Blog Post #8 (Darius Stewart)

Goedde's case study is remarkable--and maybe this is too easy--because it enacts form and content so that each is inextricable from the other and therefore helps to steer the point he is making. Sure, his study could have used a more academic structure to argue how one might facilitate creative nonfiction writing, but what would that look like, and especially if Goedde's central idea is kept intact. For me, it seems the advantage of this type of study--that is the advantage it holds stylistically--is that it opens up discussions concerning how these case studies should be written in the first place, and for whom. This is also a concern that is central to Goedde's and Lorraine's point of contention: academic versus creative writing. What do we, the readers, glean from Goedde's style that we might not otherwise glean from a (presumably) traditional model that is, say, the Len and Fei model? This is a question that was brought up in a Cultural Studies course last semester when we read creative essays from an anthology of mostly densely written, almost inscrutable, articles of cultural criticism. Then, as now, the questions that lingered asked whether we are the types of writers who want their points to be understood in a way that Goedde suggests or is our prose writing, like Lorraine's, merely a way to make a political statement? What this case study shows, to my estimation, is how writing tutors must contend with the Lorraine story that exists alongside those global mainstays (i.e. the Rhetoric essay) whose problems we've become so conditioned to diagnose and treat instinctively.

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