THE TECHNIQUE OF WRITING ANSWERS FROM GENERAL TO SPECIFIC

Nucleo, 2012

College Composition and Communication, 1990

to writing is often seen procedurally, as something which, from an instructional perspective, can be regulated and institutionalized as a coherent part of any writing program. From both the student's and the teacher's perspective, however, response to writing is often difficult and tense. For the teacher, it is the schizophrenia of roles now the helpful facilitator, hovering next to the writer to lend guidance and support, and now the authority, passing critical judgment on the writer's work; at one moment the intellectual peer, giving "reader-based" feedback (Elbow 1981), and at the next the imposer of criteria, the gatekeeper of textual standards. For students, as for all writers, response can generate its own special anxieties: misguided expectations as their private creations struggle with the public nature of discourse; conflicts of ego as the instinct to present themselves at their best battles with the fundamental need to share their doubts and imperfections at the very moment when they are most vulnerable. As teachers and as agents of the theories we generate in the field of writing studies, we have tried to circumvent these tensions and complexities with the certainties afforded by simple procedures and activities. Like farmers with new chemicals, we grasp at the slightest success of this or that treatment, forgetting for the moment that nothing in our human world, least of all writing, can be so simple. Occasionally, the keys to unlocking the complexities of writing have, in fact, been elegantly simple, lying in plain view but for our lack of vision to see them. More often than not, however, the field of composition has erred when it has too hastily trusted and laid claim to certainty when it has assumed, for example, that some new key will work with great accuracy and consistency; that it will always work, no matter what the writing, in the same way; that it will work at different stages of intellectual development and writing proficiency; that it will work across contexts, from the classroom to the newspaper office to the chemist's lab; and that it will work among diverse personalities, from the introspective, moody, or defensive to the outgoing, self-consuming, or manic. Instead of providing solutions, the urge for certainty has often created new problems by encouraging simpleminded, mechanical procedures for teaching or learning highly complex skills and processes. Guised in the cloak of reliability and efficiency, such procedures are instructionally very attractive, and teachers adopt them rapidly, often in spite of their deepest convictions about the complexities of the writing process. Easily promulgated and passed along, both the methods and their underlying philosophical origins begin to saturate the habits Q L) imaginative. (10) That such an ideology of response has prevailed in American writing instruction since Hill's "English Composition Card" is not difficult to discern: it is hard to overlook the card's educational durability, laminated as it is to the inside front and back covers of most typical composition textbooks. Symbolically sandwiching in everything else rhetorical, the card is still, in many contexts, the first and last word on writing. But we have, in fact, known better all along if not about how and when to respond to student writing, at least that real, substantive response is in one form or another fundamental to language development. Some eighteen years before the specimen theme was written, Harvard began to require the "correction of bad English as part of the examination for admission" to the college. This move simply reinforced much of what was already happening in secondary schools, where students spent most of their "writing time" parsing sentences, working on penmanship, and memorizing dozens of numbered rules of grammar and usage. Some educators, however, were already pointing out the futility of divorcing these principles from actual use from sustained with it manfully. Yet though his theme was remarkably long, a few commas in the te:::t and two or three words in the margin were almost all the guidance that he got from the instructor. He lost three or four marks, for punctuation, I believe; but the instructor added to his score a well-earned bonus for general excellence, and marked the theme one hundred. Having secured permission to criticise this theme, I spent an hour or two upon it, trying to point out both its faults and its merits. The boy had done so much that it was a shame to see his teacher doing so little. There were a hundred things to say about the composition; and the boy, by the strong intelligence of his work, showed himself able to apply them all. Yet it was nobody's business to examine his writing minutely. Nobody had time for him. (3riggs 1890, 311) While we might wonder what Briggs had in mind for his hundred comments, his observation, buried in the annals of pedagogical history, still rings true. For it is time or lack of it that so often manages to redeem us from the admission that we have corrected, circled, checked, and assigned points to our students' writing but forgotten, in the arduous and painful process, to listen to what they have been saying. But even with world enough and time, the sort of minute examination of the theme w%ich Briggs advocates might have done no more for the student's development than his teacher's formulaic approval. In addition to finding useful ways to ease the "pper load" through alternative response methods, we would do welt to study what we 10 Chris M. Anson new ways and can respond more openly and freely to it. Finally, Geoffrey Sirc offers a critique of computer programs that "respond" in one form or another to writing. Arguing that current programs are severely limited in what they can provide by way of response, Sirc offers an alternative perspective in which computer technology becomes an adjunct to, and not a replacement for, real human response. Part III draws together six studies of response to writing, ranging from descriptive analyses of teacher interactions with students to more empirical research on the relationship between response and the improvement of writing ability. In "Response to Writing as a Context for Learning to Write," Martin Nystrand and Deborah Brandt report results from their studies that the social, collaborative context of peer conferences not only helps students to revise more copiously but enhances their attitudes toward writing through the natural, functional reciprocity of discussion and review. As Cynthia Onore shows in "The Student, the Teacher, and the Text: Negotiating Meanings through Response and Revision," a curriculum based on inquiry can do much to help the teacher assume a more productive role in the classroom, closer to the role of the peer. The traditional classroom, with its established structure of authority and expectations, is unsuited to a model of growth which privileges both gains and losses in the nonlinear movement toward literacy. Drawing from case studies of three undergraduate students reacting to teacher responses, Onore reveals the complexity and idiosyncratic effects response can have on writers as they explore their way toward a finished text. By reinterpreting data that failed to reveal an expected relationship, Onore cautions us against the potential myopia of taking too empirical a view of our research. Keeping the focus on teachers, Glynda Hull and Susan Wall examine the implications of new theories of interpretation for responding to error. In a study of elementary, secondary, and college teachers' responses S1 an editing task, they suggest that the interpretation of error is often a function of the institutional and ideological contexts of the reader. To assume that hard-and-fast criteria exist even within the boundaries of easily identifiable features of texts is to ignore the functional, contextual, and interpersonal features of discourse. Next, Ann Matsuhashi, Alice Gil lam, Rance Conley, arid Beverly Moss widen traditional conceptions of :4.sponse by examining peer tutoring as a response event. Through a careful study of one beginning peer tutor's re, ronse process, the authors raise important questions about how students read texts in progress and how such readings reflect the development of writing ability. Clearly, no single method, no set theory, no specific research findings, no matter how conclusive, will provide everything we should know about or act upon in this rich and complicated process. But in gathering together the opinions, speculations, methods, and findings of twentytwo scholars and teachers who find the issue of response a constant source of interest and challenge, it is my hope that this volume moves us a little further toward a more complete understanding of the relationship between response and students' development as writers. References Briggs, L. B. R. 1890. The Correction of Bad English _as a Requirement for Admission to Harvard College. The Academy 5:302-12.