Re: Wild Lunatic Ravings Against Formulaic Writing

["Colin D. Hester" <chester@brain.uccs.edu>]

I can't believe it.  I just returned from Missoula, MT--which is,
according to John Updike and "Paris Match" the new Paris--so I'm coming
late to this discussion, but I can't believe that anyone is suggesting
that there is no formula to ALL writers' successful writing.

Magazine pieces are constructed on the classic (as opposed to classical)
5-part formula: Hey!-You-See-So-Ha!  This may mean 5 paragraphs
("People") or 500 ("The New Yorker"), but it's a five-part formula that
apprentice magazine writers quickly realize is the fastest way to craft
saleable articles.  For more info on this subtly beautiful formula,
visit http://leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu/org/occ/logs3/0074.html.

Let's see: oh, novels.  The classic 5-part formula for novels--employed
slavishly by W. Shakespeare--allows for the perfect unity of pace and
proportion.  (I know, I know, the Act divisions were added by later
editors, but any careful reading of Hamlet, Lear, or Macbeth will show how
the plays can be quickly divided into five uncannily-the-same-length
sections.  And yes, S. wrote plays, not novels.)  See for yourself: take
any published novel.  Divide its pages into fifths, inserting paper clips
if necessary.  What you will have--if as a work of art it succeeds--is a
neat division of introduction, complication, crisis, resignation, and
resolution.  Speaking personally, my own first novel wallowed like a
sailing ship with a sark's bow, a lerret's amidships, and a galleon's
stern until I drydocked it and refitted it following the blueprint
laid out by the 5-part pace/proportion formula.

Finally (and this is the one I use to great affect and effect with my comp
students) movies (films, as they're called in college classrooms).  And
movies/films originate in screenplays and a screenplay is THE most rigidly
adhered to of formulas.  I had a friend in grad school who read scripts
for Micheal Eisner (hey, if you're going to name-drop, name drop).  In
Hollyrock, all screenplays are read by producers' readers thusly: the
reader reads the title then immediately flips to page three and runs her
finger to the bottom, and if she there does not find a line of dialogue
spoken by the main character that states the larger question that the film
will explore, she fires the screenplay into the outbasket marked OBLIVION;
if such a line of dialogue is there, she flips at once to page ten, runs
her finger to the page-bottom (not the middle of the page or even the
two-thirds mark, but the very bottom) in search of the main character's
line of dialogue that will give the specific task he or she will face in
the film; next comes a flip to page 29 for the first plot point; and so
on.  My point is, I tell my students, that such rigid adherence to formula
has indeed given us Armageddon, but it's also given us Chinatown.  (And
here, of course, they look at me with blank stares, until I say, Okay,
okay, Saving Private Ryan, then.)

What I'm arguing, then, is that formula in writing does not necessarily
result in FORMULAIC writing.  Formula provides the sum of a work--a
magazine article, a novel or play, a movie or film--with the 
same structure that the common subject/verb/object formula for sentences
provides--the same structure that the order of letters in words provides
each and every namow or nam (oops!) when she or he sits down at the
keyboard or picks up a pencil.  One of my U of M/Missoula teachers
described writing as a blind tight-rope walk over the Niagara gorge while
juggling 19 live chainsaws.  If it is, then the five-paragraph/part essay
formula allows my students five less chainsaws they have to worry about.
And that to me, and to them, is worth it.

Cheers,

Colin Hester
   





> 
> 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
> 
> 
>