Beaufort states “Teaching writing is one of the most complex tasks I know of, because multiple cognitive and social factors must be taken into account at once” (205). I couldn’t agree more. Writing is a rather intimate and personal form of communicating. How do you assess someone’s writing in a way that is encouraging and mindful? It feels nearly impossible to effectively teach writing in the current academic climate. I appreciated Beaufort’s stance on transferring knowledge across multiple disciplines and discourse communities. Beaufort includes various strategies on how to teach to encourage students on how to transfer information effectively. A key idea in the College Writing and Beyond piece is “writers, if they want to gain expertise in multiple genres and discourse communities, have to learn to become lifelong learners.” (177). I think in any field or discipline it is important to keep a beginner’s mindset. Throughout my years of attempting to break fully into a regular yoga practice, I have found how important it is to have access to a beginner’s mind, and I think that applies to a multitude of different areas of life. With writing specifically, it is important to acknowledge how many changes a human goes through on a regular basis. Those changes strongly impact our writing from our writing style, voice, process, and everything in between. Beaufort has a section on writing rituals and how we all have them even if were not conscious of it. She also encourages mindfulness and to “have students keep a process journal”. I never thought of using a process journal, but I think it could be something very useful for me.
Writing and conversation always help me to understand new concepts. It helps to write things out to organize your thoughts, but conversation helps because humans are universes within themselves, and we all perceive and process knowledge differently. Hearing others’ thoughts on something you may need clarity on can lead to a pathway of understanding at a human level and then applying the information or “transferring” the information to different areas. In College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later, Beaufort writes, “I see the goal of WAW as intricately connected with principles for transfer of learning: by showing students ways of thinking about writing as an activity, rhetorically situated, supporters of WAW are hoping to give students analytic frameworks for understanding acts of writing in other writing contexts.” (5). I think that part of the issue in writing courses is that students are only there for their grade. They haven’t written about writing or learned the “why” of writing. If students understood the discipline like they understand biology or algebra, they may be more inclined to understand the impact writing has on key functions of life and therefore their writing will reflect that understanding.
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