There’s more than one way to bait a rhetorical hook.
In the classroom, the neophyte instructor will likely choose a blended ideological approach to first year writing. This approach may change or it may never change. That the instructor is willing to be flexible, willing to accept new ideas and experiment with them to find what’s most effective is all that really matters.
Thanks for a great class J. Mason!
Did anyone come away from reading Responding to Student Writing thinking some of the arguments Nancy Sommers makes are dated? I would argue that commenting/editing practices she’d like to see adopted are more easily applied to students in 1982, students who were undoubtedly, in their less plugged in era, far better novice writers. I would argue that they did not suffer as much from the pervasive inability to form sentences that plagues campuses today. Classroom application today of what she was hawking during the Reagan Administration often puts the cart before the horse.
It’s a blog. I can end with a cliché.
In my head, peer review was going to be the turning point for all essays. I’d read through the rough drafts, find common errors through them, and formulate guidelines for the peer review to follow. This worked well the first and second time. Most students had their papers in hand to exchange with their chosen classmates, took them home, and brought back critiqued copies. I’d glance through them to make sure my guidelines were met and either give a check, 1/2, or zero depending on level of completion.
As the semester progressed, students began realizing that if they weren’t present on the day of the exchange they wouldn’t receive any papers to critique and thus did not have to do the critique! In attempt to close this rather gaping loophole I’d send group emails to clusters of three (or whatever numbers allowed) absentee students asking them to use the email to exchange their rough drafts, print, and critique for return next class. The most common thing to happen was one of the three would send the draft and I’d get an email from them later asking what they should do, as the other two maintained radio silence. In fact, there wasn’t a single successful e-mail exchange. The likely cause of the silence was not-completed drafts–but I’ll never know.
When the critiques became due it was commonplace to hear “I wasn’t here for the exchange. Will I get points off my essay?” as I made my way around the room. “Not directly,” I’d reply “but without a second pair of eyes, you’re doing yourself a disservice and that might lower the grade.” The smile and “Oh, okay!” was one of the more viscous things I had to swallow throughout the semester.
In conclusion, working with people still sucks.
After reading several of Peter Elbow’s essays, I got to thinking about a New England writer I’ve read and reread plenty over the years.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a pioneer in supernatural and science fiction writing, had a poor attendance record at school and stopped attending altogether at around age eight. Years later, he wanted to go to Brown but for several reasons he couldn’t make it happen. So from childhood on his study was as self-guided as his writing. Adhering to many of Elbow’s principles well before Elbow expressed them seems to have made Lovecraft the idiosyncratic and original writer he became. This Elbow would have probably admired if Lovecraft had been the subject of much study when Elbow was in academia. However, given that Elbow’s ideology was driven to a large extent by the progressive social thinking of the sixties and seventies, he would undoubtedly have found Lovecraft’s racial perspectives particularly abhorrent (as would anyone).
Disclaimer: This post is my attempt to clarify Breuch’s theory on post-process and its connections to the writing v. composition debate.
Breuch writes, “post-process theory encourages us to reexamine our definition of writing as an activity rather than a body of knowledge” (98). She goes on to say that writing can’t be taught which supports her theory that post process shouldn’t be viewed as an activity. If it were viewed as an activity, then it could be teachable to some to degree. I agree to some degree with her and Kent’s perspective that writing is an “interpretive” act. There is a rejection of the system and process, and not of the act itself, which I think I can align myself with more. In this process, once joined with revision an act of composition may occur.
Perhaps therein lies the difference between writing and composition, if we consider writing a process separate from revision and such. What I mean is, if the document, or item is revised and treated like a new well developed project, then perhaps that is where the composition lies. The care in revising, and rewriting is the act or process of composing. A benefit of this separation may make it more digestable for first year students, who may be overwhelmed by the tasks at hand. Unfortunately it may over complicate what is already being asked of students, if they are told to consider several different processes, not while writing but afterwards too.
