Number 4: for the week of Thursday, February 11, 2010

My dear readers,

The overarching themes running through the readings for this week regard the idea of writing itself. Is it product or process? If it is process, what does that involve? What is the teacher's role in said process? Most importantly, what is the student’s role?

While this week's articles pretty much agree on the idea of writing being taught as process, they're not exactly the same on how it should be done or what it means to do it. Peter Elbow, as he does in his book Writing without Teachers advocates a classroom where the teacher is a facilitator not an overarching authority. He says that students should have absolute autonomy in selecting not only their writing topics but also their writing assignments.

Many teachers probably would like to do that, but are reluctant to allow students such freedom because of outside concerns and pressures about curriculum and standards. Also I think many teachers are nervous about giving students autonomy in any area because they are afraid it will simply breed anarchy. That, and lack of technological resources, likely also keeps many teachers from employing new media like blogs in their classrooms in the way that "Moving to the Public" prescribes.

Also, I think, in many situations many teachers are reluctant to employ new techniques because they think that since they have achieved success under the old techniques new methods are unnecessary. Let me try to give you an example.

Murray, in his article "teach writing as a process not product" refers very accurately I think to a teacher looking At student papers the way a coroner looks at a recently deceased corpse, in other words trying to determine what killed it and how that death could have been prevented. Well, that approach works well on Forensic Files, or Dr. G. Medical Examiner in a situation where you know your subject matter is already dead. However in terms of student writing such an approach is an effective because whether you realize it or not you're already assuming that there is something fundamentally wrong with the writing, and what good does that do?

Murray continues Elbow's idea that students should use their own experience to create their writing topics. I also like how Murray points out the idea that academic language is fundamentally different from everyday speech. Now, I do not think this is a bad thing in and of itself. It only causes a problem when teachers forget that most students do not use academic language except when requested to do so. To most students the academic language required in college is as foreign as the lexicon of Shakespeare or Chaucer.

I love Murray's idea of letting students write as many drafts as is necessary. Unfortunately, who has time for that? The department insists I get my students through four formal papers every semester, come hell or high water. Granted, they can do as many drafts of each paper as there is time for, but still time is a limiting factor. As unfortunately is student patience. Very few of the students I have ever taught have the patience to do more than one or two drafts before they just want to turn the final draft in and get on with their lives. The pace of college life, and modern life in general, demands they keep moving from point A to point B no matter what.

When Emig attempts to draw distinctions between writing and other types of discourse I think she goes a little too far in the attempt. She says that writing is learned behavior whereas talking is instinctive, that's not true we learn to talk just like we learn everything else. She calls writing artificial as opposed to the natural process of talking. On the contrary, many people are much more open and honest in their writings say a personal journal than they are in spoken discourse especially if they think their listeners may be judgmental of them. I mean, I understand her point she is trying to set up her context, I just think she goes a little too for.

Overall, I agree with her premise that learning speaking and writing can go together and help promote the intellectual development of everyone involved. Although her study, with its graphs and charts, and numbers, was more than a little hard for me to follow I do like Perl's idea of comparing how more skilled and unskilled writers think about the revision process. I saw the same idea in Sommers too. Skilled writers look at revision as trying to really improve a piece of writing by letting it breathe and more effectively say what they wanted to say. They understand that having to revise something does not necessarily mean it was wrong but simply stated less effectively.
Less skilled writers invariably saw the need for a revision as an indication they had somehow screwed up. Moreover, the differences in the writing quality between the samples appeared to come down to how much the different writers understood that their readers might not know what they knew and might not have had the same experiences they had and therefore might need more information. Less skilled writers apparently pictured themselves when writing and never really thought about having to explain themselves to someone who did not already know what they were talking about.

When I was a senior in high school my professor reminded me to never assume that my reader already had the information necessary to understand my argument. I have never forgotten that and therefore have always tried to give as much information in any piece of writing as I possibly could. I would rather give too much than too little. Mind you, perhaps the reason some writers do not explain themselves as well as we think they should is because they are trying to construct their own topic or context for their writing and perhaps they've never had that opportunity before and just don't yet know how.

Thank you so much for your time,

James Altman