3.5: Response- Never Use “I”

Authors: Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez, English, The University of Texas at El Paso, @escribescribe. Kimberly N. Parker, Cambridge Public Schools (Massachusetts).

The writer is present everywhere on the page. Ultimately, the writer cannot run and hide when thoughts are penned or typed for an intended audience. For instance, when my high-school sophomore student–writers read over the options for their first writing assignment—one that I attempt to make inviting and acts to give me insight into their current abilities—they know a few writing truths already.

The first truth they reveal is that all writing must be confined to five paragraphs. Soon, the second truth is revealed. Frankly, it seems paramount and antithetical as they share it in their words: Writers can never write using the first person. EVER! To use I conjures up all types of angst that—compounded with a nearly universal dislike of analytical writing—makes for a difficult beginning between writers and their writing coach. Thus, in my fourteen years with young people in secondary English language arts classrooms and in my writer identity and role, what I value is the importance of helping young people understand who they are as writers and guiding them to use writing as a creative source for liberation. For these endeavors, it is imperative that they bring all of themselves into their writing. This applies to all writers in the practice of our craft.

It’s worth considering how writers first get chastised and come to believe they must leave themselves out of their writing in the first place. When they are just beginning to experiment with language, most of the writing they are asked to produce draws from personal experience: They write about their friends, families, and pets. Personal narrative abounds and overflows within their lines of writing on the page or on the monitor screen of their computer or device. Their writing revolves around who they are and what matters and happens to them.

Poet Claudia Rankine reminds us: “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.” In ideal situations and in classrooms where standardized testing does not oppress creativity, students are their writing and voice. When I ask my student writers when they stopped writing in the first person, they usually

pinpoint to the beginning of middle school. Many also often mark this transition as the stage when they ceased to care about writing with a sense of freedom. Middle school required them to stop writing about their personal experiences (save the annual poetry unit) and instead write responses to literature. Since many of my students are readers and writers in need of revival, they also note this period of their lives when they began to dislike reading. Full-on disengagement is the norm once we meet during their sophomore year. Unfortunately, who they are as writers with ideas about what they want to write about and what matters to them most now becomes a distant, shelved memory. Writing can become a disembodied task they are required to complete, devoid of any joy, connection, or feeling. Admittedly, as writers they are convinced they have nothing to say.

Thus, we spend our semesters together in the attempt to help writers rewrite their understanding of how to be present and alive in their writing. Literacy experts Jeff Anderson and Deborah Dean advise that writers “need options for how to say what they want to say.” We read many models, pulled from all writing genres, where I query, often (incessantly, they would probably say): (1) What do we know about this writer? (2) What is he/she doing that we would like to try? (3) How can this inform or guide our own writing? Before we can dig into these questions, though, a student inevitably raises their hand and asks: What? We can use I? I thought we couldn’t do that! There are accompanying head nods from classmates that lead to the ideal invitation to discuss why the self matters in everything we write, and why writers bring themselves to the page and screen in their writing. Otherwise, why write at all? I ask. Furthermore, why read something that disconnects the writer with hardly any care or concern? Again, young writers can be skeptical of this pushback, since they’ve perfected being disconnected from their own writing and human voice. Why engage on a meaningful level now?

As writer, teacher, and coach, I invite them to reconsider their interests in our classroom by conducting a questionnaire survey, participating in writing conferences, and engaging in workshops to learn more about what matters to them. I craft assignments that draw on their interests and require their presence. When I read their writings, I want to know where they are most present in their writing and where they can add more presence in their writing. At this point, I am a motivator and cheerleader for writing one’s self, building on Stephen King’s belief that “it’s all on the table, and you should use anything that improves the quality of your writing and doesn’t get in the way of your story.”

I am trying, they respond. Show me how to do it, they challenge. I wake up my sleeping computer and project a document on the board to write before them. I talk and think aloud, arguing sometimes with myself, but always writing, rewriting. They hear my voice emerging as I write, think. All of my deliberations, all of my writing surfaces, merges, and projects. They witness the writing process as messy and imperfect, yet with wondrous possibilities. Conversely, I make leaps as a writer. I am writing my own truths before them without self-censorship; I am present as I write. This is the moment they hook themselves onto some part of what they’re writing: why one cares about a topic with concepts to explore toward writing one’s way, which includes meaning and understanding.

In a state of triumph, I read their work and hear them all over again through their deliberate thoughts that are theirs alone, yet interconnected to the worlds they enter and exit so freely and fiercely to write and name themselves through the written word. They may read their draft aloud to me; I smile in affirmation. We marvel and discuss the power of writing when writers invite, bring, and accept themselves into their work.

Further Reading

For more guidance on understanding the writing process and supporting the voices of emerging writers and thinkers, see Lucy M. Calkins’s book The Art of Teaching Writing (Heinemann), which features student writing with relevant concepts and readable contexts in the teaching of writing. The emphasis on building a community of writers with trust, writing episodes with observations, and growing toward meaning rings true today. Additionally, in Teaching Literature in the Context of Literacy Instruction (Heinemann), Jocelyn A. Chadwick and John E. Grassie provide a larger picture about literacy learning with literary works that are both classics and contemporary classics as well as student writers’ own lives.

In A House of My Own: Stories from My Life (Knopf), Sandra Cisneros, a revered poet and storyteller, guides readers through her life as she gained a reading interest and writing voice. Her journeys, struggles, and triumphs are detailed in the selected essays with photographs, which offer ways of incorporating the first-person pronoun in one’s own writings. In What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (University Press of Mississippi), Toni Morrison provides rich perspectives on authorship (I/eye), African America, culture, race, selflessness, and writing, especially as it relates to questions about bias, inclusion, language, and American life.

How does one write from the beginning or revive one’s interest in writing? Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg is a start that launches the reader and writer forward. Even if the writer faced corrective and punitive measures or even rule-based agonies in the past, this book offers a fresh voice with energizing concepts to get the writer going again in the craft of writing. Klinkenborg’s writing style is engaging and appears in stanza form with insightful ideas and concepts. The dreaded bad ideas about writing are erased deliberately by a writer who understands the struggle writers face and the need to keep writing.

In Zing! Seven Creativity Practices for Educators and Students (2010), Pat Mora collected writing advice in the form of letters written for teachers, librarians, and students to gain and maintain a creative identity. The activities Mora recommended nurture the creative self with writing in the first-person point of view. A complementary text to recommend is Be a Better Writer (2016) by Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester. The book provides guidance on strengthening one’s writing with an emphasis on the following issues: topics, ideas, organization, voice, words, sentences, punctuation, and literature. The text, suitable for both adolescent and adult audiences, contains readable prose, features recommended habits, and includes checklists for review along with activities for writing well.

Keywords

emerging writers, first-person point of view, writing assumptions, writing instruction, writing voice

Author Bios

Rodrigo Joseph Rodríguez teaches in the department of English at The University of Texas at El Paso, which is located in the borderlands across from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. He believes all writing comes to life when the reader and writer enter and maintain a dialogue on the print and digital page. Catch him virtually @escribescribe.

Kimberly N. Parker teaches high school and college preparatory courses in the Cambridge Public Schools (Massachusetts). Her research interests include English language arts with culturally responsive pedagogy and the teaching and study of African American literature. She is an adjunct instructor at Tufts University and president of the New England Association of Teachers of English. Catch her virtually @drkimpossible.