Concepts in Composition

Theory and Practices in the Teaching of Writing

Irene L. Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429685804
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Concepts in Composition is designed to foster reflection on how theory impacts practice, allowing prospective teachers to assume the dual role of both teacher and student as they enter the discipline of Writing Studies and become familiar with some of its critical conversations. Now in its third edition, the volume offers up-to-date scholarship and a deeper focus on diversity, both in the classroom and in relation to Writing Studies and literacy more broadly. This text continues to offer a wealth of practical assignments, classroom activities, and readings in each chapter. It is the ideal resource for the undergraduate or graduate student looking to pursue a career in writing instruction.

1 Processes

Approaches and Issues

Irene L. Clark

There is a “general notion in our culture, a sort of debased Romantic version of creativity wherein verbal artifacts are supposed to be produced as easily and inevitably as a hen lays eggs. . . . The classical rhetoricians knew better.”

(Bizzell, 1986, p. 50)

In the first edition of Concepts in Composition (2002), Chapter 1 was titled “Process” to emphasize that an important goal of a first-year writing course is to enable students to develop a writing process that works effectively for them. This focus on “process” originated when Composition began to be recognized as a subject of study, when the saying “writing is a process” became almost a mantra. In the second edition (2012), the first chapter was titled “Processes,” a change in title that reflected the recognition that there is no one writing “process” that works for everyone, that writers use various processes at different times, depending on what sort of text they wish to write, and that writing is interconnected with other processes, such as reading and reflection. Six years later, as I revise Chapter 1 for a third edition, Composition is now known as “Writing Studies,” and burgeoning research has yielded additional insight into the study and teaching of writing. Although it is still considered important for students to understand that writing is a process and to develop effective processes of reading and writing, we now understand that the study of writing is a great deal more complicated than was otherwise believed and involves many other considerations, among them rhetoric, prior knowledge, motivation, genre, transfer, and sense of agency. If the goal of a writing course is to enable students to improve as writers, we have to extend research into other areas—hence the current title, “Processes: Approaches and Issues.”

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of the discipline that is now known as Writing Studies. It begins by reviewing what is often referred to as the “process movement” and explains several competing views or theories of composing. It also discusses the interconnection of writing with reading, rhetoric, and reflection, and briefly explores the potential impact of new media on the teaching of writing, a topic that will be discussed in greater depth in Chapter 10. It also provides information about the role of “threshold concepts” in the teaching of writing and the issue of transfer.

The “Process” Movement

When I first began teaching writing, the hallway outside my office displayed a cartoon-like picture depicting a classroom of 100 years ago or more. In the center of the scene was a stereotypical professor of that time, caricatured with pointed gray beard, wire spectacles, bushy gray eyebrows, and a censorious expression. The picture showed him doggedly pouring knowledge through an oversized funnel into the head of a student, a sulky, somewhat plump young man. Obviously intended to be humorous, the picture ironically suggested that successful teaching involves transferring knowledge from professor to student, the professor active and determined, the student passive and submissive, perhaps uninterested, even unwilling.

I often recall that picture when I think about the term “process” in the context of Composition pedagogy, because the outmoded concept of teaching it portrays constitutes the antithesis of current ideas about the teaching of writing. Since at least the 1980s, the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition has emphasized the importance of helping students become active participants in learning to write, because, as the learning theorist Jerome Bruner (1966) has maintained:

to instruct someone in [a] discipline is not a matter of getting him to commit results to mind. Rather, it is to teach him to participate in the process that makes possible the establishment of knowledge. . . .Knowledge is a process, not a product.

(p. 72)

Pouring information into the heads of resistant students does not usually result in writing improvement, and the term “process” remains of key importance for both teachers and scholars. Motivating students and helping them develop an effective writing process continues to be a key goal of a writing course. However, it is now also recognized that knowledge about writing is also necessary for students to continue to develop as writers, in particular, an understanding of rhetoric and genre.

