Lynda Barry Article

Summary:

Her piece was all about the questions that students grow to ask about their essays.  Her writing showed that every kid when learning to write and express them self use their creativity and draw most of the time.  The main idea in her piece is that as kids grow up they are told not to be creative and not to draw on their works.  This leads students to only write an essay that asks two questions: Is this stupid? And Does this suck?  Throughout the process of learning to write creativity helped shape our minds into becoming good writers. Now, when we get into the university level, that creativeness is slowly fading away because we don't draw pictures anymore and we don't think outside of the box very often.  Lynda Barry's point is that no matter how old we are, we still need to be creative in writing and we need to stop asking the same two questions about our writing pieces.

Response:

I have to agree with this piece by Lynda Barry because I too have started asking those two dreaded questions.  First of all, this piece brought me in due to the pictures that were drawn around the words. It looked very cool and I thought it might be fun to read it. So after I read it, I realized that I need to look at my writing more frequently. It opened my eyes to what has happened within my writing experience from an early age to now.  I do realize that I used to be creative with my writing and that I used to draw to illustrate what I wanted to say.  Now I don't draw at all and I feel was though I write just because I have to. She brought up a very good point that creativity doesn't need to die once we get older within our writing, she says that it can still live on as long as you allow it and as long as you allow creativity within your pieces.  She also states the most important part to allowing creativity to flourish in your work is to not think about the two questions that relate to structure and content of an essay.