Danielle Esposito
Teaching Writing ENG 220
9-18-11
Sondra Perl is an English professor at Herbert Lehmann College and she is the founder of the New York City Writing Project. Perl has been known to analyze writings, both unskilled and professional writing. She also wrote a couple of books about writing and conducted a study. Perl has contributed ideas, guidelines that have been considered one of the greatest tributes made to theorizing the writing process.
Perl describes composing as a “Recursive process that entails rereading of small
units of text mid-way through writing with rewriting of short passages serving to move writers forward.” She argued that composing involves backward and forward movements that allow writers to discover new things as they write and rewrite. By using this process you will discover more of what is on your mind. They are “exercises” that will help you perform what most great writers do naturally every time they write. Perl’s questions how the writer writes, how does a writer come up with what they are writing? And what is going through their mind when they do? Perl studied both professional and unskilled college writers and reviewed how well the vocabulary use was, how organized the writing was, how long the writer stood on topic and how well the thesis statement was answered (if there was any.) Always remember to continue writing, even if you don’t have any idea of the subject or if you’re still on topic. Stop a few times to ask yourself “What’s this about?” And always make sure your writing expresses what you exactly need to say. By doing this with your work you notice your careless mistakes in your writing whether it be spelling, vocabulary, or running off topic this guideline helps people look over their writings and eliminate their mistakes as they write more following these rules.
However Perl’s ideas sometimes do not work the same for everyone, or everyone’s situation. What is true and the best thing to remember is that Perl states that “they are supposed to have flexibility, for you to use these rules in your own way.” Not all people are able to follow strict rules for writing and not all people have the same outlook on writing. Some people admire it some don’t, some people have different ways of organizing their data which needs to be taken into account. You should not follow the exact formation of words in Perl’s idea but that it is meant to be explored and adapted in different ways according to people’s situations and the different ways people express their writings.
The discovery of this important guideline in composing was resulted in what was the most important idea Sondra Perl has contributed to the field of theorizing the writing process. Perl used an innovative method to analyze her students asking them to verbalize all of their thoughts by writing. In other words she made all her students talk to her about their thoughts while writing. She then listened back to what she recorded and turned them into codes that could be used to analyze the students writing. These codes broke the writing down into planning, editing, writing, and unrelated thoughts. She figured out the time used by students in completing their writing. She developed a scientific procedure to study people’s thoughts while writing. As a result from this study she came up with the guide line to re read a short section of texts that halfway through your writing to help writers progress in a higher skill.
Perl’s contribution to the field of theorizing the writing process is one of the most important contributions related to writing. Perl broke down the psychological process of writing and helped many unskilled writers figure out and find a way to improve themselves and their writings. She created simple guidelines and important methods for all writers to use in their own way. The fact that these guide lines can be personalized to your own strengths and weaknesses makes it one of, if not the best contribution to the field of the writing process.
-Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composition” December 4th 1980. web. http://www.jstor.org/pss/356586. College Composition and Communication.
-Blau, Sheridan “Book Review felt sense: Writing with the Body” 2004.web. http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resources/1988. The Quarterly Vol. 26 No. 3.
-Elbow, Peter. “Sondra Perl’s Guidelines” 1987.web. http://www.focusing.org/perlprocess.html. May 30, 2006, The Focusing Institute, 2003.
Hi Danielle, what I liked about your paper was the way you started explaining who Sondra Perl is and describing the work that she have done. I liked how you used all your information and your idea and explain it well. But I think that what needs more work is your conclusion it would be better to express what you think or feel about the research and what you learned from it. Also what needs more work is saying where you got the work from in the paragraph. For example when you quoting somebody's work you suppose to give the person's name and page number and I do not see that. I see that you have your MLA work cited bibliography which is good but in the paragraph you need to quote and site page number and the author's name.
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ReplyDeleteI think your introduction would be better if you just jumped into the ideas. While bio can be useful at some points in a paper, it never really makes for a sufficient introduction in college-level writing. At the end of your intro, I should have a sense of what particular idea we'll be dealing with around the composition process. We do not get to what you think is important until the very end, and that's not so great.
ReplyDeleteThe first three sentences of the next paragraph seems great--very effective presentation of one of Perl's ideas about composing. But then there's this weird shift: "They are exercises..." What does "they" refer to? And nothing you've said so far has suggested the concept of writing exercises, so I felt really thrown off at that point. When going back over your writing, always think about what you're presenting and how your reader will receive it--has he/she been prepared for this? Is there any set-up for this idea? If we're shifting perspective, is there a transition to help the reader through?
At the end of that same paragraph, you move into providing us with a set of sentences written as commands for engaging the writing process. But since these ideas come from Perl, they should be introduced as Perl's guidelines, and should be presented with phrases like "she says" etc. It's great that you present her rules, and I think what you say about them in the next paragraph is useful, but HOW you present them matters alot too.
I think it would be interesting for you to address whether or not you think her rules are written in a way that could possibly be taken as strict? If so, what evidence do you have? If not, why not? Some close analysis of her exact words will be needed to figure this out. But your paper seems to beg for that question to be answered.
In the end, if you think the study she did recording writers talking through their process was the most important thing she ever did, then the whole paper should probably be about that, given the nature of the assignment. So I think this paper is a fine start at a rough draft, because you figured out what you think is important, but some radical revision will be needed to get the paper focused in the right direction. Be aware that focus may be a problem as you move forward, and stay tightly focused on your topic as you revise. Engage that recursive process!