Research Draft

Writing composition courses have acquired curious hybrid syllabi. The average college freshman no longer reads literary texts and produces a series of increasingly difficult responsive essays. Instead, freshman composition appears to concern itself with critical thinking, ethical argument, logical fallacy, technology, and completing writing projects which many perceive as discrete, unrelated assignments. The students read several short, fairly uncomplicated texts around which their writing exercises are designed. Some of these texts exemplify good writing; some do not. Where have the solid textual examples gone? Has reading fallen out of favor? Can students learn to write—and write well—if they are not given strong examples to model? Will they learn the arts of critical thinking and ethical analysis if the texts from which they draw demonstrate “what not to do” rather than “what to do”?

In 1980, Charles Bazerman lamented a mounting disregard for the “interplay between reading and writing” in language studies (656). Students could write in particular disciplines only if they became fluent in those discourses, he warned; and therefore writing instructors should aid this fluency by cultivating “various techniques of absorbing, reformulating, commenting on, and using reading (Bazerman 657-658). Apparently striving for a palatable compromise between traditional and modern theories (primarily a composition-studies emphasis on authorial voice), Bazerman turned to James Britton’s suggestion of “ongoing, written conversations” in which individual writings might be viewed as individual contributions (657). Bazerman’s approach is compellingly straightforward: using the conversation model as a foundation, he identifies a series of necessary skills and offers correlative skill-building exercises. Teachers have their assignments as well, for they must be able to “interpret the model through those conversations that are most familiar and important to students” (Bazerman 658). In other words, teachers must function as translators between academic and student discourses.

For students to develop the art of “intelligent response,” Bazerman contends, they must learn to interpret both factual content and authorial intent of existing writings (“prior comments”), react meaningfully to what they have read, and formally evaluate what they have read (658-659). Development of these skills will allow students to define issues for further research and formulate “informed views on those issues” (Bazerman 660). Essentially, these latter steps constitute critical analysis; and in Bazerman’s view students will learn to train the same critical gaze upon their own “contributions to the discussions” (660-661). While he identifies pinpointed assignments to help students build the other foundational skills, however, Bazerman does not precisely describe pupils might be guided toward that all-important analysis of their own writing. He merely seems to assume that this skill will naturally follow. Teachers of basic writers may suspect that it will not.

Bazerman advocates three means by which student might develop “more extensive and thoughtful reactions: marginal comments on reading, reading journals and informal reaction essays”; he also suggests that perhaps a system inner- and outer-margin notation would be helpful in some cases (659). But what system will help students evaluate their own reactions? Enter Ann Berthoff and the “double-entry notebook” In this approach, students will record their “reading notes, direct quotations, observational notes, fragments, lists, images—verbal and visual” on the right side of the page; on the left, they will examine what they have written and why (Berthoff 45). Study of their own responses to texts will help students move beyond a grasp of technical “meaning” to the more important “message”—a kind of knowing which moves beyond Bazerman’s required understanding of fact and authorial intent (Berthoff 44).

Although such a tool might not replace marginalia and reaction essays, it does fulfill and expand the writing journal requirement. In the observation column, for example, a student might jot more visceral notes than he or she might include in a more formal journal; notes about (and marginalia from) numerous sources could be added to this column. This, in turn, would permit the student to see connections and parallels which might otherwise go unnoticed. As these conclusions are recorded in the left column, the student is provided extraordinarily visual evidence of his or her own thought processes. By “offering the chance to practice interpreting in such a way that whatever is learned about reading is something learned about writing,” Berthoff asserts, “[the double-entry notebook] can teach that how we construe is how we construct. Languaging, as some like to say, is our means of making meaning” (45, emphasis original).

Too visual? Donald Murray offers a writing metaphor both conversational and visual: “two workmen muttering to each other at the workbench” (140). Here on the bench, the selves focus entirely on “their” writing rather than on some “prior comment”; as Murray astutely notes, “[you] can read without writing, but you can’t write without reading” (141). This is a process in which the “two selves collaborate: a problem is spotted, discussed, defined; solutions are proposed, rejected, suggested, attempted, tested, discarded, accepted” (140).

Clearly, this is a collaboration in which the writer’s other self (or “monitor”) reads the writing before, during, and after it has reached the page or other computer screen (Murray 141). First and foremost, it is an “explorer” who maps out as-yet unformed thoughts and “traces the trail that will get the writer from. . .meaning identified to meaning clarified”; order and language concerns must be deferred until this process has been completed (Murray 141). Like most skills, this one must be honed through the student’s own practice. The teacher is not meant to interfere but to merely “[point] out alternatives only at the moment of panic,” acknowledging that the student must make “the trip from meaning intended to meaning realized” before he or she learns to trust the other self (Murray 142).

As the writer writes, the other self engages in “recursive scanning” and assists the self through a series of critical activities—tracking the changes made and their success or failure, and “providing the writer with an engineering history of the developing text” (Murray 142). Now the teacher’s role changes: he or she must interact with the other self (of which the writer may be wholly unaware), forcing the other self to articulate what has been done and why (Murray 143). The teacher must read the text, accept the student’s progress as it develops, listen, respond, and provide delicately-balanced support; this is, Murray states, “nothing less than teaching the act of critical thinking” (Murray 144-145).

Murrays’s muttering workmen, explorers, and monitors have a rather male quality; but his theory is loosely echoed in Sherrie Gradin’s expansion of Belenky et al.’s metaphor of the web (14). While this is articulated primarily as an empowerment theory, it is also one which examines the roles of students as readers and writers of their own—and their classmates’—work. In the web metaphor, “students and teachers are both word spinners, the teachers simply a [sic] more polished design-maker” (Gradin 16). Students are “creating meaning together, and when one spinner speaks. . .the impact of that voice is felt at every place within the parts of the whole” (18). This expression has a decidedly psychological “feel,” but essentially it returns to the interaction of reading and writing: the “voice” which impacts the web may be a “flimsy reading, an inadequate response, a less than strong argument” (18). Here, presumably, students rely upon their other selves, their peers, and their teachers to help them interpret both process and product.

Mariolina Salvatori, too, argues for the “interconnectedness of reading and writing,” but notes that this approach “requires teachers’ and students’ relentless attention and reflexivity” (446). Salvatori trades Berthoff’s double-entry notebook for formal classroom assignments in which students must record their responses to texts, reflect upon their reading strategies and the purposes behind their use, and then evaluate their own reading assessments (446-447). “By means of this “triadic (and recursive) sequence,” Salvatori explains, “I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves, to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as they return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness” (447). Like Berthoff and Murray, Salvatori requires student writers to recognize (and make full use of) their other selves. Unlike these theorists, however, she specifically notes that her “assignments generate considerable resistance. . .mainly because [students are not accustomed to performing this kind of introspective reading” (Salvatori 447).

Salvatori recognizes student highlighting and marginalia as a key to understanding why students interpret texts in a particular way. She discusses these practices in class, hoping to turn a “rather mechanical ‘study habit’. . .into a strategy, one that can make ‘visible’ the number and intricacy of strands in a text’s argument” and to demonstrate how “the selection, connection, and weaving of those strands affects the structuring of the argument a reader constructs” (447-448). In this sense, Salvatori appears to carry students and their other selves, armed with their texts and their journals, into the web—fostering a kind of “group introspection.”

Borrowing from Bartholomae and Petrovsky, Salvatori also assigns a “difficulty paper,” in which students are required to identify what makes a particular text difficult for them. This exercise makes students explain as well as identify their problem areas, a practice which in turn forces them to examine whether poor reading habits or preconceived notions underlie the difficulty; as their instructor, Salvatori reads these explanations and questions their authors (448-449). “What is significant about these strategies,” Salvatori adds, “is that they function simultaneously as heuristic devices for students. . .and as constant reminders to me that as a teacher I must demonstrate in my reading of my students’ words the responsiveness and the responsibility with which I expect them to engage texts” (449). This emphasis on the teachers’ close reading of student work is key, for it hones her skills while allowing her to model desired behavior.

Dawn Skorczewski builds upon this notion of teacher-as-reader in her examination of her own responses to students’ use of cliché. Describing her frustration with well-argued student essays which conclude with such expressions as “everybody can do it if they try,” Skorczewski asks, “‘What is wrong with them. . .? What is wrong with me?’” (221). She provides a surprising answer to the latter question: she had relied too heavily on Bartholomae’s assertion that first-year composition should force students out of their own “common sense” comfort zones and into the language of the academy (Skorczewski 221). Whereas she had “believed that [students’] critical thinking stopped when they reached their concluding paragraphs,” she has realized that perhaps they were instead “going as far as possible into the realm of critical thinking without finally and completely selling out by asserting themselves in the most privileged space of the essay—the ending” (224). In this sense, she adds, students’ clichéd endings become written syntheses of “safe house” and “contact zone”—places in which students can reject the unfamiliar language of the academy while indulging in clichés which may, in fact, represent (rebellious) cultural commonplaces (225-227).

Furthermore, Skorczewski adds, students’ use of commonplaces and clichés ironically may represent an attempt to do exactly what they’ve been asked to do: state their own opinions and draw their own conclusion. Perhaps a student employs a particular expression to identify “an ‘I’ who is also part of a ‘we’”; perhaps he or she is addressing “competing external and internal audiences in the struggle to articulate what it means to have an identity in contemporary America”; perhaps he or she is “not just a student negotiating a space for [herself or himself] in academic discourse [but is] a person with a history. . .an active social agent in a field of competing claims” (226-229). These are all compelling examples which argue for a teachers’ close reading and careful interpretation of their students’ work, rather than a simplistic focus on mechanical errors. . .or perceived errors.

