Revision, Word Count, and Readers

I would like to write about revision this morning--that, and maybe about ways to frame writing assignments.

Decades ago, I shifted from minimum word count (which matches grading/ranking student writing as one of the more counterproductive pedagogical strategies) to maximum word count--e.g., "no more than c. 1200 words."  The logic is obvious--as is the dis-logic of minimum word counts.

About two years ago, I started using time: "see what you can do in about one and a half hours of writing before posting. Spend about an hour writing and leave yourself at least a half-hour to look it over and make any changes."

I'll just say this works: when the students know that their primary audience is other students in the class (remember, I don't grade), they are concerned with how they textually appear to their peers--let's just say they care more about them than us. When you ask your students to spend about an hour and a half writing, about half of them will spend three. Students are not dumb. They know that what they write and how they write shapes how their peers will see them. We don't need grades to teach them how to see this.

I have been thinking about revision. I have for decades used the first draft/second draft/final revision. We have long noted that when students are writing with computers (like us), revision is not a matter of drafts. Now I hardly ever ask students to revise. I know they are revising as they write and before they publish. Today, I wrote a post on the CWPA list about the link between authentic revision and reading aloud to peers.

I have realized that there's a-textual revision. As well as revise before they send, students virtually revise when they read what others have written. Revision is in their minds: they see what others have done, particularly those who are getting serious responses from others in the class, and they think, maybe I could have done this or that, included or excluded, been more personal, taken a few risks, heard myself speak through writing. When students do this virtually (and I get them to write about it by inventorying their experiences about writing, reading, and being read), they are learning about writing. They don't need to rewrite. Sometimes, they just need to write something new, remembering what they learned from what they last wrote.

I can't help but add: I have been reading somewhat impatiently on the list about all the time teachers waste by having their students read out of readers--as if students don't have a million things to write about intimately connected with their lived experiences. Publishers and academics make money out of these readers. Teachers have students kill time by reading and writing/discussing about what they read (this is the critical-reading strand of our  field). Ways of Reading was one of the worst exercises in this misdirection of writing instruction. If you really want students to learn about writing, have them write--all the time, writing out and writing back and forth to each other. I am hardly the first to note that we learn to swim by swimming, not by reading about how others swim.

I'm going to try to connect three things: this beautiful day in New Jersey,  Pope Francis, and writing as pleasure.

I have just finished reading my new students' responses to my initial inventory of their writing experiences. A few things are clear: for most of them, school writing has been a pain in the derriere. They don't like to do it. They write about how they don't like reading a text and having to analyze it. Boring (to write and to read). They don't like writing for the teacher, having to guess at what he or she wants, for a grade.  Somewhat surprising is how they mostly know that there is school writing (i call this fake writing) and non-school writing (real writing). They like to do the latter. Many of them persist in writing poems, stories, blogs, in spite of teacher's attempts to promote writing as hard work, as pain.

Here's my dream (unreal, I know): we could revolutionize writing instruction--get over this hard work, rigor ethos--mostly imposed on us from an external ideology; that we could make our writing classes fun, that we could self-correct writing activities that would entail avoidance rather than embrasure, that we as teachers could seriously reflect on how we got into this writing as pain ethos. I know that's asking a bit much, but . . .

Where does this lovely day and Pope Francis fit in? I don't really know, but I have a feeling about it. Something about communicating, being with others through writing rather than performing for our own materialist accumulation (like GPAs, metaphors for money).

It should perhaps go without saying that there is a link between writing and learning for pleasure. I know there are some people who think we need to know how to suffer, how to defer pleasure. Please.

Bad Ideas about Writing

I am responding in part to Cheryl's and Drew's invitation to rant about bad ideas about writing. In their CFP, they referred to the 1975 Newsweek cover article about why Johnny (and Jill) can't write. We can track these complaints back to1828 when Bishop Whately responded to awful student essays by theorizing that instead of having students write declamations about abstractions like "Citizenship" or "Honesty," he had them write from the experiences of their lives: thus, the now infamous "My Summer Vacation" essay.

We know that Harvard's claims about students' inability to write tracked back to the incoming students' inabilities to parse the sentence, “He said that that that that that pupil parsed was not that that he should have parsed” (1870).

If you parsed that :), you don't need to be remediated. It's a cool sentence and brain game. I challenge my students to parse it in the grammar section of their final portfolios at the end of the quarter. A few get it.

But here's what good writing teachers know: students of course can write--look at what my students have written in my links on the right side of this blog. I see good writing flying in from students in our program like . . . like, well, like undocumented drones.

