Katherine Lamb's Writing History
Lamb, Katherine (2010-04-29)

>>KATHERINE: My name is Katherine Lamb and I'm a grad student here at UALR. My literacy story really begins with my mother reading to me when I was a child. And I remember her reading to me long before I knew how to read and just being able to sort of memorize the story and know when we got to this picture, this is what happened. And when we get to this picture, she's going to say this in this kind of voice.

And just sort of remembering the rhythm of the story and just having it in my own mind. When I was in between kindergarten and first grade, one of my cousins who was actually a year younger than me just teased me all summer because she knew how to read because her older brother had taught her, and I didn't. But it actually didn't upset me that much because I just figured they'd teach me in first grade and I wasn't in any hurry. I knew that I wasn't really required to read at that age, and so it just wasn't a big deal to me.

And once I was in first grade and they were teaching us how to read it was fairly easy to learn and I just sort of picked it up. I'm sure that all that reading that my mother did to me helped.

But I remember the biggest turning point from first grade all the way until I was I guess the tenth grade, probably the biggest turning point was having to write papers. So we read the Red Badge of Courage and we read Great Gatsby and we read The Scarlet Letter, and we had to write papers about them. 

And I just remember opening paragraph, every time I would say something like "This is the greatest book that anyone has ever read", "This is a classic", and just really playing it up. And I mean I didn't take it seriously. I didn't believe that. But I thought that's what my teachers wanted. And so "The Red Badge of Courage is an inspiration to all who read it"...and really it bored me to tears and I hated reading it. 

And eventually I learned to take that out of my paper, once I was a freshman in college and my teachers would say, "Katherine, you can't back this us. You can't prove this. This is just you singing the praises of this book or author or poet for your own reasons. And you can't prove that the rest of your paper, so just kind of play it down. Don't be so histrionic about these people."

The class that taught me restraint the most and really stressed specificity and preciseness with my wording was philosophy of science and probably because of the subject matter of the course as well as my professor. 

Every sentence that you wrote needed to have a meaning, needed to say something, and it needed to say what you wanted it to say. Otherwise, what could have been an A paper would quickly become a C. And plus, when we tackled the notion that the sort of idea that life may not really be, it could all be a dream, we can't trust our senses, who knows if what we see is really what's there, and stuff like that, I mean that just blew my mind.

It's just a lot to take in. I'm not really sure how that connects to being specific in writing, but it completely changed the way I wrote papers.