It’s a struggle to staff freshman comp because higher education doesn’t respect the labor of those who actually do this work. The administration wants to acquire champagne teaching on a beer budget, so they exploit the labor of graduate students, faculty spouses, and post-docs who can’t find better jobs. Offer full staff benefits and decent salaries and you’ll have a larger applicant pool from whom you can choose the best-qualified.

Anonymous adjunct, at 10:51 am EDT on March 23, 2007

College Preparation for Teaching Writing

My eight years of fulltime college and first twelve years of teaching occurred, thank god, when English departments considered the best preparation for teaching writing to be the reading of the greatest literature ever written in or translated into English — poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction — and as much of it as possible, so I read Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot, Rossetti, Yeats; Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov; Dickens, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Ellison, Woolf; Plato, Descartes, Bacon, Newman, Carlyle, Marx, Russell, Orwell; and more. In retrospect, there were terrible omissions — the writing of women and nonwhite writers especially — but even given these huge holes in my literary education I would not trade it for the education in “writing” some recent graduates have described for me in which they read article after article of academic prose on how to teach writing and little of the literature by those I listed above. I’m grateful to be old-fashioned and out of date.

Bob Schenck, at 10:51 am EDT on March 23, 2007

The Professionalism of College Writing

One of the healthiest developments in higher education is the recognition that writing abilities is a marvelously complex skill that merits being taught in ways informed by theory and research—as well as by people with the professional training and enthusiasm to do it as a career. A famously sobering massive research study in 1963 found the teaching of writing as akin to “alchemy” (Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer), and a steady amount of research since then has created generation of well-trained and serious writing teachers. It’s not surprising, then, to see the emergence of writing programs independent from and staffed by these new professionals, some of them becoming departments with undergraduate and graduate majors. I recently began such a program at the University of Denver, hiring 19 faculty with terminal degrees to develop a first-year writing program, a comprehensive writing center, and thorough attention to writing in the disciplines, writing in the professions, and writing in civic life. The University of Denver, like Duke, like Stanford, and like an increasing number of schools who are following this model, have decided to get serious about this enterprise. All of us recognize that learning to write, rather than being a meager skill to be remediated (and its teaching to be avoided), is best conceived as repertory to be coached and cultivated across the college years. It’s not surprising to see, then, the strong emergence of “vertical” writing curricula, including majors, sometimes manifested as freestanding units, with a dedicated (in both senses of the term) expert faculty. While I hardly think the days of nonexpert writing instruction done on the cheap are over, I believe higher education should be heartened by several new formations of college writing instruction—and, more importantly, by the values of teaching grounded in research and tested pedagogies that they represent. —Doug Hesse, Former Chair, CCCC, University of Denver.

Doug Hesse, Professor and Director of Writing at The University of Denver, at 9:16 pm EDT on March 23, 2007

Literature improves writing

I’m with Mr. Schenck! Reading literature written by those authors he lists and more was the best preparation I had for writing. In fact I always told students that they could improve their grammar, spelling, style, etc. by reading GOOD authors and reading often. When we read, we painlessly take into our brains the patterns used by the authors. Then when we write, our brains offers those patterns to draw on. The only drawbacks are that few students read anything they are not assigned to read and that waiting until one is in college to build one’s repetoire of writingpatterns through reading is a little late. Still, if one wants to improve her or his writing (not to mention increasing mental enjoyment), starting late is better than never starting at all.

Marian O’Brien Paul, Retired, at 10:06 pm EDT on March 23, 2007

rewrite a lot too

Bob,

Read a lot and write a lot and rewrite a lot still form the core activities of most writing classes. But the questions surrounding those activities and what they mean are increasingly grounded in an indentifiable, and important, disciplinary field marked by emerging academic units and programs where writing and the study of writing and the teaching of writing is central.

So what’s new?

More than I can say here. But for an overview of the discipline and its growth and the issues under study over the years, visit http://bedfordstmartins.com/bb/history.html, for “A Brief History of Rhetoric and Composition” from _The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing_ by Reynolds, Herzberg, and Bizzell.

Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin’s, at 6:25 am EDT on March 24, 2007

The teaching of writing across the academy

Behind closed doors; the topic of graduate students at my university revolves around the low level of writing we see across the academy. Several years back, a critical thinking program was launched to assist the academy in the writing of assignments and prompts that would encourage students to critically engage problem solving through writing. It was a sound idea except that it developed through an assumption that high quality writing and rhetoric was had by the entire community.

Currently, we have students approach us and ask what are these ambiguous prompts asking for, why does their writing receive low marks, why does their identical level of writing achieve high marks, and etc. There is little if any consistency in writing across the academy by either position of professor or student.

Most writing prompts brought to us by our students are loaded with grammatical errors, shifts in voice and time, and ambiguity from the aforementioned. As writing programs develop and specificity in the majors occurs, we need to pause and ask why we have not turned our focus towards the academy and raising the level of writing in the material that evaluates our students.

As a bold undergraduate, I once took an Art History professor’s writing prompt and corrected it in red ink and ask that she resubmit. Now we cannot expect everyone at the academy to be excellent writers, yet we could set up programs to assist in their writing of assignments and prompts.

anonymous, behind closed doors, at 1:25 pm EDT on March 24, 2007

And yet, Valerie...

And yet, Valerie, my question remains unanswered, and with all due respect I must say that your suggestion that the task of teaching writing would be easy if it were only a matter of getting students to read good books is naive. “What’s a ‘good’ book?” my students ask. “A book that makes you think!” I reply — and it is precisely those books my students cannot or will not read. They have not time, they say or, worse, reading feels like a waste of time. All my students are fluent, they can all write understandable conversational prose, but when I receive the first batch of essays from my students I can easily distinguish those written by daily readers from those of nonreaders. Why? Because the prose of readers reflects their familiarity with what the written word looks like on the printed page; readers do things with their sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, interior monologue, format, and punctuation — and much more — that one can learn only from reading. Of every twenty-five students, the prose of only three or four will look like this. Next best is the prose of students born to and raised by educated, professional parents — because these students have internalized the English vocabulary, diction, and syntax they heard growing up and can recognize the preferred variants. The least “standard” English, the least “literary,” is the prose of nonreaders raised by nonreading, nonprofessional parents who have not been to or have not completed college. It’s not “illiterate,” the canard often imputed to such prose and to its writers, it’s just a colloquial, slangy vernacular not much different from the English they speak. It will get most of them by in the low-middle and middle-income world, yes, it will pass, but it lacks the form, order, cogency, sustained reason, logic, and specific evidence of distinguished academic discourse and also the evocative power, organic form, figurative language, and vivid unexpected detail of imaginative literature. The controversy surrounding its composition and its author notwithstanding, this is why I assign Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird.” For my students it is compelling reading. It evokes their horror, their pity, their wonder, their awe, and good questions of the most fundamental kind — about truth. The book is no more vulgar and bloody than the movies my students, but from reading the book they learn almost immediately the unique power of the printed word to squeeze their hearts, turn their stomachs, and move their minds in ways their favorite movies cannot. No one reads “The Painted Bird” and remains unmoved. It challenges its reader on every level — emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, philosophically, artistically. No correlation between one’s reading and one’s ability to write? Forgive me, Valerie, if I suggest that the reasons for such an inference lie in the study and in the minds of the social scientists who conducted it.

Bob Schenck, at 5:10 pm EDT on March 24, 2007

Get the real conference skinny, professionally of course!

Scott’s article generously gives the conference nice publicity, but if you want to get your hands on the large variety of teaching and learning issues, remember to go to the Kairos Conference Review (with over 25 conference reviewers) where we cover session ideas in more depth. It should be out in May, Will Hochman

Will Hochman, at 7:45 pm EDT on March 24, 2007

It seems to me after being a teaching assistant twice in an English department that the departments do not know what they are doing when they teach writing. Does the department teach writing as a subject in itself or applied writing, writing that would prepare students for their next classes, be it in science or business or anthropology? If composition (English 101) is a service course, which invariably it is, it needs to service the institution as a whole and not purport that college-level writing is always encapsulated in the MLA-based, deductive, literary-analysis style research papers. Therefore composition departments should sever themselves from the creative writing and literary folk who believe that writing can only be organic, people who really couldn’t or wouldn’t teach a business report or science report to first-year students, and who are too busy pursuing the elusive (but highly valuable) proto-lesbian marginalia of Jane Austen to design a course with the undergraduate students’ future needs in mind.

