Personal Investment

From Pre-Writing, "We described the entire activity called 'writing' as a person's transformation of the events of his life into experienced conceptual structures revealed in language for the sake of his own self-actualization and for communication with other persons through commonly shared patterns of meaning."

I believe in structure in a writing curriculum. Structure is your foundation. It's what you build first, so that later your creation won't come crashing down around your ears. Grammar is important because it is a method of expression and also a connection between a writer and her audience, and therefore deserves time and attention. I also believe in pre-writing and the outline. Structuring an argument, providing argument support, and ensuring logical execution are easier to visualize as new writers with structure supporting it. So yes, I like structure, and rules, and form.

But once your foundation is built, you enter less certain territory. Rhetoric, creativity, and theory in writing require human evaluation. We can tell our students what to think, and that may stick for an hour, 3 weeks, or years. But what we really should be doing is encouraging that human evaluation from our students. We should give them the critical thinking skills to take those areas of thought on writing and learn to deconstruct them for the tools they need. Then, using rhetoric, creativity, and theory along with their own experiences and beliefs, they can build their own creations in which they are personally invested.

A structured argument will always be important because it’s the discourse most often used in daily life, and education should have a practical application. However, I think it’s important to expose students to a wide variety of textual forms, not only to make them aware of the ranges of human expression, but also to allow them opportunities to find their own expression. A balance of structure and free-form writing allows a range of expression while providing stability to that foundation. In short, I think balance is important.

Essentially, all these elements are used to give students the tools they need. But the experience and insight they each bring to the table personalizes the writing process and makes it unique. Whether they are writing for scholarly recognition or to tell a story they need to be invested in the final product and not just regurgitating rules and structure. At this point I don't know exactly how you do that, yet. But I'm personally invested in figuring it out.

Make Them a Part of the Learning

The main thing I took away from the Research in Composition excerpt - besides the fact that I never, ever want to do formal scientific research - is the overwhelming number of variables that have to be considered in the teaching and learning of composition: the writer variable, the assignment variable, the rater variable, the colleague variable, the rating method variable, and in general controlling all those variables. So why is this relevant if I never plan to research this subject? Because these are factors that we as teachers will have to deal with every day in and out of the classroom. (And I write this as a future teacher.) However, I'm primarily interested in the writer and assignment variables for the purposes of this little blog here.

"Often referred to as measures of writing ability, composition examinations are always measures of writing performance..." We don't evaluate what composition and rhetoric skills the student contains, as if they were a jar that we fill up, but rather what skills they allow consciously or unconsciously to pour out. We have to fill them up first, but we must also teach them how to give back what they've been taught in the most effective and successful manner.

The topics we choose as assignments should be chosen carefully, as they will affect the performance of the student. Disinterest and unfamiliarity could produce poor writing, consistently if the topics are not varied and some attempt made to connect them to students' lives. The diverse population also affects these topics, as everything from maturity level to socioeconomic backgrounds may need to determine at least in part which topics are rejected and which are assigned.

But this topic selection for maximum interest and writer performance seems easier said than done. How do you get students to care about the assignment if they're fundamentally disinterested anyway? For that I turn to the excerpt from Pre-Writing: The Construction and Application of Models for Concept Formation in Writing. The authors' conclusion is mainly that what the student is asked to do in many composition classes consists of regurgitating rules and vocabulary for the edification of the teacher, which doesn't involve the student and is therefore a pointless exercise. "He is not essentially engaged as a human being in what he is doing because the only motivation he is made aware of is extrinsic: he must write correctly and effectively because the teacher and society commands him to."

Most students in composition classes today, I'm guessing, are not planning to become English teachers. They are checking off a box on their transcripts in order to move on to what they are truly interested in, whatever that may be. So maybe we start off a composition class by discovering what those interests are and then demonstrating how writing is used in those other disciplines, how it is crucial for communication and advancement, and how the student can use the class to advance their chosen interests. Already you've involved the student in their own learning process.

I agree wholeheartedly with Pre-Writing's promotion of writing as a self-actualizing experience and that finding methods to encourage that process will only increase students' willingness to engage in it. I do, pragmatically, acknowledge that it's easy to lose sight of that goal when demonstrations of calculable gains in knowledge and expertise are necessary, when students are unwilling to learn, and when the teacher is fatigued by endless composition classes. But we have to seek that balance if we're to provide students with the communication tools necessary to successfully embrace their place in society.