what's in an age or a name?

[Katherine Fischer <kfischer@keller.clarke.edu>]

On Wed, 3 Jun 1998, Robin R Wright wrote:

> Katie,
> 
> I hope I didn't offend.  I am not as young as I wish I were (my children
[snip]


Heh, heh, oh Robin, offend *me* about age?  Never.  I'm still not sure how
old or young I am except that I live with three teenagers who like to keep
reminding me.  No offense here at all.

Meanwhile, back at the cow pasture and cornfield, I've been re-reading
Carl Klaus's and William Zeiger's excellent essays  in Chris Anderson's
_Literary Nonfiction_.  In our discussion the past week about structure
and formulaic writing, I think one of the things that most disturbs me is
the use of the term "essay" for the strictly structured writing being
described. 

In many ways that writing is more like "outline" or "discourse written
with Regularity and Method" (Addison's label) rather than "essay," which,
of course, comes from the French "essai," to try, to attempt. Rather
than simply being a concern with semantics, however, my concern is that
the widespread use of the term "essay" as though most of us agree on one
main form within the composition classroom or the academy at large implies
a singular credibility to that one form.  This practice tends to deny or
at the very least mitigate the importance of more rangy, exploratory,
often mirthful or even partially fictive ways to go about writing
academically.

I think the formulaic essay as we use it in colleges is more akin to
"article" whose point is to answer, to inform, to solve.  Although that
kind of writing has its place, the wholesale use of it as THE MAIN WAY,
particularly in institutions whose mission is learning and thinking, can
be terribly limiting I believe.

I think of how like articles much of the writing is that we ask students
to do in colleges.  Articles rooted in facts and statistics and
certainties.  Articles grounded in didacticism and proof and unwavering
orderliness.  Articles in which the outcome of these things will be the
establishment of the writer as authority.  Writers as authority?  In
undergraduate institutions?  What a load.

I read of Hoagland and Montaigne, Johnson and Chesteron and Kazin and
Addison and Lamb and Espstein and Dillard all prizing the freedom for
thinking offered in real essays, and the variety.  As Klaus notes the
essayists "affirm what they also refer to as the 'freedom' of the essay --
its independence from the strictures and structures that govern other
forms of discourse.  . . . Strictly speaking, then, they seem to be
portraying it as an antigenre, a rogue form of writing in the universe of
discourse" (160).

I consider the years I spent teaching students to write thesis statements
and perfectly balanced paragraphs, each relating directly to a perfectly
formed thesis statement (a three-part one is best, of course).  I think of
how I lead them down the primrose path, teaching them to ignore the
thorns of complex thinking and meandering and positing and asking and
testing, to certainty.  And yet, out of the other side of my mouth I could
hear myself saying things like "What good is a 'yes' answer?  It's just a
dead end.  It stops the journey, the thinking."  I think of what a
disservice it was to sell students on the notion that thinking and
learning is that neat and tidy and compactable.

The more I analyze the outcome of such formulaic writing and the
predominance of it in colleges and universities, the more I realize we
channel students into one specific kind of thinking by doing this and by
giving it such prominence.  It is a kind of thinking that doesn't even
serve the scientist all that well for long since her role is to continue
to ask more questions and search for how her previous answers were wrong,
not for how certainly right they are.

I used to be grateful if students had learned well the basics of formulaic
writing back in high school, because, I thought, then I could "build on
this" in the college classroom.  I don't believe that anymore.  I find
that particularly those students who have "succeeded" (received A's on
papers) with it tend to initially feel terribly threatened by the
invitation to write any other way.  I find them also terribly defensive
about the quality of their writing as long as it's got a thesis they can
point to as "proof" of good writing.  I find that such students generally
are satisfied with the safety of knowing absolutely they know how to do
this and there's just nothing much to be learned, certainly not as much
as I hope for them to learn.

I remember when our son came home from h.s. one day angry at his AP
English teacher, "Can you believe this, mom?  Mr. B. gave me a C- on this
paper and wrote on it 'nice structure, Jason, but this paper needs to go
so much further.'"  After reading his paper, I told Jason I agreed with
Mr. B. Jason had easily received A's on his papers all through school
becasue a) he could write lovely corrrect sentences;  b) he had a big
vocabulary;  c) he could dance the form around any teacher's eyes. Because
he struggled for a few more weeks getting the hang of how to actually
think deeply within the writing of an essay, Jason was thoroughly invited
into the kind of learning and richness writing beyond formulas offers.
Could he write a formulaic paper that really says something worhtwhile?
Of course.  But the focus on form tends to give students something too
easy, something too meaningless upon which to satisfy their understanding
of good writing.  And I have frequently seen even very basic writers
succeed beautifully without the pre-planted form.

In the discussion of using a form to get students started, I was thinking
about the walkers we used to use with near-toddlers some years ago.  The
thinking was that if the baby wasn't walking by ten months, parents should
plop her in a walker and this would help support her initial steps and
then we'd be able to take away the walker and she'd walk -- voila!  Along
the way, doctors concluded, this wasn't a good idea.   Babies whose
muscles weren't yet ready to support the activity of walking were being
forced into walking too early and thus their development was actually
harmed.  The walker also tended to throw off a true sense of what
balancing is and the wheels on those contraptions gave a faulty sense of
speed, researchers claimed.  In our own observations with raising five
children, the two raised with walkers walked no sooner nor surer than the
three without.  I suspect that those of us who learned to write without
strict forms are able to write as well as those who had them, too.  
Of course beyond all this, there were a number of serious accidents with
babies in untended walkers toppling down flights of steps.  I think the
application of strict formulas for writing works pretty much the same way
with writers regardless of their levels of ability.  I cannot afford to
spend so much time teaching a structure in the hopes of teaching writing
anymore than I would focus on day after day of teaching grammar in the
hopes of teaching writing.

Java, more java. . . 
Katie