2/18/10 Blog Entry

In “Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction,” Robert J. Connors provides us with an outstanding and blessedly succinct history of how and why mechanical correctness became de rigueur in the field of composition instruction. He begins with the rather bald statement that, during “most of its history as a college subject, English composition has meant one thing to most people: the single-minded enforcement of standards of mechanical and grammatical correctness in writing” (61). Some of the reasons for this happening include: America (and Americans) attempting to define itself decisively as the New World, separate and unique from the Old World (England, in particular, and the rest of Continental Europe), the centralization of the literary elite (if you will) in the Northeastern United States, a cultural, social, and class elite which looked down on the lack of linguistic manners evinced by those in the rapidly expanding (westward, of course) parts of the country, attacks by self-styled grammarians or language experts in both England and America that bemoaned the desecration of the Queen’s English.

As we read earlier in the semester, the concerns with rhetoric versus grammar found their way into the university world . . . indeed, the very top of that world: at Harvard. Instead of teaching the art of rhetoric, writing teachers began teaching mechanical correctness. According to Connors, it was in the mid nineteenth century in America that “the goal of the freshman writing course came to be teaching the avoidance of error rather than teaching genuine communicative competence” (65). For writing teachers who were overworked and overburdened by the sheer numbers of students in their classrooms, focusing on mechanical correctness was a far easier, and a far more manageable, task than “teaching genuine communicative competence” ever could be. As Connors points out: the “new emphasis upon mechanical correctness grew out of the furor over ‘illiteracy’ [in America] . . . but also out of the understandable need of teachers to somehow deal with their huge stacks of student themes” (67). One direct result of this new concern with mechanical correctness over communicative ability or success was the creation of the writing handbook, the purpose of which was to make it easy for writing teachers to enforce and thereby inculcate mechanical correctness in the “writings” of their students.

Connors goes on to reveal that, by the 1960s, the supremacy of mechanical correctness in composition was starting to be challenged from many quarters. On this point he writes: “during the early sixties theorists and teachers everywhere were actively—and sometimes heatedly—discussing the purposes and methods of teaching composition. The reign of mechanical correctness, which had largely depended on teachers’ continued ignorance, was threatened” (70). To this, I would add some comments on my own experiences from the first semester I taught composition here at UNLV. Not having been taught (in 791) or mentored any better (but I am NOT bitter), the compositions I graded that first semester ended up looking like murdered corpses given how much red ink I splattered over them in my quest to find every single mechanical error I could find (and it was not hard to find many, many, many of them) because, not knowing any better, I thought that is what my job was: to make sure my students were writing “correctly.” Forget what they had to actually say, or to communicate, as regards the assignments they were given. So, I would say that, even though the mechanical correctness notion has been challenged since the 1960s, it is still very much alive.

It proved interesting for me to read Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” and for a number of reasons. When I taught composition here at UNLV, I learned that we’re not really supposed to teach grammar. Maybe I should say that we’re not supposed to teach composition as an entire course on grammar. In any case, one of the things I would do following a round of grading student essays is to create exercises using examples from those student papers that pointed out various grammatical (and mechanical) problems – such as comma splices, subject verb agreements, inadequate pronoun referents, and the like – and workshop them as a class so that students could have some idea of what to watch out for as they wrote subsequent essays. While I don’t have years of teaching experience behind me, I think such grammar/mechanical exercises only helped my students to improve their papers minimally. And it took away from concentration on their ideas and how well they were able to express those ideas (to persuade readers’ to their point of view). Whether it is provincial or just downright mean-spirited of me, I do feel that by the time students get to the college composition classroom, they should be able to deal with the demands of grammar and mechanics (i.e., this is something they should have mastered by the end of high school).

I’m not sure if I should admit to this or not, but I enjoyed Peter Elbow’s article, “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How it Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues,” because it seemed to be the perfect mix of the pragmatic or practical with the idealistic. Diving into this piece, I was reminded immediately of Bartholomae’s essay on inventing the university and how that is the daunting task the academy sets for undergraduate students upon their entrance into academia. It was nice to see Elbow challenging that notion or, perhaps, extending that notion, to consider the idea that teaching students to wrestle effectively with academic discourse is but only one way of teaching composition. Part of his argument includes the – to me – liberating idea that, perhaps, we should also be teaching our composition students how to make writing a part of their everyday lives [which, particularly with text messaging and other forms of electronic communication in the 21st century, seems like a given] and not scare them away from writing completely. In other words, Elbow advocates for teaching students how to write in a non-academic manner that will be just as valuable, if not more so, to their everyday selves and lives. I found myself agreeing with Elbow and wondering how, in my World Literature courses, I can figure out a way for my students to do writing that is not some bastardized version of literary criticism but, instead, a reflection of how my students feel and really want to write about the literature they are encountering in my class.

For me, style is an amalgamation of how a writer expresses him or herself in verbal/visual/written form. As such, style is always going to be idiosyncratic (or it ought to be always idiosyncratic). Paul Butler, in “Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies,” makes the case that study and understanding of style has shifted from a category in its own right to one mixed with other compositional concerns, including genre theory, rhetorical analysis, and personal writing. In any case, what’s important is how a writer presents and expresses him or herself in a piece of verbal/visual/written prose. I thought that Butler’s discussion of how such things as gender, class, and ethnicity can play significant roles in how a writer writes to be intriguing if less developed than I would have liked (i.e., I wanted more!).

Both pieces on responding to student writing (Sommers’ and Connors’), were at once comforting and disconcerting. When I taught my first composition course here at UNLV a few years back, I made the horrible mistake of thinking it was my job to point out every single thing that was wrong (mechanically, grammatically, etc.) with my students’ papers. Small wonder that my students weren’t all that happy with me by the time all was said and done. In subsequent composition courses I taught, it proved much more beneficial to me to try to give substantive comments to my students about their ideas and how they were presenting them in their essays. And my students’ seemed to appreciate my efforts at doing such commentary rather than pointing out all of their mistakes. Since I have moved into the literature classroom for the time being, and I am set to take my comprehensive exams this coming fall, and I have numerous seminar and conference responsibilities, I feel that I do not have time to provide substantive commentary on the essays I have assigned my World Lit students to do. Not on 70 papers or within a reasonable period of time. I am left to juggle and, unfortunately, the one ball I feel I need to drop is substantive commentary. And being in such a position is difficult for me because I feel my students have the right to expect better.