When the cure is worse than the disease . . .

A publisher that I have worked with before contacted me last week. She asked me to write a unit with activities that teach “voice” to middle school students. Yet, she added, “I don’t even think that voice can be taught in isolation, but this is what teachers keep asking for and I’d like to have something to give them.” Certainly, this was a strange request to write something for someone who doesn’t “believe” in what you are writing. It is also an interesting illustration about the way things get taught and published: Teachers feel pressured to teach something by test, administrators or standards. They beg publishers for helpful materials. Publishers create materials and then more people start teaching that same thing.

This interesting real-life scenario of teaching a piece of writing in isolation reminded me of Mike Rose’s essay “Language of Exclusion.” He explores the medical inspiration on the realm of remedial writing, which is based in the evolution of how learning disabilities were diagnosed and “treated” and the increasing access to education. Rose explains that the term “remedial” has its roots in the medical and can be “connected to disease and mental defect” (594). The word was initially used when talking about people with specific neurological issues and has widened to encompass those with learning disabilities to those who are regular students performing below average in content areas.

Beyond this etymological connection, there is also an historic association between the medical and educational fields. Rose suggests this was appealing to a scientifically minded society in the 1920s and 30s. To illustrate, Rose quotes a textbook, Modern Methods in Written Examinations: “Teaching bears a resemblance to the practice of medicine. Like a successful physician, the good teacher must be something of a diagnostician . . . after a careful diagnosis he is able to prescribe intelligently the best remedial or corrective measures” (595).

This diagnostic aura influenced (and still does) the teaching of writing. As Rose explains it, “The theoretical and pedagogical model that was available for ‘corrective teaching’ led educators to view writing problems within a medical paradigm. Thus they set out to diagnose as precisely as possible the errors (defects) in a student’s paper” (595). He even explains that in the 1930s that they used the label “sick sections” to highlight writing sections that needed work. This clinical approach to writing instruction seeks to isolate problems and cure them. Teachers are led to believe that they can fix writing by zeroing in on a problem, prescribing a curative work sheet on “voice” or “sentence fluency,” and voila! Thus, students and teachers believe that by improving the defective parts, they will construct a successful whole.

David Russell, in his essay “American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement,” questions this isolationist approach to writing instruction, “This narrow conception of writing and learning fit well with the industrial model American schools adopted. Progress could be measured in the number of errors reduced per dollar invested, and students could be tracked and taught according to their ‘deficiencies.’ Thus, writing instruction past the elementary school was viewed as mere remediation of deficiencies in skill rather than as a means of fostering a continuously developing intellectual and social attainment” (153-154). When we, as Russell suggests, emphasize the diagnosis of errors, we create the illusion that writing is merely an act of error reduction, rather than a means of communication and discovery and learning.

The investigative work done by Mina Shaughnessy illustrates that emerging writers view the act of writing through this narrow scope of reducing errors. Shaughnessy, in her “Introduction to Errors and Expectations,” writes that basic writers see, “academic writing as a trap, not a way of saying something to someone . . . exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn’t know . . . he is aware that he leaves a trail of error behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while writing” (391). When we view writing as something to be fixed, error becomes the obsessive focus of both student writer and writing teacher. And, ironically, the unintentional side-effects of such cures render the student “hopelessly tangled” (391). Shaughnessy provides an example of a basic writer whose sentence disintegrates from simple to incoherent, as the student is immobilized by an error-focused compulsion.

Working on problems in isolation creates an overemphasis on details at the expense of the larger picture—of ideas, content and communication. Nancy Sommers’s exploration of revision strategy in both emerging and experienced writers shows that students narrowly focus on the details and forget or feel overwhelmed by the broader scope of writing. She explains, in her essay on “Revision Strategies,” that students “concentrate on particular words apart from their role in the text” (326). She says that students “do what they have been taught in consistently narrow and predictable ways” and that “the students do not have strategies for handling the whole essay” (327).

These are the dangers that we face when we choose to teach writing in an isolated, prescriptive, clinical way. We risk an obsessive focus on error and details that distracts us from the bigger picture of writing as an act of discovery, communication and learning. Of course, this is exactly the solace I found in the promise of Progressive Education, as discussed last night in Erin’s presentation on John Dewey.

