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For Real Writing
Yes, yes, yes, Jeanne, I agree. As Lynn Bloom (Bloom, Lynn Z. "Freshman
Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise." College English 58
(October 1996): 654-675) and Penrose and Geisler (Penrose, Ann M.,
Geisler, Cheryl. "Reading and Writing Without Authority." CCC 45
(December 1994): 505-20) point out, the Western world tendency to promote
the academic essay (i.e. "the formal essay," " the English essay," "the
Five-paragraph theme") in the academy threatens to stymie thinking. For
too long, teachers have imposed artificial barriers -- this is "creative"
writing so it doesn't need a thesis or the traditional forms for
development; this is "academic" writing so it'd better have the expected
form. When writing is formulaic, we risk that thinking will also be
formulaic. I don't buy that "developmental writers" need the form,
either, as a sort of safety net underneath the trampoline of thinking and
writing. With years of teaching both high school and college,
developmental through honors levels of students, I find teaching the form
teaches the form, a fill-in-the-stencil exercise. It doesn't teach
writing. It doesn't promote thinking.
When we make comparisons to music composition or sculpting or drawing and
painting, I don't think teaching techniques of composing chords or shading
or perspective are the same as teaching the five-paragraph theme. The
equivalent in our field is more like struggling with variations in
sentence structures, working with variances for effect, shaping words and
the accumulation of them. Imagine having an artist teach you to paint by
giving you a paint-by-number canvas. This is more the equivalent of
teaching the traditional essay.
And it wasn't always this way. Ask Michel de Montaigne. Ask Addison and
Steele. Ask Annie Dillard or Terry Tempest Williams or Rick Bass.
Last September, I enjoyed working with Olivia Archibald and Denise
Stephenson presenting "Beyond the Rim of Traditional Essays: What Thelma
and Louise Learned at the Grand Canyon" in Park City (NWCA conference).
We grappled with participants about how a writing center can support
alternative writing even with faculty in far less enlightened subject
areas. No surprise that it was the tutors attending the session who
were more easily able to get beyond the hang-ups. Colleagues at
our college report that even in areas like Physical Therapy and Biology,
the rules are being broken and for the most part, if the writing is good
and "works," writers need to be less and less concerned with the usual
trappings. In our own field, I look to essays like Spooner and Yancey's
"Postings on a Genre of Email," Judy Ruiz's "Oranges and Sweet Sister
Boy," or a myraid of others for ways of writing, ways of thinking that
move beyond the singular, the one-thesis nailed to the wall of conviction
supported incontrovertibly by "proof."
And so you might muse to yourself, "if the writing is good. . . , ah,
there's the rub." But really, how good is the writing of undergraduate
students using traditional forms? It might be "correct," but as Jeanne
suggests below, it's often boring as hell. There's nothing at stake,
nothing we don't already know, nothing that moves into true scholarship
and nothing of working the brain beyond a couple of lousy sit-ups.
For my part, I think the questions are always far more interesting. I
want to see the writer sweat. (no wonder so many students see so little
use for mutliple-draft revisions)
But yeah, Jeanne, I hate seeing it happen. Most fortunately (to my way of
thinking) the young scholar in our house lives with a host of rebels and
will be quite unlikely to buckle under;-)
Katie
On Mon, 1 Jun 1998, Jeanne H. Simpson wrote:
> Suppose that you were a Martian. You came to earth in 1958 and visited an
> auto showroom for a little while.
>
> Quite possibly you would return to Mars and explain that earth vehicles
> had to have large tailfins and acres of chrome in order to function.
>
> That neither of these was a salient feature of an automobile might never
> occur to you unless someone suggested otherwise.
>
> I think that the 5-paragraph theme is a Martian automobile lesson, most of
> the time, reflecting something called "real academic writing" (oh
> Katie--doesn't it curdle your blood to think of teaching young 'uns how to
> write that stuff, knowing how nearly unreadable and uninteresting much of
> it is?) as understood by a person who was in the showroom for only a
> little while and who never really test drove the car. The pseudo-rules and
> facts about these exercises (and about paragraphs themselves, for that
> matter) have been understood as salient, completely missing the point of
> the exercise itself: it is an *exercise*, intended to focus on one or two
> specific skills.
>
> Jeanne Simpson
> csjhs@eiu.edu
>
> who just got back from a week's vacation and is enjoying a quiet afternoon
> before the summer session gears back up.
>
>
>