My experience as a teacher of writing has led me to the conclusion that one of the problems plaguing students is "The Rhetoric of Right and Wrong" and the intellectual assumptions that this rhetoric engenders. This way of talking about the writing process equates an individual essay with an individual mathematical formula or equation, and leads to two relatively ineffective ways of thinking about writing. I intentionally use "ineffective" to replace "wrong" in this context.
The analogy between an essay and a formula or equation breaks down because it suggests that writing is more mechanical than it actually is. An essay is not like the quadratic equation, for example; we cannot simply insert new words (values) into an unchanging form and arrive at the "right" answer. Nor can we use one formula or equation to solve every problem. A writing formula, like the five-paragraph theme, is no more appropriate in every writing situation than it is possible to solve every mathematical problem with the quadratic equation. Moreover, there are far fewer right or wrong answers when it comes to the writing process than there are when it comes to arithmetic or algebra. (I should also point out that mathematics is a language for describing natural phenomena, which makes its use in solving complex problems more like writing than one usually assumes.) In the writing process, there are only ends and means, and while some means may be more effective than others, there are always alternative ways to achieve any writing end, or rhetorical purpose. For this reason, I favor the rhetoric of more or less effective or ineffective over right or wrong when it comes to the process of writing.
The more profound problem with the rhetoric of right and wrong is that it leads to a way of thinking about the writing process that is ineffective. Student comments like "I'll fix the things that are wrong with my draft" or "I don't understand what you want" result from an overly mechanical way of talking and thinking about writing in general, and instructor feedback in particular. Student writers, who have been conditioned by the rhetoric of right and wrong, almost inevitably assume that instructor feedback is comprehensive, like the exes and checks on an objective test. Therefore, they believe that if they fix all the errors that have been checked or exed, they will get an A. The problem is that student writers almost always make a significant number of ineffective choices while composing a particular draft, so it is almost always possible to cover any draft with a wash of red ink. This approach is ineffective for two reasons: too much feedback can overwhelm the student and it does not teach the student how to ask effective questions about her or his own writing. It is more effective to give the student a manageable amount of feedback, perhaps on three to four of the more problematic choices they have made, and to propose a couple of alternative choices to remedy some but not all of these problems. For this approach to feedback to work, however, the students must be reconditioned to realize that feedback is more effective when the instructor concentrates upon the more problematic choices that have been made and makes the student responsible for attending to the effectiveness of the other choices he or she has made. In addition, this approach to feedback allows the instructor more freedom to provide positive as well as negative reinforcement, to remark upon effective choices and to reinforce the reasons that make them effective.
I have no panacea for the anxiety that the rhetoric of more or less effective produces in students. Undoubtedly, the more literal-minded the student the more anxiety they will feel, but even the more agile thinkers will be anxious at first since they will more than likely have a touching faith in closure. Nonetheless, the long-term payoff will come down the road when (perhaps former) students realize that education is not about memorizing information, but about learning how to ask effective questions and to make informed choices.
Homepage | Student | Faculty | Capitan Awards | Learning Community