The Writing Process Movement: A Brief History

In the history of post-secondary education in the United States, it is only recently that serious consideration has been given to writing. The field of written rhetoric, which came to be called “Composition,” grew during the 19th century from an older tradition of oral rhetoric, which has been traced back to 500 BCE. However, during the 19th century, several political and technological developments had the effect of focusing academic attention on writing in English, instead of in Latin and Greek as had previously been the case. The establishment of the land grant colleges in 1867 brought a new population of students to the university, students from less privileged backgrounds who had not studied classical languages and who, therefore, had to write in the vernacular—that is, English. Then, a number of inventions had the effect of making writing more important in a variety of settings. The invention of the mechanical pencil (1822), the fountain pen (1850), the telegram (1864), and the typewriter (1868), plus the increasing availability of cheap durable paper, paralleled and aided the increasing importance of writing at the university.

As writing became more important, the task of teaching writing was assumed by various educational institutions. The writing classes developed were viewed as “a device for preparing a trained and disciplined workforce” and for assimilating “huge numbers of immigrants into cultural norms, defined in specifically Anglo-Protestant terms” (Berlin, 1996, p. 23). In 1874, Harvard University introduced an entrance exam that featured a writing requirement, and when the English faculty received the results, they were shocked by the profusion of error of all sorts—punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and syntax. In 1879, Adams Sherman Hill, who had been in charge of the Harvard entrance examination for several years, complained that even the work of good scholars was flawed by spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors and urged that a required course in sophomore rhetoric that had been offered at Harvard for several years be moved to the first year. Thus was a literacy crisis born, and when Harvard instituted a first-year writing course, a number of institutions did likewise.

Although it is impossible to say if this story depicts exactly what occurred, I am quite fond of it and use it frequently both in lectures and in casual conversations in which someone has bemoaned the “decline” in student writing, claiming that it used to be so much better. The truth, though, is that each generation seems to look back on a golden age in which students were able to write “better” than they can at present, whatever “better” might mean; a time when students were more serious, more committed to learning, etc. And yet, even at Harvard, a recognized elite university, students’ writing had been deemed inadequate. Even at Harvard, as Chester Noyes Greenough wrote in an early issue of the English Journal (February 1913), the work of undergraduate “men” was characterized by “incoherence, lack of unity in sentences and paragraphs, ignorance of certain rules of punctuation, repeated misspelling of certain words, and so on” (p. 113).

The First-Year Course and the Use of Handbooks

Greenough’s article noted the writing limitations of the students at Harvard, but his primary concern was on the inadequate training provided to those assigned the task of working with these students. Although first-year writing courses abounded at a number of institutions, it was soon realized that such courses not only failed to provide an instant solution to the problem but also created a great deal of work for faculty who undertook or were assigned the task of reading and responding to student texts. However, by the turn of the century, a presumed method of addressing this situation was devised—the creation of a new sort of textbook called the “handbook,” in which all of the rules and conventions of writing could be written and to which teachers could refer in the margins of student papers. The idea behind the development of the handbook was that teachers would no longer have to read and mark student papers in detail. Instead, they could skim the papers for errors, circle those errors in red, and cite rule numbers, which students could then look up in their handbooks. Handbooks became very popular, and soon every publisher had developed one, followed by a workbook of exercises that students could use to practice. Presumably, these handbooks and workbooks would lighten the teacher’s load and solve the problem of teaching students to write. Yet, not surprisingly, the problems continued, and student writing did not improve.

The difficulties experienced by those attempting to teach students to write at the beginning of the 20th century were described in the lead article of the first issue of the English Journal, published in 1912. The title of that article was “Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done Under Present Conditions?” and the first word of the article was “No.” Then, after a few sentences, the article went on as follows: “Every year teachers resign, breakdown, perhaps become permanently invalided, having sacrificed ambition, health, and in not a few instances even life, in the struggle to do all the work expected of them” (Hopkins, p. 1). Certainly, this was not an encouraging portrait of an emerging field!

