COMPOSITION STUDIES BY DIANE K. OLSON, PHD, WRITING, TEACHING AND CRITICISM

I want to contend that expressivism is the most radical tradition in composition studies.  Expressivism --  where students write from lived, felt experience -- challenges the status quo of academic decorum.  Academic constraints can weigh heavy on students' own senses of purpose when they write.   Sometimes the constraints -- or perceived constraints -- are so  heavy that students experience writer's block.  Writer's block can  be conceived of as an interior, felt experience or, otherwise put, when the literacy demands of academic prose subsume the student writers' own voices and senses of purpose when they write.  Students alone do not have this problem;  many seasoned writers feel oppressed by the constraints of academic prose.  That's where expressivism offers a creative, artistic outlet that can burst the self-important bubble of academic writing.  More yet to come on expressivism.