Designing and Teaching Composition Courses

Designing and Teaching

Composition Courses

1

Teaching Writing as a Process

2

Using

The Little, Brown Handbook

3

Working with Student Writing

4

Using Collaborative Learning with the Handbook

5

Using Computers to Teach Writing

6

Teaching Writing to ESL Students

These chapters appear only in this Instructor’s Resource Manual and the Instructor’s Annotated Edition

2

Teaching Writing as a Process

WRITING AS A

HOW

Drawing on the results of three decades of research into the composing processes of writers, most writing instructors now emphasize thehowof writing. Although theorists such as Lester Faigley and Susan Miller have pointed out the limitations of trying to define systematically what happens when a writer sits down to compose a work, most writing teachers and their students have effectively adapted a focus on the processes through which students generate and revise their writing, rather than concentrating solely on a final product. This book is designed to support that focus on thehows

of writing.

Most writers agree that at least three components contribute to the processes they use most of the time:prewriting, the finding and exploring of ideas and the construction of plans for expressing them (in classical termi-nology,invention);drafting, getting the ideas down on paper and generating sentences about them; andrevising, reconsidering the ideas, the treatment they receive, the plans for expressing them, and the ways they are expressed (in classical terminology,arrangement, style, and to some extent,delivery).

Theories about the writing process have focused on the ways in which writers do the following:

■perceive and explore themselves and their worlds through the medium

of language;

■consider their subject matter as the occasion for interpretive analysis

and as the testing ground for ideas and hypotheses;

■respond to, understand, and to some degree, invent their audiences;

and

■position themselves in relation to writerly conventions, to institutional

restraints, and to communities within and outside of the classroom.

These assumptions are based on the theories outlined below.

WRITING AS AN EXPRESSIVE PROCESS

Many theories of the writing process from the 1960s and 1970s focused on its expressive content, the attempts of writers to use language to capture and articulate the unique vision of the writer. For instance, D. Gordon Rohman and Albert O. Wlecke argue that techniques such as meditative

ercises, journal keeping, and the composition of analogies (called “existen-tial sentences”) help writers find a personal truth in even the most abstract of subjects. They argue that such “prewriting” techniques lead in a smooth and linear fashion to drafting and revision as writers refine the expression of the truth they tell. This privileging of self-discovery, what is sometimes called the expressionistic or romantic view of composing, is also held by Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, William Coles, and Donald Murray, to name a few of its most influential proponents. Elbow argues for the efficacy of freewriting and drafting in helping writers explore ideas before worrying about structure and presentation. Macrorie encourages students to use “case histories” of past experiences and to work from direct observation in order to go beyond the obvious clichés, which he calls “Engfish” (because they stink of insincerity). Coles values prewriting because it allows students to explore multiple relationships to readers and subjects (what he calls “plural I’s”). Murray emphasizes aspects of prewriting that cultivate surprise, orig-inality, and new combinations of ideas which lead to personal discovery.

The expressionistic theory gives discovery of ideas primacy in the writ-ing process and sees the writer’s personal vision as more important than con-ventions and codes; its emphasis on pre- and freewriting is an attempt to give writers the power to control or even exploit conventions and expectations to convey an original vision. These beliefs have thus attracted criticism from those who believe that the teacher’s responsibility is to show writers how to become part of a community, not how to put themselves outside it. However, the expressionists’ contributions to our understanding of the formative stages of prewriting and drafting and their respect for students as writing colleagues have benefited many teachers and theorists. Ann Berthoff’s work is an interesting example of that influence; she draws on the expressionistic emphasis by stressing the power of the imagination to create relationships between ideas, but in “Recognition, Representation and Revision” she also develops an understanding of revision as a nonlinear part of the compos-ing process, an ongocompos-ing reconsideration of those relationships. Where many expressionists might insist that pre-writing generates the ideas, that revision is the process of getting them right, and that editing is the radically separate task of adjusting the etiquette of presentation (spelling, punctuation, and the like), Berthoff and others view revision as a recursive process, as the meaningful reconsideration and development of ideas articulated through the grammar of the paragraph and the sentence.

WRITING AS A COGNITIVE PROCESS

A second school of theories about the writing process is deeply rooted in psychology, particularly in studies of cognition. For suchcognitivetheorists, “protocols” (detailed descriptions of how a document is produced) and draft analyses play a key role. One of the earliest such cognitive studies is Janet Emig’sThe Composing Process of Twelfth Graders(1971), where she studies writing behaviors: how student writers find and develop their ideas. Drawing

on James Britton’s terminology, she finds that these processes differ with the audience: if students write for themselves (expressively), they are concerned with the presentation of ideas, but if students write for teachers (transaction-ally), they are concerned (even obsessed) with mechanical correctness. Emig’s technique of asking writers to compose out loud has also been used by Son-dra Perl in her studies of unskilled writers and by Carol Berkenkotter in her study of a professional writer’s composing processes. Nancy Sommers’s com-parisons of student and experienced adult writers show that experienced writ-ers come to value the development of ideas far more than mechanical correctness, whereas student writers’ concern with correctness and with the demands of the writing situation often impedes the development of ideas.

Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike also developed a cog-nitive theory of the writing process; however, theirs depends on the writer’s knowledge not of the audience but of the subject. Their “tagmemics” theory models cognitive efforts to know a subject; it focuses on how writers per-ceive a subject’s individuality, variability, and place in a larger system. These cognitive efforts should help writers find and develop new combinations of ideas. Like the romantic theories, tagmemics emphasizes prewriting and only discusses drafting or revision as it manifests writers’ developing un-derstanding of their subject matter.

