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Regina Tuakan Rinderer 1978 THE PERSON IN THE COMPOSING PROCESS: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH IN COMPOSITION

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Regina Tuskan Rinderer, A.B., M.A.

The Ohio State University 1978

Reading Committee: Approved By Donald R. Bateman Edward P. J. Corbett Donald P. Sanders

Adviser Department of Humanities Education To Don Bateman, who always believed In me

ii PREFACE

I came to the activities of teaching and writing with what educational philosopher Maxine Greene calls the eyes of a stranger. Naive, unsure of the constitutive and regulative rules for teaching or for writing, I continually approached both activities with the eyes of a foreigner, someone who is trying to learn how to cope with a new culture. Thus this dissertation grows out of an inquiry context, for I continually had to ask myself, ,fHow does one teach?'* and "How do people write?" Constantly I searched for "answers,” only to discover that there are no blueprints as to how to teach or write effectively. There are only useful attitudes, helpful relationships, tacit understandings. And, always, more questions. I started teaching writing in 1964, a shy kid, afraid of those unmanageable six-foot basketball players and burly football players my undergraduate suitemates had warned me about. Not until fall quarter of 1977 did any such students appear in my classroom; the 6*11” basketball player in my Basic Writing course was a mild-mannered and delightful fellow. What I have encountered, though, were questions, problems, unexpected situations which my brief teacher-training experience and my teaching assistant graduate training had not prepared me for. In many ways this dissertation is an outgrowth of what I have seen and dealt with out of that lack of total preparedness. The dissertation reflects my various teaching experi­ ences. In my thirteen teaching years, I have taught composition in a variety of settings: in large midwestem universities, in a small English high school nestled in the heart of French Canada, and in a middle-sized Black southern university. In addition to tutoring one-to-one in a writing lab, I have taught classes small enough to be designated seminars and others large enough for lectures only. I have taught commercial and academic high school students, some of whom were native French speakers; Black students in a Developmental Education program at a predominantly white university; Black students in a Black university. Those diverse situations have allowed me to ask questions, to have a sense of what goes wrong in the teaching of writing, and to see possibilities for the future. iii This dissertation likewise is a personal sense-making venture. It has been necessary for me at this stage in my personal and professional development to stand back and take stock of where I have been, what I have observed and read, what I know. That stock-taking has carried me down two personally useful paths. One, it has forced me to introspect on my own writing career— on my own workings as a writer, both in doing the dissertation, itself a marvellous learning activity, and throughout my life. Two, it has allowed me to reflect on my career as a writing teacher: to recollect student comments and behavior, to re-consider student mistakes and problems, to remember teaching joys and pains, so as to gain some fresh insights into the process of writing and into the teaching and researching of that process. I have reached a point in my professional life, then, where I need to make sense of what I know. Especially do I need to pull together my knowings in three areas of concern to me: the writing event, teaching writing, and doing research into how people write. This dissertation has occasioned the sense-making. As well, this dissertation has a heuristic component for the profession. In large part the intent is to extend the limits of our vision, to move beyond the trees to the larger forest. For perspective is lacking in our teaching and research, perspective which can be restored as we understand more of who persons are--their vast complexity— and more of what writing, teaching, and research encompass. There are worlds waiting to be explored, where we have perceived only dunes of sand. The thrust of this disserta­ tion is to tw incomplete theoretical understandings of persons, the writing process, teaching, and doing research. It attempts to stretch our understandings and our visions of those four areas as far as mine will now carry me. Let me add that, having been through my own period of initiation as a writing teacher, the last thing 1 mean to do in this work is to castigate other English teachers. We all teach too many students, read too many papers, expend too many energies on our students, to deserve chastizing. Tet I sense that there have been important gaps in our understanding and practice, gaps which we need to acknowledge and deal with, gaps which, when filled, would allow us to enjoy our composition teaching more fully and experience greater success than many of us do at present. It is in this spirit of friendly persuasion, then, that I offer this dissertation to all those who, like me, believe writing can be taught and researched and would like to see those activities done more enjoyably and more effectively. iv I wish to thank the many friends and family who pulled me— or pushed me— through the year as I was writing this dissertation: to Bonnie, David, Wilke, Dennis, and Jay for giving me a start last summer; to Ellie, Joan, and Tony for their presence and support, love and laughter this year; to Tom and my family— especially my mother— and to the Blyths, ray adopted family, for being there when I needed them; to old and new friends alike, who cheer me on, A special thank-you to the professors who, as teachers and friends, supported and encouraged me while these ideas were growing: to Paul Klohr for the chance to explore curriculum theory in ways that made sense to me; to Johanna DeStefano for her presence and linguistic insights; to Ed Corbett, whose questions continually challenge me; and to Don Sanders for his incisive questions, constant support, and love. Most of all, I want to thank Don Bateman for the freedom he has given me to explore the questions I needed to explore; for the many insights he has shared with me during many delightful conversations, hours which I shall miss; and for continuing to support and unceasingly to believe in me. He has led me in directions I didn't expect, to places I never thought I could go.

v VITA

June 22, 1944 . . . . Bora - Uniontown, Pennsylvania 1964...... A.B., University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 1964-1966 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1966...... M.A., The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1966-1967 ...... Teaching Assistant, Department of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 1967-1969 ...... Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1969-1972 ...... Teacher, St. Joseph's High School, Val d'Or, Quebec, Canada 1972-1975 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1976...... Instructor, Department of English, Southern University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 1976-1977 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 1977-1978 ...... Instructor, Writing Workshop, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

vi FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Education Studies in Composition. Professors Donald R. Bateman and Edward P. J. Corbett Studies in Curriculum. Professor Paul Klohr Studies in Sociolinguistics. Professors Donald R. Bateman and Johanna S. DeStefano Studies in Research. Professor Donald P. Sanders

