Week of 3/10

Sommers: “Responding to Student Writing”

Summary:
Sommers says that in addition to commenting on student papers for the same reasons we want others to comment on ours, we “dramatize the presence of a reader” for them by doing so (148). Our comments are designed to assist students: “[T]houghtful comments create the motive for revising” (149). Because the efficacy of comments is little understood, Sommers, Brannon, and Knoblauch tried to discover “what messages teachers give their studnts through their comments” and which comments students ignored when revising (149).

After laying out the parameters of the study (who, when, where, how), Sommers discusses the difference between computer-generated comments and teacher-generated comments, noting a “sharp contrast” between the two (149).

The study found that teacher comments can distract students from what they hope to do with their papers; Sommers calls this “appropriation of the text by the teacher” (150), and she provides an example. She says that because this style of comment often includes multiple directives without any indication of which are the most pressing, students “are encouraged” by this style “to see their writing as a series of parts . . . and not as a whole discourse” (151). This style of commenting, according to Sommers, conflates distinct processes and gives students a mistaken understanding of the revision process. Moreover, it leads students to focus on pleasing the teacher instead of attending to what they want to say.

The study’s second conclusion is that comments often are not specific to the paper and “could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text” (152). The commands teachers write on student papers are “abstract,” “vague,” and difficult for students to interpret (152). Sommers points out that these directives don’t tell students how to fix the things they identify as being wrong with the texts on which they are written, and they give students the idea that wriing well is a question of finding out the rules and following them. Sommers points out that the problem with these comments is that they confuse process and product, treating first drafts as if they “were finished drafts” (154). The problem is that teachers try to correct writing and not to help students find strategies for clarifying meaning.

Sommers notes that the problem is not so much with individual teachers, but instead is systemic. Instructors haven’t been trained to bring their literary critical skills to bear on reading students’ papers, nor have they received training in commenting techniques. Such training would include, Sommers implies, methods of commenting that would undermine students’ notions that what they have written is already clear, complete, and coherent and would “force students back into the chaos” of “restructuring their meaning” (154). Focusing on the text as a whole rather than on sentence- or word-level changes in comments might lead students to do the same when they’re revising.

Musings:
I certainly agree with a lot of what Sommers has to say. In the Writing Center, I often confronted papers on which instructors had written comments that I, an experienced reviser, couldn’t understand. And, in the example on pages 152-153, I was shocked to find that the instructor had written that a thesis sentence was needed. It seems to me that “Nuclear energy should not be given up on, but rather, more nuclear plants should be built” is a pretty clear thesis sentence; even if the wording is a bit awkward, it’s a damn fine try, if that’s what the student wants to say.

Sommers also makes a good point when she says that there’s no sense in having tudents revise sentences that are likely to disappear from the next draft of the paper. It’s more sensible to have students clarify meaning before they begin to approach syntax, punctuation, style—the things that give writing polish—because it’s a waste of everyone’s time to focus on what won’t be there in the end. That was one of the hardest things for me to get a handle on when I first began working in the Writing Center because I’m so comfortable with syntax and punctuation. And that’s probably another reason that instructors focus on these kinds of things. It makes the commenting process faster, easier. And Sommers’ clsses might be limited to twenty students, across town they’re limited to 25, and instructors teach at least four sections (and often five or six) of comp per semester. That’s not unusual at community colleges, either.

Sommers’ distinction between “strategies” and “rules” is a good one, and I really like her ideas about developing collaborative exercises in revising strategies. I’ll be revising my 101 syllabus over break to do this more comprehensively because Sommers is right—we have to give students a reason to revise, and that reason has to have something to do with what they’re trying to do with their writing.

