Re: Against Formulaic Writing -Reply

["Jeanne H. Simpson" <csjhs@ux1.cts.eiu.edu>]

Friends

I seem unable to keep my yap shut about this issue. I ask your indulgence.

I object to focusing on the form, specifically in this instance the 5-P
essay, as the problem.  It is a form precisely the same way a Greek
tragedy is a form, a sonnet is a form, a lab report is a form. To toss out
the form and blame it for various problems is to heave out the tub and
soap along with the baby and the bathwater.  

I remember distinctly the moment when I realized that I could write an
essay in the same way as I could do syllogisms in symbolic logic
class.  And for a while, all my essays were syllogistic.  I mention this
because I think the real problem here is not at all to worry about the
imagined iniquities of the t-P essay but to get inside the head of the
student and find out what is going on there.

Here's a scenario from my attempt to imagine the student coming to the
writing center and being told that that 5-P draft essay needs work.  The
student has used a form that his/her high school teacher pounded into
his/her skull.  Oh, sure, often with absurd parameters--16 word sentences,
and what not.  But the student has learned to trust this form as a means
to get through and has been told, firmly and repeatedly, that the form is
what is expected in college.  Then, a writing teacher in college pops
him/her for writing a predictable, unimaginative "canned" essay using the
form his/her high school teacher declared was expected.  Instead, the
student is urged to rebel, to do something different.

If I were a really bright student, I might say, yeah, ok, you're right and
hallelujah now I can say what I think.  But if I were a middling student,
one among the many, many who struggled through high school English, half
mystified by all the rules about grammar and punctuation and the opacities
of antique British poetry, I don't know that I would rejoice.  I think I
would despair, thinking, well, here is confirmation that English teachers
delight in changing the rules on me, that I will never get it.  Just tell
me what I have to do.  Risk-taking and seeking freedom of expression is
not going to be attractive to this student.  I am trying to imagine why
this student should trust me more than that h.s. teacher who provided some
very clear ground rules, even if they were absurd.  Just because I say so?
Just because I can call myself "doctor?"  How would I feel if someone told
me that much of what my high school teacher had taught me was wrong?  Would
that motivate me to take risks?  I don't think it would.

And why did the teacher assign the 5-P theme in the first place?  Because
it provides a way to get to the concept of a thesis (which is, after all,
a profoundly important concept in western thought), a way to demonstrate
what evidence and arguments are.  The three center paragraphs are numbered
three instead of two to help the writer provide sufficient support--the
same way a triangle is a stronger shape than two lines.  There is logic
and purpose here, long obscured by emphasis on details that are not really
salient.  

I would not ever tell a student to abandon this form.  I would try to find
ways to make its logic more apparent.  I would try to offer the student a
way to expand it, find variation, contrast (all those awful things that
the modes contain).  If we find evidence of bad teaching in a student's
past, one of our first problems, as in medicine, is to do no further harm.
And that, I submit, requires some caution and careful analysis.

Jeanne Simpson
csjhs@eiu.edu