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page PREFACE...... iii VITA ...... vi Chapter I. INTRODUCTION...... 1 Taking Stock ...... 1 Incomplete Understandings...... 3 Composition Theory . . • ...... B Broadening Our Theoretical Base .... 9 Theoretical Foundation and the Person; Grounds for a Re-Examination. . 12 The overlooked person: a background n o t e ...... 12 Why focus on the person? ...... 14 II. THE PERSON IN THE WRITING A C T ...... 23 Introduction ...... 23 Persons as Knowers of Experience ...... 23 Persons and Consciousness...... 26 Ref le c t ion...... 27 Anticipation...... 30 Persons and Feelings— The Affective D o m a i n ...... 31 Trust in Oneself...... 31 Feelings about Writing...... 32 Motivation...... 33 Uniqueness of Persons...... 37 Unique Background ...... 37 Unique Personalities...... 38 Internal versus external ...... 39 Split-brain functioning...... 39 Openness to experience ...... 40 Imaginative versus unimaginative persons...... 40 Unique Perceptions...... 41 Unique Language U s e ...... 45 Persons as Meaning-Makers...... 47 viii Page Information Processing...... 51 Social Construction of Reality...... 52 Persons and Process...... 53 process of Becoming ...... 53 Phenomenology and writing...... 53 III. UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING EVENT ...... 62 Introduction...... 62 Types of Writing ...... 62 Components of the Writing Event...... 65 Capturing the Thought ...... 66 Brain-to-Hand Coordination...... 66 Language and Thinking ...... 67 Ways of Viewing the Writing Event...... 67 Writing as Thinking ...... 67 Writing and talking...... 68 How does writing differ from talking?...... 68 What function does writing serve?...... 69 Writing, speech, and cognition . . . 69 Talking and thinking ...... 70 Writing and thinking ...... 71 Speech as a way into writing .... 72 Writing as Thinking: Broadening the View...... 75 writing and the unconscious...... 75 Writing and feelings ...... 76 writing as sense-making: reflection as thinking...... 77 Writing as Interpersonal Communication: Writing and the Self...... 78 Writing as Creation ...... 79 writing as organic ...... 79 The creative process ...... 81 Ghosts and watchers ...... 82 Reaching the expansive state. • . 82 Writing as Process...... 83 Stages of the writing process. . . . 84 Handling the stages of the writing process...... 86 IV. A PERSON-CENTERED DIRECTION FCR THE TEACHING OF WRITING...... 94 Introduction...... 94 Learning and Teaching: Definitions and hypot h e s e s...... 95 ix Page Learning and Teaching ...... 95 Language Learning and Learning to W r i t e ...... 97 Teaching Writing: A Developmental Model. . 99 Readiness of the Organism ...... 100 Stages in Learning to write ...... 100 Development of Intuitions ...... 104 Development of Self-Reflection..... 106 Journals and self-reflection.... 107 Increasing consciousness of self as w r i t e r ...... 109 Teacher-Student Relationship ...... Ill Components of the Relationship. .... 112 Relationship between equals.... 112 Trust...... 113 Authenticity ...... 115 D i a l o g u e ...... 115 C a r i n g ...... 116 Empathy ...... 117 Freedom...... 118 Listening to the student ...... 119 Empathic understanding and linguistic analysis ...... 119 Feedback to the student...... 123 Responses and reactions .... 124 Facilitating communication. . . . 127 Stages of response...... 128 Individual ization...... 130 A PERSON-CENTERED DIRECTION FOR COMPOSITION RESEARCH...... 137 Introduction...... 137 Literary Versus Scientific Research. . . . 137 Differing Epistemologics...... 138 Scientific Method: Discovery and Verification...... 139 Physical Science Methods and Composition Research...... 141 Problems in Composition Research .... 143 Key Difficulties...... 144 Other Difficulties...... 145 Research Directions...... 147 Qualitative Research...... 147 Qualitative research: the case from sociology...... 147 The group versus the individual: the case from psychology ...... 148 Research questions ...... 151 Research instruments...... 155 Page Research strategies...... 156 Ethnomethodological methods . . . 156 Case studies...... 157 Self-reporting...... 157 Interviewing...... 158 Participant observation and interviewing...... 159 Validity considerations...... 161 Research examples...... 161 Falsifying the Theory ...... • 164 VI. RE-VISIONING COMPOSITION: SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS...... 173 Training the Teacher of Problem Writers. . 174 A Separate Discipline...... 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 179

xi Any tradition fostering the progress of thought must have this intention; to teach its current ideas as stages leading on to unknown truths which, when discovered, might dissent from the very teachings which engendered them. Michael Polanyi

xii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Taking Stock Since the advent of open admissions policies, writing teachers have come to know a new student, one who little understands the conventions and demands of the written medium. Reading too little, bringing insufficient train­ ing in writing, and frequently speaking a nonstandard dia­ lect, such students, particularly as college freshmen, present a real challenge to their composition instructors. Victims of social, political, and educational realities, they surprise even the most stout-hearted with the fre­ quency and strangeness of the errors on their papers and with the sparseness of development of their ideas. Such unprepared college students are opening up what Basic Writing specialist Mina Shaughnessy has referred to as "the frontier of a profession."*- While writing teachers experience few major problems in teaching writing to those who "had learned most of what they needed to know about writing before they got to college,"2 the problem or Basic Writer challenges us to grow beyond our present understand­ ing of ourselves and our discipline. Attitudes and ap­ proaches that work in other settings simply do not work in this teaching situation. Thus we are forced to admit that there is more to know about teaching writing. It is necessary, further, to admit that there has always existed a group of students who either did not write capably or who, although they could turn out competent papers, found writing a genuine struggle. These writers I refer to as "problem writers," for, while the term en­ compasses the Basic Writer, they are not necessarily the same person. The problems of the Basic Writer, as amply documented by Shaughnessy and John Higgins,3 are largely those of inexperience with written prose and, most notably, of error. These writers experience the most elementary of difficulties with writing, even those of simply getting the writing instrument to move across the page.2*