Connors:“Mechanical Correctness as a Focus in Composition Instruction”

Summary:
Connors’ project is to examine the historical forces that “transformed instruction in wide-ranging techniques of persuasion and analysis” into an “obsession with mechanical correctness” (61). He notes that the democratic and egalitarian ideals of the nineteenth century, combined with the proliferation of public elementary schools and in part by the dearth of colleges in the early nineteenth century affected American attitudes about language use, and language use itself was democratized. There was no “linguistic aristocracy” in early nineteenth-century America. However, the American Renaissance (1820-1860) and a change in the nature of elementary school instruction led to increased interest in grammatical and mechanical correctness, and Eastern provincialism as well as the rise of the ideology of self improvement in the middle of the nineteenth century led to increased focus of grammaticality in the public schools.

Alford’s A Plea for the Queen’s English, with its anti-American bent increased American anxiety about grammatical correctness, reinforcing Eastern linguistic elitism. In the 1870s, colleges began to respond to the newfound American appetite for grammatical prescriptivism, and the goals of higher education came to include “simple mechanical correctness” (64). Before about 1860, grammar and mechanics were the business of elementary schools (when I was a kid, they were still called “grammar schools”—at least in the part of the country where I grew up), but they came to dominate textbooks in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Harvard’s introduction of the writing requirement into Harvard’s entrance exam also increased the importance of grammatical and mechanical correctness at the college level. Although the nineteenth century also saw the introduction of the modes, the trinity, and the methods of development, the “central emphasis . . . always remained on application of grammatical and mechanical rules at the sentence level” (65). The new pedagogy of practice, practice, practice (grammar, grammar, grammar) failed because it wasn’t actually the case that students’ instruction in grammar and mechanics at the elementary levels had been inadequate—the problem was, according to Connors, that students hadn’t had to write much at that level. Nonetheless, grammar-centered pedagogies became “enshrined in [the] textbooks” of the late nineteenth century (66), even though the focus seemed to be elsewhere.

Connors reiterates the information we read in the first week about the teaching loads of comp instructors in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century (and I gripe about the loads now!). He holds that focusing on grammar and mechaniscs was a survival strategy for overworked composition instructors, who, even if they’d had the tools to provide more thoughtful comments on student papers, wouldn’t have had the time. This led to the development and publication of usage guides such as Abbott’s and Wooley’s. Since then, textbooks have “shaped . . . writing courses” and wrought changes in rhetoric texts, which began to include more grammatically and mechanically centered content. Finally “textbooks based on the old tradition of rhetorical theory in composition virtually disappeared” (68), and instructors ended up knowing little more about writing than their students because they no longer received any theoretical training. This remains the state of affairs at many institutions, especially those where comp classes are assigned to grad students and PTIs.

Drillbooks and workbooks appeared, but by the 1930s a few people began to question their efficacy and to posit that they hurt, rather than helped, the college writer. These folks gathered research and in the 1940s and the 1950s a revolution in composition instruction began, fueled by the reintroduction of rhetoric in the writing classroom. In 1953, the idea of writing as process found currency, and “the reign of mechanical correctness . . . was threatened” (70). Connors closes by noting that the debate continues, albeit in a different vocabulary, toady. He notes that both the traditionalists and the “proponents of writing as discovery or communication” make good points (70). He says attention to mechanical and grammatical correctness should not be discarded, but “it is not all or even a major part of our work” as composition instructors (71).

Musings:
The historical overview is informative; although I generally like my history to include something more of the economic context. I’m always interested in class, and I’m sure that the fact that grammatical and mechanical correctness came to be considered paramount during the Gilded Age is part of the whole ethos of that very class-conscious era in American history. In fact, when I do the grammar classes, I tell students that one of the reasons they should learn to do some of this correctly is that (in)correct usage is a class marker that can keep them from getting where they might otherwise be able to go. But you’ve all heard enough from me on grammar, haven’t you? I’ll stop.