SJS, at 10:00 pm EDT on March 24, 2007

Extending Jules’ Analogy

Jules’ biking analogy represents a very positive approach to the teaching of writing, but it also, I think, captures the limits of some very positive approaches to writing instruction. Let me explain as I try to extend the analogy from personal experience. I bike fairly regularly and have done so in many places. In the West Lafayette area of Indiana, I could bike 50 miles a day in fewer than five hours without really straining myself because of the flat terrain there. I only needed one water bottle and rarely changed gears. That biking differed radically from my first efforts at distance biking. When I first started distance biking, friends, including one who flirting with becoming a professional biker, taught me how to conquer the back roads of North Carolina between Chapel Hill and Greensboro. Mike and Joe carefully instructed me on the fine points of drafting and helped me to be able to do so at about 35-40 miles per hour with inches between our bikes as we shot down and up steep hills with traffic passing us at 55-70 miles per hour. Trust me, I needed lots of explanation and lots of “drafts” (pun intended) before I could manage to ride with my friends in such tricky settings. I’ve also adjusted my biking from the never-need-to-shift-gears Indiana days to days of shifting constantly in the Santa Monica Mountains, and I changed again recently when a group of my friends and I met this summer to bike in Vermont. I didn’t have my own bike with me then, and it had been years since I had drafted with Mike and Joe, but I knew how to talk with the professional guides on our trip and how to talk with my friends who varied in biking experience and fitness (I was one of the most unfit for the trip, by the way, but the wine parties at night helped lots.). Anyay, I’d extend Jules’ analogy to include more than the goal of biking around town. I’d say that experts who have studied lots of biking options (and tools) in various contexts can help bike riders develop as riders able to optimize speeds down and up paved, traffic-filled roads through North Carolina hills and Vermont mountains; able to negotiate the dirt, hills, and rattlesnakes in the Santa Monica Mountains; and able to bike around the various urban settings of Chicago, New York, Kalamazoo, and Kannapolis (where I learned to bike at age 5 in my parents’ soft back yard as my mom ran beside me). I believe neither bike riding in all its forms and contexts nor writing in all its forms and contexts can be optimized by offering only encouragement and praise. Yet, offering encouragement and praise sure helps learning to bike or write well and strategically.

Kim Ballard, at 10:46 am EDT on March 25, 2007

And Back To Your First Point

Yep, guidance is the role of the teacher, and now we might be back to the points of issue your first post raised for me and your additional posts continued to raise. Those inslude (1)what kind of guidance might best help teachers of writing—from lst year writing through classes/tutorials focused on helping individuals learn to write dissertations in various fields—develop into those specialists? Are you so sure that your training in the careful reading of wonderful books—fiction, poetry, drama, and prose—is so far superior to my training, which allowed me (1) to read all the authors you listed and more, as did you, (2) to specialize in the reading of books devoted to writing and rhetorical pedaogogy and theory (as well as articles) that spanned the centuries, (3) to be mentored by professionals who had won tenure by writing books and articles and providing great service in the fields of writing centers, technical writing, professional writing, developmental writing, first-year writing, computers and writing, and reading as a content area, (4) to take exams in a literary field (Modern British was my choice because my MAs had focused on American literature, and (5) to develop graduate projects that focused on the teaching of writing in various fields? Also, are you willing to consider the idea that what you thought was the typical training of rhetoric and composition professionals (you mentioned the reading of articles) did not actually represent what most of us who are really trained in that field explored in our classes and graduate projects? Throughout this discussion, I’ve been willing to acknowledge your teaching and training; why not give me and those with similar training in our shared field the same professional consideration?

Kim

Kim Ballard, at 8:11 pm EDT on March 25, 2007

Dialogue?