1 The generic label "problem writer," however, encom­ passes as well a different student, the person who finds writing difficult for other reasons. This category of problem writer I refer to as the "beginning writer," for this person, while not necessarily struggling with error, faces problems experienced by those who are still in the process of learning how to write effectively and comfort­ ably. Their writing is not usually earmarked by an abun­ dance of errors or sparseness of development, two key char­ acteristics of the truly Basic Writer. Rather, their work can be characterized by the problems they experience with larger issues. Their style may be dull and inauthentic. They may have difficulty deciding what to write about. Or they have difficulty with coherence. Unusually egocen­ tric, they often omit bridges for the reader but are un­ able to recognize this fact, even after it has been called to their attention. Most notably, they can be recognized by the worry they exert over their writing, the anxiety, fear, or frustration they experience with any given piece.5 While at times their papers, too, are spotted with errors, their difficulties are more with handling of process and handling of self as writer than with conventions. We have always had such problem writers, some of whom need remedial assistance as college freshmen. The present national writ­ ing crisis calls to our conscious attention what has always existed in some measure, but what now appears new largely because of a new university student population. ° Furthermore, the present writing crisis forces English, departments to admit some harsh realities about departmen­ tal goals, about the preparation of writing teachers, and about the acceptability of such teachers in said depart­ ments. Both high school composition teachers and Freshman English teaching assistants receive their training from departments devoted to the study and appreciation of lit­ erature. Tet I suggest that students of literature do not often receive sufficient or appropriate training and do not always possess the personal qualities which make them suitable to teach writing, especially to problem writ­ ers. What is more, those persons who choose to devote themselves to the teaching of expository writing are often second-class departmental citizens: non-tenured or part- time personnel.' Finally, the present crisis forces ua to acknowledge the state of development of our very discipline. That state can be likened to an embryonic one, for the very epistemological foundations of our discipline, both the theories and the basic research which lend support to those theories, are fragile as goasamer. There simply is too little that we know with certainty about writing and the 3 teaching thereof. James L. Kinneavy and C. Robert Kline, Jr., have noted recently that there have been some composition theories, especially recent ones, which have evolved without a generating philosophical matrix. Without the judicious perspec­ tive of a broad intellectual framework, such theories have often been fanatically proposed as panaceas, with the result that even the valuable components of the theory are lost.8 Of research and authoritative knowledge, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., says, The neglect of basic research in composition has encouraged us to be our own oracles in the classroom. If really authoritative guidance were available, most of us would follow it, and be less inclined to grasp desperately at each new *approach* that comes along. I believe that our lack of author­ itative knowledge has created more conflicts among us than all our differences of taste and ideology.9 Until we can proceed from more certain knowledge about composition and composition teaching, knowledge which can be gained from theorizing and from rigorous basic research, our discipline will remain in an embryonic state. Thus the writing crisis challenges us as a discipline to grow. It compels us to take stock of a variety of issues, to ask hard questions, and to acknowledge that there is more to know about the teaching and researching of composition.

