LAST NAME SAMPLE MODEL TO SHARE 1 Alexis Teagarden FYE

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SAMPLE MODEL TO SHARE 1
Alexis Teagarden
FYE Orientation
20 January 2015
1,221 words
Synthesis Essay: What Motivates Writing?
Those who take writing as their subject frequently turn to the question of what motivates
writers; is it self-interested self-reflection, or is it the desire to engage with a particular audience
unlike the self? Those who fall into the former camp, claiming that too frequently the writer’s
ego influences her subject matter, disdain personal interest as a motivating factor for writing.
Those in the latter camp, noting the larger and varied social networks to which a writer appeals,
take a less moralistic tone in their argumentation. In addition to these differences in tone, both
camps focus on different genres of writing. Those who point to the writer’s narcissistic
tendencies usually critique authors of fiction and personal essays, while those who point to the
writer’s engagement of audience focus on the production of non-fiction. Despite their different
attitude towards writers and the different kinds of writing they explore, the question of what
motivates writing in general connects to larger issues about writing’s social relevance and utility,
as well as to issues of the writer’s sense of self in relation to the larger “discourse communities”
(Porter) to which she belongs.
The Narcissism Camp
Proponents of the narcissism camp, such as Virginia Woolf, Laura Miller, and Cristina
Nehring, connect essay and fiction writers’ self-absorption to larger cultural shifts. Writing in
1905, Woolf claims that the overabundance of personal essays works to sate the reading public’s
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“stale palate” (1), which has lately been inundated with printed matter. Indeed, as more people
are able to write, and as the ability to circulate printed material becomes easier, the market floods
with essays that “indulge one’s egoism to the full” (2). Unlike Woolf, Miller and Nehring do not
point fingers at the reading public for encouraging the circulation of narcissistic writing. In fact,
Nehring suggests that fewer readers turn to the essay because essayists have “lost their nerve” (2)
and decline to address any “big theories, useful verities, [or] daring pronouncements” worthy of
the reader’s time or interest (7). Nehring does, however, indict the culture more broadly, if not
essay readers in particular, for “grow[ing]…weary of [the] larger truths” that personal essays, by
writers like Montaigne and Seneca, once revealed (4). Miller also identifies today’s writing as a
“narcissistic commerce” that has sullied the once-pure spaces of reading, such as book stores,
with events meant to celebrate the writer (3). National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo),
Miller opines, celebrates the faux-writer’s ability to produce writing—no matter the quality—at
the expense of creating works worthy of appreciation by the now-dwindling population of
readers.
Despite the differences among writers exploring this problem, members of the narcissism
camp illuminate the larger issues of how the content and form of personal writing is influenced
by cultural trends. Woolf, Nehring, and Miller imply that larger forces—from increases in
printed material, writing how-to guides, and The Best American Essay anthologists,
respectively— influence the rise in writing that is self-interested. Whether the culture produces
more narcissistic essayists, or whether essays like this produce the demand for such writing
cannot be determined, making the logic of these arguments somewhat circular. These thinkers
also paint writers with a wide brush, overlooking exceptions to the rules of egoism; moreover,
Woolf, Miller, and Nehring fail to consider the kinds of audiences these self-absorbed writers
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actually reach, ultimately obscuring important cultural and economic differences within and
among genres and their readers. While the narcissism camp maintains a consistent focus on
writers, this limited view keeps them from exploring the particulars of how writing circulates and
where narcissistic writers fit in the larger field of writing studies.
The Audience Camp
Proponents of the audience camp, including Mark McGurl, Derek Thompson, James
Porter, and Mark Richardson suggest that writers are motivated by their real and imagined
audiences. All five thinkers believe the writer is in conversation with an audience that has
particular expectations or literacies that may or may not match their own. Writers in this camp
see even self-motivation as a larger cultural construct and not simply as an attempt to gratify the
writer’s ego.
McGurl’s study of the creative writing program, The Program Era, demystifies the
creative writing instructions to “find your voice” and “write what you know.” McGurl describes
how these seemingly self-motivated dictums for writing were responses to the increasing
institutionalization of creative writing. These instructions are, in fact, constructs of writing
pedagogy that speak to the larger expectations that creative writing be an extension of the
individual writer. This emphasis on the individual is itself culturally motivated, and thus
implicates the purportedly narcissistic creative writer’s motivations in a larger culture of creative
writing.
In Thompson’s piece, “Why Nobody Writes About Popular TV Shows,” he identifies
how genres—and by extension, writers and their publications, or shows and their TV networks—
target particular reader- or viewerships. This is relevant both to the kind of programming on
broadcast and premium TV and the kind of shows mass media reporters write about. Because of
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economic conditions of subscription, premium channels “produce television that is less
formulaic, [and] more attractive to the writing- and-reading-about-TV crowd” (3); therefore, TV
critics write about shows that presumably are less accessible to broadcast viewers and
mainstream press readers who are part of the broader TV audience.
Similarly, Porter considers how writers of various media, like the Declaration of
Independence, advertisements, and news reports, are not completely “free” to create novel prose
so much as they recirculate and borrow from a shared lexicon, or “discourse community” (34).
The lack of freedom Porter underscores is not directly related to economic conditions, as noted in
Thompson’s essay, though he identifies how texts address tacit audience expectations.
Discussing the role of fiction in the composition classroom, Richardson explains how
“the posture of reverence for literary products still determines [the student writer’s] attitude and
approach” to their work (282). Like Porter, Richardson pays attention to the varied
considerations a writer has when reaching her audience. He acknowledges that writers may not
always feel that they have the authority to be part of a conversation with which they aren’t
familiar. For example, student writers may not be equipped with the tools to master the meaning
of texts like Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” so helping student writers engage their own literacies when
making meaning of literature can make them personally invested in their composition.
This camp is less exclusively focused on the writer than is the narcism camp, and the
kinds of writing they consider is more diverse, making the camp somewhat less cohesive than its
opposition. This can be a strength and a weakness, however. These thinkers can help us
understand the reciprocal process of meaning making that goes on between the writer and
audience, but because each is concerned with different factors that shape how writing engages its
audience—from economic, to intertextual, to compositional—this camp is more loosely defined.
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Conclusions
Ultimately the narcissism camp’s criticism of writerly self-absorption suggests that social
context and audience should influence how and what one writes, causing their camp to bleed into
the audience camp. While both camps ponder the factors that motivate writing, they nevertheless
remain divided in their emphasis on what motivates the form that writing takes: the writer or her
audience.
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Works Cited
McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.
Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009. Kindle file.
Miller, Laura. “Better Yet: Don’t Write that Novel”. Salon.com. 02 Nov. 2010. Web. 29 Dec.
2014.
Nehring, Cristina. “What’s Wrong with the American Essay”. Truthdig.com. 29 Nov. 2007.
Web. 29 Web. 2014.
Porter, James. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”. Rhetoric Review. 5.1
(Autumn 1986): 34-47). jstor.org. Web. 29 Dec. 2014.
Richardson, Mark. “Who Killed Annabel Lee: Writing about Literature in the Composition
Classroom”. College English. 66.3 (Jan. 2004): 278-93. jstor.org. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Thompson, Derek. “Why Nobody Writes about Popular TV Shows”. The Atlantic. May 2004.
theatlantic.com. Web. 29 Dec. 2014.
Woolf, Virginia. “The Decay of Essay-Writing”. [Source under review]