The cognitivist position has been most fully expanded by Linda Flower, John Hayes, and their graduate students and colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University. They view the composing process as a series of decision-making strategies: planning texts, translating those plans into sentences, and revis-ing the texts produced to brrevis-ing them in line with the original (or reshaped) plans. Although Emig first suggested it, Flower and Hayes and their collab-orators have done a great deal to demonstrate the recursive and hierarchi-cal levels of writing processes, especially in the planning and revising stages of writing activities.

Cognitivists find linear expressionist models too simplistic; they argue that writers continually move back and forth between stages to adjust their plans. Like the expressionists, the cognitivists value personal expression highly, claim-ing it represents most validly an individual’s way of thinkclaim-ing. Cognitivists spend little time discussing the finished forms writing may take; it’s rare to see an en-tire piece of discourse reproduced in their discussions. More recently, they have been giving slightly more emphasis to the audience’s role in the cognitive work-ings of writers. But for cognitivists, the writer’s “brain work” and reflections on it remain paramount. This position has been challenged as an attempt to sys-tematize the complex cognitive processes of writers and their varying situa-tions. However, cognitive studies have arguably helped teachers to become more attentive to the varied composing processes of individuals and better able to respond to the particular challenges faced by student writers.

WRITING AS A SOCIAL PROCESS

Most recently, as theorists have focused on the social functions of and constraints on writing, studies of the writing process have broadened to

ex-4

amine the contexts in which writing occurs, to define the discourse commu-nities in which particular writing processes participate. This composition the-ory draws heavily from cultural studies practices by foregrounding issues of ethnicity, class, gender, and ability in the writing classroom. The changing demographics of college populations have also influenced this perspective. As more and more nontraditional students—older or returning, working class, of non-European origin, international—have entered the academy, teachers have been forced to change their expectations about the kinds of knowledge students bring with them. No longer can a teacher take for granted that stu-dents know what an essay looks like, or what “thesis and support” are, or how academics think. (Indeed, research conducted by Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford suggests that an unfamiliarity with the look of the printed page may be responsible for many student “errors.”)

Because of the traditional link between writing programs and English departments, one response to this situation has been to teach students the kinds of discourse that scholars trained in literature and its criticism value: journals, poetry, fiction, and literary analysis. But the “social-epistemic” the-orists, as James Berlin called them, have argued that the role of writing pro-grams is to prepare students to read and respond to the various specialized languages—academic, legal, governmental—that they might encounter.

The social theories of the writing process have two current focuses. Ac-cording to the political focus, represented by David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky, Patricia Bizzell, and others influenced to some extent by the Brazil-ian theorist Paolo Freire, awareness of the constraints of a discourse com-munity is politically liberating, potentially enabling, and revolutionary. If students can understand the constraints of that community and master them, they can come to control and change the community through their own dis-course. For theorists who believe this, discovery of the contexts in which stu-dents write and the constraints that govern those contexts comes before any other part of the writing process. In terms of classroom practice such theories emphasize a problem-solving format in which students often work with dis-cursive academic prose in peer-group settings and use revision and rereading to establish articulate positions within and against those discourses. Critics of liberatory pedagogy like Maxine Hairston (see Richard Fulkerson for a more recent critique) charge that this overtly political approach amounts to indoc-trinating students; proponents of the activist pedagogy contend that all peda-gogies, even apparently neutral ones, are in fact political.

Another socially focused theory sees writing as a fundamental tool for learning in all communities and at all curricular levels and attempts to fos-ter the teaching of writing beyond the limits of traditional writing programs. In particular, this focus is apparent in “writing-across-the-curriculum” (WAC) and “writing-across-the-disciplines” movements, which have achieved increasing success in the colleges where they have been imple-mented. Toby Fulwiler and Barbara Walvoord, two noted proponents of the movement, have both argued convincingly for the benefits of writing in-struction beyond the first-year courses. Some WAC supporters (Joseph Pe-traglia and David Smit, for example) favor abolishing general composition

altogether. Related “social construction” theories make the case that knowl-edge is achieved as a consensus among communities rather than as a hier-archical transfer of information from teacher to student. InCollaborative Learning: Higher Education, Interdependence, and the Authority of Knowl-edge, Kenneth Bruffee argues for collaborative student learning as the process through which students become members in their college commu-nities and in commucommu-nities of knowledge. While social constructionism has been critiqued for its goal of consensus on the grounds that it erases vital dif-ferences and competing discourses within communities, collaborative work has become an invaluable part of most classrooms (see for instance the works of Stewart and Sullivan). Other classroom applications of social the-ories include incorporating service learning (see Deans and Feldman) and using new technologies in writing courses. Specifically, the proliferation of new media, such as Web sites, instant messages, and blogs, is viewed as an opportunity for students to explore new genres (see Wysocki et al.) and to end the academy’s privileging of print (see Yancey). For more information on technology in the classroom, see Chapter 5, “Using Computers to Teach Writing.”

Ultimately, teachers generally adapt the theories and methods that make the most sense given the needs of their students and the shape of their institu-tional setting. The key effort of this book is to support a range of pedagogical emphases on the composing processes of writers and to help students under-stand rhetorical forms as flexible frameworks rather than as rigid formulas— as essential parts of a creative composing process.

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