Lauren Beach Matthew Bryan ENC1101 September 14, 2015 Lauren’s Narrative No matter the genre, all writing is personal. Each author has his or her own interpretation and goal when they write. The perspective of one author can seem warped to another because the writing is determined by each person’s perspective. When writing is not personal, it fails to entertain both the author and audience. In Donald M. Murray’s passage, “All Writing Is Autobiography,” his argument supports the theory that the nature of each author’s text contain “traces of their creators” making their writing “autobiographical.” Although this theory is subjective rather than objective, it frames both my literacy narrative and the literacy narrative of Emily Strasser’s. Strasser believes the only way writing should be introduced in a classroom setting, is personally. In her passage, Strasser analyzed, “Graff (an author whose theory she agrees with) asserts that argument in academic discourse is not so different from argument in popular culture, the media, or daily life, yet that higher education manages to obscure these similarities. He proposes that to mend that divide, teachers should teach students to incorporate their street smarts and common skills for argumentation and persuasion into academic writing, illuminating their similarities rather than their differences.” Showing students these autobiographical writing abilities can help them flourish academically. Ever since I developed my literacy narrative, I always felt I wrote autobiographical. Achieving my narrative was a long and strenuous journey because I was never taught correctly.

1

In my attempt to establish academic success in a family where reading and writing were as natural as breathing, I struggled. I was not one who could sit down with a book or an essay topic and finish it without dozing off physically and mentally. My mind would not sit still on one topic, and even when I tried to write, it would be scattered. In my second year of high school, I started taking advance placement classes in english. The classes made me work much harder than I had before in reading and writing; I pushed through the courses and they definitely pushed back. Although I was passing, I never fully grasped the concept of writing until my junior year of high school. The passages we had to read and analyze made my cringe, mainly because I did not understand how to approach them. One passage always sticks out to me because it helped me exhaust my analytical skills and establish my narrative. The passage called “Art For Art’s Sake” was written my Edward Morgan Forster. The concept of this passage angered me because it was difficult to understand, scattered and once understood, preposterous. The concept that Forster conveyed in his passage was there are only two orders in art, the divine and the aesthetic. He continued to say that art is the only “thing” that has order in society. Forster believed society has mixed the ideas of order and orders in that orders are considered procedures but order itself is only art that has been “evolved from within, not imposed from without” (Art For Art’s Sake). This concept annoyed me because Forster cannot see that along with art, society itself doesn’t have order but there is order present within society. When I finished reading Forster’s passage, I realized that I could not write a required essay accolading a theory that I do not agree with. I decided to go against the grain and write a paper on how Forster’s ideas were wrong. Once I started the paper, I could not stop. I used

2

different authors to prove my case and to express different theories that do not agree with Forster. On my third page of disagreement, I became stuck. I knew what I wanted to say but I could not figure out how to, so I asked my mother. She studied writing in college and she always had a way with words. Similar to what Strasser said in her passage, my mom became my literary sponsor. She saw the path I was taking and pushed me in the direction that has lead me to where I am now. She cleared my writer’s block and by the end of my paper, I had an argumentative masterpiece. I had never been so proud of my work before. When it was time to turn our papers in, I was booming with excitement because I asked around and no one else in my class disagreed with Forster. I liked my ideas standing out rather than falling in line with the rest of the papers. A week later my teacher handed back a paper that he claimed had the best structure and content, and it turned out to be mine. He used my paper as an example for how students should approach theories that they either agree or disagree with. He also mentioned how I was the only person in the class to disagree with Forster. The accolades I received from my paper taught me how important my (and each author’s) opinion is. At that point in my life, I realized what it took to write correctly; my opinion. Before, I had just followed the producers to write about an author or a subject that I didn’t care about or have an opinion on. My quality of writing was unimpressive and I never enjoyed both reading and writing. But after my experience with Forster, I finally learned how to write properly. This developed my narrative to what it is today. I tend to write more personally than others, which is why I agree with Donald Murray’s passage “All Writing is Autobiography.” The concept that each author has their own perspective, narrative, and way of writing correlates with my concept of writing.