What's  interesting is why certain kinds of people say students can't write. We hear this from politicians, members of the business community, and from many of our colleagues. From the professoriate, complaining about student writing is  a rite of passage.You're not a professor unless you complain about students' inabilities to write. If you think they can write, that just shows how much you know about writing.

Complaints from members of the professorial class may be slanted projections of their own troubled relationships with writing. They are certainly the consequence of their inabilities to create writing situations in which students might want to write (look at my rules for good writing assignments above).

Naturalizing Writing—The Happiest Place on Earth

Wonderful CWPA 2015 conference at Boise. Thanks to all who worked to bring this off in the beautiful town of Boise. I want to come back. To live.

I thought about many issues while attending sessions, listening to the speakers, and talking with old and new friends. I will try to focus on one.

I wandered into a session entitled “The Wonderful World of Administration: Improving Our Programs Using Tools from the Happiest Place on Earth.” I’m slow, but after a while, I caught on. I leaned over to whisper to my friend  sitting next to me, “Do you think I’m the only person in this room who didn’t know where the happiest place on earth is?”

Beth nodded and said, “Probably.”

Since I am neither a Writing Center person nor a Disneyphile, I was misplaced in this session—as I may be displaced in life; nevertheless, I got something out of this session. In her presentation, Nicole Caswell said an instruction to Disney hosts is “Make sure each visitor leaves Disney World happy. How can we make sure that every student leaves the Writing Center happy?” she asked. She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Uncharacteristically, I didn’t respond, but I thought: Write their papers for them.

I also thought, the happiness exit would be a good credo for our writing classes. We should as writing teachers have as one of our primary objectives students should leave our class happy—our class, not our course.

There was a lot of talk in the conference about transfer. Underneath the question of transfer lie the overt and covert purposes of required writing courses (the convert ones are complicated, involving money and the maintenance of social categories).

Purposes invite objectives. In several sessions, I listened to what teachers hoped would be the take-away for students; and here’s what I took away from these discussions: as a field, we may be going over a cliff by complicating the natural act of writing, of letting words flow from our fingers because we have something we want to say about something we care about to people we hope are listening and may have something to say back--the way I am writing here, on a plane heading out of Boise, and thinking about what kind of student writing I love to read, the kind that makes them and me happy when they leave the class.

Listening

I know I have written about assessment a bit too much--imagining a way of assessing our writing programs through what our students say about what they have learned in our writing programs rather than having them "prove" (or argue) what they have learned by their writing performance in, let's say, school (trying to be polite here) writing situations. Key is that we're evaluating our programs more directly than by asking students to perform in an artificially constructed rhetorical situation (unless we argue that teaching students how to argue for a grade is the kind of genre--and social dynamic--that we want to teach). I will say, somewhat selfishly (and in keeping with my four rules of good writing assignments), that it's more fun to read what student feed back to me what they have learned (or not learned) in our writing courses than it is to read essays in which students are arguing for a grade.

I'm imagining the same kind of dynamic--a direct evaluation--of students' learning experiences in our university. I think we can learn a lot by listening seriously to our students, through their writing, rather than by asking them to prove something to us through school writing.

At any rate, at the end of the last quarter, I asked the students to write about their first-year experience at Drexel--with some focus on what they may or may not have learned in our writing program. I've posted their essays over on the right of this blog: "Students Essays Describing First Year at Drexel." These essays were actually addressed to an Associate Vice Provost at Drexel who came into our class to talk to us about her interest in learning about students' experiences, but I also told the students that I would be posting these essays for other teachers to read.

I'm not going to say these are great essays--we do very little revising and rewriting in my classes--and, quite a shift for me, no peer response activities. We just read what others write and write back to each other. Still, I find their essays very interesting. I know we can learn a lot from our students by seriously listening to them--and what better way to listen to them then by paying attention to what they tell us in writing.

On the right side is also a link to a book my LSU students wrote--"Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives." They wrote that for other teachers to read, so I hope some of you will look at it. If you want to use any of the chapters, feel free to link to the book or copy the chapters. Let me point to the chapter on "Voice." My students always like reading that one. Another favorite is "Journals." And many of the essays in the last half of the book are, to me, startling.

Walking Through the Door

Below is an essay assignment I am posting for my class next week. It's a prelude to the next writing task, which will be to write an essay to teachers, telling them what does and doesn't seem to work with teaching/learning writing.
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Walking through the Door

This essay will be in part a preparation for our last essay, which will be directed to teachers at Drexel (and really, a wider audience, because with your permission, I may link teachers around the country to what you tell them—I have a blog about teaching writing, and I’ll put your essays up there).

