Our students come to our classes expecting us to make them great writers so that when they leave our classrooms they will be fit for any writing task they are ever handed. Now that’s a tall order if you really think about it. Why not teach students writing skills that they can use later on in whatever field they choose to enter? The sentiments are good and certainly there are valiant writing teachers out there trying to do just that - teach transferrable writing skills to their students. I agree that there needs to be a foundational level of writing (Basic Writing if you will) that will develop into area specific writing skills later on in our students’ careers. But I think there needs to be something more, somewhere we are missing something crucial to writing instruction.
Perhaps, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is the solution but we need to see it on a larger scale to really analyze the effectiveness of that approach. As David Russell mentioned in “American Origins of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Movement” (1992), “Instead of viewing writing as a complex and continuously developing response to a specialized, text-based, discourse community, highly embedded in the differentiated practices of that community, educators [had come] to see it as a set of generalizable, mechanical “skills” independent of disciplinary knowledge” (153). Writing was seen as more of “skill”, that once learned, remained unchanged yet applicable to every context.
Sadly, there are still many in the academic community who believe that writing is simply a tool that one can learn in a course or two at the beginning of a college career (or arguably earlier in secondary education institutions). This is exactly the basis that WAC combats. As Charles Bazerman wrote in his essay “The Problem of Writing Knowledge” (1988), “...academic assignments bear a loose relationship to the writing done by mature members of the disciplines” (502). This is a relatively new sentiment that has really come to light with the WAC movement. Instead of viewing writing as a stagnant means of communication that can be easily mastered, Bazerman and many proponents of WAC, emphasize the importance of writing being discipline specific.
So wait...what does this mean for us writing teachers? I do no propose that we all loose our jobs of course. Rather, I think that basic writing skills can be taught (to an extent) but beyond our classrooms, students need to continue learning about writing within their disciplines. This is essentially the premise of WAC. There needs to be communication across the curriculum to teach writing that will benefit our students.
So how do we teach basic writing then? That is still being eagerly awaited by many writing instructors, including myself. Our students are still coming to our classes expecting us to magically mold them into convincing writers but our views of writing are shifting, leaving them staring at red-covered papers in despair. I propose that we need to teach our students that writing instruction does not end with us, but instead, they must continue to grow and learn about writing in their discipline specific courses. In that case, our job is to teach them basic writing and the tools that they will need to evaluate written texts within their respective disciplines whether those criteria of writing are specifically taught or not. “What a text is must take into account how people create it and how people use it,” (Bazerman 503). So rather than prescribing set “rules” for how to write, we need to engage our students in critical thinking that applies rhetorical awareness to the texts they encounter. Joseph Williams in “The Phenomenology of Error” (1981), described that when we approach a freshman example of writing, we come to the table expecting to find errors. With that frame of mind, we undoubtedly find errors (420). So what is an error?
I think that students need to get more credit than they are given in their writing. Currently, we are asking them to make writing moves that most likely they have not had to do as of yet in their college careers. We lecture to them and give them those activities that we spend hours planning but sometimes I think those things fall short of their mark. When we grade, we still find those irritating “errors”. Their papers consequently get handed back to them covered in red ink or the computerized equivalent. “[T]he BW [basic writing] student both resents and resists his vulnerability as a writer. He is aware that he leaves a trail of errors behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while he is writing. But he doesn’t know what to do about it” (Shaughnessy 391). Williams proposed that we need to see these errors not as isolated issues restricted to the page but as “a flawed verbal transaction between a writer and a reader”(415) because oftentimes, the writer (the student) is not able to think about all the “rules” that he or she is supposed to know and consequently gets bogged down by whether or not those “rules” are followed properly and not necessarily by whether meaning is clear.
Don’t get me wrong, those “rules” are there for a reason but as Williams concluded in his essay, those “rules” are also meant to be broken. Williams ended his essay with a section asking his readers to try to remember all the “errors” that he committed throughout the length of his essay. A really poignant approach to this issue of “errors” because it asks us what really is the importance of some of those rules given that we can read his essay and most likely not remember many (if any!) errors at all. He message is quite clear and we might not even notice that he made any “errors” at all if he didn’t ask us to evaluate his writing at the end of his piece. Thus, we can come to some sort of conclusion that at least questions the good of our “rules” that we seem to prize so much in writing (maybe because we don’t have much else to cling to as writing instructors?).
So to conclude myself, WAC has the beginnings of the general movement that we need to see in writing instruction. Writing is not a formulaic approach to exchanging meaning but it is an exchange of meaning and its effectiveness is dependent upon both the writer and the reader. Writing is discipline specific, especially when put to use in specific discipline contexts that expect certain writing features that general writing instructors are not privy to. I think that a lot of our work ahead of us as writing instructors lies in teaching our students how to negotiate those different writing contexts and giving them the rhetorical strategies to chose deliberately how and when they adhere to “rules” and the consequences of those choices in their own writing and the writing of others. Writing instruction cannot be left to us alone but also must carry over to discipline instructors because they will be the real gatekeepers to the discipline expectations that our students enter. We have to pass on the knowledge that will give our students the tools to evaluate their discipline writing and learn from those examples.
Do not despair, writing instructors! The task is daunting but we will continue to grow with our students. We will find a way to work with other disciplines to create an effective approach to teaching writing but in the mean time, strive towards rhetorical awareness and critical thinking strategies that will help our students become aware of the moves that are made within writing to communicate effectively between writer and reader.
Works Cited
Bazerman, Charles. “The Problem of Writing Knowledge.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. 502-514. Print.
Russell, David. “American Origins of the Writing-across-the Curriculum.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 151-170. Print.
Shaughnessey, Mina. “Introduction to Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. 387-396. Print.
Williams, Joseph. “The Phenomenology of Error.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies. Ed. Susan Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. 414-429. Print.
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