Bob, I actually think my “best” writing may be the grant I won for the TRiO Student Success program at my school two years ago and the one I wrote for another school last year; the first one won us funding for four years and the second one won that school funding for five years. Since you want published pieces, though, feel free to check out “The Writing Lab Newsletter: A History of Collaboration,” which appeared in a journal titled Composition Chronicle. That piece is way old—from the early 1990s. For more recent stuff, you might snag a copy of The English Workshop: A Programmed Approach, which includes many pieces I wrote and supervised. Look specifically at the Profile in Success, Job Talks, and Getting Connected pieces, but realize that others wrote many of the tips and margin pieces. I also am pleased with the design transformation of that book from its 4th edition to the 5th. I accomplished that work when I served as Senior Editor for the book. Other “best writings” include book launch proposals from my days as a Senior Editor, but I doubt that you can find them published in the sense I think you’re using the term in your question. Also, I’m rather fond of a proposal I just wrote to my Provost which may secure a substantial increase in the budget for the school’s writing center; this week I think I did a pretty good job on peer review comments on a article for the Writing Lab Newsletter (which probably aren’t public); I also feel pretty good about three conference presentations I just completed; and I like the three recommendations for students I’ve written in the past two weeks, including one that should be published in parts in some college or local publication soon because a student won a regional award from it and from her own tutoring philosophy.

But my real concern with your last post is that I’m having trouble following your logic—the title of your post indicates we are having a “dialogue,” yet I’m beginning to feel that you might want to have a contest, and maybe that’s been your point all along? From my perspective, I’ve answered all the questions you’ve asked. I offered you a list of advances in writing pedagogy you requested. I gave you a list (maybe too long) of what I think includes my best writing. Will you do me the courtesy of considering my questions and answering them? I’ll offer them again using other words: (1) Do you think you might have misrepresented the training of those in the rhetoric and composition field when you relied on your conversations about that training from individuals whom you think told you they had read a lot of articles? (2) Do you insist that your training in reading great literature—which you yourself indicate had gaps—is really better training than the training I indicate I received, training that included all the reading you listed plus reading of various rhetoricians throughout Western civilization, mentoring by professionals in various types of writing and writing instruction, and opportunities to develop projects in literature and numerous types of writing? I’m not sure that you’re dodging my questions, but it begins to feel that rather than being in a dialogue you’re hunting for my weakness. I have many flaws, but I don’t think my training is one of them. Kim

Kim Ballard, at 5:56 am EDT on March 26, 2007

Different Kim

Bob,

The Kim Ballard who wrote the text you found is, I think, a male linguist in England. I think he has also written other books that deal with grammar activities. Once a student of mine eagerly told me she’d just seen my books online (having also Googled me) and was impressed with my British publishers.

Thanks for the consession. I just wanted an answer to my questions, and I hope our exchange will help you understand the field a little more instead of letting you react with the quick dismissal you offered earlier. I truly appreciate your willingess to reconsider your views, which makes me think you really did want a dialogue after all.

As you requested, I reviewed your writing on your blog. I couldn’t quite move from the first part of “Insanity” to the next chapter, but I read the entire poem. That piece seemed sad to me, and it seemed to offer a theme of desire to be a gadfly or a willingness to generate conflict for no real purpose. But I only read the poem once, and I know better than to suggest a poem is a reflection of a writer’s reality.

In any case, I have to reject the notion that you can’t read writing developed for a discourse community. Your poem and certainly “Insantity” have been written for a discourse community whose members could appreciate them or critique them. Our posts have been written for a discourse community, maybe multiple ones. Maybe you’re dismissing the term “discourse community” without truly understanding it or how it can be helpful in writing pedagogy. Certainly I was helped in developing all the texts I previously mentioned as some of my “best” writing by understanding the conventions of the discourse communities for which I was creating the varied texts.

Good luck with your teaching and writing.

Kim

Kim Ballard, at 10:16 am EDT on March 26, 2007

from service to discipline: one national model

The University of Minnesota has taken the idea of writing studies as a discipline quite seriously, by recently establishing a new Department of Writing Studies. We will open the doors Fall September 2007 as a new academice department in the College of Liberal Arts. A merger of existing faculty, staff, and programs in Rhetoric, Post Secondary Teaching and Learning (formerly General College), and English composition, we will be a stand-alone academic department with tenured faculty, full time instructors, and established degrees from the bachelor’s to the doctorate. We take this charge, and the national visibility that comes with it, quite seriously and hope to be a model that our rhetoric, composition, and writing colleagues can point to as this national move toward disciplinary status takes on new life.

