AI | ENG 5020: Writing Theory & Practice

Peter Elbow and Donald M. Murray love writing. Much like I love writing, and most of you love writing (don’t say I don’t know my audience). It takes someone who loves writing to understand how to teach it this well. You have to have an itching desire to spread what brings you joy.

Promoting low stakes writing in classrooms in order to supplement high stakes writing is an excellent way to teach the writing process and allow students to build the confidence for high stakes assignments. My concern is that everyone who has been involved with the writing and revision of this theory has probably loved writing, or at the very least pedagogy.

I would like to look at this theory from the perspective of someone who hates writing; I want to see this idea from the perspective of a students who hates school.

When Elbow asserts that the ability to convey understanding is of equal importance to the understanding itself, I may argue that I can convey my knowledge, just not in writing. Or, that according to Vershawn Ashanti Young, I do not need practice in conveying my ideas how the system has deemed they are supposed to be written out.

Then I stop in my tracks, and realize I have lost sight of my perspective, because no student that truly hates writing references Young to explain why.

Peter Elbow broaches the concept that speaking feels lower stakes than writing. Students do it constantly, at recess, at lunch, in class- it’s a challenge for them not to talk. Speaking feels lower stakes because we are not openly evaluated when speaking. In fact, you have to watch the other person closely if you want to pick up on how they’re truly reacting to what you’ve said.

Writing is permanent, and expressionless. Not in the sense that nothing is expressed, but that there are not gestures, or facial features, or intonation to express tone and emotion. All of that has to come through in rhetorical technique and grammatical choices.

But, just because nobody can use a red pen to show you where you’re “wrong” in your speech, or how you could change it to improve your communication, does not mean that you are not using rhetorical techniques to be perceived a certain way. That also means that everyone uses rhetorical analysis on a daily basis in order to perceive one another. Yes, I know, terrifying. Rhetoric is simply unspoken in the physical world, as opposed to the written world.

With a recorded thought you can go back and re-analyze, re-read, and the thought stays the same. There is no shifting language, the idea cannot be forgotten, misconstrued or warped by the passage of time. The spoken word is subject to the human memory, which is heavily impacted by perspective and time. Anyone can lie about anything, there’s no proof to go back to.

All writing is high-stakes is you consider it’s permanence, and that is why many struggle to force themselves to do it. It feels unnatural in comparison to talking to a friend. I think to expand on this idea I would ask about where the boundaries of low stakes writing are. Is texting low stakes writing? If so, I think incorporating written communication between friends into the classroom could do a great job of encouraging students to enjoy low stakes writing.

This also leads us to the question of what “good” writing is, and if “academically correct” and “good” being synonymous has some classist and racist undertones. Peter Elbow draws attention to the line between the importance of understanding and the importance of being able to convey your understanding, but I would argue that most can convey their understanding. They simply may not be able to record their understanding in a way you deem intelligent or respectable.

But I’ll save that for Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Peter Elbow’s campaigning for the utilization of more low stakes writing assignments in schools correlates with the way I feel I actually “learned” how to write. In High Stakes and Low Stakes in Assigning and Responding to Writing, Elbow posits that “Low stakes writing helps students… find their own language for the issues of the course; they stumble into their own analogies and metaphors for academic concept” in a way that “is saturated with sense or experience” (7). I’ve received all sorts of passing grades during my life as a student, but the ones that come to my mind whenever I think of assignments that I’m proud of are ones where I was allowed to add my sense of humor or a creative twist to the assignment; it sort of speaks to this idea that a student doesn’t view their writing as their writing until a part of themselves is actually in it, and its no longer just a paint-by-numbers recreation of whatever the teacher had them study. To that point, after class Maya and I walked to the parking lot with the One Most Inextricable from My Soul, we continued talking about how we learned to write, and Maya made a distinction that struck me; she made a distinction between her personal writing and her academic writing. I myself make that distinction often, but hearing another writer bring it up casually made me realize how ingrained the disparity between how we’re taught and how we actually learned can be for some of us. We, intentionally or unintentionally, other our academic writing instead of consider it integrated with the writing we do for ourselves.

I also enjoyed Elbow’s sections on how to respond to student’s writings. He writes, “Even when we write clear, accurate, valid, and helpful comments, our students often read them through a distorting lens of resistance or discouragement—or downright denial” (8). Of course, such a reaction is to be expected when helpful comments are directly tied to a decreasing score; they seem a lot less helpful and a bit more punishing. His later mention of “[avoiding] an impersonal ‘God/truth voice’ in [his] comments” actually makes me reminisce about an educator of mine who would use those constantly; I fondly remember “Wrong!!” and “Incorrect!!” or even just “!!” in red ink all over my essays for two marking periods during my senior year of high school (13). She would even yell her heavenly judgments out during presentations if you misunderstood the presentation topic; although I ended up thriving in her class, I definitely understand why so many of my classmates dreaded 2nd period. If she was a bit gentler, maybe we all would be in graduate writing programs.

As for Donald M. Murray’s Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product, the first quote that struck me was his use of the word “autopsy” to describe how educators teach literature (3). It made me smile pretty wryly because its a very apt descriptor for many classes I’ve been a student in and, regrettably, many classes I’ve been a teacher in as well. I also like Murray’s statement that “you don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it” (20). It seems like it can be reductive, but in my experience the best way to learn the process is to practice the process; it’s certainly more engaging than just “autopsying” a piece and holding up its parts for show hoping your student can recreate it by their next due date.

This blog post was sonically powered by John Coltrane’s 1958 album Blue Train. I was in a Coltrane mood this morning, but wanted to try something other than A Love Supreme (which I love; I just needed a bit of variety today).