Beholding Freshman Writing Ethically

This Thursday’s discussion about Shaughnessy reminded me of one of the fundamental principles of rhetoric: know your audience. Before reading Shaughnessy, I didn’t know my freshman audience as well as I should have. My relationship with them was weighted with assumptions. I assumed that everyone was like me and could write if they tried. Writing always came easily to me and I usually received good grades on my papers. If I didn’t do well on a paper, it was often because I didn’t try. So I assumed that these freshmen all weren’t trying. Granted, many of them aren’t trying, but I understand them better. Reading those examples on pg. 391 of the writer who tried ten times to start was like reading a poem. Somehow it explained exactly why writing was so hard for that person. That person couldn’t see past her or his own flaws to see the bigger picture. I’ve often felt that way (my entire middle school and high school social life, for example).

Furthermore, I began to examine my assumptions about how to look at writing. I look for flaws. Before reading any student’s essay, I had the mindset of “what’s wrong with this writing?” This is the approach my teachers took, so naturally I assumed it was right. But think about only looking for flaws. This tunnels your vision and you miss a lot of greatness and beauty both in life and in writing. Sometimes a better approach is to examine what’s good first, then comment and encourage the writer about her or his strengths. When you encourage the good, perhaps the bad ebbs away naturally, and the student has a much more positive learning experience.

From a practical standpoint, I began to look for original thought in freshman papers. I found that amidst all the predictability and clichés, many freshmen had something unique and original to say, or at least something they hinted at saying but felt they couldn’t through their Engfish-laden prose. When I found an original thought, I would comment on it and tell students this is a good idea, and to explore this theme more deeply. I also found that the approach of looking for the positive rather than the negative made me less grouchy when grading. I still gave the same letter grades, but I personally felt much better.

Erasing Toxic Writing Philosophies

I believe that freshmen already have their own philosophy of writing before they start 1301. However, these philosophies are often toxic. Students think writing wastes their time and they won’t need to write. It would be fascinating to read a study about freshman attitudes toward writing, but even without reading one, I can often tell a student’s writing philosophy through the way they write. When I read an assignment, I can tell whether or not a student cared about her or his work. I can tell if a student has proofread or not, for example.

In my mind, the ideal form of teaching is where the student comes to the teacher, not the other way around. As a teacher, one needs to adjust unhealthy student writing philosophies, but I think it’s important for students to think they arrived at this conclusion on their own. It’s an Inception moment. If a teacher brings students to a point where they have a healthy philosophy of writing, that teacher will produce writers.

But what is a healthy philosophy of writing? Must it lie within the four taxonomies? Within the taxonomies, I subscribe to a combination of romantic and rhetorical. Beginners should write to become self-aware, and once a writer is self-aware, she or he can make rhetorical/social contributions. I don’t think that the cognitive approach necessarily helps, because I don’t believe imitating expert writing behavior is going to help novice writers. And the formalist tradition is too formal, because it’s paralyzing to new writers. I just learned the reasons behind proper comma use last semester. Before that, I had an intuitive sense of how to use a comma and just faked it. The point is that grammar is such a complex subset of rules that it should not obscure clear thinking or idea flow.

So as a future writing instructor, I think that would be my goal: to inspire kids to become romanticists and then rhetoricians. How to practically and effectively implement that idea is something that perhaps only experience can teach.

Disclaimer: This Post May Contain a Small Existential Crisis

While I read the Kitzhaber article, it struck me how little has changed in freshman comp since the 60s. We discussed this in class, too. The problems Kitzhaber describes in his article (a lack of teachers, scholarly texts, content organization, and aims) still haunt modern composition programs across the nation. I wondered if the reasons freshmen couldn’t write well in the 60s are the same reasons freshmen can’t write well today.

English educators read this article, shake their heads, and lament, “nothing’s changed.” But a lot of things have changed. We have the Internet, cell phones, satellites, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, cable, and many other technologies/social movements that have shaped our lives. Freshman comp, in spite of all this, has all the same problems. My existential crisis occurred when I thought “the freshman writers that endured this program in the 60s are now running the world. These are the same people that society and academia said were not literate as freshmen. So if these people have made such an impact, is freshman writing even important?”

People who have a good idea must communicate it in some way or another, whether that be building it, sketching it out as a blueprint, or telling someone else how to do it. Are these modes of communication linked to writing at all? If so, how? Does it even matter if people can write? Are the measurements we’re using to gauge these student’s communication performances obsolete? If a student can communicate a message, does it matter how eloquent it really is? Generally, I equate a lack of literacy with a lack of cultural progress. But our society has progressed rapidly, and it continues to progress. How can this happen while freshman comp remains the same crusty old class? What is going on? How does it affect my role as someone who loves writing and English?

Taxonomy of Instructional Emphasis and my own writing journey

Yesterday’s discussion about the Taxonomy of Instructional Emphasis opened my eyes to how the way I learned to write provided models of how I might teach writing. As a teacher, I believe it’s very important to be aware of the benefits and dangers of teaching things the way I was taught. I saw a lot of parallels between the taxonomy and my personal writing journey.

My first exposure to composition was in sixth grade, and it was indeed a very formalist approach. My teacher was a fervent disciple of the five-paragraph essay. She first made us outline our essay via a complicated structure of bubbles, lines, and boxes, and then she graded the outline. When we wrote, she stressed the importance of putting your thesis at the end of your introduction, using a list of “special words” she gave us as transitions (first, second, last, next, consequently, etc.), and using a concluding sentence at the end of each paragraph. She also gave us lists of words we could use in our thesis and our conclusion. Ultimately, I think this stifled my personal writing style, making it manufactured and generic.

She maintained an iron grip on our writing processes, and I followed her methods until about midway through college. I outlined everything and had a clear thesis and conclusion in mind before I did anything else. I thought that was the first step in the writing process. Ultimately, however, I realized it made me a very slow and brittle writer. If my research pointed toward something different, I lacked the skills to adapt. I found that when I free-associate and write an expressive, romantic rough draft, my brain arranges data and a thesis is often waiting for me. Shifting from formalist, to expressive, then to cognitive was a major breakthrough in my writing. I haven’t yet reached the level of social, but I hope to arrive one day. I wish my middle school teacher had alerted me to options in the writing process. I’ll be sure not to be such a control freak with my students.