While Skorczewski (like Gradin) devotes much attention to empowerment, she directly acknowledges what Gradin avoids: that “this gap between our students and ourselves, like the gap between every writer and reader, can never fully be bridged. This is the nature of human communication—the fact that language writes us as much as we write it” (235). She also echoes Salvatori’s commitment to holding herself to a critical reading standard at least as high as that to which she holds her students. Most importantly, teachers must monitor their own written reader-responses—this responsibility does not lapse when one crosses the threshold dividing student and teacher. “Our challenge,” she concludes, “is to learn to recognize our own clichés. . .and the habits of thought embedded in them that have become so familiar to us that we think of them as common sense” (Skorczewski 236).

Alison Cook-Sather describes an even more complex reading-and-writing course at Bryn Mawr College. “Finding the Bias: Tracing the Self Across Contexts” relies heavily on the metaphor of translation; students read and critically analyze texts selected by interdisciplinary teams (92). In this course, students must “define and redefine their understandings of narratives and of selves that constitute and are constituted by different biases”—an idea loosely borrowed from Linda Brodkey (93). This description evokes Skorczewski’s culturally-diverse students defiantly wrapping themselves in cliché’s, for in Cook-Sather’s course differences are the point: they are to be embraced rather than ignored.

In particular, Cook-Sather explains, students are asked “not to separate and distance themselves from what they study and who they are but, rather, to recognize, name, and trace a variety of biases along which they and we live, think, and write” (93). By acknowledging their cultural diversities, students recognize the ways in which those differences affect their interpretations of texts; by acknowledging their increasing maturity, they recognize the mutability of the written source. More importantly, perhaps, they recognize their own changeable natures and their multiple roles: they “must be at once characters, authors, and critics; they must be text, translator, and reader [. . .] students themselves are both the translators and the translated” (Cook-Sather 94).

In this course, as in others discussed above, students must read recursively to make sense of texts and they must be able to articulate their reading strategies in cogent written form (Cook-Sather 95). But in Cook-Sather’s course, they must also “transform themselves” through a “multiple-perspectives assignment” (95, 97). The assignment is deceptively simple: students must write about a personal event from their first-hand perspectives. Next, they must rewrite the story from two other participants’ points of view. Finally, they must write a reflective essay detailing the process and describing their growth (Cook-Sather 97-99). Not surprisingly, most students find their own perspectives easy to describe; it is the process of adopting another participants’ bias that creates difficulty (Cook-Sather 99-100).

Many students write about situations about which they are certain a specific fellow-participant will share their own view—only to find that this is not the case. For some, the struggle to identify another’s perspective and then reexamine their own is apparently liberating. One student reported, “‘Because I felt confident that my own story was my own personal “truth,” I was no longer afraid of finding a story that was different than my own interpretation because my story was already strongly established and I believe in its validity’” (Cook-Sather 100-101). For others, this process is much more painful because they find they cannot believe in their own truth’s validity. All must face an inevitable fact, however: “the search for truth in narrative and in life. . .the belief that such a thing as truth with a capital T even exists, is problematic” (Cook-Sather 101).

The “life points” of this assignment are obvious, but the essential elements of reading and writing must not be overlooked. A student’s other self maps the field and guides her into the writing; it monitors her progress, reading recursively; it cheers her on. But then the writer’s “real” self must consciously read the writing from others’ perspectives. This process often provides a previously-lacking grasp of a loved-one’s “truth”—and forces the writer to reexamine her own. The writer must fully immerse herself if she is to successfully complete this process of translation, recursive reading, rewriting, and reflecting (Cook-Sather 102-103).

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Finis…for now.

Bazerman, Charles. “A Relationship Between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model. College English 41 (1980): 656-661.

Berthoff, Ann E. “A Curious Triangle and the Double-Entry Notebook; or, How Theory Can Help Us Teach Reading and Writing”. The Making of Meaning. Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1981. 41-47.

Cook-Sather, Alison. “Education as Translation: Students Transforming Notions of Narrative and Self.” College Composition and Communication 55 (2003): 91-114.

Gradin, Sherrie L. “English Studies and the Metaphors We Live By.” Empowering Students and Ourselves in an Interdependent World. Conf. on Coll. Composition and Communication. Seattle. Mar. 1989.

Murray, Donald M. “Teaching the Other Self: The Writer’s First Reader.” College Composition and Communication 33 (1982): 140-147.

Salvatori, Marjolina. “Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition. College English 58 (1996): 440-454.

Skorczewski, Dawn. “‘Everybody Has Their Own Ideas’: Responding to Cliché in Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52 (2000): 220-239.