Here’s my thesis--and I don’t think it’s a half-bad one: education works when students enjoy learning about something. It doesn’t work when students don’t enjoy learning. Actually, these claims seem obvious—but I’ll bet there are many professors who would argue with me on this. But one of the things we want to do as educators is encourage students to be self-directed learners such that learning is a life-long project.  Self-Directed learning is in fact one of the twelve Drexel Student Learning Priorities  (aside—one wonders why 12?).  It’s one of the two we have adopted for our writing program.  In general, one might suspect that each of you has decided on a major because you have learned how to enjoy the activities associated with that major. (I know there might be other reasons as well.)

Since I am very interested in writing and would like writing to be a part of your lives, I’m going to make another claim—which I know I have already made in class: if any writing task assigned to you in any course (including mine) makes you have an uncomfortable experience with writing, then you will be inclined to have a bad association with writing; consequently, you will have learned the wrong thing about writing. This is just me. As I said, a lot of people disagree with me. But they’re wrong (joke--maybe).

Ok, let’s get to a topic we can write about. I would be very interested in your experience so far at Drexel. But I’m interested in a bit more than your experiences in courses. I’m interested in how this part of your life is different (I’m thinking of Annelise’s essay here, the essence of which that the childhood part of her is over and now there is that “adult” (and her use of scare quotes was appropriate, given how many of us act as “adults”) life stretching in front of her—and this year might be thought of as walking through the door.

So maybe you can spend a couple of hours telling us (in writing) what it’s been like, walking through the door. It will be fun for the rest of us to read if you can give us some specific issues and maybe scenes, things that happened and made you think about things, about life, about who you are, about what you’re doing (again, Annelise’s essay is a great start in this kind of thinking because she has described for us her changing beliefs—I know I really didn’t do it justice in class today).

As you describe your journey in this first year, it would be great if you would include something about your experiences in your various classes.  I (and a lot of other people) would really like to know about the kind of learning experiences you are enjoying and the ones you’re not. I’m good friends with an associate vice provost here who is very interested in retention issues. I know that I would like to share your essays about walking through the door with her—I’ll bet she’ll learn something by what you write.

An Act of Grace

I'm working through grief about Ali. I've been here before--or at least in a place too much like this one, but that doesn't make the journey any easier. I'm one thought away from crying.

When people ask me, innocently, how are you?, they really just want an easy answer, a sign that everything's okay and we can continue on with our day unburdened by other people's griefs. My problem at this stage is that if someone asks me, I tell them probably in some attempt to unburden myself. I know from hard experience that keeping grief inside doesn't work. It festers there. On the other hand, you can't shout it from the rooftops. Some people really don't want to hear.

These thoughts and one of my friends led me to a new thought about personal writing. I have for decades used writing as a way of getting things more or less "out there," not keeping them "in here." Of course they stay inside, but by having them out there as well, they're just not as bad. Sometimes, I  even figure things out. I think that being able to use writing like this is an emotional resource and that we should at least in our writing classes give this gift of writing to our students.  A few years ago, my students wrote a book of advice for writing teachers. If you look at the chapter on "Journals," you'll see how students use writing to cope with some of the difficult problems we face in our lives.

Writing Ourselves into Each Other's Lives

A close friend of mine has been listening to me whining. I called her on the day Ali died. She had had a particularly hard day herself, coping with something very sad in her life. She listened to me for about an hour on the phone, I suppose you could call it bearing witness to my grief. I talked to her the next day and she said something striking.

She said something about how it made her feel better by making me feel better by her listening. I can't remember her exact words--but I had never thought of personal writing from this point of view. It goes something like this: the writer gets some sort of release by opening up those emotions, fears, hurts that our culture teaches us to cover--the places where we are most human, and as Bene Brown has said, most vulnerable. I had never thought about how opening up is a gift of sorts to whoever was gracious enough to hear you. I haven't quite said it yet: the reader gains by opening up to hear the writer. It's really an act of grace.

Desire

I led a workshop yesterday at the Dornsife Center, a community center in a largely impoverished area of West Philadelphia. The workshop is part of an outreach series sponsored by Drexel in an effort to integrate the university with the surrounding community. Given that context, I suspect this blog entry will be a study in irony.

The workshop was about writing. Five community members, about five students--who came, I believe, because their teacher was awarding them extra credit--and my good friend Rachel was there. Like me, Rachel is in love with writing; she's also a prime mover in the community-based learning projects sponsored by Drexel (again, the irony).

We wrote and read aloud about ourselves as writers. I learned a lot by listening carefully to what others were saying. A kind of theme emerged as we dug deeper into our relationships with writing. Everyone in the workshop had an interesting story--a very interesting story--about themselves as writers. I would love to go over all I learned by listening to their stories, but this blog entry would be an essay. Instead, I want to focus on this theme, a kind of block, a gap, a contradiction.

