Every good writer goes through the following steps: planning, writing, and revision...right? That is what we are taught in school and that is pretty much how we think of ourselves writing, right? Maybe we come to the table with those ideas in mind. When we set out to write a paper of some sort, no matter what level of writing, we have this preconceived idea in our mind that we are going to plan out what we want to say, say it, and then go back and revise our work. But is that really how we write?
Within the last forty to fifty years we have started to experience what Thomas Kuhn terms a paradigm shift. Maxine Hairston in her article “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution of Teaching Writing” (1982) described this phenomenon of the shift in teaching pedagogies of composition. She explained the shift from composition as some sort of underrated subject to one of rising importance as more students are passing through the system and teachers feel that “Their students come to them writing badly and they leave writing badly. Handbooks won’t solve their problems, and having them revise papers does no good” (Hairston 444). By teaching students that there is a formulaic approach to writing they are simply learning those formulas for writing and not learning how to apply those formulas to situations outside of their academic career.
Writing and composition instruction has been on the rise in recent years given the need and push back from employers and instructors alike. Students are going through their academic careers without learning the needed and very necessary skills to apply their writing knowledge to the “real world” and even within the classroom itself throughout their academic careers. How do we address this ever-growing issue of how to teach applicable writing habits and “genres”?
David Foster in “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Composition?” (1988) acknowledged this lack of direction in composition studies and teaching pedagogy and proposed that part of the struggle with this field is due to the fact that composition does not have one singular path that it follows throughout history. Rather, it comes from a messy mash of “perspectives and methodologies arising from vastly diverse sources” (Foster 452) and this lack of distinctive history lends itself to confusion. How are we to teach writing if we do not know where it comes from or where it is going?
I do not think that history of composition is the real issue, we can trace bits and pieces of the course of study to different fields such as rhetoric, psychoanalysis, and other such bits and pieces of academia. I think the real issue is that we need a direction. Where do we need to take composition?
This is a key factor in the paradigm shift that we are experiencing right now in the classroom regardless of level of study. Perhaps we can see this shift most apparently in the college classroom but it happening everywhere as we see the need for a change in how we view and approach writing practices.
Perhaps the most prevalent view on composition studies that I have experienced personally is the “social view” as described by Lester Faigley in his article “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal” (1986). He outlined the social view of composition as “human language (including writing) [that] can be understood only from the perspective of a society rather than a single individual” (Faigley 659). And more importantly, “The focus of a social view of writing, therefore, is not on how the social situation influences the individual, but on how the individual is a constituent of a culture” (Faigley 659). How we view writing in the classroom flows over into how our students view writing in the workplace, at home, and everywhere that writing and reading take place. There are no distinct boundaries in writing. How we interact with each other through writing is crucial to how others see us and how we see others, especially given how integral writing and communication is in our world today.
The concepts that play into the paradigm shift in composition teaching and writing itself as a social practice influence how our students will interact with each other for the rest of their lives. As writers, we grow and come to understand through how we interact with others. Therefore, writing has a huge impact on how we will act as a society and shape our culture.
In the classroom, we need to not focus on how we can prescribe writing techniques and formulaic approaches to how to write an effective piece but instead we need to approach writing with how this will carry over beyond the classroom. We need to teach our students how to take what they learn with us beyond our classroom and apply their rhetorical knowledge and practical writing skills to everyday writing tasks. So maybe not saying “plan, write, and revise” but take into consideration that very rarely does someone write this way. Writing happens through the act of writing. We never write in a vacuum nor do we actually ever write exactly what we expect to when we set out to write something. We may have a general idea, we write some, take a look at what we have done, think some more, write some more, rewrite some, go back change that, write some more, revise some more, talk pieces over with other people, write again, revise again, and at some point say that our writing has accomplished what we hoped that it would.
Nothing is ever really “finished” because there is always room for improvement. No paper should ever get 100% because there is always room for improvement. How better could that one bit here have been said? Maybe this piece should have been moved down to the end...there is always room to improve or approach the topic another way.
We need to teach students skills that will carry over from the classroom to whatever walk of life that they choose to follow. This is where I think our composition studies is shifting to but we as instructors need to make that shift happen so our students can benefit from meaningful writing tools that actually matter and reflect how writing actually happens.
Works Cited
Faigley, Lester. “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. 652- 666. Print.
Foster, David. “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Composition?” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. 451-460. Print.
Hairston, Maxine. “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. 439- 450. Print.
Image Borrowed from:
