A Productive Discourse

The red pen. What started off as an innocent means of written commentary now symbolizes everything wrong with the direction of most academic commentary. The cowering student humbly submits the pieces of paper that capture so many hours of hard work so that the red pen demigod may chew it up and spit back out on the student's crushed, and now moist, face.

I've already written about why the way educator's conduct their commentary is so important to the process in terms of building a positive and trusting relationship, and it is becoming more and more accepted that professors' commentary needs to move away from the perspective of strict critic to achieve this goal. But what about the initial objective? At a certain point, teacher commentary may become as ineffectual as friends' commentary may be, they both want to dance around the issues to establish or maintain a personal base with someone.

While overly directive commentary is a clear mistake, professors and consultants should be wary about becoming too facilitative. Facilitative commentary assumes that the writer always has the potential to write perfectly. The advisor hopes that by asking the right types of questions, the writer will be able to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, the students who need the help of the writing center most will not be able to fully capitalize on that type of discussion.

Of course, the consultant should never give specific new ideas to the writer, but at least by leading the writer into a certain train of thought they have a better chance of arriving at a conclusion that is both originally their own and better informed. I observed a writing consultant who enacted the following tactic: She would focus on a specific point in the text, ask the writer to reread it, neutrally vocalize some issues, and ask the writer to collaborate on how to improve that section.

The key part was that when the writing consultant referred to an issue, the issue was always a consequence, not the root. For instance, she would highlight a passage that felt awkward because of a specific grammatical issue but not point out the grammatical issue itself. This forced the writer to find her own mistake so that the combination of directive and facilitative commentary that the consultant adopted allowed for both the writer and the writing to improve. I was very impressed.

Professors and writing consultants need to mirror this type of smart balance in the way they comment on papers to foster win-win situations: Better papers and better students.

Where to Start

It's an issue that every writer has to address. The first issue, actually. Where to start.

It seems like the simplest question. If your paper prompt is about health care policy, you write about health care policy. If your paper prompt is about Aristotle's ethics, you write about Aristotle's ethics. Easy, right?

Well,

Is it a research paper? Is it an opinion paper? Is it an analytic paper? Are you supposed to incorporate outside sources or limit yourself to the text? Is it a short paper? A long paper? Are you supposed to choose a specific topic within the realm of health care policy or Aristotle's ethics? Are you supposed to address one entire text? All the texts? What do you know about the topic? What do you need to know about the topic?

Uh...

What was a clear assignment is now rather mirky. Luckily, The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors suggests a few possible ways to clarify a paper subject and select a solid topic. They include brainstorming/listing, freewriting, webbing, and outlining.

Of these, I've personally found webbing to be the most helpful. Webbing allows you to see all of your ideas, which ideas link, and how they proceed from each other. This method naturally allows you to see all the paths your essay could take, and gives the writer a network of mini-outlines to work from. One idea might seem really appealing, but if you realize you can't expand that part of the web very far, it might not make a great topic for a longer paper. On the other hand, if you can develop a few concise branches off of one web, you may have just found focus points for your thesis.

The danger is any type of early planning is that writers get caught up in an interesting idea and may diverge from the intention of the prompt. Pre-writing bestows no benefit if the writer is clearly organizing a paper that the professor doesn't want.

Most writers will dismiss prewriting as an elementary exercise. They will claim they don't need to pre write. That they have a good idea of their topic and how their paper will go. They'll say it's a waste of time.

Bull. Shit.

Pre-writing is probably THE most time-effective measure a writer can take. A decent webbing pre-write can take somewhere between 10-20 minutes to lay out, but the clarity of ideas the writer obtains can cut their essay writing time in half.

Any journey starts with a step, and the first step is always critical. Make sure you start your writing on the right foot, and take the time to pre-write.

Error Revisited

After reading Kendall's "The Assignment Sheet Mystery" and Bartholomae's "The Study of Error", I became concerned that I could have handled my review of a friend's paper (the subject of my last post) better than I did. Given the apparently tight relationship between speaking and writing, I decided to revisit the paper with my friend, just so test out a few things.

He was a little apprehensive. He had already turned his paper in and wasn't seeking general English lessons, but I told him it would help me for a class and he submitted. I highlighted some of the most grammatically hazardous passages in his paper, and asked them to read them aloud. He read the first one, and looked up towards me. I had this a facial expression that screamed, "Do you hear that? You get it now, right?" But his face was blank. I asked if he heard anything wrong with the last sentence he had read, and he responded "No".

I repeated the exercise for all of the highlighted passages. Of the nine passages I highlighted, he thought that seven of them sounded perfectly fine, and that two of them could be phrased better, but that "I chose to phrase the sentence like I did. I could change it, but I don't see the point." This put an interesting spin on the role of "error analysis" that Bartholomae discusses.

I was trying to extract what he was doing correct: The quotes were relevant to his argument, his ideas adequately responded to the assignment sheet, and he supported his argument with sources. He clearly understood the paper topic and the aim of the paper. His ideas simply were not translating over well from Chinese to English and verbal communication wasn't getting him to notice it. This wasn't an error of speech to text, but language to language.

The two most consistent errors I found were unnecessary extra words like "multiple many" or "because since", and problems with tense and number such as "The crusaders was fought" or "People liking be knighted". I'm not a grammar scholar, but I explained the problems with both of these errors to him. He said he understood the examples I explained to him, but when I asked him to correct a different sentence, his correction maintained the issue. The influence that the structure of his primary language plays still plagues the clarity of his writing, however, I hope that at least by making him aware of two of his most consistent errors he'll begin to start catching himself in future papers and that I'll learn how to better explain his English grammatical errors to him later.

Writers and Writing

While doing some reading in my dorm room last night, I was asked a question that should not have surprised me the way it did. It was a question that lots of my friends ask me, and I never hesitate a response like I did this time.

"Can you read my paper?"

There were two major factors contributing to my shocked response. 1) This is the first time I've been asked this question since the start of my Writing Composition Theory and Pedagogy class. 2) The question came from an international student from China.

I had never read an international student's paper before, but since he seemed to get relatively good grades, I figured his English writing must be sophisticated. I was... well... wrong. There were grammatical or spelling errors in every single sentence. I could get the gist of some of his sentences, but the meaning of others were lost. My first impulse was to red-pen the entire page, to critique and adjust every sentence into "proper" English.

I knew, however, that I needed to restrain myself. As Stephen North points out, writing consultants do the most good by helping make better writers, not better writing. And so I ignored the vast majority of grammatical mistakes and focused more on points of organization, style, evidence, and arguments. These types of focus points get writers to think about the way they use their language and how they can do it better in the future instead of mindlessly accepting the authority of your red-pen grammar corrections.

I eagerly await to see if my friend's feedback from his professor improves. As he finished his revisions, he commented how "in China, our teachers didn't care much about organization or evidence or quotes. Most of our writing was creative, and we were expected to use language to be creative, but America seems to expect much more structure."

And maybe that's why we have certain expectations of peer editing in the first place. We are taught to believe that structure and "proper" English are the most important aspects of writing and so we start with those and later build up to advanced writing styles, organization, and synthesis. My friend suggests that China might teach language in the opposite direction, and it might work better (or at least make writing consultants' jobs easier).