Hartwell: “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”

Summary:
Hartwell says that the issue of teaching grammar is thorny. There are two sides to the debate, according to Hartwell: “the grammarians and the anti-grammarians” (206), and those involved cannot agree about how to interpret the data that research into teaching grammar has produced. His goal is to reformulate the grammar debate in what he hopes will be “more productive terms” (208) by asking four questions. Then he outlines the differences between the two sides, before moving to discussing the “five meanings of ‘grammar’ ” (209), which is a refinement of W. Nelson Francis’ “The Three Meanings of ‘Grammar.’ ”

Grammar 1 is unconsciously used by every language speaker over the age of five. It enables us to make meaningful and “correct” sequences of words without consciously referring to rules, even though they are in fact lawful. Hartwell backs his claims by describing experiments designed to elicit Grammar 1 knowledge from native speakers of English. He concludes that literacy acquisition “profoundly affects” one’s Grammar 1 skills.

Grammar 2 is the goal of linguistics as a science: to articulate the rules intuitively understood—the Grammar 1 rules. Knowing these rules on a conscious level is unnecessary to their use as Grammar 1. However, Hartwell notes, it’s difficult to convince a grammarian of this. Here, Hartwell cites a number of linguistic experts who agree with his assertion. He also describes research from which this knowledge is derived and provides further evidence from two cognate areas, one in the area of artificial language and one from the area of second-language acquisition. The research suggests that Grammar 2 knowledge only becomes functional knowledge after the skills have been acquired at the Grammar 1 level.

Grammar 4 rules, those we learn in school, are also “inadequate” without Grammar 1 competence (220). It’s why sometimes the “rules” are “wrong.” Hartwell provides several examples of linguistic constructions in which the rules for forming possessives break down. He notes that this level depends on rote learning.

Hartwell moves next to an argument for redefining error and says that many studies show that students make errors because of instruction (I’m thinking here of the kind of hypercorrection that causes people to say “between you and I” right now). He says that we should “shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules . . . and . . . regain our confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge” (223). Hartwell notes that cross-cultural studies indicate that metalinguistic awareness, rather that grammatical awareness, is “a defining characteristic of print literacy” (223). According to Hartwell, this makes the issue of nonstandard dialect “a non-issue” because Grammar 1 mastery transfers to orthography, despite oral dialect. Moreover, this allows for an understanding of multiple liteacies, once again evident in cross-cultural studies.

Looking at Grammar 5 shows that “the grammar issue is simply beside the point” insofar as style is concerned (225); since most mastery takes place at the tacit level we cannot actually offer beginning writers useful tips about stylistic considerations. Hartwell labels this view of grammar the “romantic view” (225).

Finally, Hartwell turns to experimental research on grammar instruction, and he draws the conclusion that it will show that formal grammar instruction has little to do with “control over surface correctness” or with “the quality of writing” (226). However, it may improve the ability to “think logically” (226). The studies do not agree on this issue. But there is strong evidence that the best teacher of correctness and style is “active involvement with language” (227). In fact, according to several studies, high school grammar instruction is the least important factor in developing beginning writers’ composition skills.

Musings:
Believe it or not, I really liked this article, despite (or because of) my grammar fetish. In fact, I teach grammar in a way totally congruent with what he has to say. Because I begin by telling the students (and meaning it) that it’s useless to try to memorize a lot of rules that are just designed to make us all feel stupid and incompetent regarding a language in which we manage to make ourselves understood all the time. And I mean it. I teach tricks. I teach mnemonic devices. I teach the things I figured out to remember stuff when it made the difference between getting a nickel from Father O’Connor and getting a rap with a ruler from Sister Alexia. And I love the self-referring sentence game (223). I’m gonna play it with my husband when he gets home. He teaches critical thinking. I think he’ll get it right away, but I’ll have some fun with him if he doesn’t!

He’s right about ceasing to worry so much about the rules. I think understanding grammar functionally is much more useful than understanding it prescriptively. For instance, according to a prescriptive grammar, the sentence “I don’t feel well” means that I don’t use my sense of touch effectively. According to the rules, it’s technically an incorrect use of an adverb with a sensing verb. Technically, we’re supposed to use adjectives with the sensing verbs if we’re using them as sensing verbs. But a functional understanding lets me derive the intended meaning from the utterance, and I offer to get the utterer some aspirin or some matzoh ball soup. In this case, I understand that the word “well,” which is usually an adverb, functions as an adjective in this sentence, so I can classify it as an adjective. There are lots of words in English that work functionally, so what’s the difference? Of course, most people don’t think about this in as detailed a way as I just laid out. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many times over the course of my life: I’m weird about grammar. I think it’s because I spend so much time immersed in philosophy, and theory, and literary analysis, that it’s just refreshing to understand something as being right or wrong. That doesn’t mean I wish to impose it on everyone else. Okay. It does mean that, but I do manage to restrain myself. Most of the time.