All of the participants wanted to write. They wanted to write stories, memoirs, poems, essays, histories, diaries, collections of letters from ancestors--the desire was almost palpable. You could touch it. But with one--or perhaps two--exceptions, there was a gap, like a physical distance between the desire and its consummation. People want to write, but they find every reason not to do it--and that gap seems to make them want it more.

Our conversation made clear that all of them would be writing more, would be writing the way they breathe or whistle or sing if it weren't for how they have been conditioned not to write. It's as if in school, we have taken their voices away, and this desire to write is mostly a memory, a memory of far back in their childhoods when they loved to write, when they had such pleasure in putting words on a page and hearing them said, but we've schooled that pleasure out of them. It was enough to make me shiver.

Distance between Writer and Reader

My friend Carra constantly sends me things she thinks I should read. I know she’s trying to educate me, and that’s all right. A few days ago, she linked me to Virginia Woolf’s review,  “The Modern Essay.”  I’ll admit, I scanned it.  I had an initial response that was different from Carra’s. I’m not arguing here against Carra’s—that would be surprisingly stupid. But I am using this incident as a way of saying something about the teaching of writing.

What a lovely piece of writing.  Perhaps a bit overwritten. I wonder whether other readers sensed just a bit too much time spent on getting the right word, image, phrase, and rhythm (a shade ironic, given her objects of disaffection)? But I was reading closely enough to catch that she marked Max Beerbohm, and perhaps to a lesser extent, Walter Pater, as writers who managed through their writing to diminish the distance between themselves and their readers. Admittedly, Woolf’s examples of meaningless paragraphs may have been overweighted to ridicule overly-distanced discourse; nevertheless, Woolf makes her point: good writing diminishes the space between writers and readers. Bad writing is distorted by intermediating personas.

I am thinking about what this notion of distance has to do with how we teach writing in required writing classes.  The distance between writers and reader is possibly in indirect proportion to one’s pleasure in writing and consequently related to the kinds of writing situations we construct in required writing classes. It's not too difficult to imagine why when we read so much of our students' writing that we complain, a complaint that is perhaps misdirected.   

I have had the good sense before publishing this post to reread Woolf's essay--and I have to thank Carra for sending me there--and wonder that I had never read it.  The first link below is to Woolf's paragraphs on Beerbohm--I want all of my student to read this.  The second is to the essay, which if you haven't read, take some time, give yourself pleasure and read it more slowly than I did at first. An essay like this makes you wish for all the time in the world only to read what gives you pleasure and as slowly as possibly and reread again.  I told Carra, I would hate to be on the receiving end of V.Woolf's sword.  I think Pope said something about true satire severing the head from the body and leaving the body standing.  Woolf leaves with few exceptions most bodies standing.

Links: Woolf on Beerbohm
            Woolf, The Modern Essay
            Beerbohm, A Cloud of Pinafores

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Having Fun Again

I'm just saying: what would happen if writing teachers at all levels (think Lucy Calkins) made as their primary objective having fun with writing (writing and reading)--and note (as you will if you read my students' writing) some of this can be hard fun.

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DeZenning Zen

I spend most of my day writing or reading and thinking about writing.  I know I'm trying to reforge my identity by all the writing I do, constantly trying to write myself out of who I am and into a me somewhere else.  I know how unZen and uncool my stance is here, but it's me. It's possible of course that Zen is the flip side of what is commonly imagined.

I have a million things I want to say/write, but I've lost my voice tonight for reasons I could never explain here, all of them in a space that simply has to remain my own. I'm thinking about my students: how easily they can be shut down as I feel shut down tonight.  I'm thinking about the tender relationship between writing and self and how easily as teachers we can be oblivious to the almost supernatural link between who we are and what we write.  Teachers have commonly claimed they are critiquing the writing, not the writer.  One might say comically claimed.

Maybe I can let one of my students speak for me:

 I’m writing in the way I speak because essentially, that’s who I am. Sometimes, I wish I could send Standard English and grammar rules back to where they came from. My vendetta against those two are pretty intense mainly because they take away the one thing I should be able to show at my own discretion. My vulnerability is made candid because of the way I speak. My dialect, my disposition and the sass within my voice reveals so much about who I am. I hate that my flaws are exposed to the world when I “be talkin’.” No matter how hard I try to tell my story from a mainstream perspective, I always feel like I’m pretending to be someone I’m not. 

I'm wondering now what my first two paragraphs and my student's quote have to do with each other.  Probably nothing--self, writing, silence, being elsewhere, zen, ~zen.  Maybe I'll put the pieces together tomorrow.