didn’t find out on this particular trip. After all of the talking, we were too frightened to even get out of the car. I did notice as we shined the headlights onto the house that the walls inside were a deep red. As we sat there discussing what could be inside the dirty white house and the broken cellar that was connected to it, we saw something move in the overgrown, but very dead grass.

We left and decided to take the dirt roads home and drive by an old cemetery on the way. It began to rain, and as we passed the cemetery, we noticed some sort of light. We all agreed that it was a candle and I maintain to this day that there was a candle burning. In the rain. I have gone past that cemetery a number of times since the night we saw the candle burning and have not seen anything similar even during the day.

A few weeks later, after having heard my story of the red walls and the burning candle in the cemetery, my fellow Gilbert’s Grove adventurers and I decided to head back out to Hippie House and see what we could. We got up the nerve and drove out with our flashlights. As we got out of the car, we turned on our flashlights and paid no mind to the sign that assured us that we were violators and yes, we would be prosecuted. We opened the door and the first thing I noticed was that the walls were now white. Had someone painted them since my last visit or were the red walls I had previously seen a mere trick of my imagination? I’m still not entirely sure. My colleagues in crime and I made our way to the basement at which point bats flew from the rafters and seemed to surround us. Startled, we hurried back upstairs and out to the car when we realized the bats had only been birds.

At this point, Evan, the driver of the car, informed us all that he could not find his keys. To make matters worse, as we debated what we should do, cars began to drive past and we had to kill the flashlights. Scared and in the complete black that is the country at night, we saw red and blue lights that could only be the lights of a police car. Fortunately, the car was miles away and drove past Hippie House, probably doing nothing more than pulling over a speeding car. We continued to shine our flashlights and eventually found the car keys on the ground. As we headed back towards town, Evan confessed that he had thrown the keys on the ground and into the tall, dead grass when we got there because he thought it would be scary. It was.

Upon returning from these adventures, I began to notice that school was a lot less interesting than it had been before. Before our weekend excursions, I’d had no problems with school. Sure, some of the stuff we were learning in school was boring, but up until that point, I had never cared so little about the things we were reading in English classes (despite the fact that English had always been my favorite subject). Until then, I had gotten a lot of excitement from reading stories and novels, but regardless of what we read, it just couldn’t match the level of exhilaration I felt when my friends and I were exploring the haunted places surrounding our town.

One English teacher even took me aside and mentioned that he noticed that I didn’t seem to have much interest in what was happening in his class. Of course, Mr. Ginapp was fully aware of both Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House; he knew all about them and the legends that came with them. Having known Mr. Ginapp for much of my life even before high school, it was easy to tell him that I had been daydreaming of visiting these haunted places again. When I told him, his suggestion was to write about it. Get it out of my system. Let go of it and focus on it on the weekends. I didn’t think it would work, but I trusted Mr. Ginapp fully by this point and I decided I would take his advice.

What I wrote then is very similar to the first few pages of this memoir. In the eight or so years it’s been since I wrote about Gilbert’s Grove and Hippie House, I haven’t had much of a problem staying focused in school. Now when I seem to be losing my motivation for school, I write. I take Mr. Ginapp’s advice and write about something that’s interesting to me. I write something that I don’t have to write for school. I write about work or music or even about school.

By taking time out of writing for school, I’ve found that it helps me to write better when I do have to write a paper for class. That’s why I’ve taken poetry classes here at UNC. I will readily admit that I’m no poet and even though most of the stuff I write for poetry classes is terrible, I continue to do it. I like reading poetry and I like writing it and in doing that, I find that it keeps me from getting into the rut of letting my voice be strictly academic.

Sometimes my academic voice finds its way into poetry and other things I write for fun and sometimes I find that a more conversational voice works its way into the things I write for school. When I realized that this was the case, it made me nervous. After all, academic writing is academic writing for a reason. People often read poetry for enjoyment, not to have something taught to them. It was Mr. Ginapp who first pointed out to me an idea very much like Toni Morrison’s; he wanted me to know that fact and truth can come from different places.

In the end, it’s thanks to my adventures to the “haunted” places surrounding my little town that interested me in writing. If I hadn’t gone to those places, had those experiences, and lost interest in other things, I wouldn’t be writing today.

Imitation- Because she needed a plan, it became clear that watching was better than waiting.

Model Sentence- "To have even a portion of this illuminated reason and true philosophy is the highest state to which nature can aspire, in the way of intellect." -John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

Imitation- To become the ovject of desire and passion is the least important position one can assume.

Model Sentence- "The most important Indian grouping on the continent, north of Mexico, from the very beginning of European conquest on through and after the American Revolution was the Confederacy of the Iroquois." - John Collier, Indians of the Americas

Imitation- The best guitar player in rock and roll, aside from blues music, in the last fifty years and for the rest of time, is Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Model Sentence- "He went through the narrow alley of Temple Bar quickly, muttering to himself that they could all go to hell because he was going to have a good night of it." - James Joyce, "Counterparts"

Variation of the Pattern- Because he was going to have a good night of it, muttering to himself that they could all go to hell, he went quickly through the narrow alley of Temple Bar.

