Wild Lunatic Ravings Against Formulaic Writing

[Kevin Davis <kdavis@mailclerk.ecok.edu>]

I can't believe it.  I just returned from Paris, so I'm coming 
late to this discussion, but I cannot believe we're even 
having it.  Maybe I went through some time warp on the
airplane and I've landed back in 1968; that was about the
last time formulaic writing had any defenders.  I'll limit my 
comments to four:

1. The whole idea of a five-paragraph piece comes, 
somewhat bastardized, from Aristotle.  But there are three
key points to Aristotle's suggestion: (a) he was making 
speeches, not writing; (b) he was limiting his discourse to
argumentation and said nothing about other types; (c) he
regularly broke his own rule and, in other discussions 
of arrangement, suggested that discourse follow other
patterns.  Hence, the use of the structure is grounded
on out-of-context comments made well before the 
written word had begun to have impact.  Suggestions
that essays have some "natural" form, like sonnets or
symphonies, are based on these out-of-context comments
from Aristotle and have no basis in reality (check the 
dictionary: structures are given for sonnets and 
symphonies, but not for essays).

2. The form limits essays, for all practical purposes, to 
between 350 and 500 words.  Is that all the writing we
expect students to ever do?  Are we not doing them a 
terrible disservice by teaching them to use a form with
such limited use when other approaches (rhetorical 
problem solving, for example) have much wider applications?

3. Formulaic writing doesn't work and isn't "real."  Most of
the research on this was done in the  '70s.    Start with 
Emig's "Composing Process of Twelfth Graders" (1971)
and Meade and Ellis's study which demonstrated that the
methods of development taught in textbooks do not 
explain the patterns professionsl writers actuall use 
(English Journal, 1970).  You want to teach students to
write, sentence combining works better (Daiker, Kererk and
Morenberg, CCC 1978); free writing works better (Clifford, 
RTE 1981);  structured courses in pre-writing work better
(Rohman and Wlecke, ERIC 1964); simply writing, lots of it,
works better (Kinneavy, 1979).  And, as Rose pointed out
in 1980, the form-centered approach encourages students
to attain at the lowest levels (CCC).

4. When my son was a junior in high school, his teacher 
required the 5-P structure. One day, Nathan arrived in
chemistry class, where he regularly wrote his essays, 
 to discover that seven of his classmates
(in addition to himself) had forgotten to write their 5-P 
essays the night before.  Nathan then wrote, in a single
hour, 8 5-P essays, which were then copied by the other
errant students, earning seven As and one B in the 
process.  This is really the kind of work we expect from
our college students, 8 minute essays?

Form-centered approaches to writing have been shown
for nearly 30 years to be ineffective ways of teaching, 
grounded in misrepresented phliosophy and a lack of 
understanding of how writers really write.  And I cannot
believe that a bunch of writing professionals would even
be entertaining this topic at this time.  There is not one 
shred of empirical evidence which suggests that the form-
centered approach to teaching writing is either effective
or useful.

I hope this wasn't more straw-man, Carl.  But it's the best
I can do on the spur of the moment.  

And springtime in Paris is something to sing about, if 
you were wondering.

kevin