Elbow: “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues”

Summary:
Elbow begins by telling us that he loves lots of things about “what’s in academic discourse” but that he “hate[s] academic discourse” (135). He defines academic discourse as “the discourse that academics use when they publish for other academics” (135). Elbow notes that the reasons for teaching his students academic discourse are obvious, and he lists those that relate to their lives in the academy.

In the first section of the paper proper (couldn’t resist), Elbow argues that nonacademic discourse ought to be an integral part of the freshman writing class. First, he says, most students will not use academic discourse once they leave the college setting. Second, Elbow points out that basing the argument in what people will have to write assumes that people won’t write unless they have to, a pessimistic view in his estimation. Third, Elbow says that good academic discourse presupposes good nonacademic discourse.

Elbow argues for a nonacademic discourse “that tries to render experience rather than explain it,” a discourse that he believes is “particularly important to teach” (136). He envisions this as teaching autobiographical, poetic, and narrative discourses as well as academic discourse. He holds that our job as writing teachers is to try to “pass on the great human accomplishment of written language” (137). He opposes explanatory and “rendering” discourses and says that since students will write explanatory discourse in other classes, it’s up to English to allow space for rendering discourse. Moreover, for Elbow, academic discourse can allow students to mask what they don’t know. Turning to Bakhtin and Vygotsky for confirmation, he says that the true test of whether students understand something is whether they can put it in everyday terms.

Elbow argues that academic discourse doesn’t actually exist because different disciplines have different conventions. He offers many different examples of discourses that might be called academic, but insists that they are so different that it becomes impossible to teach academic discourse. He says that academic discourse(s) focus attention on the packaging rather than on what’s being said. He says that since ideas cannot be separated from the people who hold them the notion of academic discourse constitutes an objectivist bias. He believes that the detachment he says is inherent to academic discourse disguises the fact that discourse is always communication to someone by someone for some purpose. However, he notes that we cannot allow a move to “pure subjectivity” (141); he just want to argue for a discourse that allows one’s personal stake in an issue to be apparent rather than masked.

Elbow comes to altering his definition of academic discourse from the straw man he set up in the beginning of the essay to something more like what it actually is. He moves on to say that since his definition fits nonacademic writing, it’s not really academic discourse—it’s just good writing. There are other ways of defining academic discourse, Elbow claims, but they all lead to the same problem of distinguishing academic from nonacademic writing, so he moves to a consideration of style and conventions.

In his discussion of style and conventions, Elbow notes characteristics of academic discourse: (in)explicitness, lack of forms of “to be,” and certain syntactic and structural conventions derived from pretensions to objectivity. He notes that it can be exclusionary in its use of esoteric vocabularies (i.e., his criticism of Berlin’s use of “epistemic”). He discusses four things he thinks “are taught by the surface mannerisms or stylistic conventions of academic discourse” (146). Then he moves on to an outline of the implications for teaching freshman composition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what we should learn from what Elbow has said about academic discourse, is that we should be teaching as he does.

Musings:
First, it seems to me that Elbow’s examples he gives of what students might write more if writing classes were better—“to write notes and letters to loved ones . . . to write in a diary or to make sense of what’s happening in their lives . . .” are a huge part of our students’ culture (136). Hell, they’re part of most Americans’ culture. I guess the fact that he wrote this in 1991 might have something to do with this, since the Internet wasn’t a part of most people’s lives at that time. But kids are doing nearly every one of the things he notes. They’re using their phones and computers to do them online, employing grammar, syntax, spelling and other conventions that we didn’t even imagine in 1991. Something else (plural?) is making them reluctant to write in academic settings. It’s worth exploring what that is. Some of it, I think, is what Sommers talks about in her article. Some of it is the fact that . . . No. I won’t go there.