Incomplete Understandings Indeed, there has always been more to know about writ­ ing and about persons as writers. Persons are such com­ plex creatures that no matter how well we understand even our very selves, there are always new insights to discover. Our view of students frequently becomes so task-oriented and mechanistic that we do not see their totality, and thus we miss much of what they bring to us as writing novices. In the main we have not viewed each student as a meaning- maker, who continually creates meaning out of the facts and circumstances of everyday life. Nor do we tend to view our students as subjects with motivation, as persons with intuitive language knowledge, or as persons gifted with uniqueness. Rather, we appear to view them as ob­ jects, to be programmed, factory-like, to turn out the requisite product upon the stimulus of an assignment. Too often we ignore the influence of their feelings and 4 attitudes, their needs for sense-making, their perceptions and manner of processing information, on our classroom activities and assignments. There is need, then, for a less mechanistic view of our students and thus a fuller appreciation and understanding of their persoiihood. Nor do we understand the composing process or the writing event fully. What is known with any certainty about how persons compose? We have the Paris Review inter­ views of professional writers done by Malcolm Cowley and various literary studies of the genesis of the works of famous authors.^-0 Only in recent years, however, have attempts been made to research how students and competent adult writers compose. Janet Qnig broke ground for us in 1971 with her case study, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders. a study of the oral composing processes of eight Chicago twelfth graders. Prior to that, Emig also studied the processes of well-known authors.11 Others are following suit. Charles Stallard and Terry Mischel have studied the processes used by high school students, Donald H. Graves has done a case study of elementary writ­ ers, while Charles Cooper and Lee Odell have begun to re­ search the composing processes of professional adult writ­ ers . As Emig herself noted, though, prior to 1963 only two of the 504 writing studies cited in Research in Written Composition focus on processes used by student wrTFers.13 There remains much more to discover. Prom the late nineteenth century to the last decade, the focus in the profession has been on writing as product rather than on writing as process. Using our literary analysis skills, we have analyzed paragraphs and essays to determine the requisite qualities of a good composition but have not often enough raised the question of how the product arrived at its finished state. Not until the last decade has there been much discussion of the process of writing, with such works appearing as Qiiig's, Robert P. Parker1 s **Focus in the Teaching of Writing: On Process or Product?", and Susan Miller*s Writing: Process and Prod­ uct.1^ The attention to process represents a much-needed shift. But even there we have made only a beginning. Nancy Sommers points out in a recent issue of College Composition and Communication that in our haste to discuss process not product, we have continued to use the same nomenclature to describe process as we used to describe product and have not developed the necessary vocabulary to adequately discuss the psychological and intellectual operations of the composing process.15 5 Too, much of our understanding of the writing event has been inadequate. Our teaching has at times proceeded as though writing were a linear activity, moving neatly from outline to finished product. Yet professional writers tell us otherwise.1® Also, while we understand well the need for logic and structure in writing, both operations of the conscious mind, we do not understand well enough the role played by unconscious processes. Peter Elbow in Writing without Teachers offers some important beginnings here. Nor have we given sufficient emphasis to other facets of writing. One aspect too little attended to is that of writing— even what is commonly called expository or referential writing— as an organic creative activity which, at least in its initial stages, follows its own momentum rather than any conscious, given blueprint. Nor have we attended sufficiently to writing as a communication event, as a shared I-message from the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader. We have rested, I suggest, with an inappropriate model, particularly for our beginning writers: with the model of a speech or written discourse to a public audience, rather than conceiving of a more intimate writer-reader relationship as the appropriate model. Likewise, we have assumed at times a virtual one- to-one correspondence between writing and thinking, without acknowledging that writing encompasses feelings and atti­ tudes as well. Nor do we know enough about the psycholog­ ical workings of writers. As James Britton says in The Development of writing Abilities (11-13), "the psychologi­ cal processes involvea in writing are not well under­ stood."17 Much, then, remains to be understood about writing. Not only is there more to know about writing and writers, but there is also more to know about teaching writing and about doing research into the activity. We publish articles based on what works for individual teach­ ers in individual classrooms but have no clear and complete understanding that these methods will work for most teach­ ers in most classrooms.1** Our understanding of how to do empirical research has not advanced much beyond that offered in 1963 by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer in Research in Written Composition. We operate with incomplete and-insui:£icient models of composing, teaching composition, and researching com­ position. As college writing teachers in particular, we lack exposure to a variety of classroom approaches and learning theories. Like most teachers in any discipline, teaching as we were taught, we bring with us to the classroom a single pedagogical model, called by educator Faulo Freire 6 the "banking method of education": we provide student writ­ ers with a set body of content about how to write and ex­ pect that they will return to us with interest this deposit of "how to1s" in the form of their finished product. Freire says, "In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowl­ edgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing."19 How apt a characterization of the view we have frequently taken of our students. Thus we often rely on a cookbook approach— on providing a recipe for writing success. What a vast oversimplification of both teaching and writing such an approach promulgates. In Teaching the Universe of Discourse. James Moffett argues against pre"teaching prob- TemS~-an3—solutions, a variant of the banking method. Instead, he suggests a naturalistic approach, one allowing writing to grow naturally out of dialogue and permitting the student freedom to make mistakes while providing cor­ rective feedback when such mistakes occur. Because we are teaching a skills course, one which contains the many complexities suggested in the preceding discussion of persons and the writing event, and because our students are themselves experts about their content for writing, our teaching model very much needs to be an enabling model. Rather than pour information into the minds and hearts of our students, we must find ways to open the word-hoards of those minds and hearts, ways to free people, as Freire says, to "speak their word" and "name the world. "21* We need to look at alternative teaching models for the insights they will offer us into how best to teach writing. Alternatives to the teacher-centered class are possible. One such model is that of the student-centered or decentralized classroom, wherein students and teachers are co-learners. Lou Kelly uses this approach in From Dialogue to Discourse. In her classroom, all are co­ part icxpants~ajT^3IaIogue; writing grows out of that dia­ logue. Shaughnessy recommends a decentralized setting for Basic Writers, one "where students participate as teachers as well as learners," for such a classroom "opens up the students1 'secret1 files of misinformation, confu­ sion, humor, and linguistic insight to an extent that is not often possible in the traditional setting."22 Timothy McCracken and W. Allen Ashby in "The Widow's Walk: An Alternative for English 101— Creative Comnunications" also describe a learner-oriented classroom, in which the class begins '*with our differences" and "with perception and the senses since that's where all learning begins."23 Mary Edel Denman offers a related model in "I Got This Here Hang-Up: Non-Cognitive Processes for Facilitating 7 Writing": the option of focusing on the affective as a way to facilitate writing. She says, The use of non-cognitive processes for facili­ tating writing is based on the premise that most— possibly as much as 90%— of what goes on in any class­ room is emotional or affective, rather than cognitive, and that this emotional, affective, non-cognitive part of the classroom experience profoundly affects every student, either enhancing or inhibiting his growth and performance.2^1 Other classroom possibilities exist, especially as we move away from a model which forces us to be the only "knowers" in the room. We can approach a class as a writ­ ing laboratory or workshop where students do not read and discuss essays but rather concentrate their energies on writing— producing, revising, editing— and where the teacher gives advice to individuals rather than lectures to a group.25 other course possibilities include operating the course strictly as a tutorial, using a small groups approach, or viewing the class as a community of writers who will support and encourage one another and who will receive the support and encouragement of the teacher as well. Various grading options also deserve consideration, as do various responses to students. The folder of stu­ dent writing might be graded only at the end of the term, a la Macrorie. Other options exist: contract grading, as in John V. Knapp's "Contract/Conference Evaluations of Freshman Composition";2® self-evaluation; peer evaluation. Also, different ways of responding to student writing are ossible; positive feedback only,27 responding as a writ- Png "coach,"2® responding as a sympathetic, "trusted adult,,t2^ rather than as an examiner. As we move to ex­ plore various options and consider more fully the meaning of "teaching" and "learning," we can move to more effective classroom models for the teaching of writing. Finally, our research model also is incomplete. First, we know too little about how to do research. We need more understanding of experimental design and research strate­ gies. Second, we rest too heavily on the tools and tactics of the "objective" natural sciences. Such an emphasis is quite clear from the Braddock, Jones, and Schoer study, which recommends greater attention to numbers and varia­ bles. Further, these authors criticized research in writ­ ten composition for its failure to be "conducted with the knowledge and care that one associates with the physical sciences."30 One of the latest books on research in 8 written composition errs in the same direction. Sara W. Lundsteen1a Help for the Teacher of Written Composition (K-9): New Directions in Research recommends the 1'analytic, objective rigor of the-behavioral scientist."31 While some of this advice is valuable, we need to go beyond it in our understanding of research. We need to recognize that research techniques into how human beings operate must be decidedly different from those which investigate how nonhuman creatures and inanimate objects behave. Humans, endowed with intelligence, feelings, attitudes, must not be approached as inert objects who provide no input into a research project. Intelligence, emotions, perceptions, powers of reflection and anticipa­ tion, as well as motivation, must be taken into account in understanding how persons write and how best to teach them. We need the total picture,32 not simply an easily researchable numerical piece.

