EducationNews.org

Is this article some kind of late April Fool's joke? If it's not, then congraulations, your lack of wisdom and insight is now on the internet. Let me just say, I am extremely offended by
your ignorance. First of all, I think you are a sexist fool for specifically discouraging young girls to have their writing be seen. How do you expect them to grow or gain skill and knowledge by keeping a diary that stays locked up where no one else can ever read it or judge it? You obviously have no idea how it feels to be passionate about a subject such as writing, and to want to be able to share that passion with the rest of the world. If a piece of writing is thought to be good writing, probably by people other than yourself, why shouldn't it be entered in a contest? Why shouldn't it win a contest? Why shouldn't it be shared with the world, if a number of people can find it entertaining, informing, or persuading? The are other high school girls out there besides the ones shown in Disney's "High School Musical" or some other misinforming source. And many of them have a lot more to express in their writing than getting the lead role in the school play or taking the boy of their dreams to the spring dance. I'm pretty sure that the only crime and shame is allowing a man like you to publish such a naive and discouraging article, not only for current young female writers, but for writers everywhere who have been intrigued by the writing and judging process since
they were young.

How can you possibly believe that "teen autobiography came to be a substitute for nonfiction reading and academic writing"? If there's anything I love more than writing my own nonfiction pieces, it's reading ones that already exist. As far as academic writing goes, I'm pretty sure my daily hour and a half Advanced Placement English class takes care of that, thank you very much. Nonfiction writing provides aboslutely no limitation to any other form, includng academic writing. All high school students in my county are required to take four credits in English in order to graduate. This most certainly includes writing numerous essays on nonautobiographical topics. The last essay I wrote was a 16-page research paper, proving my thesis on a specific topic related to the psychological approach to literature in two classic literary works. Writing that paper didn't stop me from keeping up with my "diary entries."

By the way, I am a seventeen-year-old female writing student involved in a rigorous literary arts program at my high school. I just recentlyt won a very honorable award in a major competition for a creative writing piece that I wrote. and let me tell you, that piece was pretty damn good. In addition, the college essay I submitted to the university I will be attending next year was thoughtful, interesting, and exemplified my talents as a writer while at the same time giving the evaluators a sense of the kind of person I am. Just because you may have had a boring and worthless childhood doesn't mean that the events and expereinces I've had in my life thus far wouldn't spark interest to an audience. My "precious time" is never wasted, only improved, by participating in a hobby that I feel so deeply connected to. No need to worry, though. your underestimation of young (female) writers won't stop me from writing in the forms I want to write on topics I want to write about, or submitting any of my ingenious stories to contest after contest.

Nonfiction writing allows teenagers to spark their imaginations, their curiousity, their views of the world; they don't all have to be superficial or lame existential nonsense, and classifying all young writing so negatively is just plain stupid and naive. Although it will never be my goal as a writer to interest you personally with my writing, I apologize that it never will, just because I don't normally write on topics like calculus or chemistry. I do happen to courses in both of these subjects, and I think I have devoted enough of my time to gaining knowledge in such courses without writing essays on them.

I am appalled at the shame you have brought to the world of writing. Just because you wouldn't choose to sit down with a creative piece written by a young person doesn't mean you have to devalue young peoples' creative writing as a whole and ruin it for everyone else. It's one thing to criticize a particular piece. It's another to be close-minded enough to bash a form in its entirety and the age group and gender it appeals to.

I hope you don't have children, and if you do, I hope they never want to be writers.

Let me launch off here by saying that I am an eighteen-year-old female attending a public magnet high school for Literary Arts. This article is a disappointment, and not because of its tendency to stereotype the teenage girl (which in itself seems to lessen the very validity of this piece

