Apprenticeship Session 3: 3/3/08

I was thinking today about what my expectations were when going into this semester. I didn't really have any idea what to expect. I knew the name of the course, and that it was going to prepare me for becoming a writing fellow, but other than that I didn't know what I was getting into. I suppose that my initial thoughts were that the class would be a lot of grammar review; getting syntax right and some strategies for being a good tutor. Now I have come to realize that being a tutor--a good tutor--means a lot more than being someone to tell you that it should be "its" instead of "it's."

A student came into the session today with a paper for a class, but seemed to be a little surprised when the tutor started discussing the content of the paper. I got the distinct impression that this student was only expecting the most basic of tutoring: instructions on spelling, punctuation, and grammar. But what I have learned from this class as well as from my apprenticeship is that writing is easy to define as a physical act but much more difficult to define on a social or an emotional level. Again and again we have discussed in class how writing is the single most powerful invention in human history--how, arguably, every single advance that human beings have made over the past 4000+ years stems from writing.

Writing, for me, is an emotional process. A composer, I believe Mozart, once said that he knew that a piece of music was finished when he knew that it did not need a single note more or less. I think that writing is similar, but more and more it has been proven to me that writing is a process. How do we know when a piece of writing is really, truly finished? Can it ever be? Especially with the advent of the internet and hypertext, when writing is no longer the result of a single person but can be edited by an infinite number of people, writing as a form is always evolving and changing. I can only hope that the student who came in today came away with at least a slightly different perspective on writing and the writing process.