Why is the personal problematic?

"We find that writing teachers have been as much or more interested in who they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write" (Faigley 396).

Throughout SI, I have been struggling to put my finger on why I find some types of writing super difficult.  Not that they are hard to writer, per se, but they are hard to let myself write for I don't know how I am being perceived or what people will think of the self I have constructed.

Megan left me a great comment on my blog post from Friday.  She noted that writing seemed extremely personal to me and maybe the reason that I felt comfortable with school writing was that it, perhaps, didn't hit so close to home in terms of emotion and identity.  

Over the weekend, I read Lester Faigley's article "Judging Writing, Judging Selves."  Faigley writes the quote that I placed at the beginning of this blog post early in his article, discussing the different in the evaluation of composition classrooms over the years.  And I think Faigley's article ties into the reason certain types of writing were more difficult for me.  

Growing up with a very prescriptive understanding of language and composition, I just knew there was only one way to write a "good" paper.  So, I wrote my good academic papers with a respectful level of distance and reserve.  

But once I started becoming more familiar with teachers who required a process-based approach, I began to get nervous.  Assignments seemed too "up in the air" with not enough criteria to help me really understand what they were grading me on.  Writing what "I wanted to write" seemed scary.  I felt that the writing I was being asked to do was personal in a new way--for once I was even allowed to use "I" in my paper.  And when I looked back over my draft I saw myself stamped all over the pages.

You would think that would cause me to be excited--I was finally able to truly invest in my pieces of writing in a way that was personal and showed their value.  However, this was more terrifying to me than the academic personna I had taken on previously.  I knew who "Academic Carrie' was (doesn't that sound like a bad Barbie?) and was sure she would be accepted.  But I did not really know about this new, risk-taking personal writing Carrie.  She was vulnerable, constructing her identities and sharing her real thoughts, unedited by school.

This new Carrie liked the person that she was/constructing but she didn't know how others would perceive her.  Could the world of school handle her? Or would they buy into her writing because it rang more true.  What if she had chosen to construct the wrong self?  What if she had read the wrong writings and simply was creating herself in a way that just didn't fit?

Faigley's article helped me to identify not only how teachers assess their students' writings in different ways based on the identity they want the students to construct, but also why certain students may find higher levels of anxiety with some types of writing than others.  After all, students may not be sure that they are a poet, an essayist, or a writer at all.