Blog Post for Sunday 9/26

As I read “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition” by Anne Ruggles Gere and “A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing” by Eubanks and Schaeffer I noticed that there was a common theme. Both of the writers seemed to be focusing on the problem of academic writing and how students deal with the issue of writing academic papers. Although both articles talk about academic writing in different forms they both come to the same conclusion that academic writing is filled with way too much jargon and that something needs to be done about the way it is taught and how it is viewed by universities.

The article “Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms” by Gere focuses mainly on how one acquires the literacy skills to be able to write and how extracurricular writing can be more beneficial to one’s literacy skills than academic writing in classrooms. She states a lot that classroom writing can be harmful to some writers because once they receive a bad grade on a paper or a negative comment from an instructor they start to believe that they cannot write so they give up on it all together. She believes that personal writing is very helpful for students because it allows them to write about things they know and in doing that improves their confidence and brings more meaning to writing than just forcing themselves to write an article filled with terms and ideas they don’t care about does. One of my favorite lines from Gere’s article and one that I can relate to is “our students would benefit if we learned to see them as individuals who seek to write, not be written about, who seek to publish, not be published about, who seek to theorize, not be theorized about.” To me this line really focuses on how Gere feels about how academic writing is being taught and how teachers view their students.

In the article “A Kind Word for Bullshit” Eubanks and Schaeffer seem to be backing up Gere’s statements about academic writing while looking at it from a different angle. The main message that Eubanks and Schaeffer are trying to get across is that academic writing is filled with way too much jargon or “bullshit” that students, when writing academic papers themselves seem to add things like words they don’t understand, and statements that ramble on and on without actually going anywhere. This can be simply to fill up the paper or because they are trying to impress the professor and trying to get him or her to think that the student is a very advanced writer and they know it will get them a better grade. Eubanks and Schaeffer make the statement that “when non-academic writers call writing bullshit, they mean that it uses jargon, words whose meanings are so abstract and vague as to seem unrelated to anyone’s experience.” For me this statement was one that really ties the articles by Gere and Eubanks and Schaeffer together by talking about the need for writing to relate to one’s personal experience in order for the reader to make sense of it.