Re: Wild Lunatic Ravings Against Formulaic Writing

[Wendy Smith <wesmith@ucsd.edu>]

Colin and All,
Here's one problem I see w/the 5P--it's not the "5 parts"  specifically,
but with the deductive reasoning:  when I ask my "Critical Thinking"
students what a particular author is arguing, they immediately look to the
first paragraph, when, in most published essays, the argument is stated
close to the end.  The first paragraph often contains a question, or a
description of a problem--not the argument.  I have a hard time getting
students to read critically and flexibly when they believe the thesis
ALWAYS goes at the beginning.  I wonder if they aren't sometimes reading
like your friend--if things aren't where they are "supposed" to be, the
student tosses the essay as "incoherent,"  "too difficult," or "badly
written."  Will the works of Montaigne be tossed into "an outbasket marked
OBLIVION"?

Does anyone else get the feeling that our goal of teaching students to
write structured essays and our goal of teaching flexible, critical
thinking are sometimes at odds?
Wendy Smith

>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
>>
>>
>>