Research Question: How can inexperienced writers find their authentic voices in college writing courses?

Research Question: How can inexperienced writers find their authentic voices in college writing courses?

Bartholomae, David. Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching.

Bedford/St. Martins, 2005.

These essays (a collection of articles written over the span of Bartholomae’s career) depict a socially conscious, student-centered teacher and scholar. Recurrent throughout Bartholomae’s work is an insistence that there is nothing “wrong” with basic writers; like all writers, they struggle to adapt to the foreign discourse communities (those of the privileged) that they have been thrown into upon entering the university. Thus, when a student writer utters anything in writing, he first has to tailor his language to suit the expectations of his overeducated audience (the professor). Students don’t really master writing (if it can ever be mastered), however, until they learn to craft a voice of their own. Until this happens, students simply go through the motions of academic writing, motions that do not amount to worthwhile discoveries. In this way, I found Bartholomae’s views connecting most resoundingly to those of Winterson’s, Atwan’s, Sirc’s, Bishop’s, and Shor’s.

Quotables:

On assignment sequences: “A sequence of assignments is repetitive. It asks students to write, again, about something they wrote about before. But such a project allows for richness; it allows for the imagination that one thing can lead to another, that the world can give and give. This is an idea hard to pin, difficult to say, and, perhaps, offensive to some” (190).

“If a writer’s education is to matter, if it is to be anything more than a conventional exercise in correctness, it must confront the question of style–the record of where and how the writer matches with the language” (11).

“Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion–invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (60).

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Olive Editions, 2016.
Pilgrim is plodding and recursive, richly–and yet implicitly–metaphorical in its vivid, often grotesque representations of the natural environment. The book is diaristic in form–a more artful, polished version of Thoreau’s journals perhaps. Yet Dillard’s prose style is not overwrought. Rather, it is wildly–and excitingly–idiosyncratic, though sometimes esoterically so. The book teaches us how to see. And, perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates an invaluable relationship between writing and seeing.

Quotables:

“I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks–Tinker and Carvin’s–are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection” (5).

Like Preciado, Dillard is an “autotheorist”: “I propose to keep here what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist” (13).

Dillard has a penchant for the grotesque: “her abdomen was swollen like a smashed finger; it tapered to a  fleshy tip out of which bubbled a wet, whipped froth” (58).

Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Elbow’s first book serves as a guide, not just for becoming better writers without teachers, but how to “teach” a teacherless writing class. Many of the practices that Elbow explores here have since been widely adopted by writing programs everywhere (freewriting, “growing” and “cooking” ideas through the writing process, peer review, believing and doubting games). Perhaps most interesting to me is the form of Elbow’s book. It is almost pure teacher-research up front, followed by a theoretical essay at the back written to silence the “doubters” who have criticized Elbow’s work as anti-intellectual. Elbow, in a nutshell, argues that practice sets the foundation for theory: “There is an interesting dialectic here between theory and practice: I learned a new piece of theory from reflecting on my actual practice. But this new theory went further than I could actually follow consistently. Eventually I could turn around and use my theory to improve my practice” (xviii).

Quotables:
“Teachers seem to play a big role in making it harder for people to write” (xii).

“I finally learned that I could write decent stuff if I let go of planning, control, and vigilance. I had to write down without stopping whatever came to me in my thinking about my general topic, and above all I had to stop worrying about whether what I was writing at the moment was any good. I had to invite chaos and bad writing” (xviii).

“Cooking means getting material to interact…. Growing means getting words to evolve through stages” (73).

“The striking thing about learning to write is that people have been trying to teach it for as long as they’ve tried to teach mathematics yet no one has succeeded in making this kind of orderly, hierarchical progression that works. Someday someone may do it, but for the time being learning to write seems to mean learning contrasting but interdependent skills–double-binds: learning X and Y, but you can’t do X till you can do Y, but you can’t do Y till you can do X. (The proposition that it is theoretically impossible to learn to write has the ring of truth.)” (135).

