I Stand Here Savoring
By Juliana Hopper
Writing 111: Writing Seminar
I stand here savoring. The spoon in my hand, hovering just above my lips as the aroma of marsala sauce warms my nostrils. I blow gently on the liquid, and a puff of steam rolls off the spoon like the early morning fog. I place the tip of the spoon in my mouth. At first the heat stored in the metal overwhelms my tongue, but then the different flavors start to interact with my taste buds. A bitter note from the wine. A nuttiness from the mushrooms. A sweetness from the chicken stock. I can pick out each individual flavor, but they also work in harmony to create the unique taste that is chicken marsala. This is one of my favorite dishes that my mom makes. Not just because it is delicious, but also because I love watching her cook it. Seeing her interact with the ingredients. Considering their individual flavors, and how much of each she should incorporate into the dish as she revises the recipe in real time. Adding a pinch more of pepper. Another splash of wine, to get that just right combination of flavors..
I stand here savoring. But this time it’s my writing, instead of my mother’s cooking. My eyes soak in the sentences from my computer screen. They pause at each comma, letting each preceding clause marinade. As I read, dissonant sentences grab my attention. Sometimes there are even bitter paragraphs that I have to restructure to make them more palatable.Similar to my mother in the kitchen, I always start with a recipe for my writing, and then adjust as I go. My outline is not usually a fully drawn-out plan, but a familiar idea or topic that inspires me to make new meaning as I write. Through savoring my own writing and the writing of experts this semester, I have found my writing process to be similar to the cooking process: a perfect mixture of invention and my personal experiences.
Both writing and cooking are creation processes. They start with an idea, but it’s just an idea until it is brought into physical space through words or ingredients. Reading is also a creation process. As stated by Emerson, “one must be an inventor to read well” (qtd. in Sommers 217). But what does it mean to be an inventor? To me this means coming up with original, thought-provoking connections as I read. Even though invention involves creating original material, the connections I synthesize while I’m reading do not just come out of thin air. They are a product of my past experiences. What makes them original is not the content itself, but how I forward[1] the content from my past experiences in order to make new connections. Doug Downs, an editor of the textbook, Writing about Writing, explains how reading and human interaction are similar since we are constantly experiencing “a vast range of sensory signals and interpreting them by associating them with networks of our existing knowledge” (Downs 462-463). Downs’ idea of creating meaning through a “network of existing knowledge” can be compared to the law of conservation, which states that matter cannot be created or destroyed. This suggests that original ideas are not created in a singular event but are formed from the restructuring of existing ideas and concepts that are familiar to the writer. The same law of knowledge conservation applies to my mother when she cooks chicken marsala. She did not decide to proportion the ingredients out randomly. There was a recipe that she found, and then put her own twist on, in order to create a new dish for our family. A new dish to be savored.
When my mother started my culinary training, she broke down the recipes into simple tasks that I already knew how to do. For example, she would have me mix the wet and dry ingredients together whenever she baked sweets such as cakes, brownies, or cookies. Practicing the simple mixing technique helped train my muscles so that they would be better prepared for the next level of mixing, which was learning how to fold the delicate egg whites into the lemon ricotta pancake batter. This transfer and forwarding of knowledge is not just a skill that I developed in the kitchen, but in my writing process as well. When drafting an essay I often start with free writing about the source material that seems most important to me, and then build my ideas from there. Moreover, the writing process for my rhetorical analysis [2] on Annie Dillard’s essay, “Sight into Insight,” highlighted this technique of starting inside my comfort zone and then branching out my analysis from there. When I sat down to write the chunks for this rhetorical analysis, I focused on analyzing one particular quote about an amoeba that Dillard was looking at in a glass jar. The quote stood out to me since I am passionate about biology and appreciated how Dillard used the amoeba as a lens to consider how some organisms interpret their surroundings through sensation. Analyzing this quote with a fine-tooth comb unlocked the essay for me. I read the passage several times before I noticed that Dillard switched back and forth between an analytical style of writing and a poetic style of writing. This observation then led me to consider Dillard’s purpose for writing “Sight into Insight,” which was to show the audience how perspective, analytical and immersive, influences the way we interpret our world.
Dillard’s prose throughout her essay was complex, yet beautiful, making it hard to even summarize certain sections of her essay. If I did not start with a section of prose where the ideas resonated with me, then I would not have reached the same conclusion, or achieved the same depth of analysis as I did in the final draft of my second paper. After writing my rhetorical analysis essay, I realized that writing comes most naturally when I start with what I know, and then build from there. Using concepts that are familiar to me often gives my writing the strong foundation it needs to be successful. If I try to start with concepts that are too abstract or foreign to me then the foundation is weak, and the ideas built from it also tend to be weak since they have no support. Another tool that helps build a strong foundation is ethos[3], which allows me to bolster the claims I make in my writing with personal experience.