Aside from the misogynistic overtones of this article (do the celebrated literary trials and tribulations of teenage boys bother you just as much?) I think it's sad that you consider Creative Nonfiction to be such a contemptuous endeavor. It must be people like you who cut funding for art and music in favor of banal curriculums featuring material that is easy to grade, test, and condemn to a rubric. The personal essay is an art form that does require a certain amount of maturity, I agree; the writer must be self aware, poetic, and insightful. But perhaps that is the reason why colleges want to see personal instead of analytical essays: to measure personality where standardized tests and AP scores cannot, and to see whether the student can employ literary devices in a way that suits his/her intended purpose. If teachers are asking their students to attempt this form of writing alongside their required research papers and analytical essays, I see no cause for your complaint. And as for college level students finding themselves unable to comply with college term paper assignments, I would like to know which institution of higher education you are referring to, and I would like to speak to the troubled students therein. Perhaps they did not receive adequate basic-level English at their high schools, whereupon I would be interested to know if they even had access to Creative Nonfiction training at all. Finally, I would not be so quick to mock the musings of teenagers as most contemporary classics (The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, and The Bluest Eye, for example) deal with the same issues that personal essays grapple with.

I disagree with and am offended by many of the claims you make in this article. As a high school senior, I have nearly four years of writing experience behind me, and while I fully appreciate the knowledge I have garnered from completing analytical and research papers in a number of my classes, including English, history, engineering and technology, and various science classes, the knowledge I have learned from writing "creative nonfiction"--as you so condescendingly refer to it--is just as important to me. Perhaps writing nonfiction essays isn't always enriching to subjects such as trigonometry or biomedical engineering or the Industrial Revolution, but that certainly doesn't make nonfiction "anti-knowledge" or "anti-intellectual" or "anti-academic" or a waste of my "precious time." In fact, I think that taking nonfiction classes and writing nonfiction pieces has been one of the most important components of my education. It's easy enough to vomit facts into a research paper and hand it in for a good grade, but knowing how to eloquently express your own thoughts, opinions, ideas, and emotions is something that takes a good deal of effort, and writing nonfiction has taught me to do those things skillfully. To imply that the thoughts of high school students, particularly girls, are not worth writing or reading about, as you have in this article, is outrageous. My own nonfiction work has not only allowed me to reflect and analyze my own personal thoughts, opinions, etc., but to examine the behaviors of others and the nature of humankind, which, in my candid opinion, is no small thing. The art of writing "creative nonfiction" or, my preferred term, "personal essays," is one of the most important genres of writing because while personal essays, particularly by those of the female sex, may discuss trivial topics such as fashion and school, at their core they illuminate subjects that are universal and will always be relevant: a girl who writes about what she should wear is also discussing the basic human's obsession with a desire to attain the approval of others, something that always has and always will exist. Your article, on the other hand, will eventually become obselete and forgotten, while the genre of personal essays thrives. "Creative nonfiction" has been published by hundreds of influential people including Virginia Woolf, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath, George Orwell, Nora Ephron, Joan Didion, and Francois-Marie Arouet (better known by his pseudonym Voltaire). Are their works worthless? Of course not. Emerson and Thoreau lead the Transcendentalist movement, Plath was a pioneer in confessional poetry, Woolf made stream-of-consciousness writing famous and published a book-length essay entitled "A Room of One's Own," and I hope against hope that you know enough about Voltaire to understand his importance. While those writers may not have been sending their essays out to contests while they were in high school, I doubt that their writing was considered "anti-knowledge" or "anti-intellectual" or "anti-academic" or whatever other nonsense you've been proposing in this article. Quite frankly, I think you haven't done enough research to write intelligently on this subject, considering many of the claims you make aren't well-supported, making this a very pathetic piece of journalistic writing. What girls from what schools have been writing this "creative nonfiction"? What awards have they won? Where are the quotes from these essays that babble on about sophomoric drivel? If I were you, I would be embarrassed to call this an article or a commentary. If anything, it reads like a whining blog entry, or a "pumped-up diary entry" that should've stayed within the confines of your private journal and never seen the light of day. Perhaps you should dismount from your high horse, remove the stick wedged between your gluteal muscles, and publish some exemplary, long, and serious pieces of "creative nonfiction" in your prized Concord Review. Or are you worried some of these girls' personal essays might give your history research papers a run for their money?

Does this guy get paid for this stuff? His prose is about as effective as his comb-over.

