Post 4: All Writing is Autobiography

What I get from Murrays' article is that he would rather us focus on the constructs that surround us and avoid the ones that do not cause us any interest. He stresses this most when he starts talking about academic writing. a good paragraph that I think stresses how he feels about academic writing and writing in itself is comes on page 64. " I do not think we should move away from personal and reflective narrative in composition courses, but closer to it...", he goes on to state that, "I do not think that we should make our students write on many different subjects, but that they write and rewrite in pursuit of those few subjects which obsess them." What i take from this is that he wants writing to be seen more from ourselves rather than somebody else that either forces the writing on us or the person of thing that we are writing about. This why our writing is our own and in a way our own formed autobiography as the title and subjects that Murray brings up suggest.

Post 2: Williams on Error

When reading Joseph Williams' article about error i noticed one main thing that the article does. I noticed that it challenges why do writers and other experts that make the "rules" for grammar are so picky when even they themselves don't notice their errors in their own writing. He uses two examples where this occurs and also questions why no one else, along with the experts (example: E.B. White), don't catch or notice these errors. I also get a sense that he is puzzled as to why students can make these mistakes in their own papers but be told they have made an error and these experts are not questioned in the same way. As a undergrad i might now have understood the message of the article exactly but i feel like he targeted an older audience of writers and teachers that my have been previously blinded by these "rules" and "errors". I also think that Williams is defiantly targeting or indicting writing in general. More specifically he is targeting the picky and tedious rules that so called experts make that teachers then follow. The question being that, "If these experts make the mistake and then teachers ignore the mistake and a student then learns the mistake the teacher misses why are these rules even followed if they are actually learned?" This, Williams states, is why he is so puzzled.

Post 1: A Little About Myself and Writing

I am going to college for Psychology and having been in many psych. classes has cause me to write a lot of article summaries and/or research proposals over the past 3 years. These of course being in APA format instead of the common English MLA. Learning APA has become my main focus of writing and almost always follow the APA rules when it comes to writing. I am interested to see and a little worried about writing in this class because I have not used the MLA style since my first year in college. All in all I enjoy writing to a certain extent, however I have not written many long essays because research proposals and article reviews are much shorter. The research part shouldn't be a problem because that is mostly all I do. Hopefully everything will turn out in the end. That's just a little about my writing history.