3

In Murray’s passage, he continues to develop his argument in my favor. “We are autobiographical in the way we write; my autobiography exists in the examples of writing I use in this piece and in the texts I weave around them. I have my own peculiar way of looking at the world and my own way of using language to communicate what I see.” Every single author has their own unique narrative because each author’s language background is different. This shines through the literacy work of every author. Murray elaborated on a theory about each person’s childhood being directly correlated with their narrative. He said, “My voice is the product of Scottish genes and a Yankee environment, of Baptist sermons and the newspaper city rooms, of all the language I have heard and spoken.” The development of ones narrative stems from the early ages of childhood until the adolescent age of 15 years old. After the age of 20, everything is just considered an “observation” rather than a learning and developing experience. Come high school english class, each student has their own individual narrative to work with. My first college paper that I had ever written was in my dual enrollment online class for the University of Florida. I took Introduction to Music Literature with hopes to expand my knowledge in the history of music. Being a musician, I thought it would be an easy course, but instead it kicked my ego down. I had to write an extensive paper on a symphony of my choice and describe the music using all of the musical terms I had studied throughout the course. Although this procedure was not intimidating, they also asked for an explanation of the musical terms to be expressed creatively within the paper and flow with the music in the symphony. As the due date approached, I decided to bury myself in the music and think about things that I have experienced to describe the symphony.

4

Growing up in South Florida, I have basically lived on the water all my life. Not many people have the same luxury that I have had living only 5 minutes from the beach and owning a boat. So, I decided to compare the symphony to the ocean and the water life within. I finished the paper with ease because I was able to make it personal to my entire life and received a 97 on my paper with only a comment about only an improper use of an Italian term. This experience enforced Murray’s theory that because of each author’s unique background, all writing has to be autobiographical because each perspective is completely different. After the papers were returned and graded with feedback, everyone in the online class (all four of us) had to read each other’s paper. The difference in each of our approach to the essay topic was amazing. We all were given the exact same requirements for an essay yet all of our papers were complete opposites because of our difference life experiences and perspectives. In a classroom setting, it is considered best for the student to be allowed to express themselves in their literary work, according to Emily Strasser. Strasser wrote a personal passage on the importance of students to learn how to write in a more autobiographical style. Her theory proves that students will learn better and become better writers in the future when they’re taught to be more emotionally invested and attached to their work. In her passage, “Writing What Matters,” Strasser wrote, “The devices of grammar and rhetoric remain superficial skills until a writer employs them to express important and powerful feelings, thoughts, and ideas.” Her theory derives from her personal experience as a teenager who was properly taught how to correlate persuasive and analytical skills in her “personally meaningful writing.” Strasser’s theory agrees with Murray’s theory that writing should be taught as a personal piece of work.

5

Strasser expressed how students are unable to use their full potential in writing when I student cannot be fully (and personally) invested in their writing. I experienced this in most of my middle school and high school english classes. The teachers stressed the importance of structure, word count, and bland content rather than the importance of opinion. This followed students into their standardized tests the the FCAT or SAT which required only structure. In my SAT tutoring, I was told to memorize a specific structure on how to write the essays in a timely manner without needing to think. This experience crushed my personal narrative, which made it so difficult for me to create later in high school because I was more focused on structure than actual content. Throughout my journey and the journeys of Murray and Strasser, we have all achieved our individual literacy narratives that have progressed our writing from homework assignments to pleasure. At the end of Murray’s passage, he presented a new thesis for his audience to ponder. Murray wrote, “I suspect that when you read my poem, you wrote your own autobiography. That is the terrible, wonderful power of reading: the texts we create in our own minds while we read or just after we read - become part of the life we believe we lived. Another thesis: all reading is autobiographical.” Murray’s witty thesis is proved true in this assignment. I have taken his theory that writing is autobiographical and I’ve made it a part of my life that I am currently living. This got me to think about what ENC1101 has taught me so far. In class, we have been reading different passages with different theories for us to relate or to negate as our own literacy narrative. While doing so, we make the passages autobiographical by the personal correlation to our own writing. This in turn makes the class more interesting because it indirectly is about the students. Personally, I have become more interested and invested into the class and assignment

6

now that it is personal, which is exactly what Emily Strasser’s theory is about. From discovering my literacy narrative and then reading about it, I am now more aware of my writing style for future papers in this classroom and for the future in general. 


7

Works Cited Wardle, Elizabeth. Downs, Doug. Writing About Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2014. Print.

8