In Response to Prompt 2 – How is seeing writing/communication as Artificial or Natural useful? 

Writing is, as Emig points out on page 124, a “primary technology”. A device through which an individual transforms their thoughts into a form that can be stored and reproduced by someone else. The whole concept is mind blowing when you really think about it. “I CAN PUT MY BRAIN ON PAPER!” It’s the earliest form of recording device.

But there’s still this distinct artificiality to it, at least when it’s done poorly. That’s kind of this underlying issue that a lot of these readings are trying to deal with. Bartholomae, when he talks about writing being caught up in culture, and of a need to be critical, speaks to a thought that I’ve had about writing ever since I started incorporating Engfish into my curriculum: some writing just feels… fake.

There’s a concept called the Uncanny Valley, which is a term coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The idea is that humans are hardwired to recognize certain traits as being “human”. When these traits are replicated, we tend to accept them (and even find them cute) when they’re highly stylized. After a certain point, however, things become too realistic. You end up with something that looks extremely human, but is off somehow. On a bell curve, this creates a sharp dip in the response. Once things look 100% human, then acceptance levels spike back up. This creates a “valley” effect.

I’d argue that writing, particularly the writing that Bartholemae and Elbow are talking about, functions in a similar way. You have papers that are obviously just… bad writing. The person doing them is very young, or is new to English, or is just really bad at grammar. Or maybe they have this informal honesty to their writing, but they’re not quite college ready, yet. Up to that point, this may not be acceptable, but we accept the fact that the person in question is still learning.

But at the first year comp stage, the students typically have a functional grasp of language and grammar, and they’ve been exposed to “academic” discourse for the first time. They have an idea of what things are supposed to look like. They also have thoughts and opinions in their head, but may not know how to articulate them properly. So the end result is this kind of double translation. There’s the translation of natural thought and speech into text… but there’s also the translation of natural thought at speech into discourse, which is an entirely new language for most of these students. The result, often, is a text that looks correct to the student, but contains numerous flaws that inspire revulsion in the instructor.

This is where the problem comes in. These students should be able to think. They look like they can think, but that thought isn’t being articulated properly. The result is this idea that there’s some sort of mental deficiency in our students. That they’re incapable of thought, or caught up in social dynamics, or that there’s some sort of flaw in their logic. It ends up creating a situation where writing is like CGI in movies. When it’s done well, you don’t notice it. When it’s done poorly, it becomes the target of revulsion and mockery.

It would be more helpful to approach writing classes as a course on teaching students how to use an intellectual toolkit. We’re not some sort of department of Promethei that bring down the fire of Thought to the unwashed masses. Students can think. They just don’t know how to operate the machinery of the university yet.

In “Writing as a Mode of Learning” Emig claims that “with writing, the audience is usually absent; with talking, the audience is usually present” (124) therefore writing allows for careful production of thought without inhibition. In comparison, Elbow would have a slightly modified viewpoint of whether writing can be receptive or function as a listening act. In “Closing My Eyes as I Speak” he works through the conflicting idea of considering the audience in writing and the need to write in isolation without consideration of the audience in order to make new meaning. Based on what he discusses in this article, I would argue that Elbow believes writing can function as a listening act, however this is not the best way for writing to exist as a way to make meaning. Instead, Elbow would say that we should write with our eyes (and ears) closed first, especially for more competent writers. The audience is present in the writing process, but by forcing the audience out of the picture, more enhanced learning will take place, because the voice in writing is free from inhibition. The important difference between Emig and Elbow, though, is that Elbow argues that there is a time and a place to allow the audience back into consideration. More specifically, the writer should [listen] to the needs of the audience after there has been copious amounts of exploratory writing, thus the learning process has already taken place and the most important experience of writing occurred within a private dimension.

So I guess this isn’t exactly a profound thought, but I am extremely interested in the distance between spoken language and written language – in terms of first year composition at least. Emig seems to comment that, since writing is a learned behavior and speaking is not (arguably), there are more opportunities for knowledge in the writing process.

I think on a more fundamental level our students find this separation of language challenging because they aren’t fully aware it exists. As young writers who haven’t really gained experience in writing yet, it becomes difficult for them to separate their thinking voice, speaking voice, and writing voice. I’d argue, based on stacks of Freshman essays, that these are all the same voice in most Freshman students’ view.

This is a huge area of frustration for us as teachers because we [unknowingly] have separated these voices and given them functions of their own. While all of these voices inevitably collide and work with each other to create language, I think an understanding of how they are different is ultimately the purpose of teaching “audience” in early composition courses. When a writer has an audience, we hope that they think about how they will address that audience – the same way a student would speak differently when giving a presentation as opposed to having a conversation with his/her friend over a beer.