Moreover, the Composition course was often a brutal experience for students as well. Lad Tobin (1994), in his essay “How the Writing Process Was Born—and Other Conversion Narratives,” recalled it like this:

Once upon a time, in an age of disciplinary darkness and desolation . . . writing students were subjected to cruel and inhuman punishments. They were assigned topics like “Compare Henry Fleming from The Red Badge of Courage to one of the characters in the Iliad; make sure to consider the definition of an anti-hero” or “Write about your most humiliating moment.” They were told, with a straight face, that no decent person ever wrote without outlining first, that there is a clear distinction between description, narration, exposition, and argument; that grammatical errors were moral and mortal sins, and that teachers’ evaluations of student essays were always objective accurate and fair . . .

In that dark period of our disciplinary history, teachers rarely explained anything about the process of writing (unless you count “outline, write, proofread, hand in” as the student’s process) . . . Or they would explain some of the rules governing good writing. But they would say nothing about invention, how to get started, what to do in the middle, or what to do when the middle turned back into the start, and so on.

(pp. 2–3)

Of course, this picture constitutes a generalization, and it is likely that many teachers, intuitively understanding what was helpful to beginning writers, did not adhere to this model of “teaching” writing. Yet, that this model did indeed exist I can attest to from my own college experience, where essay topics were assigned regardless of whether students knew or cared much about them, and where few, if any, process-oriented activities—prewriting strategies, multiple drafts, collaborative groups, student–teacher conferences—were encouraged or even mentioned. When I submitted a paper as a college student, I would wait with trepidation for the teacher to return it, which he or she would eventually do, usually without having written anything other than a grade or perhaps a brief evaluative comment on the front page.

In a review essay titled, “Of Pre- and Post-Process: Reviews and Ruminations,” Richard Fulkerson (2001) characterized the situation of how first-year writing used to be similar to “riding a bicycle. If you knew how to do it, then you could demonstrate your ability on demand; hence the idea of in-class and time-limited writing” (p. 96). Fulkerson (2001) described his own experience in a “pre-process program” as follows:

In the fall quarter, we had an anthology of readings, a handbook of grammar, and the 2nd edition of McCrimmon’s Writing with a Purpose. We wrote at least five papers. One assigned topic was “My First Day at School.” Another was “any philosophical issue.” A third was a limited research paper about some historic person, who we were to argue was or was not “great” based on several readings in the anthology. Dr. Staton would assign the topic orally, and we would have about a week to write. Then he marked the paper, put a grade on it, and a brief comment.

(p. 95)

Learning to write in those days meant being able to figure out what the teacher wanted in order to create an acceptable “product,” and, apparently, few teachers thought that helping students acquire a workable writing “process” was part of their job. Whatever process students used, they had to manage on their own. Unfortunately, this model still exists, not usually in first-year writing classes, but often in other classes designated as “writing-intensive,” where writing is assigned but not actually taught.

This lack of attention to the process writers engage in when they write reflected a concept of creativity that to some extent persists in our culture—that is, that a “good” writer is someone who can produce an excellent text as quickly, independently, and effortlessly as a bird learns to fly. This idea suggests that those of us who struggle, for whom writing is a laborious, time-consuming, and often painful process (i.e., most, if not all, of us), are not, by definition, “good” writers. One could either write, or one couldn’t. Such was the fantasy of that time, and even now our culture continues to value speed and ease of production, particularly in reference to the speaking ability of our politicians, who are deemed “good speakers” if they can think on their feet.

In ancient times, however, classical rhetoricians understood the concept of “process,” although the concept was used in the preparation of speeches, not for the writing of essays. In ancient Greece and Rome, rhetoricians envisioned the composing process as consisting of five stages—invention (the discovery of ideas), arrangement (putting ideas in a persuasively effective order), style (finding the right language in which to present the ideas), memory (memorizing the speech), and delivery (using voice and gesture to present the speech effectively). Apparently, it was understood that a “gifted” speaker had to engage in an elaborate process in order to deliver an effective speech.

For Writing and Discussion

Write a brief essay describing how you learned to write. What sort of writing tasks were you assigned? To what extent was your experience similar to Fulkerson’s description? Did your teachers focus on the idea of process?

The Birth of the Process “Movement”

This product-oriented view of writing continued through the 1950s and 1960s. Then, in 1963...