One typewriter benefit I neglected to mention in my inarticulate presentation is defense against surfing. For the writer, the typewriter is an excellent hedge against squandering hours on the web instead of working. A writer can, of course, temporarily disable connectivity on a laptop or desktop but how long is that going to last? Eventually the urge to Google something, the urge to log into something is going to rear up. Surely that’s not to say that you can’t be distracted by smart phones or tablets conveniently left sitting next to your typewriter. But those temptations are far more escapable. Working on a device that is internet capable is, by far, a less escapable temptation.
One of the more difficult things I’ll be doing this semester is not passing a student who, in my opinion, has no reason to be taking the class or ENC1102 for that matter. The essays he handed in were exemplary in both form and content and engaging in thought and language. His understanding of the material (despite a tendency for absenteeism) is impressive and, based on the few times I’ve spoken to him, he’s able to string together legitimate arguments/separate trains of thought in impromptu fashion. If what he’s told me about his personal life is true, there’s a lot on his plate outside of school: a business he’s running, family he’s looking after. So there are supposed reasons for his truancy–not that any of it matters without documentation.
To my fault, I’ve been particularly lenient with him on due dates because the quality of his work is of such high order–and also the fact he was added to my class almost two weeks after starting. But with neither essay 4, 5, and so far 6 handed in, he’s not giving me any other options.
It’s a lesson he’ll learn. An important one at an non-detrimental stage of his academic career: You can be brilliant as fuck but if there’s no effort there, it ain’t going to help.
Not all novels may benefit from management software designed to aid the drafting process. Though I think such tools are helpful for plot-driven novels, especially epics, they may not aid character-driven novels. To my mind they may saturate the writer’s characters with prescribed qualities and situations and therefore weaken or hide the unexpected discoveries the writer can make in the drafting process. I suppose, rightly or wrongly, that I have always considered the creation of character-driven novels to be something a kin to an unmapped journey. Perhaps that’s just the impression left on me from works that so often have vapory plots. Perhaps I’m really arguing for the converse but I don’t think so. I think there must be eureka moments in the drafting process that achieve their eureka-ness due to the absence of preconceived characteristics or trajectories held in the writer’s mind (or metal surrogate). A digital template seems an impediment to such moments.
The attendance policy on the given syllabus for ENC1101 was notoriously soft. Students could whimsically skip with no repercussion for their truancy in sight. The syllabus allowed for recoil at semester’s end via class participation, but that 8% don’t scare nobody.
Without needed to say so, this leniency was taken advantage of. Chronically in some cases. And this bothered me heavily until mid-November when a pattern of quality of work and resulting grade started developing correlations with these absences. The flighty birds were coming home to a nest in ruin. Surprisingly, not a lot of absentee feathers were ruffled by the revelation (possibly expectation?), which was okay–although I was fully prepared to engage a debate over what’s fair in a domain where I decide the fairness. Only one student (the most consistent skipper, who at the semester’s beginning said to me “I just won’t be here sometimes.” disregarding any implicit “whys”) raised heavy concerns about the state of her grade. It was almost a letdown how easily diffused her strife was after telling her the last two essays (that she’s yet to pick up) were scored lower than her first two because my expectations had risen–and that this is something she’d know if she were present for the lessons or picked up her critiqued work.
The lesson, I suppose, is that attendance regulates itself in most cases.
I found rather early in the semester that the syllabus was going to be impossible to rigidly adhere to. Thankfully I had included language in my syllabus that reserved my right to make any changes to it whatsoever.
The first major hurdle I encountered in keeping to the schedule on the syllabus was that textbook acquisition was not a timely and uniform activity, it came in trickles. Neither the carrot nor the stick sped up the process. Frustrating as it was, there was little I could do until the class had reached critical reading mass, so to speak.
The second major hurdle I encountered was a disastrous final draft of Essay 1 in both my sections. It was so awful, I made the classes re-execute it. That certainly fouled the schedule.
A repetitive problem in keeping to the timeline on the syllabus was submission tardiness. If more than 40% of the class showed up on a Monday without the drafts for peer review, the most efficient use of the class time was not peer review, so that got bumped.
In the end, the work all got done but it was done in different sequences. My take away after this semester is that a syllabus must be fluid, not rigid or things may fall apart.