Writing, Math, and the Question of Right Answers

As a writing teacher, I often hear people comparing writing to math, with writing taking on the negative charge in the pairing. At least in math, the person I am talking with usually will say, there is a right answer. You can do the same equation every time, and the answer will be the same. That can't be said for writing, which is so subjective.

We've all heard this and probably believed it, because we have all experienced writing classes (at least I have) where our different teachers had varying criteria for what they thought was good writing. A student furthered this argument recently when he acknowledged sadly, "I can spend an entire day trying to write a good paper, but at the end, it still won't be good enough. That's not true of math."

The problem with these complaints isn't that we are wrong or to think them. It's that we aren't really clear on what we are comparing. If we are going to compare writing to math, and if writing is so messy and subjective, so uncertain, then why compare it to something so clean as basic math? Why don't we think about writing in ways that makes it a bit more clear?

I propose that we do this. If we are going to compare writing to simple forms of math, we might argue that the five paragraph theme is roughly similar to algebraic equations. Plug ideas into the formula, run it, and you get predictable results. But if you move away from simple forms of writing into the place where writing becomes an act of discovery, then my student is right. You can write all day and not have a perfect paper. You might need to put it away, come back at it again a week later, think about what you've discovered, and go at it again in a new draft. You might repeat this process many times, the way that actual writers do. Then you might have something that more closely resembles the kind of problem solving that mathematicians do. I'm talking about the specialists in math who recognize that there are different ways to arrive at solutions, and they know how to come up with ways to describe, for example, how traffic jams happen, or an orbital flight that results in going to the moon.

Such a flight is not the result of any math I ever took. But it does resemble more closely the way I think about writing, and here is the problem. We think that high school writing and math should both be simple. Neither is, if we are teaching problem solving. If we are teaching students to think and to reflect that thinking in their writing, and not just teaching forms, then we are teaching them to think as rhetoricians. We are teaching them something that, were we to compare it, our closest kind of math might be something resembling calculus.

I'm not arguing that the comparison between writing and math is like comparing apples and oranges. I am suggesting that we haven't taken the comparison seriously enough. We haven't given writing its just due. We haven't respected our students or the seriousness of what it takes to write well.