There are many important aspects when
it comes to Sondra pearls article “Understanding Composing.” To me the most
important contribution in this article to me was her take on Projective structuring. Projective structuring
is defined as rereading bits of previous discourse as well as reusing key words
that relate to the topic, particularly when the writer is stuck. Sondra Pearl interperates
it as taking an outside view from your paper and thinking outside of it in a
third person point of view to see what you can change/improve on in your paper.
Projective structuring is not an issue, it’s a great teaching tactic, however
it sometimes causes big confusion and drifts writers away from their own
personal thoughts and feelings. The main issue with it is when a writer takes
that structure and only focuses on that but wonder away from talking about what
they would actually like too because they think it’s best to stick with what they
were taught. As Sondra Pearl states, the reader starts to question themselves
with statements like “is what I’m writing correct?” and “does it conform to the
rules I’ve been taught?” In my opinion that is a major issue in a lot of students
writing. What I interpreted from what she was stating was that sometimes
writers avoid writing about what they feel. Instead they are too paranoid on
what others would think and focus on the main structure that was given to them
because that’s what they think will give them the best paper possible. In reality
a mixture of both is what they need. Otherwise if everyone stuck with the same
structure on a topic, everyone’s paper would be the same and it wouldn’t make
their personal paper unique. Which I personally think is the receipt for a
successful paper and a unique thought.
Joey,
ReplyDeleteI am glad to see you understand one needs a mixture of projective structuring and felt sense--and also retrospective structuring too. Your felt sense is pretty clear in this piece of writing, so that's good. You are, ultimately, both making your point and making it clear what Perl is saying.
If we were going to revise, I'd suggest this was ready for the projective structuring phase, where you go back and make sure every sentence is clear and necessary, that ideas are organized well, that you use paragraphs to separate ideas. Right now there are several sentences that need structuring and you have no paragraphs.
And be careful to spell the author's name correctly--that kind of mistake is easy enough to prevent and it makes a bad enough impression that one shld really make every effort to go back, re-read, with an eye for structure--sentence structure, argument, structure, paragraph breaks, transitions...
As you note, this is all just as important as felt sense. They are needed equally. But felt sense does kind of come first. When you're getting your thoughts out fast, you have to just let it rip. So in testing conditions, like the situation our tutees will be in, felt sense is what many will need to find first, most people but maybe not everyone. But ... the students will also need to attend to structure in order to pass the CATW. They need the whole process--all three parts.