One of my favorite tools in the kitchen is my mother’s spice rack. As a child, I always loved smelling the different spices since each scent reminded me of a different dish that my mom made. Seasoning was her forte. Whenever she had me season something she would emphasize the importance of putting on more than I thought was necessary since these spices were where all the flavor came from. Adding spices to a piece of writing is also an important rhetorical move since it helps to boost my ethos. It was not until college when I started to season my writing with my own personal flavor. Looking back, I realized that my writing in high school was quite bland since it was formulaic and lacked any personality. But how much personal flavor should I add? When does it become too much? These were rhetorical choices I struggled with when writing my first college essay. I wanted to have an academic tone, but my professor also told us that we could and should use “I” since it was a reflection on our literary experiences. Balancing the academic tone with the personal voice was challenging, but the use of personal pronouns helped me to elaborate further on my thinking process. This then freed me to do a more in-depth analysis of my sources, instead of just summarizing their claims objectively. Nancy Sommers, an authority figure on writing academic essays, also believes that the personal voice is important in academic writing since “being personal means bringing [our] judgements and interpretation to bear on what [we] read and write, learning that [we] never leave [ourselves] behind even when [we] write academic essays” (Sommers 218). Sommers illustrates that personal flavor is always a part of the writing process since all writers need to draw on their own experiences, in order to establish their credibility. This emphasizes the fact that personal flavor is not just a garnish, but rather a staple of the writing process that all writers need to differentiate themselves from other writers.
Seasoning a piece of writing also involves using different rhetorical strategies within the prose in order to highlight the flavor of the author’s voice. New Yorker essayist, Chang-Rae Lee, is a master of his writing spice rack since his prose is layered with meaning and purpose[4], even in this short sentence: “It was all there––the old flavors I knew, the beautiful salt, the sweet, the excellent taste” (Lee 311). Lee uses syntax and punctuation to slow the moment down, showing how he’s savoring the meal his mother made for him each time he came home from boarding school. Digging deeper, this line took on additional meaning when I considered it in context with the rest of the story. Lee’s mother is dead, so the author is not just savoring the meal that he is writing about, but memories of his mother’s company. Each comma separates the different flavors that remind Lee of his mother, but also links them together in a way that allows Lee and the reader to flow smoothly between each sensory memory. Creating the sensation of savoring. The savory sentence structure also helps to highlight Lee’s voice as a writer since he fleshes out his description with long fluid sentences with many commas. This sentence structure forced me to pause and let the description marinade as I read. This enhanced Lee’s ethos and pathos in this piece since the pace of the prose allowed me to reflect on his mother’s life along with him. After reflecting on Lee’s essay, I noticed that he uses two types of personal flavor. The personal flavor that Lee adds to his writing can be quite subtle because it is concentrated within the prose itself. It is the way Lee carefully constructed his sentences, so that the reader would stop and savor his words. Lee’s application of personal flavor is important in creating a well-written essay because it enhances the author’s voice, allowing his own personal flavor to seep into their prose.
One of the most prominent memories I have of my mom cooking was when I was about five or six years old. She was making her famous lemon ricotta pancakes and was gently folding the fluffy, whipped egg whites into the golden batter. After she finished, I was allowed to taste the batter before she started cooking the pancakes. Even though it was such a long time ago, I can still feel the malleable rubber spatula against my tongue as I licked off the lemony batter. Cooking with my mom became the backbone of this final paper since my mom has greatly influenced my literacy in the kitchen and on paper. Learning the cooking process has helped me to better understand the writing process. I did not realize the impact my mother had on my writing until I found new models, such as Sommers and Downs, since they helped me see how I model many of my ideas and structure many of my essays around values and biases that my mother passed down to me. Often it was the past experiences I had with my mom, which helped me come to terms with these new models and use them in my academic writing. I will forever be influenced by the values and biases that my mother instilled in me, for they are the root of my writing. They are the source of the personal flavor that I bring to every essay. Flavor that inspires me to draw meaningful connections between even the most unlikely ingredients. Allowing me to create an essay worth being savored.
Footnotes
[1] The idea of “forwarding content” within a work of writing comes from Joseph Harris, the author of Rewriting, whose text we read and discussed in class.
[2] For this Writing 111 assignment we were tasked to choose one of four essays from our textbook, The Little Norton Reader: 50 Essays from the First 50 Years, and write an analysis on how the author we chose used rhetorical strategies within their writing and their effect on the reader.
[3] In the context of our writing class ethos is an appeal to credibility, which means that authors uses either their experience (educational or personal) or status to boost the authority of their message.
[4] Chang Rae Lee is another essayist that we read in my Writing 111 class. I chose to analyze part of his essay “Coming Home Again” in my first paper, which was the first draft of my reflection on my literary practices.
Works Cited
Downs, Doug. “Rhetoric: Making Sense of Human Interaction and Meaning Making.” Writing About Writing: A College Reader. Third Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2017. Print
Lee, Chang-Rae. “Coming Home Again.” The Little Norton Reader: 50 Essays from the First 50 Years. Melissa A. Goldthwaite.W.W. Norton & Company.2016.311.
