The creativity impromptu came very challenging to me because I never pictured myself as a creative individual. When trying to describe the idea of creativity, I immediately thought of art class in elementary school. The problem with this was that I only thought of creativity when it came to art. I never even considered music, writing, or any other aspect of life as fitting into the idea of creativity. In this sense, I feel as though I was not thinking “out of the box,” and was not creative in my realm of thinking.
After reading Bartholomae’s essay, I realized that my essay followed the same pattern as the song writer’s essay. I noticed that throughout her essay, she changed her definition of creativity, realizing that she was not necessarily being creative because she was imitating music she had heard on the radio. However, by not purposely copying them, she was using them as inspiration while creating her own music. In my essay, I made the point that I had been creative because I made the only bumble bee in my fourth grade class. However, after thinking about this, I realized that all the students were being creative because they were making something of their own. At first, I thought creativity was something that had to be completely different from anything anyone has done. Then, I realized that I was wrong. Creativity is something that everyone possesses, something that is done by anyone who has an idea and creates it (in my essay it was a paper mache animal.)
I think that Bartholomae may have been pretty hard on my essay. After reading the advanced essay, I realized that the vocabulary I used was not advanced. I may not have had many grammatical errors, but the content was not at a high level. Furthermore, in my final statement “[creativity] will produce imaginative works of art that most people could not have even dreamed of” I created a commonplace, assuming that everyone sees creativity in art.
When writing my creativity impromptu essay, I knew that I was writing for an English professor and for my peers. With this in mind, I tried to describe creativity (at first) as a child would, and then “grow up” and describe creativity in its true sense so that the reader will see where I started from and where I was going to end. Realizing that creativity was just doing something different made me reconsider my thoughts about my “creative bumble bee.”
Bartholomae made some great points about writing but I’m still curious about his idea of grammar. Is it not true that most professors care just as much about grammar as they do about content? If a student writes with authority, but cannot spell or punctuate, doesn’t the professor lose some respect for the author? If grammar is forgotten about it the classroom won’t a lot of students have problems learning how to write without errors further down the road?
I don't think that Bartholomae thinks that we should forget about grammar when we're writing. I think that Bartholomae believes that you should focus more on your ideas and the way you express your ideas in writing, than on making sure there are no grammatical errors in your piece. When you put the prevention of grammatical errors in the fore front of your mind when writing, you may have a harder time expressing yourself, using a style of discourse appropriate for piece, and getting across your ideas to your reader. Once you can get your ideas down on paper, you can then learn to fix any grammatical errors that were made. However, you need to be aware of the fact that when you fix an error you may make an idea unclear, or leave it out all together, which is what I think Bartholomae is against doing.
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