[Teaching_Composition] Puzzling First-Year Students

[Claire C. Lamonica]

I find myself wooed out of my "lurker" status by your frustration, Mark. 
    I've been teaching freshman composition on and off for 20 years or 
more, and I know exactly what you mean by those "rules."  In fact, I 
used to give my students a first-day of class assignment in which I 
asked them to make a list of the "10 Most Important Things I Already 
Know About Good Writing," and their lists looked very much like the one 
you offer in your post.

So, yes, they do have a lot of prescriptive, non-productive stuff 
jiggling around in their heads. The question is, how do we handle it?

Well, one way would be to take these rules one at a time and patiently 
explain why they aren't really "rules."  It SOUNDS like maybe that's 
what you've been doing--in one way or another.  But that might not be 
the most effective approach.  (Sounds like you haven't found it very 
effective, anyway.)

Another way might be to provide some engaging readings that "break" the 
"rules"; or, better yet, to send them out on scavenger hunts, looking 
for pieces of published writing that break the rules.  That might be a 
start, but it wouldn't be enough by itself.

The risk you run with any of these approaches is that you'll end up with 
a lot of incredibly frustrated students who just just shut down.  Why? 
Because you're tearing down the only foundations they have and refusing 
to give them any materials to use to build new foundations.

By making explicit what you DON'T want and then resisting their 
entreaties that you just "tell us what you DO want," you make writing 
look like a game they can only lose because they don't know ANY of rules.

The truth is that good writing DOES have "rules" . . . sort of.  They're 
rules like:

--know your audience
--know your purpose
--know your forum . . . and be able to identify its conventions
--know your topic . . . and be willing to learn even more about it
--know what kinds of evidence and appeals are possible . . . and how to 
choose which kinds are appropriate
--let your organization grow organically from the interaction of what 
you know about your audience, your purpose, your forum, and your topic

Stuff like that.

So a third approach to those ingained "rules" can be to teach your 
students these NEW "rules" to replace the old ones.  Pretty soon they 
find that the old ones often don't work in the context of the new ones, 
and those old ones can die a natural death.

As I always tell new writing instrutors I work with, "teaching freshman 
composition is a lot about exploding myths."  But if you're going to 
explode--or demolish--you MUST offer tools for re-building.

Hang in there, Mark.  Nobody ever said it would be easy, but lots of us 
will say that it can be rewarding!

Claire Lamonica





Mark Scott wrote:
> None of my 30 students is puzzled, and this puzzles me. Or I should say, 
> the only thing that puzzles them is “what I want.” They spend most of 
> their time in class trying to guess what that is. I resist telling them. 
> They fill in with all that they have learned over ten or twelve 
> years—the rules they were taught to write with and by, namely:
> 
>     * Always have an introduction, body, and conclusion.
>     * Always have a thesis. Make sure the thesis is stated in the
>       introduction.
>     * Never use a sentence like, “In the following essay I will ...”
>     * Always write in ascending order of importance.
>     * Don’t get too personal in essays.
>     * Never use contractions or informal speech.
>     * Use at least one quote per paragraph.
>     * Never begin a sentence with “but,” “because,” or “and.”
>     * Never start a story with a quote or dialogue.
>     * Sentences should not be longer than three lines.
>     * Always have at least five paragraphs in an essay.
>     * Always have smooth transitions between paragraphs.
> 
> 
> There are twenty-six more. I spent a month bringing these rules out into 
> the open, as objects of thought. But they’re like the animal Fred 
> Flintstone ushers out the door: they come right back in through the 
> window. Maybe ten students wrote a so-called “literacy narrative” that 
> surprised them. One said, and I believed her, that it was the first 
> paper she’d ever written in which she’d been “100% honest.” The gist of 
> it? That she hated writing. She wrote an almost flawless paper of 300 
> words or so in which, for the first time, she really looked her 
> miserable education in the face. Or so I thought. In talking to her 
> about it, I saw that it too meant so little to her. Why? Because I liked 
> it, and that’s what mattered to her: she’d done what I wanted after all. 
> Until that complex can be worked out, I don’t see what value there can 
> possibly be in talking to semi-literate young adults about arguments and 
> positions.
> 
> Mark