Hello! My name is Diana. I was born and raised in Spanish Harlem, I’ve lived in the same building and the same apartment my whole life. Needless to say, I don’t work well with change. I am Puerto Rican and Salvadorian, but was raised more Puerto Rican. I currently work at the New York Public Library and I am very much involved with my sorority, Theta Phi Gamma Inc. I’m majoring in Professional and Technical Writing with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I am extremely excited for this semester. I have always loved school, even though I complain about the amount of work I have for classes. In all honesty, I am not sure what I want to do after college, all I know is that I want to be able to work in the writing field in any way possible. My current goals in life is just being able to graduate and maybe looking into getting my masters in writing. I’m really not sure yet, but that doesn’t sound too bad of a goal if you ask me.
“Probably one of the most important developments to affect writing theory
was the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntatic Structures in 1957. His
theory of transformational grammar, with its insistent look at the rules by
which language is generated, caused a new focus on the process by which
language comes into being.* The publication of Francis Christensen’s essays
on the generative rhetoric of the sentence and the paragraph in the early
1960’s also stimulated new interest in the processes by which writers produce
texts. Certainly the tagmemicists also provoked a fresh look at the act of
writing when they urged writers to generate ideas by thinking about subjects from a dynamic, three-faceted perspective. And when the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers began to criticize behaviorist psychology just as Chomsky had criticized behaviorist theories of language, he probably hastened the shift away from product-response evaluation of writing.”
Hairston, in this part at least, is describing some of the influences that helped change come along in the profession that is teaching writing. He begins with the works of Noam Chomsky and how his views on transformational grammar triggered the later works of Francis Christensen and Carl Rogers. How all of these men had a say on the relationships between grammar had the impact on how one thinks about writing and even how one writes. Hence having an impact on the way the writing looks and is perceived once they are done writing. At least, that is what that passage sounds like to me. When reading in this section it caught my eye. I mentioned in the beginning of this blog that I have a problem with change. But reading this reminds me that change can be good. Who knows how writing would look like now had Chomsky not take a moment to criticize behaviorist theories of language? Or how it would look had Rogers not look into behaviorist psychology? These little curiosities have a bigger impact in the end. Sometimes change is needed. Whether that need is the need to better something or just to get a new way of looking into something as simple as writing. Not only did this make me think of the good in change, but as well as the snowball affect one person can have on an entire profession.
