On Readings for 2/11/10

Since I'll be in Albuquerque, I needed to get this reading and post done early.



This week’s readings focus on the idea of writing as a process rather than a finished product. In fact, that is Donald M. Murray’s argument in his 1972 article: that we ought to be teaching students that writing is an ongoing activity rather than as one that has any kind of a definite end. For Murray, “the process [is one] of discovery through language. It is the process of exploration of what we know and what we feel about what we know through language. It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (4). This is a collection of very idealistic (and, dare I say, Romantic?) statements about writing that, for me, serve as a nice reminder of what is possible when it comes to writing. I will admit, however, to some concern (probably born out of fear) when Murray writes that “we should teach unfinished writing and glory in its unfinishedness” (4). I am certain Murray does not, by unfinished, mean writing that is incorrect and/or incoherent, but rather writing that is demonstrative of that still striving for understanding and knowledge of the world. Perhaps this is where I need to remember that, as an English professor, that I am part of that process—the process that seeks to teach students how to write—and not the sum total of that process. In other words, students’ ability to write is something organic and ongoing that will continue to develop long after they have left my classroom for the last time.

I was also concerned with Murray’s reduction of the writing process to a formula, complete with percentages. These included 85% of a writer’s time being spent on prewriting, maybe 1% on the actual mental and physical act of writing, and the remaining 14% spent rewriting. I just don’t feel that the writing process can be quantified—or should be quantified—in such a way. As even Murray himself goes on to say when he describes Implication No. 9 of his process: “students are individuals who must explore the writing process in their own way” (6), the writing process is idiosyncratic for every writer and, as such, attempting to group them under some neat mathematical formula clashes with the ideas if individuality and idiosyncrasy. But I did like Murray’s Implication No. 3, which states that, within the writing as process ideal he imagines, students use their own language (5). To me, that made a nice connection with David Bartholomae’s article in which he describes how students are expected to reinvent the university, at least in terms of its disciplinary idioms, every time they step into all of their different classes. Is it possible, I wondered after reading Murray, for students to reinvent the university using their own language? Or does, as Bartholomae seem to insist, reinventing the university demand absolutely that students learn and regurgitate (until they can make it their own) academic discourse?

Meanwhile, in her 1977 article, Janet Emig explores the idea of writing as a unique mode of learning that is different—in distinct and quantifiable/observable ways—from reading and listening. I like this idea and hope that it is something I can communicate and teach to my students regardless of what kind (i.e. Composition or Literature or Theory) of English class I am professor of. In my own experiences with writing, one of my idiosyncrasies is that I often begin a piece by writing in hand with old fashioned pen and paper. Not only does it slow the process and, in my opinion, allows me to think through my ideas more as I am writing, it makes me feel “closer” to what I am doing and trying to accomplish in whatever project it is I am working on. One major point in this article was Emig’s statement—contra those theories Rose delineated for us last week on hemispheric studies from past decades—that writing “involves the fullest possible functioning of the brain, which entails the active participation in the process of both the left and the right hemispheres” (10-11). Even though I am not a psychologist or a doctor with medical knowledge of the brain, but it was nice to read someone like Emig expressing the idea—with conviction—that the entire brain is involved in the writing process rather than only one side or the other. Writing has always seemed like a full-brain activity to me!

After five weeks of being in Contemporary Composition Theory, I could not help but be struck by the title of Sondra Perl’s article, “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers.” Of course, my attention focused on her use of the term “unskilled” in the title of her article, particularly after the discussions we’ve had and the readings we’ve done that attempt to challenge the notion that writing is a mere skill that anyone can learn and should learn/master by the time they arrive in the Freshman Composition classroom. Aside from title problematics, Perl’s article was the kind of piece that, as primarily a literature scholar, drives me crazy. All of the documentation about how the study was done and the charts detailing the data collected did not interest me. All I wanted to get to was the results and the findings of the study. It was interesting to discover that “unskilled” writers have just as palpable of a composing process as more experienced writers. It also seems logical that less experienced or practiced writers would produce essays that make too many assumptions about what their readers know and don’t know, that are disjointed and mangled due to their focus on the “rules,” and that are comparatively unsophisticated. I would think that, as writers continue to practice writing—in tandem with good professorial instruction—that writers would make the leap from “unskilled” to “skilled.”

Along the same lines, Nancy Sommers article looks at how student (significantly, as opposed to “unskilled”) writers approach the demands of revision in comparison to experienced adult writers. Once again, it seems logical that student writers would look at things like surface errors, particularly at only a word level, as they approach the task of revising a piece of writing. I have also seen in my own classes, that student writers have a very difficult time seeing (or re-seeing) their papers in a larger context; they seem to think that changing a word or two here or there, or correcting their punctuation is sufficient revision. And, it seems logical that adult writers, or writers with more experience writing, would be concerned with their ideas and how those ideas are articulated on the page in terms of order, style, and coherence. Such writers have more of an idea that they are writing for others who want to understand what it is they have to say. The question becomes, how do you teach student writers to cultivate the perspective (and its demands) of more experienced writers?

In “A Method for Teaching Writing,” Elbow (some twelve years earlier than Sommers) focuses on the idea that writers are always trying to produce some kind of desired effect in their readers (115). For Elbow, writing assignments in the Composition classroom should be drawn from real life or, in other words, they should be demonstrative of the kinds of writing human beings do (or could do) in their everyday lives, like a letter-to-the-editor or a plea to state legislators to not cut higher education funding anymore than it already has been (sorry, had to get that out) in Nevada. From this perspective, the only criterion of good or successful writing is whether or not it gets readers to do what writers want them to do (or to think in a certain way, or to change their minds about something, etc.). Heaven forbid our Composition courses should be practical as well as academic.

Since I am new to blogging in the classroom, I found Lowe and Williams’s article, “Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom,” to be enlightening and informative. I am, in fact, to the point where I would like to figure out how best to incorporate blogging into my Composition and my Literature classes. It seems like an excellent means of making the writing students do in my classes both relevant and exciting for/to them (and myself as their professor).