I have always felt a little prohibited in my writing classes. By no fault of the university I attend, or any individual educational institution do I want to shovel the blame, so I’m just going to say they all suck. Just kidding, they’re fine, it’s probably a combination of faculty and staff and directors and programs and the state and the work places and all sorts of things that make it so difficult in writing studies. However there have been a few professors here and there that have sort of let me…spread my wings. Shout out to Dr. Sharma!
Stony Brook has all these writing classes about personal writing and expressing yourself and writing for you, but never have I felt comfortable writing exactly how I am, how I write, or how I truly feel. I’m constantly in fear that it just wont be understood or “fit the bill” of the requirements of an assignment or otherwise, which I am surprised at how rigid they still are for classes with such titles, claiming such freedoms.
However, I don’t want to toss all the poop at schools and classes, my writing is a little odd, and generally particularly personal. Usually exhibiting a number of poor attempts at being funny, and of course I’m not gonna add a giant disclaimer at the top of all my writing saying “THIS IS SUPPOSE TO BE FUNNY!” And with writing, it is inherently difficult to just let everyone do whatever they want, nothing would get done, and that would make being a professor impossible. And because my genre of writing is stupid so, there is that.
I had to teach myself to write the way I do, I don’t think any classes can really teach you the type of writing I do, something so personal, and having to be a certain way. Back to me because I’m obviously a narcissist, I have a strange style. I usually have a sheet or two full of ideas, one line or a few sentences with an idea. I look at it, and write a story and some jokes, and all sorts of stuff around it, and test it out, like a weird script type of story. Now getting into that creative process is really something I don’t think that is transferable. Maybe you can teach good writing and storytelling, you know, the proper use of nouns and adjectives and predicates, get yourself a halfway decent joke (this is a big maybe). But you have to spend a lot of time around a lot of idiots, and doing a lot of work to write a halfway decent fart joke.
It is probably impossible to skate that line though, accommodation meets curriculum. The only thing you can do is provide more classes for more topics and types of writing and hopefully the seats fill up, warranting the space, teachers, and courses. I don’t expect school to be able to teach anyone much of anything anymore, perhaps just the basics. At best, and particularly in this field, I think the best studying writing can offer is the basics, like I mentioned, fountains for you to obtain knowledge from on your own, and help people come to a realization, whether that ‘thing’ is for them or not.