Women's Ways of Writing, or, Images, Self-Images, and Graven Images

College Composition and Communication May 1994

Women's Ways of Writing, or, Images, Self-Images, and Graven Images

C. Jan Swearingen

Abstract

conversations and further meditations helped her change her working habits so that she was able to write daily, to use a different voice in her writing, to include personal information for an academic audience, and to finish her project in time to submit it for publication. The article was accepted. It's perhaps a particularly capitalist perspective to think of meditation as a means to an end. In Buddhism the practice of meditation is all, and meditators are cautioned against becoming attached to outcomes or insights. Yet in a discipline which talks of process but where teachers often must still evaluate products, and in universities where students want class activities to feed directly into the papers they write, it's difficult to avoid arguing for the practical benefits of offering meditation-at the very least, to students with writing block. Just as Elbow argues for the inclusion of personal writing in the curriculum because, as he puts it, Life is long and college is short (Reflections 136), I urge meditating writing teachers to combine meditation with writing to provide an anodyne for the wounds of schooling and to offer a model for healthy living.

Journal: College Composition and Communication
Published: 1994-05-01
DOI: 10.2307/359011
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality