FoolsCap

Maybe the single worst pun yet this year.  I’m so ashamed.

On Hartwell’s Grammar-Rama:

p. 442: "the assumption that students will learn only what we teach and only because we teach"

More cautionary advice about assuming too little of one’s students.  Heed it.  Or not.  It’s your show, baby.

p. 452: Diagrams and stuff about definite/indefinite articles

I’ve worked with a few ESL students already in the Writing Center, and it’s true: choosing the right (if any) article is a very difficult process to learn.  (Prepositions are also funky.  Why should that be?)  I don’t really have much to say about this, but I was happy to see this issue explored, completely second nature to native English speakers but a cause of much confusion for ESL students.

p. 454: Concentric circles

Concentric circles (as mandalas) are a recurrent visual motif in Moby-Dick.  Was anyone wondering?  Now you know.

p. 455: Clear Only If Known

This raises an actual pedagogical issue for me.  I’ve had some students come in to the WC (that’s Writing Center, not water closet, btw) who are writing for a non-humanities course and I’m not quite sure how to advise them on content sometimes.  I can still help with mechanical issues, but I don’t know whether it’s worth noting for them that I don’t know what they’re talking about when they use phrases like "civil engineering" (It turns out to be bridges and stuff.).  Now, as a general reader without an engineering background, should I suggest to my student she add a sentence or two aobut what that means?  Or should I let it slide, assuming instead that her audience (presumably an engineering instrucutor) knows all about civil engineering?  COIK indeed.

p. 462: "It is, after all, a question of power. [. . . .] [T]he thrust of current research and theory is to take power from the teacher and give that power to the learner."

Again with power.  Oy.  Maybe I need to read more Foucault, bceause I remain unconvinced that writing is about power.  Maybe I’m willfully misunderstanding the issue.  Anyhoo, I agree with Hartwell in that he argues that grammar questions point to a power relationship between teacher/student in that whatever quirky little rules and idea I have about grammer can be excised to the detriment of a student’s writing, but qualitatively (by reading for error rather than content) and quantitatively (by risking his grade on my own grammatic neuroses).  That’s power there.

Responding to “Responding to Student Writing”:

p. 384: “We want to know if our writing has communicated our intended meaning [. . . .]”

I guess this raises questions about intentionality (one of my pet issues).  I suppose intentionality isn’t the dilemma it is in literature when commenting on freshman comp works, but. . .Our goal as pedagogues then, is to help novice writers communicating their meaning with greater  clarity?  I agree, with a reservation.

There’s been much discussion about the 5P theme in our little class, and it seems that clarity is one of its virtues.  Once you get down to that big ol’ thesis statement in the first paragraph, you know fo’ damn sure what the student is writing about.  But I fear that if clarity is our primary goal, we risk losing the opportunity to develop an interest in implication and ambiguity as valid rhetorical moves.  While I understand that implication/ambiguity do not in themselves preclude clarity, I fear that there’s a risk in sacrificing them to the totem of explicitness.

p. 385: “[. . .] [W]e comment on student writing [. . .] to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves [. . . .]”

This is why I described reading/writing as a symbiosis a a post or two back.  I think it follows that if you must read in order to write, writing will, in turn, help you become a better reader, of your own work and that of others.  Nothing much more to add to this one.

p 385: “Comments create the motive for revising.  Without comments from their teachers or from their peers, student writers will revise in a consistently narrow and predictable way.  Without comments from readers, students assume that their writing has communicated their meaning and perceive no need for revising the substance of their text.”

Is this true?  I disagree or have problems with each of these statements, and I will show you why.

Sentence One: Comments don’t motivate revision.  They guide revision, offer alternatives or suggestions, address unexplored questions, or ask for more acute analysis.  Grades motivate revision.  Will a student with a B+ revise his paper?  Maybe–but my guess is not many, unless it’s a required part of the assignment.  My suspicion is that most students (from what I hear from other GTAs) don’t have the investment in what they’re writing to revise unless it’s a matter of improving their score.  How we get them to make that investment is the real challenge of our pedagogy, so that comments do motivate revision for the sake of improving one’s writing–not for the sake of improving one’s grade.

Sentence Two: I think it is unfair to make this assumption about a sudent writer.  As we’ve discussed, teaching to dumb students produces dumb students, and this assumption here suggests that a student is incapable of seeing the need for revision on his own.  I particularly resent the suggestion that whatever a student does revise will be “narrow and predictable”.  I’ve turned in writing as an undergrad that wasn’t my best but still received good marks on it–and any revision I later decided to make was of my own accord, not because an instructor told me to.  Grr.

Sentence Three: Really more of the abve comment, I guess.  I think it’s a dangerous, limiting, and short-sighted assumption she makes here.

p. 391: “Our goal in commenting on early drafts should be to engage students with the issues they are considering and help them clarify their purposes and reasons in writing their specific text.”

Agreed. . .but I still don’t think Sommers really ever convince me that comments motivate revision.  I think comments function exactly as she says they do here.

One thing that Sommers never questions is writing as a process, and, given other things we’ve read, that sort of troubles me.  I mean, yes, of course, writing is a process, but every writer has her own idiosyncratic process; that is, no process is universal.  Therefore, I don’t think that the writing process is even as programmatic as this:

draft-comment-revise

And this is the model that Sommers seems to take for granted.  I rarely revise after submitting as assignment, but I do a lot of revision while I compose, moving things around, rereading what I’ve written and trying to answer the questions that that generates.  Granted, I may be an exception, but I’m sure there are some other students like me that see revision as something simultaneous with composition.  I guess what I’m circling here is whether we should assume comments are simply to guide revision or a way to extend the discourse (they can of course be both).

Which is to ask: does commenting on a paper automatically signal for the student “You must revise this according to my feedback” or can we use comments in order to say “Great job–here’s some things I thought about while reading?”  I’m not trying to force a binary here, but simply ask whether comments can be used discursively as well as editorially.

This is my response to Lester Faigley’s "Competing Theories" essay.  I couldn’t come up with a suitably inoffensive pun on his name, so I took the easy way out this time.

p. 529: "[. . .] [T]hinking was different from writing and antecedent to writing; therefore, teachers should stimulate students’ thinking by having them write journals, construct analogies, and, in the spirit of the sixties, meditate before writing essays."

Okay, so the meditation thing is sort of curious, but it seems like several of these practices are still in place.  All you need to do is substitute "blogs" for "journals." 

Actually, what I think I see here is sort of the beginning of the composition goals we’ve been talking about.  In Rohman and Wiecke’s working, thinking comes before writing (which makes sense), but their approach also seems to allow for thinking while writing. . .an approach that seems to fufill the goals of Corder’s generative ethos as well.  I think there’s something good here. . .I’m just not sure that I would be so quick to say that thinking comes before writing, bu that it rightfully takes place while you write and after you’ve read what you’ve written as well.

p. 534: Quoting Scardamalia: "’novice writers cannot be turned into experts simply by tutoring them in the knowledge expert writers have’ [. . .]".

I wonder what exactly this knowledge is, what form it takes.  I have a hunch that if you asked an expert writer, she could not tell you what makes her an "expert" but, rather, could tell you what makes sense for her writing and who/what she reads that has inspired her work.  Just as some of my colleagues have expressed reservations about the phrase "basic writer," I want to problematize "expert writer" in this context.  Simply because someone’s been published, say, does not mean they know how to make someone else’s writing better, or even that they, necessarily, are objectively "better" writers than someone else.  If it is true, as we see in Corder and many others, that there is no universal definition for "good writing," how can we speak of "expert writers?"  "Experienced" yes. . .but "expert?"

They can’t all be gems.

To whit:

p. ??: [The JStor copyright page]

I always check on the JStor pages to see when an article was originally published.  I do this for two reasons: First, I want to know if an article is recent so I have some understanding of current debates/discussions in comp theory.  Second, if the article is not current, I want to know how it fits into past/ongoing debates, so that (in the limited context of our course readings) I can begin to understand the history of contemporary issues, and what influenced those questions.  "Writing’s Dying" was published in 1960, and I see a lot of the issues raised here still haven’t been hashed out.

Does anyone still use the phrase "hashed out"?  I don’t normally use if even. . .where the Dickens did I pull that from?

p. 207: "That writing’s a way of seeing yourself coming back.  You know who you are partly through hearing yourself talk, getting responses to your words and behavior from others."

I just want to point out how much this echoes Spellmeyer, p. 726.  [If you’re not sure what I mean, click here.]  Actually, I also want to point out that this seems to be a trope that pops up again and again in a lot of the pieces we’ve read: that writing (at its best) is not so much a matter of the writer telling his reader something (say, we need bread) but rather a writer asking his reader to stop what he’s doing for a few pages, come on over, and hash out some ideas with him (why is it we need bread?).

p. 208: "Recognize that the kids aren’t used to writing."

Obviously, there’s echoes of Bartholomae here, but I also want to question this a bit.  Now, I grant that I’m fast approaching my tenth year out of high school (Cousino Patriots rule!!), but I imagine (hope) that the state of writing in secondary ed has improved since 1960.  I certainly remember doing a lot of writing in high school, not just in my English classes but in history, health, psych, and poli sci as well.  I was a member of the second year of students to take the short-lived High School Proficiency Test, which was, like, 50% writing.  Things can only have become better, right?  Even the SATs have a writing portion now.

So: let’s assume that students are doing more writing pre-university today than they were 46 years ago.  Why, then, does it seem that writing hasn’t improved?  Now, I loved my AP English teacher, so no insult to  her, but maybe what hasn’t improved is the quality of English/comp instruction.  Perhaps our high school comp colleagues aren’t making the same comments we’ve been thinking about making in responding to student work, or maybe (due to the more acute scrutiny to which they are subject) they don’t have the opportunity to focus on more qualitative issues in student comp and are obliged to focus on producing "correct" (as opposed to "good") writing.  There is, too, my guess that they simply don’t have the time to put the energy asked of us into responding to student work (or to engage in the debates we’re trying to understand), assuming that most high school comp teachers probably teach what, 5-6 classes a semester with 25-35 students in each session?  That’s a heck of a lot of reading. . .I think a certain fatigue is only natural.

p. 208: "Let ‘em know early that real writers didn’t learn by reading somebody’s handbook to English but by studying the big hitters. [. . . .]  Learn the common things by your own observation.  Then develop your own style."

Ah!  As if in answer to my cries in the night!  A recognition of the symbiotic relationship of reading and writing!

I think this might also explain why 1020 syllabi are constructed the way they are.  We could simply just lecture at our students every week, have them diagram sentences, circle gerunds and the like and tell them that by doing so they’ll become better writers.

Bologna.  [It really works better if you write "Baloney."  Alas.]  There’s an implicit statement being made by teaching writing through reading, and it’s the one that Macrorie makes explicit here.  Personally, I think I’m a better-than-average writer (Have to keep up the appearance of modesty at least.) not because the muses whisper into may ear when I sit down to write, but rather because I read and read and read.  I’m not willing to suggest a causal relationship between reading and writing, but I think it would be foolhardy to overlook the presence of the relationship the two do share.

p. 208: [George’s rant about increasing class size.]

This is of particular note to us, I feel, since we work and teach at a University dedicated to an open enrollment policy.  (Those of you who haven’t seen the University’s Strategic Plan should take a look at it–it’s very revealing.) By 2011, the Wayne administration want to increase enrollment to something like 40,000 students.  There’s cities in the US with smaller populations than that.  Open enrollment also means that not all of our incoming students will have an AP or college prep background on their high school transcripts, which in turn means more work for us: not simply numerically (i.e., more students), but qualitatively–that is, it will take more than a few comments on the first few papers to get our students producing college-level compositions.  And this task they assign to novice teachers who are themselves trying to figure the whole composition thing out.

Hrm.

p. 209: "Help comes from hurt sometimes."

I just picked this sentence out to sort of represent George and Ed’s debate about peer review.  I’ve mentioned before my reluctance to incorporate p.r. into my own pedagogy, but as Macrorie discusses it here, I’m starting to reassess that position.  Reading this, I realized another problem about p.r. (at least from my experience): fellow students just aren’t cuttthroat enough to say the things that sometimes need to be said.  Or perhaps, they themselves don’t see the more substantial problems in writing that we do. . .so while they may be able to say to their peers: "I think you mispelled ‘bazooka’", they might not think to ask "why do you think Derrida should be strapped to the front of a bazooka."  I guess my biggest fear about p.r. is that it could devolve into (and I don’t intend to criticize students with this metaphor) the blind leading the blind.  Well. . .the inexperienced leading the inexperienced would be a kinder way to phrase it.

Sometimes I luck out and the Smiths puns just write themselves.

Re: "Phenomenology"

p. 408: "I was told that the definition of error had been taken from a popular handbook, on the assumption, I guess, that that answered the question."

This passage nagged me, and I’m still not quite sure why.  Here’s what it might be: Williams here is plainly dismissive of the researchers use of a handbook definition, and it seems like a cheap shot to me.  (Perhaps this is why the researcher is unnamed?)  It’s cheap because, as Williams demonstrates in the very next paragraph, there is no concrete definition of error (or of what errors should concern us) within comp instruction; therefore, the handbook-researcher’s choice is just as arbitrary as Williams’s own.  Further, I think I it might be important that the researcher was using a "popular" handbook; if the definition of error is set by an instructor’s preference in handbooks, then surely it indicates something about that instructor’s pedagogy and what errors he/she feels are worth addressing.  I guess maybe it just really bugged me because I thought the rest of the essay was pretty balanced, insightful, and a great guide for how we might want to address errors in student writing–this cheap shot at another’s pedagogy seemed out of place to me.

Um. . .that’s really the only specific note I had about the piece.  I tended to agree with (what I understood to be) his central argument though: If an error does not interrupt the reader’s understanding of the piece. . .let it go.  [I realize I’m simplifying a bit, but. . .] 

One final question: Are we allowed to telll a student he is a "Simply illiterate, horrible oaf" or that his work is an "atrocity, garbage composed of detestable vulgarity?"  ‘Cause that would be cool.