Elbow’s right when he says that very few students will have to write academic discourse once they’ve graduated from college. But, in fact, academic discourse is not very different from the discourse that one employs in the upper echelons of the business world, Donald Trump notwithstanding. I was part of the business world for a long time, and I was immersed in business discourse. The polite way academics have of deflating an argument is nearly identical to the discourse I deployed when I wanted to push a project through that my supervisors didn’t want to see completed. Or started for that matter. I believe I advanced further than I otherwise would have because I “sounded smart.” And, as a woman in management positions in an industry where nearly all managers are men, sounding smart and mastery of the polite putdown were very handy, let me tell you. What was essentially an academic vocabulary was indispensable, and that’s a fact.

Moreover, I’ve supervised hundreds of people who worked in a variety of positions throughout my business career. I never once thought that someone couldn’t write because they deployed academic discourse. Of course each discourse community has its own conventions. Are we supposed to teach them all, just in case? How are we supposed to choose? Should we let students use textspeak because it’s a form in which they enjoy writing? (I did actually find myself telling a young friend that it might not be a bad thing if texting altered our spelling conventions to a more phonetic mode. Of course, the idea that phonetic spelling might be a good thing has been around a long time, but it seems more of a possibility now that texting has become so ubiquitous than it has ever seemed to me before.) I can imagine a young person handing me a resume full of that! I wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. I’d assume that s/he had no idea of propriety. I wouldn’t hire him/her.

Academic discourse is a good foundation, based as it is in critical reasoning, cogency, and politesse, for other discourses. It’s easily adaptable to the jargons required in other areas, such as the FDA and law. Actually, I can see how it might be an impediment in law, whose object is to obfuscate rather than to clarify. Anyway, the fact that it takes a variety of forms, each with its own vocabulary and conventions doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist (138). It might mean that a plurality of them exist, but a plurality of nonacademic discourses exist as well—even within a single genre, like autobiography. That something has not got ontological status doesn’t mean that it isn’t a functional category. You know, like literature. Now, if we could only teach students that academic discourse doesn’t involve writing every sentence in the passive voice! Anyway, I wonder if Elbow thinks that his essay is not a form of academic discourse, just because he uses the first person throughout. Because I’ve got news for him. It’s a tidy piece of academic discourse.

Now, all that being said, I must add that I deplore the elitism of academic discourse. I also find it exclusionary, and its replication of America’s nearly invisible classism, its sexism, its ethnocentrism, its religious hegemonic discourses, and its racism disgusts me. It’s masculinist and makes expressing, or even implying, one’s feelings nearly impossible (Elbow does have something there). But if we’re properly teaching student how to write, we’re also teaching them how to question and assess the functions of the discourses in which they’re immersed. We’re not, in other words, just teaching academic discourse. We’re teaching (hopefully) a buttload of other skills, too. We’re letting them know that this isn’t the only vocabulary that they can use when they’re writing. We’re teaching them how to assess their audiences and the effects they hope to have on the audiences, and how to determine how to deploy language to do that, and how to allow themselves to dive into and swim around in language until they know where they’re going with and in it. If we can do that, students won’t have to “unlearn” academic discourse because they’ll recognize the value of the other discourses to which they have access long before they step into a composition classroom and which they retain after they leave the classroom. In other words, as I tell students, this is just one more vocabulary we can use when it’s appropriate. We don’t have to give up all other vocabularies in favor of it.

And, as Dr. J. noted in a comment a couple of weeks ago, it may be possible to teach students to resist. The question that remains for me is whether it’s possible to teach something and simultaneously to teach how to resist that very thing. I wonder if this means a change in paper topic. Nah. I think I can incorporate this stuff.

I could go on and on about different things in Elbow’s essay. But I don’t feel good, and I’m tired, and I have a presentation to finish for Dr. Bowers’ class.
Peace to all.