Interestingly, I feel that Carter somewhat answers the question I posed in my previous blog: “Though, who has the credibility to make that list, and why should we, the writerly populace, accept such a list of prerequisites to in turn feel like accomplished writers that know what we are doing?” On a local level, each locality has its own rules and regulations, thus deeming writing as something that means and acts as something different for numerous communities. Although writing may have some immensely important role in some communities, it does not act that way in others. Thus, Carter somehow answered my question within two pages of insight, though, there is more to the story regarding what writing means and who gets to decide what is “right” and “wrong”.
Additionally, Carter also somewhat answered another question I posed: “Where is step one, and who will take responsibility for that?” This is where the concept of generalism comes in, and shows to be helpful in terms of allowing a person more flexibility in performing in different domains… the “step one” is not always the same across the board for every writer every single time they write, but with a certain general knowledge, can be more easily found and answered with such insight.
Combining the two, we get the concept of pluralism, which is important when it comes to expertise within a certain field, but I find it to be not as important in the realm of writing (at least currently, but my view may change throughout the semester). Surely there are aspects of writing that should be mastered, like grammatical correctness and sentence structure, and so on. Though, when it comes to composition, organization and style are key, but the way in which we approach it is not usually a set equation that yields one perfect solution. Rather, at least for myself, it is the experimentation, whether successful or not (though to me, it is always successful) that adds to the experience of the writer. And sometimes, this experience is not always remembered, and cannot always be used in every situation in which one sits down to write. To me, there is no such thing as an expert in writing. There are too many ways in which writing exists, in which it represents something, as thought of in Duffy’s excerpt. There are ethics within writing, and questions that are answered in very different ways each time a writer composes, like “what shall I say?” or “to whom do I speak?” and so on. Dryer also discusses the temporary-ness within writing by showing us that words, which at the very basic level compose our grand writing compositions, mean whatever they do mostly in part to context, and meaning can often change based on perception. Thus, really, what is there to be an expert on when it comes to writing? Is it the development of strategies that set the writer within one of the five modes of expertise (why should we label where we are in our writing journeys, anyhow, even as a student, if there is no end point in sight)? Thus, we should amount this “expertise” to experience, rather than to the perfect balance of local and general knowledge. One will always be lost in the limbo of the two, so why must we be so aware of it? To accept that we will never be masters, and if we are masterful in one area, we are depleted of knowledge in the next? In this, I am unsure… I write because I have a calling, though not all humans hear that same calling, and that is why I am having issues with this Carter’s information.
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