Another homework assignment - it's amazing the things I'm revisiting in this course. The writing prompt was "In the past, have you ever felt 'silenced' in a class?"
My first experience with writing silence was in 10th grade English class. We had to exchange papers with a classmate and review each other's papers. I can still clearly see the boy who reviewed my paper walking up to me to hand it back. He opened his mouth to say something, shut it, shook his head, handed me my paper, and walked away. I had never seen anyone have such a visible, negative reaction to my writing. I remember thinking, "Is my writing really that bad?" For the rest of the school year, I struggled with all the writing assignments, no matter what class they were for. I spent unnecessary hours re-writing papers and making myself sick with worry after I had turned them in and waited to find out the grades.
I learned to be ashamed of my own writing because I loved reading, I loved the words other people wrote. I wasn't arrogant enough to want others to love the words I wrote, but neither did I want to cause such a visible, negative reaction in someone who read my words. I concluded I no right to write because I obviously hadn't been granted the privilege of knowing the secret of writing. As Haake says, "There is a whole world of people who feel more a desire for language than entitlement, or even ease. For them, 'language' – especially literary language, or any other discourse of power – is like someone else's secret code. It is a simple feeling of exclusion: 'real' writers, have it, or own it, and they don't" (65).
I was lucky, though. I got my writing voice back, or chose to take it back, the following year (ah, how resilient is youth). The school offered the option of taking the traditional English class or an advanced composition class. I decided that since I was such a bad writer, I should take the composition class, even though I expected to fail it. Instead, I unlearned and re-learned the English language. I learned the mechanics of writing in a new way, and then found topics I was interested in on which I could practice using them. I read and wrote about Sylvia Plath, Emily Brontë, and Kate Chopin (The Awakening, ironically - the first book I was not able to put down until I had finished it). I wrote the required journal entries every week - those were a bitch, facing my own head twice a week, but whatever else is tough love? I worked my way through A Brief and Lively No-nonsense Guide to Writing, which was so much better than the dreaded Warriner's English Grammar.
I discovered I could almost always quickly find the angle or perspective I wanted to pursue in an essay, and spent my time rolling the words around on the paper until they reflected what was in my head - editing and revising were no longer chores but meaty projects. I learned the power of writing was in expressing my ideas as clearly and originally and precisely as possible. The best lesson I learned in Mrs Messer's Advanced Composition class was to ask "Is this what I really mean?" when I'm writing.
I learned what Haake learned: "What I had always experienced before as a kind of difficult and painful translation had become…something more open-ended and fluid, a continuously unfolding site of surprise. Palpable, material, and with its own economy, logic, and music – language…does not just get written but also somehow writes the writer, who is inscribed, being-written, in the moment of writing" (64).
I will always be grateful for that class, and I am (grudgingly) grateful to the boy who shook his head when he handed me my paper. He sent me where I needed to go.
Haake, Katharine. "Begin by Beginning Again." What Our Speech Disrupts. Phoenix: Premium Source Publishing, 2000.
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