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).

** ** **
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.

Voice...resonating down the halls of the academy...

[Subtitle: If I learned one thing last week, it's that my voice RESONATES!!]

I'm sure this will shock you all, but I believe that resonant voice has a very important role in the academy--in student writing, in teaching, and in grading. Seriously. . .when was the last time you read a formal text that was completely devoid of personality? Did you like it, or was it borrrrrring? Bartholomae can "write in the academy" until the cows come home, but we still recognize his voice. Think about it: how much of his writing doesn't include the occasional "I want to argue that..." or some other identifying phrase? That's his voice.

So I shall borrow from Elbow and Bartholomae, for just a few seconds, by "trying on" [Elbow] Bartholomae's voice. I want to argue that voice is perhaps more necessary to the academy now than in the past, because people today are more influenced by others' voices than ever before. We have TV in elevators of high-rise buildings; we have YouTube and other Internet sources coming at us from every direction; we have iPods, personal ringtones, PDAs...we are constantly surrounded by voices. Before we realize it, we've adopted pop-culture "isms" ("I'm so not going to go to class today," "Oh, no, you didn't just say that," "That was the most gynormous lie I ever heard!"). We are influenced by so many voices that we are at risk of losing our own...permanently.

We all have stories about favorite teachers (as well as the "not so much" variety). Of the tales we've heard from classmates, how many of them have centered on margin commentary? Don't we all have certain words (or even lines) permanently etched in our memories? "Nicely argued!" "Do that again!" "I can't even GUESS what that means!" "UGH!" That's resonant voice, pure and simple. Maybe we didn't like what we read, but we sure as heck remember it; and we derive something from it...even if that something is "I never want to be THAT teacher!"

So I want to argue that, yes, voice is important in teaching and grading. Am I going to be the favorite of all my students? No way. Are they going to remember something about me? Probably; and it will probably be something I've written.

And I want to argue that, yes, student voice is important, too. Have you had this experience? You're slogging along, grading the two zillionth brief assignment [fill in the blank] over the same lackluster text...and all of a sudden a voice resonates out of that little TTOPIC-window wilderness. Sure, it might be poorly written, but the kid has managed to allow his or her voice to shine through--while remaining entirely within assignment guidelines. Although I've enjoyed several such moments, my favorite example is probably still the pie chart from BA 1: kid after kids pointed out that female participants had rated "financial status" and "personal-psychological traits" as least important attributes in males (with a total of 3%). But one kid prefaced that statement with "Fortunately for male undergraduates,..." That's resonant voice, and I'll probably remember it for years to come. Did he undermine or the compete with "academic voice" there? I don't think so; I think he enhanced it.

How do we teach students to write with voice? Well, I think we model it, for one thing (and of course, that means we need to find our own). I think we encourage them to take risks while reminding them to choose their times and their degrees of resonance wisely. Several of my students write with voice--some more successfully than others. As might be expected, some are struggling to gauge how much is too much, while others are learning how much is too little. Mr. "Fortunately" has written a properly formal Draft 1.1, but that je ne sais quoi resonates here and there. How do we assess it? Well, I've noticed that both the first and second readers commented on Mr. F's "engaging" writing style. They may not realize they're commenting on his voice, but I do.

What about us as students? Can we/should we write with voice? You bet! How do you think I got here, old as I am? It sure wasn't those stellar GRE scores!

The Evolution of the Blackwell Philosophy

(My students freewriting--most of them, anyway!)
I began this semester without any very clear teaching philosophies in mind. My work experience had taught me that even well-educated people often write poorly, and I wanted to help students learn basic skills. But I realize now that my background had supplied some unfortunate assumptions. My parents had college degrees, read incessantly, and demanded straight-A report cards. I attended strong public schools, as did my children. Consequently, some of the readings in this course originally puzzled me: how on earth could students born into the information age find writing truly challenging? After all, they frequently text each other instead of calling. Isn't that writing? Since so many of them have MySpace or FaceBook pages and/or blogs, aren't they ALWAYS writing? I thought the reticence described by the course readings was probably a thing of the past.

