from VCCA Journal, Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 1996, 44-47
© Copyright 1996 VCCA Journal
What many of us teach as college or occupational writing is often not good writing. If it were, more college teachers would assign more of it and proclaim what a joy it is to read. I don't hear many such proclamations from my colleagues in history, English, biology, physics, mathematics, psychology, business, and electronics. Many of you are probably saying, "Yeah, but that s because you English types aren't teaching them what they need to know." We in English can do better, it's true. Who can't? Faculty in every discipline can do better to understand, assign, and teach good writing, and through ongoing conversation we can help one another do so.
A good deal of academic and occupational prose, published or otherwise, is simply not good writing. It is often unjustifiably cumbersome, compacted, and jargon-ridden or else clear but lifeless, just no fun even for devoted colleagues in academe or the world outside. It tends to be predictable and plastic in form, inorganic by design. We perpetuate it because, well, we assume that teachers or executives at the next level expect it. It is, after all, academic or occupational convention. And yet when the best of the best in any field transcend the convention of being deadly dull, as most of the best do, we're grateful and excited. Much of the bad writing we're getting from students is the bad writing we assign and teach them to produce.
To make matters worse, there is little agreement, even among English teachers, on what is good writing, much less how to get students to produce it. Colleges are rife with confusions about writing and the teaching of writing, not because we don't have good teachers of English, but because the subject is very complex, spanning virtually all of the human condition, including natural and developed psycholinguistic processes, epistemology, critical thinking, metaphor, scholarship, word processing, carpal tunnel syndrome, and transportational breakdown. ("I would have had made it to class with the draft of my paper, but my car broke down.") There is--understandably but frustratingly--very little agreement on what should be taught and how.
At the same time, there is considerable evidence that when a group of people talk purposefully about samples of writing, they can reach consensus about quality. Holistic evaluation of student writing, as is done for the CLAST test in Florida, has proven to be equitable and impartial when evaluators undergo training together systematically and periodically. (In Florida after two years in the community college, students must pass a writing test, an essay, before going on to the third year at a state university. Teams of readers, who train together for holistic evaluation, learn to value similar qualities and evaluate by a common standard.) Likewise, English departments that conduct similar sessions periodically tend to foster more nearly the same standards than departments that don't. The same principle applies to discussions among various disciplines, as is readily apparent in colleges that have developed programs in writing throughout the curriculum.
At the recent--and very successful--VCCS English Conference, writing guru Lynn Bloom honored us with a talk entitled "Coming to Life: Personal Writing and/in Freshman Composition." (I just received an e-mail message that she has agreed to post a transcript on the VCCS English listserve file: VCCSENGL@VCCSCENT.BITNET) In addressing the issue of good writing in academia, Bloom discussed an essential connection between the personal and the academic (hereafter, please read occupational as well), which I have for many years found at the heart of the writing we tend to call GOOD. We hear and feel this connection in most or perhaps all of the non-fiction prose of thinkers and writers we most admire in virtually every discipline.
Bloom stressed that "personal" need not mean "autobiographical." "Autobiographical" involves events from our personal lives, for instance my father's death when I was six or my slamming a finger in the car door as I was about to begin my very first date (with Katie Smith, seventh grade, my mother and stepfather chauffeuring and chaperoning--slam!--my mother hurrying up to Katie's front door to announce, alas, they were rushing me to the emergency room). While "personal" may, of course, denote "autobiographical," it may also mean something deeper, something human that we're attracted to when we hear and feel it in writing. It reveals itself in VOICE, in STYLE, in MANNER OF THOUGHT AND FEELING. Perhaps it is the human spirit, a synergy at the intersection of mind and heart. It usually embodies insight and commitment, a force of knowledge and understanding. It may be impartial but it is not dispassionate. It conveys deep caring about the subject, the self, and the reader. It is never the same from one writer to another, for while it reflects some essential quality we as humans share, it springs as well from uniqueness of character.
I feel it in Lewis Thomas' essay "Death in the Open," a section of his now famous book, Lives of a Cell, which won the National Book Award for Arts and Letters in 1975:
Everything in the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet.
