EngL5630: Theories of Writing and Writing Instruction Sp06

I thought this might be useful in helping students understand poetry, because they want to see it as fixed and immutable, with certain rules (it must rhyme, it must have X number of lines, it must...).

But, indeed, poetry is defined more by what it does than what it looks like, or its "textual regularities in form and content." Although I couldn't possibly speculate about why poetry developed without making a fool of myself.

I think Bartholomae, certainly, would agree that genre is "typified social action." Elbow's views about this are obscure to me. I see Elbow as a coach, but his theoretical underpinnings feel slippery. Neo-Platonist doesn't really make sense to me. Does he really believe that genres exist within, and we just need to access them and pull them out? That just sounds silly to me.

All the to-ing and fro-ing in this essay about whether "personal writing" "should" be taught was very interesting to me, since it's something I've always taught in one form or another, and I've never even thought about NOT including it in a first year writing course. It's a huge part of the way I teach, regardless of the texts we're looking at. I'm guessing that comes from my own background as a creative writer, and my own comfort level with some genres more than others. So perhaps in my own way I'm just as "exclusionary" as a "Bartholomaeist" would be. It's not that I don't encourage other "genres" -- and maybe I don't quite understand that term in the context of the essay -- but I don't necessarily teach "persuasion" or "argumentation" in a "here's how to do it" explicit sense. I guess I tend to start with more "personal" writing and then move to writing which looks at other voices, and working on helping students to integrate or respond to those other voices. For me teaching argument can feel formulaic, which I tend to resist. Where that puts me in the context of this article, I'm not exactly sure...

I suppose it's in part because (unlike Marcia and Gary) I do not have a creative writing that I like this emphasis on argument. The first essay my students write has a narrative component, and I include it specifically for the reasons Villanueva and Freire talk about. In the first few weeks of class, I have my students read some essays on ethics, class, and race (I for instance, give them an essay in which the Princeton ethicist Peter Singer puts forth a utilitarian argument for affirmative action), and I have them compare those essays to the values and politics they were raised with. They all produce amazingly good essays with this topic, I think because they're all so comfortable writing in the narrative genre; however, I doubt that they really learn that much about their own backgrounds in writing these papers.

I became really interested in this essay's question whether argumentative essay work outside of an academic setting. Thus, Freedman and Medway contrast a sociologist's use of evidence to a person being convinced that a brand of mayonnaise is bad based on seeing one rotten jar of it. And on page 258 Clark claims "a genre such as the argument essay can be presented in terms of more familiar ones, such as the advertisement." This is contrasted, though, with the personal essay in which the student uses "relevant personal experience and opinion" (256). Instead of making me question the value of the argumentative essay, the mayonnaise example actually made me more suspicious of the value of the teaching undergraduates creative nonfiction. The person in the mayonnaise example is behaving irrationally. So I wonder if it's really a bad thing that students have a hard time writing argumentative essays. I don't think popular culture has prepared them to recognize good evidence, and if their argument essays seem tortured in comparison to their narrative essays, isn't that a sign that they are learning?

As I read this article, I was struck by a lot of the information that I have read on language acquisition and how, in a general fashion, students tend to internalize different language abilities at different steps of the acquisition process. While the process of acquisition in children is different from that in adults, it has been my opinion that at the academic level studied as young adults, the study of writing may be more analogous to the cognitive processes involved in second language learning than in those of native language learning. The reason I think this is relevant to the article is that, at the risk of leaning too far towards structuralism, there may be a certain set pattern of abilities to write within the context of narrative functions that students follow as they learn to write. This in turn may influence the type of writing that students are able to do at certain times in their development as thinkers and writers. The students I work with are generally classified as intermediate low to mid on the ACTFL scale of language acquisition. Their abilities are generally limited to description and narration in the three time frames. While I try to have them stretch at times and write on argumentative and comparative topics, their success tends to be dictated by their ability to function within the performance limitations of their language level. Maybe students need to learn “personal writing� before they are able to write academic prose.

As I read this article, I was struck by a lot of the information that I have read on language acquisition and how, in a general fashion, students tend to internalize different language abilities at different steps of the acquisition process. While the process of acquisition in children is different from that in adults, it has been my opinion that at the academic level studied as young adults, the study of writing may be more analogous to the cognitive processes involved in second language learning than in those of native language learning. The reason I think this is relevant to the article is that, at the risk of leaning too far towards structuralism, there may be a certain set pattern of abilities to write within the context of narrative functions that students follow as they learn to write. This in turn may influence the type of writing that students are able to do at certain times in their development as thinkers and writers. The students I work with are generally classified as intermediate low to mid on the ACTFL scale of language acquisition. Their abilities are generally limited to description and narration in the three time frames. While I try to have them stretch at times and write on argumentative and comparative topics, their success tends to be dictated by their ability to function within the performance limitations of their language level. Maybe students need to learn “personal writing� before they are able to write academic prose.

Since my students are non-native English speakers, the points about language acquisition that Edward brought up are relevant in my class, too. My students are at an advanced level of English, but they still need help understanding and meeting the expectations of academic writing at the college level. Obviously defining those expectations is a bit slippery, but teaching specific genres (especially the thesis-driven research paper) is a start.

I agree with the last part of the quote from Cope and Kalantzis about the Australian genre experiment: "Students from historicaly marginalised groups. . . need explicit teaching more than students who seem destined for a comfortab le ride into the genres and cultures of power" (247). While my students are not necessarily from marginalized groups, I think they are at a disadvantage compared to native speakers when it comes to familiarity with academic writing in English. As for the role of language acquisition here: the jury is still out on whether expicit instruction is always necessary, or whether "comprehensible input" (lots of exposure to text which the students can understand) is sometimes enough. I'm making a jump here from theories of language learning in general to writing specifically - but based on my experience, I think some explicit instruction is absolutely necessary.

That makes, me, I suppose, somewhat of a Bartholomeist. I'm realizing more and more that I agree with him, especially on a practical level. I like Elbow's ideas, but I find myself thinking that they're sort of pie in the sky. It would be fantastic if all of my students could find their voice and see themselves as writers, but before that happens I think my primary role is to help them master the forms that they will need to succeed in many college courses - and it seems to me that explicit teaching of genres plays an important part in that regard.

Definitely, the positivist and traditional view of gender as primarily fixed, clearly classifiable and immutable is unsustainable with new theories and writing perspectives, but I think is a concept alive among most people, even instructors, academic people and probably part of all of us. In this point I believe that it could be useful to ask ourselves if we master different genders, what they are and how we learned them. Can a set of rules and recipes help? How and why?
When I read the argument of Freedman about gender, like Edward, I thought of the language acquisition process because in Freedman’s view the rules of gender, just like the rules of language organization, are “complex, nuanced, variable, context-specific, and as yet unnamable to complete reconstruction even by skilled researchers� (p.248). But if we want to derive some pedagogical consequences, the analogy with gender would be better with second language acquisition because there are conscious and volunteer components in both.