Week #3

  For our third lecture, we were privileged to have Kathryn Ricketts as a guest speaker and she was able to share some of her interesting ideas with us. One of the activities she had us to do was for us to pick up a pencil and simply write about which was similar to the free-flow writing from our earlier classes. I’m starting to realize the power of free-flow writing, it allows me to essentially ramble on and talk about things without having to worry about being criticized for writing anything that isn’t deemed correct. I’m also starting to realize that type of writing isn’t as easy as I thought it was. At all points during writing, I am constantly reading over everything that I’ve written because I’ve been trained to do. Rereading everything I’ve written is something that is very natural to me because in other classes, proof reading is very important because it decreases the margin of error on our papers. In this case though, rereading causes more errors because we end up erasing everything that is natural about free-flow writing  Then she told us to create a movement or physical emblems using the pencil as something that would not be associated with its original use. I thought that was activity was very interesting because growing up, we’ve always associated certain items with specific activities, but for this activity we had to display the items in a completely different way. The activity was harder than it originally appeared because our brains have been trained a certain way and it was difficult to escape that, but when I did come up with a movement, it allowed me to see that I’ve been limiting by creativity due to associating pencils with only activities related to school.