Response to "Building a Mystery": Alternative Research Writing...

One thing that I really liked about this article, and found different from the other pedagogical articles I've been assigned to read, is that the authors routinely quote creative writers: songwriters, novelists, poets. The authors valued writing as a whole, instead of separating different kinds of writing into neat little fields that shouldn't overlap, which I appreciated. Also, considering where we go to school, it was nice to have a quote from Donald Barthelme: "Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they've done a dozen..." (423). It reminded me of something that his brother, Frederick Barthelme, said recently in workshop--once you reach page 70 in a novel, it's all downhill. Of course, he knows, we all know, that writing is rarely easy, but things are more difficult at the beginning, when everything feels like "not-knowing."

There were a lot of things in the article that I found useful, and that made me think, though there were a few times at which I questioned the authors' tactics. For example, in the first paragraph, Davis and Shadle quote from 1982 survey. Considering that "Building a Mystery" was published nearly twenty years later, I found it a little suspect. I also found it somewhat unnecessary to to state all of the objections and criticisms to each of the alternative research writing methods that they discuss. If you ask students to write one kind of paper, it invariably excludes others. This isn't really a criticism.

There were so many great ideas here, however, that I feel a little badly for pointing out such small criticisms. This was my favorite: I LOVED the idea of the autoethnography, "where students interview three people about themselves, then affirm or rebut the comments" (434). If I asked three people questions about myself--say, my mother, one of my professors, and a friend from high school--I would get all sorts of contradictory thoughts about who "I" am. Which of these people am I really? And then, of course, I have ideas about myself, but if I wrote them down on a piece of paper, would anyone recognize the person I think I am, in my head? And if no one recognized me, what does this say? There are so many interesting questions here that I'm sort of dying to do one of these now. I was also really interested in the multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research project, and the examples from the students at Eastern Oregon University. The authors referred to these examples early in the article, and I thought I was going to get to read one of these papers in their entirities, so I was a little disappointed. The students at Eastern Oregon seemed excited about, and invested in, their projects in a way that students generally don't while writing papers. I was particularly interested in Sherri Edvalson's "A Feminist Education for Barbie" and Michelle Skow's Japanese American Internment project. I'd love to read these.