I'm not going to dispute the fact high school students today probably DO need to learn to write term papers for college and to think beyond themselves, but why does Mr. Fitzhugh think that creative nonfiction is "teenage writing"? Tell that to Joan Didion, John McPhee, or any of the other masters of the genre whom this generation would be lucky -- indeed, skilled -- to successfully emulate. For that matter, why does he think creative nonfiction is limited to autobiography? Despite the fact that people who write creative nonfiction are often present as the narrator, creative nonfiction isn't necessarily limited to the writer's viewpoint. Moreover, it often requires serious reporting. (Think In Cold Blood.) Anyway, it would be good if this particular academic would do his own research and learn what the genre IS before he dismisses it completely, rather than recognize that it serves a purpose other than his own. And by the way, I'm 43 and a science writer.

Great comments. These young women make their case.

Thank you, sir, for your ill-informed, condescending, and sexist rantings. I wholeheartedly endorse the other posts who call you on your ignorant ways.

To respond only to some of the comments, I would quote a letter from one of my many female authors:



Mr. William Fitzhugh, Founder
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road,
Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776


May 17, 2006


Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you so much for publishing my essay on the Irish Ladies

I wonder if this author is acquainted with the personal statements required by college admissions departments, or is aware that many first-year college composition courses, including mine, require personal writing. Creative nonfiction assignments do not prevent my students from writing substantive research papers; the personal essays instead teach them the importance of developing their ideas, of not assuming their audience will take their assertions for granted, of avoiding clichéd statements, and of getting beyond the limited five-paragraph paper they learned in high school. Creative writing is one more way for my students to develop skills they need in any form of writing; it need not be an either-or proposition. I commend these teens for enhancing their writing through regular practice, and would be lucky to have such adept writers in my classroom.

This article has no supporting evidence. Since the author seems to think formal term papers are so important, he should know that opinions need to have some factual basis. One cannot pull opinions out of thin air and expect to be taken seriously.
The author of this article needs to learn what creative nonfiction is. By definition, "creative" means "using or showing use of the imagination to create new ideas or items." The word "nonfiction" is defined as "writings that convey factual information." (1) "For a text to be considered creative nonfiction, it must be factually accurate, and written with attention to literary style and technique." (2) Creative nonfiction is not necessarily autobiographical, as this article implies.
(1)Encarta Dictionary
(2)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_nonfiction
((Yes, I know these are not proper endnotes. I decided it wasn't worth it to make proper endnotes for this.))
Next time you write an article, try doing research first. I doubt you've done half as much research for this as creative nonfiction writers do for some of their essays.

I was going to give you a list of creative nonfiction authors you really ought to know about before attacking the validity of a whole genre, but I doubt you would read it.
Suffice it to say you are not qualified to be a critic of education, literature or anything else. I'm offended that you were ever allowed in a classroom. How could you teach young women considering your vitriolic attitude toward them?

I find your rant, Mr Fitzhugh, a comical display of cluelessness. How often were you spurned by said high school girls? I will, however, give you props for unburdening your blatant sexism in this time of political correctness. It will be useful fodder for those giggling little girlies when they graduate from scribbling mindless drivel to search for examples of the sexism/misogyny of their great-grandfather's generation.

Did one of those daydreaming, diary-writing ditzball's "essay" get published ahead of your narrow-minded neanderthal diatribes?

Someone suggested in an email that I have published ONE essay by a female author. In fact the majority of the 824 papers I have published from 35 countries in the last 21 years have been by female students. Look on www.tcr.org

While you may have proven one email correspondent incorrect in his or her assumption, Mr. Fitzhugh, the fact remains that you've done nothing to address the concerns about the misogyny apparent in your essay itself. Furthermore, you've done nothing to prove even a nodding familiarity with creative nonfiction, a genre of literature you have tried to savage with this uninformed attack. When you dismiss creative nonfiction as a form for the vapid and the vain, you simply make yourself look aliterate, as you're thus attacking the works of Michele de Montaigne, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, George Orwell, Maxine Hong Kingston, and many others whose work falls under this generic umbrella. If you want to make an attack against literature, that's your business-- but please, spare us the smarmy condescension and pseudo-intellectual affectation.