Sommers, Nancy. “I Stand Here Writing.” Writing About Writing: A College Reader.Third Ed. Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2017. Print
A Word from Juliana
When I first received the prompt for this essay I was quite perplexed. The assignment was to revise my first essay of the class, which was about my literary practices. However, in this new version I was also supposed to showcase what I had learned during Writing 111 by using the various writing experts we talked about in class as sources for my paper. Even though I liked the way my first paper turned out, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to revise it because I thought I said all that could have been said about my literary practices. But once I sat back down to re-read the essay I realized that there was still a lot more I had to say about my literary practices since my writing had changed so much within the course of the short semester.
After reading through the original essay several times, I kept being drawn back to the sections of the essay where I talked about the impact that my mom had on my literary practices when she read Harry Potter to me as a little kid. There was something about her as a literary influence that I wanted to explore more. With this new lead, I started to think about all the things that I used to do with my mom at home and how I could relate them to my literary practices. One activity that kept standing out to me was cooking, since my mom taught me everything I know about creating in the kitchen. Once I broke down the cooking process, I started to see all parallels that I could draw to the writing process. Now I had direction and could start writing. I found that this was one of the easiest papers to write because it was about topics that were all very familiar to me: cooking, my literary journey, and my mom. As I was writing, it seemed like everything just fell into place. Even adding the sources from the writing experts, the part I was initially most worried about, did not end up being too difficult, because the sources I chose felt like they belonged in my paper without being forced or finagled into place.
Writing about what you know, or at least starting with something that you are familiar with, is one of the writing practices I highlight in this essay. It is also one of the most important things I’ve learned as a writer and in the kitchen from my mom. She always talks about how it is important to make a recipe your own by adding a twist on it or changing some of the ingredients to make it more suited to your tastes. This is what I set out to do within this essay, which is based off one of Nancy Sommers’ essay, “I Stand Here Writing.” I drew inspiration from the structure of Sommers’ essay, but put my own twist on her work by describing my literary practices in terms of learning how to cook. I hope that you will savor reading this essay as much as I have savored writing it.
Bon Appétit!
From Professor Anne Boyle
Assignment
Assignment 4: Narrative and critical reflection on your own literacy practices and/or pressures (5-7 pages)
You have generated a great deal of writing in this class and you have read articles, reflections, and arguments regarding the importance of writing and scholarly analyses of the writing processes. Your last paper will allow you to use passages in your own writing and in your reading that have inspired and helped you the most. The final paper is a radical revision of your first, but instead of just a narrative reflection of a literacy experience you have had (an experience with reading and/or writing), you will use our readings to turn that narration into a critical analysis of your writing and, possibly, reading practices.
Here are some steps you can use at the invention phase of drafting your paper:
- First, read over all the writing you have done this semester and choose passages you think are important to you or that show your writing development, both strengths and challenges, or that taught you something about your writing process. You might contrast a passage from a first and later draft. You can use a passage where you were not able to get your meeting across clearly and think about why you had this difficulty.
- Next, mull over the syllabus and review our readings. What readings have been most memorable, important, or influential to you? Why?
- Consider how you would like to revise your first paper by constructing a well-transitioned, critical reflection of your literacy experiences. The experience you reflect upon may be radically different from the original because it will be informed by writing studies, your own writing experiences in this class, and the works of fellow students. At times, the original narrative might not even be central to the new critical narrative. Full documentation and a works cited page should be included. You need not annotate your works cited. 5-7 pages.
- Remember that “In truth, care is more essential than carelessness” (Elbow, 552)
Professor Commentary
Students in my Writing Seminar work to practice and refine many of the skills that they will need to be successful writers and critical readers. They begin the semester with a short text about their own writing or reading experiences. From there, they write a rhetorical analysis of a complicated text; an argument; and then they write a second argumentation paper in dialogue with published scholars. As they work on these essays, they read works by scholars of writing and great essayists. Their final essay is a critical analysis of their writing development, using the readings that have significantly influenced their work.
Juliana’s essay is not only beautiful and intelligent, but also very sophisticated. I introduced the class to Nancy Sommer’s essay, “I Stand Here Writing,” by explaining how she modelled her work on Tillie Olsen’s short story “I Stand Here Ironing.” When Sommers wrote this personal, but thought-provoking essay, she knew she was merging genres for an academic audience; she was taking risks. Juliana takes similar risks as she analyzes her own writing processes. Central to Juliana’s analysis is a narrative reflection that merges the academic and the personal. Her central metaphor, how the writing process mirrors the cooking process, provides structure for her essay, but what she learned from her close and careful reading of Annie Dillard, Chang-Rae Lee, Doug Downs, and Joseph Harris allowed her to be in true dialogue with her sources as she invents her own work. She doesn’t cherry-pick quotations, but has truly “come to terms” with her sources, as she “forwards” their ideas fully,” and “takes an approach” to use Joseph Harris’s terms. She does more than mimic or model; she extends their ideas through her own critical reflection.
Juliana was a very capable writer when she entered the course, but, as she writes in her essay, her prose was “bland” and “formulaic.” I so appreciated Juliana’s ability read, thoughtfully, to analyze, how writing works, and to find her own voice.