Hesse, Douglas. “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies.” College

Composition and Communication 62.1 (2010): 31 – 52. JSTOR. Web. 28 Jul. 2014.
Hesse argues not just for creative writing in the composition classroom, but for a partnership between the two disciplines. I get the sense that Hesse would like to see creative writing and composition merge into a single department. Such a merger, he argues, would strengthen both disciplines (which currently receive short-shrift in the departments that house them), and, moreover, the disciplines could benefit from each pedagogically. Composition could stand to emphasize the production of original texts, while creative writing could benefit from a more theoretical, systematic approach to teaching writing.

Quotables:
“As digital tools and media expand the nature and circulation of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composing texts not created in response to rhetorical situations for scholars” (31).

“While students having knowledge about composing is eminently worthy, ignoring different kinds of writing for wider audiences and purposes is marginalizing, especially when digital tools and networks expand the production and circulation of texts” (35).

Johnson, T.R. A Rhetoric of Pleasure: Prose Style and Today’s Composition Classroom.

Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2003.

Johnson begins his book using personal experience and the occurrence of school shootings as a contextualizing lens/an occasion for writing. It is because of student misery that Johnson desires to investigate the role of pleasure in the learning process–particularly in the writing process. The book aims to show how “authorial pleasure is concretely linked–rather than hazily opposed–to the sorts of rigor and clarity prized in well-disciplined, professional discourse; how pleasure’s link to clarity and persuasion has sparked some 2,500 years of inquiry into its precise nature and importance; and thus how authorial pleasure is therefore an entirely legitimate, even crucial concern for the teacher of writing today” (ix).

Quotables:

“This book has one primary purpose: to define authorial pleasure through a long but ‘renegade’ tradition in the history of rhetoric not as the stuff of whimsical self-indulgence but as a feeling of connection with one’s audience” (xii).

“Before students can learn how to persuade an audience of anything, the student must first learn to experience composing itself as a kind of pleasure-charged performance, for once they learn to generate a rigorous, positive excitement around the task of rhetorical action, they’ll stand a much greater chance of spreading that feeling to their audience” (2).

“Teaching students to play with stylistic devices and encouraging them to read out loud are part of the broad project of helping them to develop a sense of audience and engage in inward dialogue, critical reflection, and generative ‘magic'” (52).

Koestenbaum, Wayne. Humiliation. New York: Picador, 2011.
Koestenbaum’s book takes humiliation as its subject, its obsession, because it is a human experience that, on the one hand, disturbs the author, and, on the other hand, excites him. The form of the book  (written as a series of “fugues”) facilitates wandering, the ability to “gradually approach [the subject]. Back away. Tentatively return” (28).

Quotables:

Aim; process; justification: “Not merely because I am tired, but because this subject, humiliation, is monstrous, and because it erodes the voice that tries to lay siege to its complexities, I will resign myself, in the fugues that follow, to setting forth an open-ended series of paradoxes and juxtapositions. (I call these excursions ‘fugues’ not only because I want the rhetorical license offered by invoking counterpoint but because a ‘fugue state’ is a mentally unbalanced condition of dissociated wandering away from one’s own identity” (4).

“I’m glad to see language turn into slobber. Rather, I’m glad to see language forced to admit, ‘I’m slobber.’ I’m glad to see language unmastered. And I’m glad to belong to a community, however scattered, of souls who like to see rules (of linguistic propriety, of sexual propriety) turned upside down” (48).

“Humiliation is worthy not because it is good, or enjoyable, or desirable; humiliation may be execrable and unendurable, but is also genuine. And in a world that seems increasingly filled with fakeness …. humiliation at least rings true” (60).

Macrorie, Ken. Uptaught. New York: Hayden Book Company, 1970.

Macrorie suggests that students will “write live,” (not what he calls “Engfish”) if we allow them to “write freely,” for themselves and for one another rather than for the teacher. Macrorie is obviously a precursor of Sirc’s, but also of Batholomae’s ideas about “inventing the university.” Of course, Bartholomae is likely to tolerate more Engfish than Macrorie or Sirc ever would; Bartholomae isn’t calling for the total subversion of academic discourse. Until we begin to treat our students as human beings with real, valid experiences, says Macrorie, we will continue to treat them like slaves. Macrorie is advocating for freedom in the classroom, but not the kind of freedom that leads to a lack of rigor. Rather, by allowing students to write freely and creating expectations that their writing will “knock out” members of the classroom audience, Macrorie cultivates a high level of discipline. He calls this style of teaching “The Third Way,” as opposed to the First Way (too prescriptive) and the Second Way (too liberal).