Composition Theory It is not possible, however, to explore all these areas in a single dissertation. The point of departure for this dissertation is the domain of composition theory, for it is in the area of theory and the philosophical base thereof that work is needed. Theoretical constructs help us to make sense out of our experience and observations and suggest ways of testing reality. As Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey note about theories, At the very least they represent a cluster of atti­ tudes (assumptions) concerning behavior which in a broad way limits the kinds of investigation to be considered crucial or important. In addition to stimulating certain general kinds of research, they also provide specific parameters or dimensions which are considered important in the exploration of these problems. Thus, even if the theory does not provide an exact proposition for test it orients the theorist toward certain problem areas and tells him that par­ ticular variables are of central importance in study­ ing these problems.33 They note, too, that the value of a theory lies in its utility, not in its truth or falsity.3^ While it cannot be said that the field of composition has no theory, many of our theories and approaches either lack adequate philosophical justification or are not ade­ quate for the full range of data at hand. The intent of 9 the theory offered here is to take into account more of the variables impinging on our teaching and on the writing event, so as to emerge with a more comprehensive theory for our discipline. Hypotheses emanating from that theory will then be open to testing. Until our discipline is grounded epistemologically in a more solid theoretical base, it will not be possible to proceed with the appro­ priate basic research called for by such authorities as Shaughnessy and Hirsch. Nor will it be possible to do the most effective teaching job possible.

Broadening Our Theoretical Base The theory governing the field of composition at present comes from the province of rhetoric. It might well be said that rhetorical theory has been useful over the years for the prevalent teaching situations of the time. Rhetoric has given us a valuable tradition of knowledge about logically and effectively persuading an audience. While rhetorical theory has served us well for over 2000 years, with present changes in student population and in our own understandings in a variety of areas— linguistics and psychology, for example— that theory is no longer sufficient as the governing theory for the dis­ cipline of composition. It might even be said, borrowing Thomas S. Kuhn's terminology, that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the field and that our present theory is part of the old paradigm.35 Our current theory is inadequate largely because it lacks sufficient explanatory power. It does not cover the new student population taught by the college writing instructor: the beginning or Basic Writer. Rhetorical theory has been sufficient for students who already knew how to write or who brought with them to the classroom certain conscious knowledge or tacit understandings about writing which many, perhaps most, of our present student population do not bring with them. That population, grow­ ing up in a media culture, frequently numbering more stu­ dents from poverty backgrounds than in the past, lacks, as I have said, practice and experience with written prose. For this new student population, rhetoric, with its empha­ sis on conscious choice of strategies for persuading an audience,36 provides an insufficient theoretical base. Students who do not understand the features and conventions of written prose are often not at a sufficiently advanced stage of writing growth to make conscious choices about how best to convince an audience. They are likely not ready to even think about an audience, at least initially. Also, while rhetorical theory offers useful prescriptions 1 0 and suggestions for the advanced writer and helpful descriptions of external processes in composition (inven­ tion and arrangement, e.g.), it does not explain fully the psychology of composing--how persons write or why they experience difficulties with the composing process. Yet it is these very understandings which are needed in working with problem or beginning writers. In addition, it takes too limited a view of human communication. It approaches all written communication as argument or persuasion, the attempt to win over someone else, while in actuality much human communication is an act of sharing of self with another self.57 Basic Writers are usually not ready to leap into convincing someone else and frequently need much support and encouragement even for sharing of self. Final­ ly, the relationship model derived from the view of all communication as persuasion tends toward a dominant- submissive modelt58 whereas the classroom relationship model recommended by Shaughnessy for Basic Writers, as mentioned earlier, is that of teacher and student as co- learners.5^ A second area in which rhetorical theory lacks ade­ quate explanatory power is that of the role of the uncon­ scious in composing. Rhetoric places heavy emphasis on conscious choice, on logic, on arrangement, without adding also the unconscious, the intuitive. As such, it does not explain fully the thought processes at work in composing. While recent developments in rhetorical theory^O have added new insights, it remains necessary to broaden our theoretical base with new insights from other disciplines— from linguistics, psychology, communications, sociology— so as to include both new understandings and our new student population. We need to add a variety of pieces to our theoretical foundation. We need to turn, for example, to psychology for understandings of what stifles or blocks individual persons from writing success. What attitudes, personality features, modes of behavior as writers, facilitate or impede written expression? We need to look to communica­ tion theory for greater understanding of the dynamics of human communication. Sources such as Joan R. Searle's Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Paul Watzlawick, Janet BeavTn, and Don JacWsorP’s Pragmatics of Human Communication, along with information-processing tKeory and Charles W.^taorris’s semiotic theory, contain powerful insights for us. Likewise, we need to turn to linguistics for the insights it offers us into language as a rule-governed activity. We want to look further into sociolinguistics for information about language variation and community uses of language; into psycholinguistics, XI including studies of animal communication, for insights into language acquisition; and into discourse analysis for a fuller understanding of the meanings of such commonly used terms as "the paragraph" and "coherence." We need to look, too, at phenomenology for an understanding of the phenomenological reality of the writer, so that we can better understand the writer's perception of the overall writing context. Even as we turn to other areas for important pieces for our theoretical foundation, problems arise. Where, for example, is the clearly articulated language theory to which we can turn? Noam Chomsky's transformational- generative grammar is a relatively recent development. But Chomsky has not given us the final word. As we well know, syntax was tackled first, as a preliminary to under­ standing semantics, the key area of language functioning.4*1 Yet syntax has still not been worked out thoroughly, as evidenced by disagreements among case grammarians and strict followers of Chomsky.42 in addition, linguistics has not worked out a way to handle language variation satisfactorily. The relationship between Chomsky's theory and dialect is not clear. Nor have dialectologists fully succeeded in describing individual dialects of American English. Even at present, for example, major questions remain about the source and actual descriptive features of the dialect known as Black English. Some linguists consider it a social-class dialect or sociolect, used predominantly by urban lower-class Blacks. Others, sub­ scribing to the Creolist hypothesis, view Black English more as a separate language, having its roots in African languages.43 Recent research has even raised the question as to whether Black English is simply Southern speech transplanted to a Northern clime. Roger Shuy has found even invariant ,*be," the most distinctive feature of Black English, in Appalachia and in the South.44 Thus, the language theory on which our discipline rests is still incomplete. A similar point can be made about the various other disciplines to which we look for insights. Do communica­ tions theoreticians know with certainty the precise mech­ anisms by which one person sends a message and another receives it? Information-processing theory is in its infancy stages. Discourse analysis, while prominent in current European linguistics, is not prominent in American linguistics. Attempts by linguists and communications specialists to unearth presuppositions for communication have only been begun. Similarly, radical sociologists known as ethnomethodologists have only begun to get at the tacit rules by which persons structure their daily 12 activities. Psychology, with all that It does understand about personality and Interpersonal cocmunication, Is only beginning to explore right- and left-brain functioning. Much remains to be understood. Yet a beginning must be made. It is important to recognize that the theoretical foundation for understanding composing, and the teaching and researching thereof, is incomplete. We need to broaden that base. This disserta­ tion represents just such a theoretical effort.

