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.
Harrison, I love the title of your blog--alliteration and all. The formulaic writing instruction you describe takes me back to a particular AP English instructor I had in high school. I need to do more reading on this topic, but it seems like your teacher was trying to honor some kind of "process" approach to the teaching of writing but that she had a pretty tight lock on what she thought the process *must* be.
ReplyDeleteI like your application of the taxonomies to your own writing. I've always thought of them as teaching styles rather than writing styles or stages in the writing process, but your application of them really rings true for me. I agree that a romantic rough draft can often be a springboard to better, more interesting writing. I'd like to read more about your impressions of the social-epistemic approach and why you say you haven't quite gotten there with your own writing yet. Do you mean that you typically don't get others' input on your writing, that it is more of a solitary than social act for you?
Thanks for helping me think of these taxonomies in a new way.
Hey Ronda! Now that you ask those questions, I'm not exactly sure what I meant. Usually proofreading is a solitary act, because I don't think most people would want to read my rough drafts and pare them down. I have swapped papers to proofread with people, mainly because an assignment requires it, but my writing model generally is a fairly antisocial process. When I think of social writing, I think of writing something, publishing it, and generating discourse. I don't feel like my writing has reached that level yet. Most writing never reaches that stage in general. I wonder if it's right to think of it in terms of a "more advanced stage" though. I think it's a different stage...but it isn't necessarily more advanced, depending on the writer's goals.
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