Alternate Expression- "Go to hell," he thought, deciding he would have a good night of it as he quickly went through the alley of Temple Bar.

Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae have both been at the forefront of the way I have been taught to write in English classes all throughout my high school and college experiences. How is a high school student supposed to decide how to write? Personally, I was not ever really taught how to write. I was told how to write. There have always been some sort of conflicting views going on and for the most part it depended entirely on which teacher was doing the teaching; occasionally, however, it seemed that students were being taught contradictory information on how to approach writing. I was tempted to argue that this clash of views has made my writing suffer and that it has done little except confuse me, but as I thought about it I realized just how much the ideas of Elbow and Bartholomae have brought depth to the type of writing I do.

One English teacher in particular was always there to guide me along the path of writing in what was a unique and often very peculiar way. Mr. Ginapp played a large part in my decision to become an English major. The three years of English classes with Mr. Ginapp were the best years of learning I’ve had. While I definitely learned a lot of other important things in high school and an even larger amount in college, Mr. Ginapp’s class taught me more in such a short amount of time and it shaped me into the person I am.

Mr. Ginapp’s classes looked at English through the scope of both Elbow and Bartholomae. On one hand, Mr. Ginapp taught his classes that it was extremely important to be an individual. This was the first thing I thought of when I began to read Bartholomae’s Against the Grain. At the very beginning Bartholomae says that “how [he] writes is against the grain” (Bartholomae, 19). Up until Mr. Ginapp’s classes I had learned that no, it’s not really all right to write against the grain and that it is only acceptable to write in a perfectly structured and ridiculously predictable way. What Mr. Ginapp did differently was allow his students to experiment while still following certain “traditions.” Many times we would be told to (to borrow from Bartholomae) inherit the way in which we wrote. We were encouraged to borrow from authors we liked. At the same time we were instructed to, as is the problem Elbow presents, be a writer as opposed to be an academic.

The problem here is obviously that we were being told to do two completely different things. In my high school sophomore brain I could not reconcile trying to copy and to be unique at the same time. I got a C on my first paper for Mr. Ginapp; when I talked to him after class his reply was that he liked my paper, but it sucked. His instruction to me was much like Elbow’s goal for students- that they be able “to end up saying, ‘I feel like I am a writer: I get a deep satisfaction from discovering meanings by writing- figuring out what I think and feel through putting down word” (Elbow, 72). In other words, what Mr. Ginapp hoped for me was that I would enjoy writing and let the clarity it brought me extend into something my reader would benefit from as much as I did.

I think a lot of people are taught similarly, but in a way that is not so helpful. They are told what to write, how to write, and when to write. The role of the teacher was to grade assignments based on how well a student wrote more or less exactly what they were told to write. In fact it is quite possible that this is the case based on the fact that many of the writers in my freshman level college writing classes seemed to do fairly well. Regardless, the first time I had to write a reader response, it was a completely new experience for me. I’ll be honest; I was shocked that my interpretation was one that was potentially “right” and that it could be different from the interpretations of others and the agreed upon interpretation that was stated in the teacher’s edition of a text book. Up until that point, it had been the teacher’s way or the highway. Another English teacher would literally tell students who didn’t agree with him (what he referred to as “not working to their full potential”) to go play in the street.

The lesson I took from Mr. Ginapp is one that is still valuable to me today. He taught me that it is important for a student to think for him or herself and write from that particular and individual point of view, but that’s it’s also important to have some knowledge of the past and the perspectives of people who have written before. After all, how could we know that we weren’t saying something that had been said thousands of times if we had no knowledge of past writing? In one class in particular, Mr. Ginapp told the students to write each day in a notebook. At the beginning of class we had to hold up our notebook so he could see that we had written something. It was a notebook he would never read, but one we were told to keep simply because it was important to write in a place where he wouldn’t be grading (in other words, a place without a teacher). One way the notebook shaped my voice was that I was allowed to write anything I wanted. This helped me to not only become familiar with writing for myself, but it allowed me to begin to learn the difference between academic writing and other writing. Mr. Ginapp always told his students that their voice was just as important as what they were saying and that it was always important to retain what was unique about our writing styles; at the same time he made it abundantly clear that a good writer follows the rules of the past, breaking them only when the writer actually knows what the rule is.

I don’t really consider myself an academic or a writer necessarily, but I do feel like I am getting there, and that’s important. In the end, I think it takes a certain experience to become a good writer and a competent academic. The only way I have been able work my way into being either is through writing about various subjects and for different reasons all while under the guidance of someone who has done just those things. For Mr. Ginapp, it was important that his students look to the past for inspiration and learn something from people who had written before us, but it was also incredibly important to my endeavor that I try to keep some sense of voice while bringing parts of the past into each thing I write.