Theoretical Foundation and the Person: Grounds for a Re-Examination In the introduction to The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, Janet Etaig points to what she sees as per- haps the chiefvalue of her study: "its steady assumption that persons, rather than mechanisms, compose•"45 It is that very assumption which guides the thinking of this essay and which provides the philosophical base for this theory of writing. The theory offered here focuses on the Importance of the person doing the composing. What it means to be a person and a communicator must be attended to by writing teachers and all who would understand writing, or we will too frequently miss our desired mark, that of enhancing the language skills of our student writers*

The overlooked person; a background note The person appears to be a much-neglected part of the communication triad. Rhetorical theory stresses the audience and the subject but touches little on the self of the writer. It is difficult to account for this phenomenon. Why is the writer as person so little attended to in our practice and theory? One reason may be a historical one. The astute observer of the history of the profession can turn to the nineteenth century and find there in the writings of Fred Newton Scott an emphasis very similar to that propounded in this dissertation. 46 But as education became more practical at the turn of the century, the discipline shifted away from that emphasis. The aims of education at the time and the nature of the student body came to influence our direction, as they so often do. Witness the present "back to the basics" movement, arising in part because of a new student population and in part because of the changing needs of workers and society. Or witness the 13 emphasis in writing classrooms on teaching for academic survival or on "school writing" rather than "real writing," that is, writing as a genuine communication act. The reasons for what we do stem so little from the internal demands of the discipline or the needs of writers and far more from external demands. Another historical reason may be the relatively recent psychological understandings about persons and the lack of emphasis on psychology in our own training. Which brings me to a second reason, a practical one, for the lack of attention given to the self of the writer. If the full-time writing instructor teaches from fifty to one hundred fifty writing students, to ask for greater attention to students as individuals is to make unreason­ able demands of already overworked teachers. One is brought back here to a political reason, the status of composition teachers in English departments^7 and their workload in comparison with that of literature professors. That reason has to do also with the composi­ tion teacherfs desire to be thought of as respectable and tough-minded. There is an assumption afoot, perhaps as a result of the "relevance" years of the 1960*8, that paying more attention to students is soft-headed. To stress "the student" is viewed as a throwback to those days. Likewise, it may be perceived as a request to be friends with stu­ dents, "buddy-buddy," and thus not teachers. Nothing could be farther from the intended thrust of the position taken in this dissertation.4® Even more crucial is the second- class nature of the composition teacher's citizenship in English departments. The view widely promulgated is that composition scholars are "mere practitioners." If one wants to deal with theory and with what is "really impor­ tant," one is a literary scholar rather than a composition specialist. For composition teachers to advocate the importance of feelings and "the student" rather than to stress cognition, writing as thinking, is to suggest that we are "touchy-feely*1 people and is to confirm the worst suspicions of our literary colleagues: that the discipline is '"mere pedagogy*"49 and lacks substance. Finally, the sciences have had their impact on us. We have attempted to follow too closely their objectivity and impersonality. As literary critic Norman N. Holland notes, even our literature teaching seems "designed to achieve the kind of impersonal agreement that we respect in the natural sciences by taking the self out of the literary experience."^® A similar observation by a psychologist with regard to his discipline also applies to ours: 14 Because of our need to compete with the physical sciences, behavioral sciences have skipped over, by and large, the naturalistic stage from which other disciplines developed. We have not been people- watchers as biologists were bird- and bug-watch­ ers. . . .Very few of us make any attempt to use our scientific training to investigate what people are really like when they are being themselves. When one examines the literature in the behavioral sci­ ences, one seldom hasthe feeling, tthat*s what itTs like to be me.* The person is usually miss­ ing. . . .51

