Values in Writing.
There are seven people currently enrolled in ENGL 127: Writing about Literature.
Twenty-nine thousand and one hundred and twenty-seven students make up the undergraduate, graduate, and professional student sectors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Our class makes up approximately .024% of the population of this campus.
The course bulletin says that this course aims to "emphasize literature, critical thinking, and the writing process." And this semester, .024% of this campus has further developed their skills in this department.
That, to me, is tremendously sad. There's an incredible amount of unrecognized value in learning to write well, regardless of what career one decides to pursue.
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Do you want to know something about me? I keep a pencil in my shower.
Sometime in the midst of my awkward middle school years when I liked to take naps in the shower before getting ready for school, I found out that you can write on the acrylic walls of a bathtub in pencil, and it doesn't cause any (lasting) damage. I also found out that my best thoughts come to me by way of hot water and Herbal Essences shampoo. I don't remember when either of these realizations came about, but they've been consistent since that day.
I fell in love with writing at around the same age as when I first learned to form letters. I used to make up stories about princes and princesses, and less conventional things: like a poem about eating french fries with ketchup. When I was old enough to know the difference between a subject and a predicate, I began to pour out my soul in assignments just to read them aloud in class. I was reading eight different books at any given time, and like any other high schooler who appreciates English too much, I gave up on AP Calculus and spent that class period writing too.
My love for writing peaked in the summer of 2013, between my junior and senior year, at Governor's School West at Salem College. Governor's School is not, and has never been, something I like to boast about. For me, it was a safe haven to expand my creativity and push past the boundaries of my writing. And since that summer, I've never really been in an environment to provoke that sort of passion again. Not until now.
English 127 gave me something of a release from my impending writer's block. It allowed me to regenerate my love for writing literary critiques, and even re-exploring the bounds of my creativity. And it makes me incredibly sad that only .024% of this university was able to experience this love.
I understand that this passion is hard to come by, especially at this age when we're "forced" to stay up into the early hours of the morning by our own bad procrastination habits, working on a twelve page paper that's due the next day. We loathe any sort of essay assignment from professors, and we complain throughout the entire process. College sucks the fun out of writing for most students, and if you decide to declare an English major, well then you're just plain crazy.
As someone who came to this school with the idea of potentially declaring an English major, it's extremely disheartening to face comments regarding the inevitible "mortality" of the field. People say things like "What can you do with an English major, besides dust it every now and again?" or "Making it as a writer today is virtually impossible".
I don't expect everyone to love to write. But writing is an art in itself, and if you can't love it, you have to least appreciate it and all that it is capable of doing.
The thing about being a writer is that you don't really ever "become" one. You just are. It’s not a craft you can learn, like a blacksmith or an electrician or a car salesman. You just write. You feel the need for words building up in your throat and your fingers when you’re a child, and you continue to scribble for the rest of your life. Every empty space, from the extra napkins in your glove compartment to the Notes section on your iPhone, becomes a new area of possibility. You don't write because you love it. In fact, more often than not, you actually hate it. But you write because if you don't, there's an itch you can't scratch, a thirst you can't quench, a fire that you just cannot put out. You write simply because you must.
But at the end of it all, somehow you feel better. It's therapeutic. Writing takes the jumbled cloud of words and letters in your brain and turns them into complete ideas that you can see. Your stressors seem smaller, your ideas seem bigger, and you feel like the entire world can be put back together.
Studies show that by writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events, participants were significantly more likely to have fewer illnesses and be less affected by trauma. Why? James Pennebaker believes this act of expressive writing allows people to take a step back and evaluate their lives. Instead of obsessing unhealthily over an event, they can focus on moving forward. By doing so, stress levels go down and health correspondingly goes up.
By writing, you learn to communicate, to analyze. In our culture, communication is so often hampered because we don’t know how to express ourselves, whether it be verbally or written. But when we embrace the process of self-expression through language, we learn to speak to others.
Lastly, writing is a community. We learn from each other, we build and expand our own thoughts from the thoughts of others. We edit, and re-edit, and then allow someone else to read it, only to edit again. It's a learning process together that we will never actually perfect, only expand.
The seven of us, whether we liked it or not, have learned so much about ourselves and each other. We've learned to write a little better, speak a little louder, and even type a little quicker(if we're the ones who would always procrastinate). The seven of us are better writers. The seven of us are better people.
Everyone should write because writing makes us decide what we believe — and so it makes us decide who we are. Life is mysterious, and unstable. Writing forces us to draw lines. It’s humbling because we will never hit the mark perfectly, but we must try to get as close as we can. Great writing, as Tolstoy had it, is writing that teaches us how to live.