Now with all of this being said, am I’m going to write the unit on teaching voice? Of course I am. Getting paid to write is always a delightful proposition. But, in defense of my ideals, I am going to include an introduction that explains the contradictions of teaching “voice” in isolation.

**By the way, I know that the majority of class was skeptical about Progressive Education. Here is a link to the school my children attend (www.psas.ws). It is very much based on the ideals of Progressive Education, while still manages to be academically rigorous.

Samuel T., how I love thee!

I try to be open minded and unconventional (as unconventional as a married mother-of-three can be), yet I judge men of history when they are not good family men, abandoning their wives for a tortured relationship with opium and touring Europe. So, I started with negative feelings toward Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I also consider myself a great lover of poetry—all poetry except hard-core gangsta rap and Romantic poetry. With my disdain for Romantic poets and bad husbands, I expected to dislike Coleridge. Call me a slob, but my mind was nearly shut on the subject of him.

Yet, in reading Rex Veeder’s essay “Coleridge’s Philosophy of Composition: An Overview of a Romantic Rhetorician,” I became inspired—not Coleridge-defined inspiration, but at the very least, excited. Speaking of inspiration, I agree with Linda Flower that Coleridge’s theory of inspiration could be harmful to the ideals of composition teaching, which believe writing can actually be taught not divined. When we value lightning bolt inspiration, we make writing seem mysterious, inaccessible and magical. This historic notion of inspiration is likely the biggest cause of “writer’s block” throughout the centuries. Yet, if Coleridge was bi-polar, as some modern thinkers have suggested, he probably did experience fits of mania, posing as inspiration.

With all of these strikes against Coleridge, I still find much to celebrate in Veeder’s estimation of him. Coleridge advocates for the personal. He, according to Veeder, believes that “the composing act, therefore, has a personal and a social dimension. It requires the composer to examine personal insight and to research and observation” (23). Further, Coleridge privileges personal knowledge. He says, “No knowledge could be acquired without subjective influence” (24). He values both the intimate and the intuitive and believes that the writer serves as a conduit between the intuitive and the objective. Veeder writes, “Composition is an intimate act, tentative and exploring, where the composer reveals a sustained and personal involvement in both the subject and the process of discovering the implications of the subject’s relationship to writer and audience” (26).

He acknowledges that composing can be a non-linear process. “Coleridge’s favorite metaphor for the composing process is the spiral . . . if we were to visualize Coleridge’s method, we would have to make extensive use of concentric circles, spirals, and loops” (26). Veeder also writes, “The structure of the essay would suggest a looping activity rather than a linear one, where the writer digresses often, but brings the subject of digression back to the central concern of the essay” (27).

And, he, of course, encourages the presence of the creative in writing. He applies the Romantic emphasis on imaginative thinking onto the composing process, and he even devises his own map of imaginative thinking. His writer-ly life is punctuated with a wide variety of genres, from poetry to sermons, from essays to criticism. Coleridge also believes that as we create as writers, “our habits of thinking and composing create who we are” (28).

These ideals of the personal, the non-linear, and the creative are recognized as values of more modern composition theorists, like Wendy Bishop, Gordon Rohman, Ken Macrorie, Ann Berthoff. He seems to have much in common with feminist theorists who write about oppressive composition practices that require the suppression of the self and of the personal, and thus, erase a diversity of voices from our communal discourse. For so long, we have compartmentalized writing in terms of head vs. heart, objective vs. personal, academic vs. creative. Coleridge’s theories of writing blur these distinctions.

He also values diversity: “Coleridge’s great metaphor for composition is the journey outward from the center of the self in order to embrace diversity and bring difference into harmony with the self” (22). Veeder writes of Coleridge’s thoughts on composition methodology, “Practicing this kind of composition forms the habits Coleridge felt were necessary for an individual to interact with a diverse society: suspension of judgement, the ability to reflect, the ability to speculate and compare, the ability to act on ideas and not appetites” (28).

Quite possibly, despite his sappy poetry, Coleridge was a man who lived before his time.