Why focus on the person? To ignore the person doing the writing is to mechanis­ tically ignore what would seem to be the most important part of the communication triad of subject-writer-audience, for without the person there is no act of communication. The communicator is the key element in any communication act. Linguist Wallace Chafe makes a similar point about the communicator in speech: It is the speaker who 'generates* the semantic struc­ ture in the first place, and it is the semantic struc­ ture that determines what comes after. The hearer's role is a matter of recovering what the speaker began with, a second-hand role at b e s t . -52 It is true that in recent years, perhaps since the Dartmouth Conference in 1966, it has become increasingly acceptable for our teaching practice to focus on the person- hood of the student writer. James Moffett in 1968 gave us A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum, Grades K-13. Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing advocated the use of real language by real persons rather than what he called "Engfish." In the early 1970 's came an outpouring of texts focusing on the voice of the individual writer: Jim Corder's Finding a Voice, Ken W. Symes's The Writer's Voice, Jill Cohn's writing: A Personal Voice. During that same period, we saw texts on Hie writer as unique experiencer of reality, the most notable of which was Joseph Comprone's From Experience to Expression. The focus thus moved more and more ontotKe writer asperson. Tet this teaching practice lacks solid theoretical Justification. Further work is needed on persons as writers because nowhere in the field have understandings about the human person been pulled together from psychol­ ogy, philosophy, and sociology, to give a person-centered 15 approach, a firm theoretical foundation. Much of what person-centered teachers do is "by guess and by gosh," according to hunch and intuition. Certainly there is value in these approaches as starting points. There is also need, though, for firmer theoretical ground to walk on. The theoretical stance taken in this dissertation, emphasizing as it does the person as writer, is consistent with understandings about the importance of the person gathered from a variety of fields. It is consistent with the emphasis on the self in many personality theories, as evidenced by the use of such terms as "self-concept," "self-image," and "self-actualization."55 The emphasis on the person follows, too, from "third force" psychology and from a phenomenological emphasis on the consciousness of the person as a knower of experience. It rests, too, on a sociological-anthropological focus on the view of the insider, the emic view, in addition to the outsider*s or etic view. This perspective "is a point of view which looks at human behavior not only through the eyes of an outsider, but through the eyes of the person doing the behaving."5^ The person is key, too, because we need to recognize that persons bring different life experiences to the act of writing and handle the composing process differently. Style of revising, method of prewriting, and such idiosyn­ crasies as time of day for writing and color of pen used vary from writer to writer. Related to this point, Basic Writers commit their own unique sets of errors and have their own unique sets of writing problems.55 It is important to see and respond to where each person is start­ ing as an individual and to encourage each person to handle the writing process in ways that facilitate the best expres­ sion each is capable of. The overall thrust of this dissertation, then, is to synthesize emerging understandings about persons and about the writing event, so as to emerge with a more complete composition theory. Prom there, the dissertation will examine teaching and research directions emanating from the theoretical construct. More specifically, the disser­ tation rests on the thesis that fuller attention to persons provides an important part of the theoretical foundation for our discipline and represents a significant direction for both the teaching and researching of writing. To a large extent, this chapter and this dissertation call for a change in paradigm. On the one hand, the new perspective demands that we step back and see ail that student writers as persons are and all the resources and 16 needs that they bring with them to our classrooms. It is as though we must shift our field of vision to a wide-angle lens to see more of the variables impinging on the writing event. On the other hand, though, the new perspective demands an ever closer look at each individual person, a zeroing in on the problems and processes of each individual. Here, we need a close-up shot. Chapters Two and TCiree use the wide-angle lens. Chapter Two examines the complexity and uniqueness of persons; Chapter Three examines the complexity of the writing event. Chapters Four and Five provide the close-up shot: the teaching and research directions emanating from the theoretical groundwork laid in the first three chapters. 17 Endnotes

xMina P. Shaughnessy, "Basic Writing," in Teaching Composition: 10 Bibliographical Essays, ed. Gary Tate (Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 167. ^Hina p. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 19*7777 P- 293. ^Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations, is especially illuminating here. See also John A. Higgins, "Remedial Students' Needs versus Emphasis in Text-workbooksCCC. 24 (May, 1973), 188-192. ^Shaughnessy, Errors, p. 15. ^Cf. "writing apprehension," as discussed in John A. Daly and Michael D. Miller, "The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writing Apprehension," Research in the Teaching of English, 9 (Winter, 1975), 242-249. ^Shaughnessy, Errors, pp. 1-3. See also Shaughnessy, "Basic Wtiting," pp. 138-140. ^Dennis Szilak, "Teachers of Composition: A Re- Niggering," College English, 39 (September, 1977), 25-27. 8James L. Kiimeavy and C. Robert Kline, Jr., "Composition and Related Fields," in Teaching Composition: 10 Bibliographical Essays, ed. Tate, p. 243. 9E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Philosophy of Composition (Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 1977), p. b. 10Malcolm Cowley, ed., Writers at Work: the Paris Review Interviews (New York: Viking Press, 1967)1 CF. such works as John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Hew York: “Houghton Mifflin, 1^2777 Even my own toaster’s Thesis was just such a study: "Religio Literature, 1638-1682: A Study of the Genesis of Drydenf¥ Religio Laici," Thesis, The Ohio State University, 1966. Janet Emig, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (Urbana, Illinois: NCl*E, 1971), pp. 22-25. l^Charles K * Stallard, "An Analysis of the Writing Behavior of Good Student Writers," Research in the Teaching of English, 8 (Fall, 1974), 201-218; lerry^Muache1, "A Case 18 Study of a Twelfth-Grade Writer," Research in the Teaching of English, 8 (Fall, 1974), 303-314; Donald*~H.—iSraves, TTSn fexamination of the Writing Processes of Seven Year Old Children," Research in the Teaching of English, 9 (Winter, 1975), 227-241; CharTes ft. Cooper an3~Lee Odell, "Consider­ ations of Sound in the Composing Process of Published Writers," Research in the Teaching of English, 10 (Fall, 1976), 103-115. 13Emig, p. 19. 1^Robert P. Parker, Jr., ,TFocus in the Teaching of Writing: On Process or Product?", English Journal, 61 (December, 1972), 1328-1333; Susan filler, Writing: Process and Product (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, Inc., T576T. ^■^Nancy Sonniers, "Response to Sharon Crowley, ’Com­ ponents of the Composing Process,' CCC, 28 (May, 1977), 166-169," CTO, 29 (May, 1978), 209-2117 l6Emig, pp. 24-25. 17James Britton etal., The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) (London: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1975), p. 19. Cf. Andrea A. Lunsford, "What We Know— and Don't Know— about Remedial Wtiting," CCC, 29 (February, 1978), 47-52 and Josephine Miles, "What We Already Know about Composition and What We Need to Know," CCC, 27 (May, 1976), 136-141. 18Paul W. Swets, "Salvaging Rhetorical Instruction: An Experimental Approach," CCC. 28 (October, 1977), 235. Cf. Shaughnessy, "Basic Writing," p. 147. *®Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 19*71), p. 557 20Jsmes Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908),pp. 188-200. 2*Freire, p. 76. 22Shaughnessy, Errors. p. 40. 23Timothy E. McCracken and W. Allen Ashby, "The Widow's Walk: An Alternative for English 101— Creative Communications," College English, 36 (January, 1975), 561. 19 2^Mary Edel Denman, "I Got This Here Hang-Up: Non- Cognitive Processes for Facilitating Writingf,f CCC. 26 (October, 1975), 305-306. 25See, e.g., James Klein, "Self-Composing,” College English, 35 (February, 1974), 584-588, for a model of this approach. 2®John V. Knapp, "Contract/Conference Evaluations of Freshman Composition,” College English, 37 (March, 1976), 647-653. Denman, 308. 28M6ffett, p. 189. Cf. the grading approach taken by Paul B. Diederich, Measuring Growth in English (Urbana, 111.: NOTE, 1974), pp. 20-23. 29Britton, p. 66. ^Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition (Urbana, 111.: NOTE, 19(53), p. 5. 3^Sara W. Lunds teen, ed., Help for the Teacher of Written Composition: New Directions inTfeesearch (llrbana, Uli: 5teTE,1976yrP.-55. ------32Roger Poole, Towards Peep Subjectivity (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 108. 33Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories of Personality (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), p. T7. 34Hall and Lindzey, p. 13. 35Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolu­ tions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, l976), pp. 84-85, says, "The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is • . . a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications.” 3®In "Traditional Misconceptions of Traditional Rhetoric," P. Albert Duhamel provides an Aristotelian definition of rhetoric: ” ♦Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of per­ suasion in reference to any subject whatever. . . Also, he says that "The more thoroughly students are made aware of the possibilities of alternative means the richer 20 will be their grasp of the idea of the complexity of the art, the finer their appreciation, and the more likely they will be to discipline themselves to its acquisition.1' In Rhetoric a Theories for Application, ed. Robert M. Gorrell (Champaign, 111.:- fcKTE, 1967), p. 25 and p. 27. 37Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole), trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston, IllV: Northwestern University Press, 196$, pp. 69-71, says, "To communicate, man ex-presses himself. • • .Thus the function of expression consists in a movement of man outside himself in order to give meaning to the real. Expression is the act of man establishing himself in the world, in other words adding himself to the world.11 38 Gusdorf, pp. 97-98: "One can also speak in order to sway the other, in order to impose on him one's own point of view. Here collaboration yields to a kind of imperialism. . . .Rhetoric, dialectic, and sophistry, for example, represent traditional forms of an art of persua­ sion that makes logic the instrument of the desire for domination. To convince is to conquer." 39See p. 6. ^°I refer here to various forms of the "New Rhetoric." See, e.g., S. M. Ha11oran, "On the End of Rhetoric, Clas­ sical and Modern," College English, 36 (February, 1975), 621-631; James L. Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (Engle­ wood Cliffs, N.J.: Pre nt ice-Hall, 197lT; Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric; Discovery and Change (New York: Hareourt, 1970). ^Robert de Beaugrande, ,fLinguistic Theory and Composition," CCC, 29 (May, 1978), 135, makes a similar point. He notes that linguistics has been preoccupied with "formal aspects," a preoccupation with which "had in fact led to a consistent neglect of the conmunicational side of language. Even the issue of meaning was ignored as *extralinguistic * or postponed until such time as a complete and rigorous catalogue of all human knowledge and experience should become available." See also Wallace L. Chafe, Meaning and the Structure of Language (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1§70;, p. 7%: "Linguistics thus finds itself at the present time in an awkward posi­ tion, for of all the things it has learned about the various parts of language, it has learned the least about seman­ tics. . . .In consequence, we still know very little about the nature of language. ..." Judith Greene, Psycholinguistics (Baltimore: Pen guin Books, 1972), pp. 21