What I've learned is that it ISN'T a thing of the past. Yes, teenagers and young adults e-mail, text-message, and blog, but they don't view that as "writing." They consider it "talking." Some of them do find it extremely difficult to grasp that the work they are doing in 1301 is just a more formalized way of "talking" via the written word. They do fixate on details rather than seeing the larger picture; they can be crippled by an instructor's comments (however constructive); they don't understand how mastering basic reading and writing skills will play a part in their academic and professional lives.

I've discovered that I did begin with an underlying teaching philosophy, and I'm not sure that philosophy has changed, exactly. I think students must learn to read critically, process what they've read, and synthesize those ideas into a well-written, understandable product...all without abandoning their own voices. However, I've begun to think much more about how teaching styles impact those abilities. Whereas I started with a "grammar must be perfect" stance, I've realized that (a) "perfect grammar" is somewhat subjective, (b) trying to produce a grammatically-correct writing often stifles student voice, and (c) students are often unexpectedly inspired or crushed by instructor comments.

I've begun to understand that for many students, writing is risk-taking: they want to be "right" and their egos are on the line. In much the same way that children often consider their parents invulnerable or view the exercise of parental control as a form of sadistic entertainment, students tend to think of their instructors as know-it-alls who judge them and torture them for fun. Some want to be "right" because they are preprogrammed to strive, some want to be "right" to disprove teacher expectations, and some of them have given up hope of ever being "right." Many of them really believe that we instructors never struggle with writing and, for some, that triggers resentment. So I've begun to acknowledge those expectations by openly exposing myself to risk. Because my students love freewriting and hate the structured assignments I require of them, I've started "sharing their pain." I loathe freewriting, so I have agreed to freewrite and let them read it. The results have been startlingly positive: suddenly they view me as a fellow struggler, and that has made them far more receptive.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that my teaching philosophy hasn't so much changed as it has adapted to include those students who experience genuine fear of writing and "terror of error."

[Insert "deer in the headlights" expression here]

What are your questions about the readings so far? What aspects of the readings are bothering you?

I have found much of what we have read intriguing and even exciting. There are so many approaches and debates to consider that I often find myself revisiting readings as I gain teaching experience.

I must admit, however, that while I am very interested in the more complex articles (cognitive theory, for example), I wonder how they truly apply to me in my current role. After all, I can't follow students around and study the way they write, and I probably won't know how much of what I've taught them will remain with them past semester's end. Unless Dr. Rice plans to tag freshmen before releasing them into the wild, they will be lost to me (us) forever.

Some of the other articles which interest me really aren't applicable to our 1301 and 1302 curricula. I find ideas I'd like to try...but I can't, because the syllabus doesn't provide much improvisational room. Take this week's reading, for example: I love Johnson's approach to peer critiquing. Anonymous, online peer critiques would be much more effective for one of my sections than face-to-face practice will be, at least initially. But could my students be lured into submitting writings on yet another website? I doubt it; and realistically speaking, I wouldn't have time to keep up with such a venue anyway.

Meanwhile, I often wonder why we don't study more recent materials. Keywords wasn't exactly published last week, and some of the concepts seem to be a bit passe. My research has led me to "fresher" material concerning these concepts, so I'm curious...should the absence of more recent articles from our syllabus be construed as a dismissal of newer scholarship? Since we seem to be so media-oriented in this course, why aren't we reading more articles about relevant tips we can use in the TOPIC-driven environment now?

I guess my broadest questions are: (1) if I become a literature professor when I grow up, how "transferable" will this course's lessons be? and (2) if (as seems likely) I become a literature professor with some composition courseload when I grow up, will this course's readings stand me in good stead, or will they be too outdated for the classrooms of the future?

Cathy