There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again. The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death but the withered slug, with its stalk and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively in order to produce more of themselves.
Thomas writes such compelling prose only in part because he knows his subject through and through. As well, he is passionate about it, and just as importantly, he is compassionately mindful of his reader. Nothing in the prose is autobiographical, and at first glance nothing may seem personal as such. But he creates a powerful implied relationship between the person of the writer and the person of the reader that goes deeper than his use of "you" to address us directly. He places us side by side with him, standing in that meadow, and empowers us to see with our own eyes what he observes with his. He establishes with us an implicit relationship which implies a remarkable degree of mutual respect and understanding, although he is a world-class expert in the cycle of life and death on our planet, and I barely know an amebocyte from a hockey puck.
I don't pretend that masses of undergraduates can or will write like Thomas. But community college teachers already exist, some in English, some in other disciplines, whose students do produce writing that both satisfies academic or occupational demands and is enjoyable to read. What's the difference between their pedagogy and everyone else's?
One main reason for having students write is to involve them in the process of thinking through a concept or issue and of refining their thought by writing and rewriting. Getting them truly engaged in this process, helping them develop a personal involvement with the subject that drives their investigation, thinking, writing, and rewriting, is a complex pedagogical matter. I recall vividly from 1963 one of my projects for an ecology class at the University of Miami, snorkeling to observe echinoderms in their natural habitat, collecting specimens, studying their reactions to changes in environment, developing ways to display them without disturbing their natural appearance, keeping notes, thinking through my observations, drawing conclusions, writing up my findings, reading published material, comparing others' observations and conclusions with my own. The professor and graduate assistants encouraged us to behave, think, and feel like scientists engaged in science, with them as our colleagues.
Teachers who get good writing help students establish a trusting, generative relationship between writer and reader, whether the reader is the teacher or a group of students in the class who read and respond to one another's writing in progress. Student writers must experience the satisfaction of interaction with readers of their writing, instead of merely cranking it out, submitting it, and praying for a B-. Normally, writers address a specific audience, often an audience that knows less or has thought a good deal less about the subject than the writer has. One main reason we read is to gain knowledge and understanding that we desire but lack. In most college classes, even in many writing classes, the question of audience is neglected or else the assumed audience is the teacher, who knows more and has thought a good deal more about the subject than any of the students and whose role is to judge and grade rather than read and respond in order to bring about revision. We can help one another develop means to establish such generative pedagogical relationships.
Teachers who get good writing observe the difference between good writing and the formulaic, empty-sounding, throw-away prose so often tolerated. They promote good writing by having the courage to recognize it, teach it, expect it, and praise it rather than assuming that the usual boring stuff is an academic or occupational necessity or that the students are incapable of better. A colleague of mine said recently, "I'd be satisfied if I could just get them to explain things clearly; I don't ever expect to get real voice and style in their writing." Clarity of thought does not result from the artificial removal of everything except the essential information of a concept. It results from personal commitment to and involvement with the subject and the reader. Anyone who writes knows that thought as it appears on paper is often murky at first, even when we know the subject well, and we write and rewrite toward clarity and grace. What's the difference between those who do and those who don't? In many cases it's merely the steadfastness to keep at it. What drives those who do?
Something deep, perhaps something human we're attracted to when we hear and feel it in the writing? How often do we as teachers feel its compelling power in the writing our students now produce? I know we can do better. And so does my honors student Jnanam MacIsaac, who thoughtfully criticizes a textbook which our English faculty, I included, consider one of the best of its kind. She says, "Like the astronomer [in Whitman's poem 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer'], the authors . . . pour forth a monstrous load of mental concrete that smothers brain cells and assaults the tender membranes of imagination. On occasion, the learn'd authors also inject their scholarly exposition with dull, poorly written prose." Ongoing conversation about the nature of GOOD WRITING could be very satisfying--for our courses, for the workplace, for our lives.
Dick Harrington, who teaches English at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, served as the first president of the Virginia Community Colleges Association.