Flynn Responses

Greg Warman

11/14/12

Eng 1510

Flynn – Composing as a Woman

                Flynn offers that having “foremothers” or nurturing teachers that evaluate drafts, read journals, and bring out the meaning in students’ works instead of having a powerful, father-like figure that we write to allows more of a feministic approach to writing and composition. From what I took from her article, Flynn argues, based off research, that women and men have different development processes and ways of interaction, and she believes that by studying this, we can create a better way of teaching them the writing process. My opinion of this idea is that these “feminist researchers” are trying to make this differentiation of gender and development a bigger deal than it actually is. She completely complicates the whole idea behind her writing by using difficult sentence structures and blows out of proportion the difference between males and females.  I didn’t enjoy reading this article and I don’t believe it has any academic worth.

Flynn – Contextualizing as a Woman

                Starting with her first sentence, Flynn basically admits that her ideas are going against the norm of things.  She tries to validate the idea of contextualizing as a woman by comparing the controversial idea, in regards to writing constructs, to the work of Thomas Kuhn in his work The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Basically, she tries to explain that her first work bringing up the point of feminism in writing, Composing as a Woman, is in essence, trying to explain the same exact thing that Kuhn does: Proclaiming something different than what is already widely accepted must be presented in the strongest way possible.  Personally, I don’t think Flynn does this.