Readings about FYW
5 Failure is Not an Option
Allison D. Carr
Allison D. Carr’s essay, “Failure is Not an Option,” comes from the book Bad Ideas About Writing. In Carr’s essay, she draws on both personal experiences of failure and research about failure to suggest that it’s an important part of the writing process. Carr argues that instead of avoiding failure we need to change our orientation toward failure, which is not an easy thing to do.
Read Allison D. Carr’s “Failure is Not an Option.”
Listen to Kyle Stedman’s audio-version of this text..
Keywords from this chapter in Bad Ideas about Writing
, failure, , , struggle,
Author Bio from Bad Ideas about Writing
Allison Carr is an assistant professor of rhetoric and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Coe College. Beyond researching the intersection of failure and emotion for her doctoral dissertation, Allison considers herself a failure savant, leading her students by example toward riskier, frightening, and sometimes downright stupid undertakings. She tweets about food, politics, writing, and baseball through the handle @hors_doeuvre.
is a pedagogical term for "high-risk" students who are perceived to be unprepared for freshman composition.
Mina Shaughnessy (1977) argues that basic writers produce compositions in which there are a "small numbers of words with large numbers of errors." David Bartholomae (2005) maintains that "the distinguishing mark of the basic writer is that he works outside the conceptual structures that his more literate counterparts work within."
a state of mind that happens "when students understand that their abilities can be developed” (Dweck, 2014).
is a learning design that entails conditions for learners to persist in generating and exploring representations and solution methods for solving complex, novel problems
an iterative, recursive process in which authors develop compositions