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differently; therefore, nothing you think about can be plagiarized. As long as you are not copying somebody's work or ideas, inspiration can come from anywhere. Utilizing these techniques, a person can ease into a writing group, feeling open and comfortable to express themselves in a way that allows them to reach their full potential.
This connection between humans is accomplished, most often, in peer review, editing, and discussion. The way this process brings people together comes with the vulnerability they feel. As a writer, your stories are small parts of you compiled into a certain amount of printed pages; not only do they represent you, but they show who you are to anyone who reads them. Secrets usually held in your mind, like certain opinions or experiences, can easily, and should, find their way into artistic work. This vulnerability is what humans can feel together, a connection that is hard to find. It allows people to show their true selves in an artistic environment. This connection through vulnerability is what creates a community for writers to feel free in expression.

That sense of expressionism is another aspect of writing, along with collaboration, that pushes humans to explore themselves. Expressivist theories suggest that writing should always, even in research-based writing, revolve around the writer. We must also remember that the "self" that is the author has, over years, been constructed through collaboration with humanity. Christopher Burnham writes that "expressivist pedagogy employs free-writing, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small-group dialogic collaborative response to foster a writer's aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development." (Burnham 19) Particularly in teaching composition and creative writing, it is true that the work of the author should, in some way, work towards their own "aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development." I have always considered writing an impossibility without experience; in other words, if something is to feel real on the page, it helps if it really happened. Linda Adler-Kassler, in her essay, "Ownership Revisited: An Exploration in Progressive Era and Expressivist Composition Scholarship," writes, "as a result of their desire to uncover what I'll call genuine' consciousness, expressivists argued that effective compositions started with and centered around experiencedefined as personal, private, individually felt understanding by the writer of the subject" (Adler-Kassler 218). This quote

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