Laura Gurak, Professor and Chair at University of Minnesota, at 1:24 pm EDT on March 26, 2007

Teaching Writing

Bill, you’re astonished because you say “writers” are absent from a conversation in a blog for an e-journal titled “Inside Higher Ed"? I’m confused. Lots of people who posted in this conversation noted they are writers—they mentioned fiction, poetry, grants (successful ones), proposals, articles in juried journals, textbook contributions, and lots of other “writing.” You seem to suggest these people can’t be real writers because they write some articles for “academic” audiences. So who are writers? Also, almost every one of the college instructors in this discussion have indicated the importance of their own writing and of studying writing—either by focusing on rhetoric or literature. Your suggestion that having those who study rhetoric/literature teach writing is like having someone who has never held a scaple teach surgery doesn’t hold either. “Academics” who happen to practice, study, and write about surgery teach classes in surgery, just as most of the contributors to this conversation—whether they’re arguing that literature is a better training or that separate profesional training is better—emphasize the importance of their own writing and study of how writing works. That is, they offer evidence that they practice what they teach, and you seem to ignore that evidence. I also challenge your “assumption” about the meaning of the bicycle analogy. You say that analogy indicates the principles of writing directed at one audience do not translate to another, yet both individuals who wrote about that analogy indicated transfer was the goal. The extended analogy suggested that students could also benefit from learning to write in different situations, not that no transfer was possible. Finally, the reason the teachers are not saying, “Heck, bad writing is all the same,” as you suggest, is that they are focused on teaching. Telling individuals in any field, “Your writing is bad, period,” doesn’t help them as much as explaining why a memo written for a business audience fails to meet the expectations of that audience or why a lab report does not conform to the needs of readers of those reports, although the same text might make a good piece for Nature. Vastly different expectations exist for “good” writing in different academic fields and different professions. It’s easy to spot “bad” or “ineffective” writing; it’s much more difficult to teach someone how to improve. As a non-traditional student in Professional Writing and Computer Information Science, I’m grateful for specific discussion of audience and strategies my business writing teacher offered when I learned about writing proposals, and I’m grateful for the discussion of visual rhetoric my technical writing instructor has offered. Thank goodness for professionals who want to explore how writing works and discuss those ways with students. I also enjoy literary analysis and the writing style of that field as well as the writing style of history, philosophy, and art.

Heidi

Heidi, at 7:16 pm EDT on March 26, 2007

Thank you, Bill M!

Thank you, Bill M!

Bob Schenck, at 7:41 am EDT on March 27, 2007

James O. Freedman

In today’s Inside Higher Ed, March 27, James O. Freedman says much better than I what I was trying to say about literature and composition. Wonderful!

Bob Schenck, at 8:45 am EDT on March 27, 2007

detente

I’d be pleased if any of the beginning and developing writers in my classes could write as well as any of those writers who have commented here; and I believe any of those here could offer useful accounts of how they learned to write as well as they do. There was once a time, I’m told, when it was thought any well-educated adult could offer such advice. I was surprised that my initial remarks here were taken personally by others, though I quickly realized why they were and regretted them. They put Kim, for one, first on the defensive and then on the offensive. I had meant only to express my own preference for one kind of preparation and not — though I guess I did — denigrate other kinds. For the latter I apologize. But in my job — as I assume it is in the jobs of other academics — I am constantly engaged in ongoing discussion and debate in my department and in the college over which courses in English should be required and which not required, which funded and which not, whom hired and whom not, which textbooks to require and which not, which methods to employ and which not, what type of writing to require and not, whether business and technical writing courses should be permitted to substitute for traditional composition and literature courses in the first year of college, and more. Though I remain friends, I hope, with the colleagues with whom I disagree in our exchanges on these matters, the reality — for me at least — is that I cannot express equal support for all alternatives. I have to choose and decide. I wish my students and colleagues and I had the time and energy to read — like Kim — literature and theory and pedagogy in quantity. Kim’s right. This is ideal. But that’s not the academic world I inhabit here as a writing teacher at a community college. My authority is slight and my choices are few. If we can require students to read just one book in class, should I assign “The Painted Bird” or “Tao Te Ching” or a traditional manual on the process of composition? If we can hire just one more teacher of writing, should we hire one with a degree in literature or one with a degree in composition and rhetoric or an un-degreed but published writer? I intended in my contributions to this discussion only to express my own opinion of what — given such a tiny arena — seems best to me and not — though I clearly did — to offend.

