Writing: To the Classroom...and Beyond!

It's September and my students again consume my attention. For some introverts like me, teaching is difficult. To want to fall back on habit, or to draw on old techniques that worked before and not be present and aware, this becomes a daily hazard.

With this consideration, I wanted this blog to focus on teaching and writing. And given that already, in the first week of classes,  some of my students have risen to the defense of the Five Paragraph Theme—and I didn’t even attack it--I wanted to focus on the ongoing controversy of how writing is taught today.

This becomes a little technical, but stay with me.

Writing For the Classroom

My students are not blank slates. They come to my courses with a long history of learning on their subject. Some of the learning has to do with facts, techniques, or other kinds of subject matter, but some of that learning is what I would term cultural, even ideological.

Linda Bergmann and Janet Zepernick, two teacher-researchers in composition, have conducted a study of transfer knowledge and First Year College writing. They report that every student in their study “seemed to have internalized a strong sense of the real rhetorical situation of the classroom” (133). This “rhetorical situation” is not of the greater world they know. It is the classroom. Bergmann and Zepernick typified this in the following terms:

the purpose of school writing is to get a grade,…the audience is the teacher,…and a successful paper must take into account both stated constraints (length requirement, number of sources, and sometimes even sentence types that must be included) and unstated (a teacher’s known preference for papers that exceed the length requirement, or a teacher’s obsession with what students typically see as meaningless details). (134)

This school “rhetoric,” which comes complete with an audience, structures, and purpose, has been explored since the 1960s, perhaps first by Janet Emig, who noted that when doing writing for school, students’ tendencies to simplify assignments could be compared to a routine form of “stale art” (53).

In The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, her classic case study research with 8 high school student writers in the Chicago public schools in the late 1960s, Emig describes the “prewriting periods” of "Lynn," noting how "the length of the prewriting period available affects the choice of subject matter” for Lynn. When she decides to shorten this period, she avoids

work on a topic or problem…(that is) cognitively or psychically complex and instead selects one that is more 'programmable'…one (s)he has already learned or been taught, and one (the student) has internalized. For Lynn…this schema is for some kind of extensive expository writing that does not require the deep personal engagement of the writer. (79)

Emig calls this work “school-sponsored writing,” in contrast to “self-sponsored writing.” Like Zepernick and Bergmann, Emig notes that school writing has the audience of the teacher, and these teachers’ concerns tend to be represented by the students as a concern with picky issues like penmanship, good spelling, or, in the case of “Lynn,” writing a title (71, 79).

To clarify the problem of "school sponsored writing," Emig cites linguist Leon A.Jakobovits’s definition of “stale art”: an “algorithmic…computational device that specifies the order and nature of the steps to be followed in the generation of a sequence” (50). Emig notes the similarity between this and the “kind of essay too many students have been taught to write in American schools” (53).

Writing is Not Math

This use of “stale” structures may result from any number of student perceptions that lead to their sense of hurry, of short circuiting their period of invention. As a teacher, I’ve noticed that the value the student places on an assignment may determine the time she thinks the assignment is worthy of.

There are so many K-12 writing assignments that preach this school, classroom rhetoric, all of them exercises in structure and not invention, all of them assignments that represent the audience as the teacher/grader, and all of them having a grade as their purpose. And for all of them, deeper thinking, problem solving, and writing with a purpose are "left behind."

In giving writing assignments, I have the hardest time getting students to really think beyond the classroom and how I might grade them. Like Linus, from the Peanuts cartoon, much of the time I have with my students involves helping them “unlearn” the lessons of their schooling,

Works Cited

Bergmann, Linda S. and Janet Zepernick. “Disciplinarity and Transfer: Students’ Perceptions of Learning to Write.” WPA, 31.1/2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 124-149.

Emig, Janet. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. Urbana: NCTE, 1971.