The Lovely Language Arts in Four Parts

Language arts is a dusty word for me, conjuring up visions of grammar exercises, spelling sentences and inadequate excerpts of stories found in clunky reading textbooks. (It is hard to not also think about chalk-encrusted teachers, institutional green walls and asbestos tiles, or scrawny pimply bra-snapping boys.) Yet, last week, Dr. Hugh Burns blew the dust off of my middle school memories. He spoke about language arts, stating he loved all four aspects: reading, writing, listening and speaking. While this might not strike you as being especially profound, it resonated with me. Actually, the resonance was exactly what I liked about it. I get the feeling that Dr. Burns is good at packaging things, and this statement made the language arts seem like a nice poetic package.



Maybe I’m a bit slower than an English graduate student should be, but I was grateful to be reminded of the big picture that encircles our field of study. Because what was wrong with the language arts languishing in my memory, it was all about chunks, parts and pieces. Suddenly, thinking of Burns’ four-sided frame, I could almost feel the disparate pieces in my brain connecting to each other with new electric synergy. OK, maybe I’m overstating a bit, but only a small bit. (Even those of you who already had your eye on the big picture, have to admit that “listening” is an interesting addition to this list.)

It is with this frame that I re-read Nancy Sommer’s essay “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” and read for the first time “Shaping at the Point of Utterance,” both from the Norton book. While I enjoyed much about both essays, I want to focus here on the ways they relate speaking to writing—connecting two of the language arts. Sommers is critical of the work of writing process theorists Gordon Rohman and James Britton, “What is striking about these theories of writing is that they model themselves on speech” (323). She argues that by basing the writing process on the speaking process, we are imposing a linear structure onto writing. “What this movement fails to take into account in its linear structure . . . is the recursive shaping of thought by language; what it fails to take into account is revision” (323). Because once something is said, it cannot be unsaid. We cannot take an eraser or a delete key to speech, and unfortunately, there is no Ctrl+Z (undo) feature in real life. Sommers quotes Roland Barthes, who points out that speech is “irreversible.” And, further, he states, “writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible” (324). It is when we overemphasize the connection between speech and writing, according to Sommers, that we will paralyze our ability to revise. She notes this when examining the way that student writers perceive the revision process. When people speak, they often repeat themselves. So, Sommers states, “The aim of revision according to the students’ own description is therefore to clean up speech; the redundancy of speech is unnecessary in writing, their logic suggests, because writing, unlike speech, can be reread” (326).

The many authors, James Britton and company, of “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” also (made obvious by the title) connect the dots between the arts of speaking and writing. They counter theorists like Sommers, “I want to suggest here that rhetoricians, in their current concern for successive drafts and revision processes in composing, may be underestimating the importance of ‘shaping at the point of utterance,’ or the value of spontaneous inventiveness” (461). They claim that the writing process should borrow from the speaking process because “in normal speech we do, almost of necessity, shape as we utter” (461). Writers should harness this power generated from invention-on-the-spot to shape their ideas, suggest the authors. They note that when we speak, we trust that our words and sentences will end with closure and have purpose. Speaking puts words together with spontaneity, and the authors argue that “highly effective writing may be produced in just that spontaneous manner, and that the best treatment for empty verbalism will rarely be a course of successive draft making” (463). When we shape our words in the spur-of-the-moment, we are also able to shape our ideas and find the patterns in our thinking process. The authors quote Barrett Mandel, who writes, “It is the act of writing that produces discoveries . . . words flow from a pen, not from a mind” (463).

These two essays counter each other’s ideals. Sommers values the power of recursive revision in the writing process, while James Britton and friends favor the initial invention. In a complete oversimplification of these arguments, Sommers likes the end and Britton’s group likes the beginning. Despite these disagreements, both essays fit themselves within the larger frame of language arts, juxtaposing their ideals within a larger context.

Sommers notes that many students struggle in writing because they often reduce it to pieces, words or rules, forgetting that there is “something larger.” As students of rhetoric and composition, we must also avoid a reductionist over-amplification of details and remember the theories we study are connected by history, people, ideas and the four language arts. While no light bulb appeared or no trumpets sounded, I was grateful to Dr. Burns for this poetic framing of the language arts. (The word seems so lovely now.) I was happy that I practiced the art of listening while he practiced his art of speaking. This is one of the simple formulas behind discovery and the development of knowledge.


**On a completely different note, March is Women’s History Month. Let’s all celebrate by sharing the story of the maverick, yet virtuous, Mary Astell.