Quotables:

“Engfish: A language in which fresh truth is almost impossible to express” (9).

“Most students are not my equal in experience or knowledge of literature and writing. But in some aspects of each they may be my superior. I will never know until I let them bring forth themselves full of their own experiences and ideas and feelings, as they are forced to let me bring forth myself” (68).

“All those  years I had tried to get a student to put down a sensuous detail that would bring alive his ideas and feelings! Now I simply ask students to write freely, first recording random thoughts, then focusing on one subject, and they frequently produce what the poet Wallace Stevens called ‘the exquisite environment of fact'” (22).

Murray, Donald Morison. A Writer Teaches Writing. Houghton Mifflin, 1985.
Murray’s book is addressed to new and would-be teachers of writers. Much of the instruction is familiar (writing is an idiosyncratic, social process; it cannot be commanded or prescribed; it must be practiced daily, etc.). What I find most interesting is Murray’s constant insistence that a writing teacher be, herself, a writer. Without writing, Murray suggests, a teacher cannot empathize with his students. Not only that, he cannot properly know himself. Murray advocates, like Elbow, for constant, unmediated practice and for the teacher to be responsive to his students–not the other way around.

Quotables:

“To learn a craft you have to observe the oboist shaving a dozen reeds to get one that may be right, to hear the soloist practicing three crucial notes over and over and over again, changing the inflection and rhythm time after time. You have to see the messy palate with all the wrong colors mixed with such false confidence, to observe the failed sketches and inappropriate lines hidden layer after layer underneath the final oil. You have to go to rehearsal night after night to see actors stiffly speaking lines, moving awkwardly, filling the air with unnecessary gestures to comprehend the ‘naturalness’ achieved by opening night” (188).

“The composition class … should be a place where … diversity becomes an advantage, where individuality is nurtured, developed and given expression. We should be grateful that our students are not delivered to us as McDonald’s products but are like fingerprints and voiceprints, each different from the other” (132).

“Experienced teachers are often prisoners of their past successes” (107).

Perl, Sondra. “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Research in the Teaching of English 13.4 (1979): 317 – 336. JSTOR. Web. 27 Jun. 2014.

Perl’s study suggests that unskilled writers have, in fact, internalized composing processes. While some teachers of basic writing have assumed that their students’ error-prone writing to be “arbitrary,” Perl’s results show that the way unskilled writers compose is, in fact, not arbitrary at all. Rather, “Their lack of proficiency may be attributable to the way in which premature and rigid attempts to correct and edit their work truncate the flow of composing without substantially improving the form of what they have written” (328).

Quotables:

“This research addressed three major questions (1) How do unskilled writers write? (2) Can their writing processes be analyzed in a systematic, replicable manner? and (3) What does an increased understanding of their processes suggest about the nature of composing in general and the manner in which writing is taught in the schools” (317)?

“In none of the writing sessions did [Tony] ever write more than two sentences before he began to edit. While editing fit into his overall recursive pattern, it simultaneously interrupted the composing rhythm he had just initiated” (324).

“A major finding of this study is that, like Tony, all of the students studied displayed consistent composing processes; that is, the behavioral subsequences prewriting, writing, and editing appeared in sequential patterns that were recognizable across writing sessions and across students.
“This consistency suggests a much greater internalization of process than has ever before been suspected. Since the written products of basic writers often look arbitrary, observers commonly assume that the students’ approach is also arbitrary. However, just as Shaughnessy (1977) points out that there is ‘very little that is random .. in what they have written’ (p. 5), so, on close observation, very little appears random in how they write… Their lack of proficiency may be attributable to the way in which premature and rigid attempts to correct and edit their work truncate the flow of composing without substantially improving the form of what they have written” (328).