Bob Schenck, at 1:01 pm EDT on March 27, 2007

Vocabulary Development?

Bill,When I come across words that I don’t understand, I look them up. I love doing that because I learn so much. We’re having this conversation in a blog on Inside Higer Education, and the audience includes a variety of individuals; for many the terms you dismiss are hardly arcance or obscure, and those readers aren’t just academics in writing studies. I know I first heard the word “heursitic” in a first-year community college math class when it was contrasted to algorithm (one being open-ended; one being more formulaic), and I was a sophomore in a community college public speaking class when I heard “discource community.” The walls housing the buildings on my campus are hardly ivy-covered, and they weren’t at the community college I attended my first two years. The university where I teach has a large commuter population from the urban area in which it’s located. My students understand discourse community because they know they live in different worlds, including the academic one. They also know that to survive and succeed in some of their different worlds they have to be able to speak in and even write in different audience-appropriate styles. Many of my students also like to think of writing as a means of solving problems and as a craft/art that has strategies. Maybe they just want to please me, but they don’t seem overly confused by the words “heuristic” or “discourse community,” just as those words didn’t throw me. My students seem to embrace words that explain what they live, they like knowing that strategies exist, they’re thrilled I’m not spending hours asking them to locate verbs or predicate nominatives in sentences they did not write, and they like that we can all practice our craft together. If the two terms you challenged were really confusing or arcane to you, then maybe you needed help with your vocabulay development. I think I and others in this conversation tried to offer that help to you, and those teaching efforts were not that differnt from your attempt to offer me the name of a professional who writes about new approaches to journalism. As teachers, we want to share our developing knowledge. I am not surprised to learn that someone is suggesting new ways of considering the work the journalism profession. I also bet the writer’s “clear prose” would not be clear to every audience, and that some readers of that article would have to look up words or be provided some background information to appreciate the article as you do.

Rob

Robert Teague, at 8:20 am EDT on March 28, 2007

college — writing programs

Unless a writer is some honored national figure, it seems colleges/universities don’t trust a writer with a B.A. or B.F.A. or even a J.D. to teach in a writing program. Despite working the a writing industry (newspapers) for 25 years, my friend who has a journalism degree — but no M.A. or PhD. is relegated to lower level classes, no possibility for tenure, and a diminished status at a university where she teaches. It matters not that she has extensive writing, editing, publishing experience. The PhD’s in journalism have more status. I find it ironic that writers who “write across the curriculum” themselves are held in such low regard by universities.

Finally, high school English curricula must begin to increase students’ exposure to a wide variety of writing matching the types of writing found in business, medicine, journalism, law, sales. Business writing is also not well-regarded by many high school English teachers because they haven’t done it themselves.

Linda R, at 8:40 pm EDT on March 28, 2007

LInda R.

You may know that most community colleges, colleges, and universitites seek accreditation from organizations that help set the rules about who can and can’t be hired. Most community colleges required 9 hours of undergraduate writing instruction (or classes that required lots of writing) for teachers in the developmental classes, and some places will let professionals teach beginning composition classes with those credentials. “Stars” with no degrees can teach, too, as you said. Colleges and universitites require either current training in an MA/MS program, 15 hours of an MA/MS program, or a terminal degree (MA/MS/MEd/JD/MFA, etc.) If your friend wants a tenure track position and would be willing (and able) to go back to school on a part-time basis, she could position herself as a highly competitive candidate for many positions because of her experience. Will she learn a lot in her grad program that she can use to teach? That depends on the program and her instructors. I don’t know if it’s fair or valid to make your friend seek an MA/MFA/Terminal degree for a tenure track job, but I do know how she could become competitive for a tenure track position or even the classes she wants to teach if she wants. Kim

Kim Ballard, at 10:01 am EDT on March 29, 2007