[2022 Creative Writing MFA Applicants Forum]

On 1/11/2022 at 10:58 AM, koechophe said:

The thing that annoys me the most is how prioritized they are in High School (or even middle school) education. Reading the "classics" in high school messes students up bad, in both their desire to read and in their ability to write.

I was a writing center tutor for most of my undergraduate, and so I saw a lot of incoming students. People legit wrote essays that sounded like they were Jane Austin novels, because they had been taught that was the pinnacle of great literature. It's a total double-standard though, because that type of writing will get students bad grades on essays since it's too verbose and indirect. I basically had to un-train them on their writing because they spent so much time in high school reading things that they SHOULD NOT mimic for modern purposes.

I remember one specific individual who attended the writing workshop I managed. She wrote a ~250k word novel that was written just like a romance novel from the 1800s. The writing was extremely verbose and romantic, and she thought it was fabulous because she'd been taught the classics were the best, and it read a LOT like the classics. She was frustrated because no agent/publisher would give her anything but a forum rejection. Extreme example, but I really think that a lot of the mistakes and problems I see in people's writing comes from too much respect for the old ways of writing when if you want modern success, the writing should be modernized. 

I also met so many students who said they hated reading. And I don't blame them, if you've got a 16-year-old reading Crime and Punishment, OF COURSE they're going to hate it. Maybe a select few won't, but the bulk of them will be totally turned off of reading. 

We have a lot of fabulous modern YA pieces that can both capture interest and present profound thoughts. Admittedly, a lot of modern YA tends to be too colored for my taste (when I studied it in undergrad, too much of it was basically like "here's the RIGHT way of thinking, and everything else is wrong, and people who think this way are wrong, horrible people.") 

But there are complex pieces out there that teach people to look at all angles of a thing and teach people to think rather than teaching them to blindly follow. 

/End rant.

You're a writing tutor and English major who can't spell Jane Austen's name?