General Writing Advice, Part 4

This fourth blog in a series (non-consecutive, I should add), will seem pedestrian to some readers, and I have to agree that it is. But the other day it happened to me again, and I decided that this needs to be said. By way of preface, let me add that because I both teach and try to produce writing, I am perhaps too aware that writing is not fully respected by most as a discipline, not like physics or math, and that writing is taught in the schools as though most people will not be expected to learn or use it.

Writing in the Red
The other day, a colleague from another department at our university heard me say that I was revising my textbook.

“You’re proofreading it?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I’m revising it. I’m developing new content, adding a new chapter, and rearranging some of it.”

I was about to explain the purpose behind my revision, but she appeared suddenly puzzled, so I let it drop. But my friend’s inner-paradigm for writing was obvious: Write one draft, proofread it, and then hand it in. Further “writing” (read “revisions”) means you’re not a very good writer.

Old School
This is the pattern we are still taught in the schools. Write a first draft (this is called “sloppy copy” in elementary school), then proofread it, and then hand it in. Second efforts only involve cleaning up what is sloppy.

This has been the problem I’ve tried to address in my textbook for First Year College writing, which, as I’ve already noted, I’m revising now. General Study writing is what most people remember from their public school experiences. General Study writing emphasizes a curriculum of grammatical correctness, even though there is language in the California standards for teaching process.  

Red Pens in the Closet
The goal I’ve long had for my textbook is to make it a bridge from this reductive view of writing over to the way real writers work, which is messy and personal. A few of the chapters work to do this, but my goal is for the whole book to become a solid introduction to writing as a real subject. This is why I’m revising it.

Writing is difficult to teach and made even more difficult in high school where the curriculum is rushed to meet the standards, most of the time is spent on reading literature, and the classes are too big.

My students, persuaded by twelve years of General Study writing, get their rough drafts back, correct the few errors I’ve noted, ignore my comments in the margins for more thought development, clearer organization and transitions, and then don’t understand why their grade doesn’t go up. They are not interested in further exploration or discovery.

But that’s just the problem. How do you teach thought development? How do you teach seeing and reasoning, or the imaginative qualities that go into thinking about an audience beyond the teacher with the red pen? How do you teach these skills when all of your students and their parents don’t believe that they have anything to do with your discipline?

Old Habits, New Curriculum
The old ways of thinking die hard. Even when I help writing teachers to symbolically stop using the red pen and start emphasizing skills like invention and revision, the change is slow.

I can only speak for myself here. I remember the first time I was told that marking up papers in red wasn’t an effective way of grading, that I needed my students to attend to larger, more complex issues with their writing. So I got rid of my red pens, used green for a while, and then discovered that I was using green to mark errors with.

Old habits die hard.