The Not So Princely Reign of “Sloppy Copy”

I have long respected what K-12 teachers do. If anything, I meant to convey some of this respect in my recent post “The Blame Game.” 

So I hope it is clear that I have no desire to criticize elementary school teachers. It is simply that my First Year students sometimes express reductive ideas about how writing should be done, and I am concerned with how writing tasks are being represented at all levels of education. And there is one all-too-common way that writing is represented in the lower grades that is catchy and, well, cute. It is also misleading.

I’m talking about the designation “sloppy copy.”

In elementary school, this is what teachers (and then their students) have come to call the first, or rough draft.

It is sloppy. If we start unpacking this term, it seems to imply that, above all else, the final draft should be the opposite of sloppy. It should be neat.

In other words, the drafting process has to do with handwriting or surface mistakes, not thinking. And the final draft should be neat—with good handwriting, no mistakes.

But what about the thinking? Thinking can be sloppy. Thinking can be rude and crossed out and tangential. Thinking can be just starting out in a sloppy copy.

But thinking might not be what will improve "sloppy copy."

What I’m suggesting is this: The idea that writing is mainly an affair with getting rid of mistakes, with turning in clean copy that may or may not (probably does not) say anything, starts early, with the first lessons of grammar school. 

And certainly, all finished writing should be neat, clean. But it should also say something, and if "sloppy copy" doesn't teach this, then we will need to turn to other lessons that do.

Learning the R word

The first lessons are perhaps most powerful. But they don’t have to be the only lessons that benefit us. In fact, the idea that just a few quick "lessons" in writing are all that is needed runs counter to a wealth of important research showing that writing improvement happens developmentally over many years and through much guided instruction. Learning to write is not like learning algebra. It is more like learning to swim or paint landscapes scenes.

My second grade teacher, for example, in 1963, handed a paper I’d written back to me, said it was good, but said I should “revise it.” Yes, she did not call it “sloppy copy,” as though she had to talk down to me. She referred to my writing with an adult word, one I'd heard my father, a news reporter, use: “revision.” I remember it to this day. I remember thinking that revision meant improvement, but I wasn't sure how.

My teacher did not follow up on this by modeling for me how I should revise, and I think today that she should have. But she was busy, with a full class of squirming, inattentive second graders. And at least she put the word in my writing vocabulary. Two years later, in 1965, my father reinforced it when he told me a a story I’d written was good, but I should revise it. I think these two got me started on a path I'm still following.

Hollywood Portrayals

This is to talk mainly about how learning to write is represented in the early grades. But there are more cultural influences around us as well. The movies, for example, seem to reinforce cultural stereotypes, though most of us don’t think when we go to the movies, and really, we are given little reason to do so. We probably never give any thought to the way writing and writers are represented to us by Hollywood. I never did until I started teaching and thinking about literacy.

One of my favorite Hollywood scenes comes from an old Frank Capra film. Barbara Stanwick, in Meet John Doe, after being let go from her job as a reporter, sits down at her typewriter and writes out a letter and scheme that sets the whole movie in motion—all in one sitting, without sloppy copy, of course, because, after all, she’s a good typist.

In an ‘80s movie, we see the Hollywood cliché of the writer in the opening scene with Billy Crystal, who plays a writer, sitting at his typewriter with a glass of wine (it may be sherry, I can’t be sure), and typing variations on “It was a dark and stormy night” over and over again, until, with the credits done, he has filled up a waste basket with paper wads and is lying on his typewriter quite drunk. Except for the obvious plagiarism--I've seen this line in the old Peanuts cartoons and in Madeline L'Engle's story A Wrinkle in Time--this scene has been shown in countless films about writers. The message of both the Stanwick scene and the Crystal scene is this:

Writers work top-down. They sit down, without planning, and write a perfect copy. There is no stage of invention, no planning, no second thoughts, no revisions. Just get it right the first time, and if it's neat, well, you're good to go.

The Other R Word

Representations are powerful and often subliminal. They give us a lot to think about, and we rarely realize that they have. With our busy schedules, we labor as romantics under the idea that our first thought is the best, or will have to be, or should be, because revision will not be true to the first thought, and not true to the way that geniuses work. 

Sloppy copy doesn't contest this idea. It has nothing to do say about second thoughts—or third ones. And later, the implication seems to be, grown ups can skip it because real pros, played by Barbara Stanwick and Billy Crystal, are adults in possession of fine motor skills and therefore, apparently, neat. 

Revision suggests something else, something to do with vision and getting closer in our attempts to our intentions.It also means work and the way all successful writers write. 

As for sloppy copy, the pros may still be making it when they are looking at the proofs of their work about to be published. F. Scott Fitzgerald is supposed to have done this, messed up the galleys with significant changes to his novels. 

My point here may not be that we should no longer teach "sloppy copy." But unless we are going to take this catchy, popular phrase and complicate it with our teaching, sloppy copy doesn't go far enough in representing to us what really happens in the process of composing.

Toward a Curriculum of the Imagination, part 2

Last month, while visiting Las Vegas, I found myself thinking about the adult imagination. This month, while hearing the same ideas about creativity over and over from my students, I began to wonder. Could the adult imagination be traced back to its roots in school, where we are taught to respect facts and rules and deny the imagination?

This past month, as I've said, I’ve heard over and over again a belief my students hold to as a dogma. “Creativity,” they say, “means throwing out the rules and just expressing your self.” I've noticed that they usually do say "self" and not "mind," but that is a point for another blog.

What we basically have here is a widely held belief about "Creativity." But those who hold to it should not be shamed for accepting it any more than those little girls, who haven't yet had music appreciation, should be shamed for their love of Justin Bieber. In the few General Education classes where my students had to write, they were told very little, at least in comparison to the ancients. They were not told that good writing meant rewriting (as Mark Twain wrote, and as my father always told me). They were told to follow rules--and punished when they didn't:

Rule one: Never use first person.

Rule two: Never begin a sentence with the word “and.”

Rule three: Have five paragraphs, three of which form the body of the paper.

Rule four: Have seven sentences (or five, depending on the teacher) for each paragraph. 

Rule five: Write grammatical sentences. (And this led to about ninety other rules, each followed by exceptions.)

Post-Rules

That’s about it. The rules are stupid, of course. 

Oh, but to be creative means to throw them out.

And I can see why my students want to throw them out. They aren’t of any real help when we want to communicate our most important ideas to the real world. They are not about generating ideas or examining them. They are not about reflection or idea development. They are a series of rigidly correct moves to make at all times, regardless of audience, subject, or purpose. 

But tossing the rules is doing little more than the equivalent of elementary school finger painting and is really not much help either. If it were, the world currently would be noisy with creative writers. And it isn’t. This mirage of creativity, this hope, is so different from what I read from creative writers. Flannery O’Connor, for example, referred to habits of mind.

To most of us, there is no need for habits when creativity is supposed to flow like a stream from the average consciousness. There is no need for paying attention, concentration, learning about ideas, or learning anything about how language works or how other writers and poets have learned about language. The idea is that nature is by itself enough.

Nature is What Happens to Us

Well, nature isn’t really enough. Nature is what is happening to us all the time and what will eventually be our undoing. Instead, we need to practice. We need to fail. We need to have others around to critique our work and to tell us, in effect, where and when our ideas are stupid or poorly realized or too sentimental. We need a process. We need to write, read, rewrite, rewrite again, and learn what others are doing.

But my students generally do not accept the idea of process. They accept format.

But a format is rigid, a one time deal.

Though I fear I am being too obvious, I am coming off another semester of teaching writing classes to people who do not believe that process matters.  So I need to say this. It does. 

And we need to place it at the center of any curriculum of the imagination.

Without process, we are left with the rules or no rules approach. And that is, to sound the cliche, to be between a rock and a hard place. 

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.

 

 

General Writing Advice, part 3: Thesis and Outline

This past week, I helped to teach a workshop on writing at Azusa Pacific University. For four mornings, for four hours each morning, a colleague and I met with a group of wonderful people motivated to be effective writing teachers. These teachers came from many disciplines, not just English, where, the stereotype suggests, writing should be taught. Our colleagues from across the curriculum at APU, from biology and nursing to Communication Studies and Education, joined in discussions about what was and wasn’t working for us in teaching writing in our disciplines. I was honored and encouraged by everything that went on this week.

And I was struck by a few important issues. I realized that those bits of general writing advice—never use contractions, never use the first person pronoun “I,” and some of my own pet peeves, like never use the second person “you”—were all well-known, deeply entrenched, and taught in our various fields. Less known and practiced were principles of Composition process pedagogy—that good writing results from writing many drafts, and writing many drafts can often lead to students having fewer grammatical errors. In contrast, most students don't revise, and they don't really practice invention techniques that really work for them. They aren't really taught these techniques.

Thesis and Outline

What I discovered instead was that some general writing advice, especially the advice to have a thesis statement and write an outline before writing, is widely practiced.

This is what passes for invention: We mainly tend to focus on generating the content and organizational patterns of writing, but we ignore audience and the context of what we have to say. The word has gotten around that having or finding a thesis or a focus is standard number one for good writing. Every essay should have one. The trouble is that most of us force our students to write one—and their outline—before they have defined the problem they are interested in, and without really knowing what they are writing about.

The problem with writing an outline should be obvious enough. The outline is written before the paper. We write it and assume that it gives our essay its final structure. And then we write and discover ideas we couldn’t have anticipated before the outline stage.

This is why most published writers do a first draft—Donald Murray calls this the “zero draft.” Then we can work on it again and add our new ideas, return to invention as needed. I shared this week that I usually don’t write an outline of a piece until I have a rough draft. Then I write an outline, which reflects back to me the shape of what I’ve written, what I’ve emphasized, over-emphasized, left out, or not developed enough. The outline helps me then to rewrite and generate more prose.

From Ancient Traditions

The thesis is most interesting, though. In the ancient Roman and Greek tradition of Composition, called the progymnasmata, the thesis was often viewed as a question. Instead of the modern view of a statement, the ancients saw the thesis as a tool for exploring a problem fully.

We do not view thesis statements that way today. We do not invite students to explore, to ask questions. We don’t view writing this way either. We tend to see writing as reporting results, which should be unified around our thesis statement.

If this is so, no wonder so many students and teachers see writing as trivial.

I didn’t get that impression from my colleagues this week, though. And I look forward to the good things that are going to happen across our curriculum this fall.

Revision/Repentance: Sorting Through a Contrast

This past week involved a struggle with a writing project. I’m working on a novel, and after getting some great feedback on it last week (see last blog), I found myself going back to the drawing board on a few things. Writing is like that, though. I’m used to it. Some people might look at this as similar to “repentance” (I say this because it is common to look at having to do something over again as a form of punishment). But I try to avoid attributing moral or spiritual guilt where none exists (more about this later in the blog). And I don’t rewrite to cover errors or mistakes, as though I’m working on a math problem; I rewrite because I’m learning more about the material I’m working on. Revision, or re-seeing, concerns getting closer to the vision I had for writing in the first place. Nancy Sommers, a Composition specialist, calls this part of the writing process, when we return to earlier stages of the process, “recursive.” That is, it involves returning to earlier stages of a writing process as a part of moving forward toward a better draft.

Most of my work this week could be called recursive. I literally went back to the drawing board, to stage one: I added a new chapter, which I then spent most of the week writing and giving shape to. But in writing this chapter, I also learned more about other parts of the book I’ve already written, and I also found myself adding new scenes to other chapters already written. Many people might look at that as failure, or as too much work. But my understanding of the world of my novel is deepening; my rewriting, rethinking, re-inventing, I hope, will reflect this. The whole week seemed worth the effort.

We tend to look at many aspects of life, especially those concerned with learning and growing, as consisting of stages of development. Once we pass through an early stage, we are done with it. This model might work for childhood development, though I’ve also heard of it being criticized. As for writing, the stage model has long been criticized, and yet it is also deeply entrenched in teaching writing in the lower grades.

The stages model suggests that five stages are needed to write an essay: Pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The assumption with this model is that when we finish “pre-writing” for an essay and move to “drafting,” we are finished with “pre-writing.” And once we finish “drafting,” we move on to “revision” and don’t need to “draft” again. This is to teach these five stages as “non-recursive.”  

This is simply too neat to be true or accurate. All of the writers I know don’t write in stages. They don't see returning to the drawing board as a form of “repentance.” They do return to planning again, they do re-draft whole segments of their work, not because they are terrible writers, but because they are good ones, and in writing the first draft, they realized what their piece was really about.

This seems to be true of most things. When we are involved in a new endeavor, we have only a sketchy understanding of what it is to look like and how we will pull it off. So we plow through until we realize we’re off track. We return to the beginning with a better understanding of what to do.

This is the part of revision that I suppose cuts across into religious thought. Although revision should not carry the moral repugnance of repentance, repentance does resemble the recursive element of revision. Repentance is a turning away from what we’ve done and a turning back to what is perceived as the right path. I suppose for most of us, repentance carries all of the childhood memories of shame, disgrace, and, yes, moral repugnance. But there is also this promise of a better understanding than we had before--yes, it does resemble a new revision.

Aside from the harsh, haunting childhood images, repentance could also be seen as a lot more like revision, as a new opportunity to do things better, the way they should have been done the first time. Certainly, if I’ve done real harm to someone, it's probably a sign of health that I feel remorse.  

For those of us who follow a developmental, stages model for faith (I usually do at an unconscious level) and assume we're really moving far along and getting deeper and better, we may want to question our model. Christianity without repentance is like writing without revision.

If you’ve looked at as many essays as I have that were written by student writers who don’t revise because they believe revision is only for bad writers, then you’ll understand that it is not a pretty picture.

Most of the time, spiritual progress does resemble writing. And sometimes, as C.S. Lewis once noted, to go forward I first have to go back.