3J. l . Dillard, Ralph Fasold, and William Stewart are the most notable spokesmen for the Creolist position; the controversy has raged most heatedly between Stewart and Walt Wolfram, a non-Creolist. For further discussion of this point, see: J. L. Dillard, Black English (New York: Vintage, 1972); Ralph W. Fasold, "Deereolizat'ion and Autonomous Language Change," The Florida FL Reportert 10 (Spring/Fall, 1972), 9-12, 51; and Walt WoTfram, ’’Hidden Agendas and Witch Hunts: Which is Witch? A Reply to William A. Stewart," The Florida FL Reporter, 11 (Spring/ Fall, 1973), 33-34, ATI ^Professor Johanna S. DeStefano, personal com­ munication. *SEmig, p. 5. 46 See Edward P. J. Corbett and Virginia M. Burke, eds., The New Century Compos ition-Rhetoric (New York: Apple ton-Century^(Jr of ts, 1971), pp. xiii-xiv, ^7See Richard Lloyd-Jones, "The Politics of Research into the Teaching of Composition," CCC, 28 (October, 1977), 218-222, and Szilak, 25-31, for an illuminating discussion of the problems here. 48Not that this writer is against such friendship. She would even advocate loving students (in the sense of agape, of course). Cf. Jerry Farber, "The Student as Nigger," in The Rhetoric of NO, ed. Ray Fabrizio, Edith Karas, and Ruth Menmuir (Ne o r k : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 411-418. 49Cf. Lloyd-Jones, 26. At least one department chairman has been heard to utter very similar thoughts. ■®®Norman N. Holland, "Transactive Teaching: Cordelia's Death," College English. 39 (November, 1977), 280.

^Richard E. Farson, ed., Science and H imhati Affairs (Palo Alto, Calif.: Science andBehavior Books, 1965), p. 13, quoted in Don E. Hamachek, Encounters with the Self (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 437“ 52Chafe, p. 59. 53 Hamachek, p. 6. ^Hamachek, p. 32. 2 2 ^Shaughnesay, Errors, p. 40, says, "Not all BW students have the same problems; not all students with the same problems have them for the same reasons. There are styles to being wrong." Also, p. 280, she notes that Basic Mriters "assert their individualities in a variety of ways— in their styles of learning, their paces and patterns of development, even in the features of their writing that resist or give way to instruction." CHAPTER II

THE PERSON IN THE WRITING ACT

Introduction As Chapter One has suggested, we ignore or de- emphasize the person in the writing act at our peril. There is simply too much of importance and of substance to attend to about persons, understandings which, when left unattended to, actively militate against the success of our composition teaching. The irony is that sometimes we manage to teach persons to write better anyway. We could achieve so much more. Ignoring the writer as person ignores too many key understandings from psychology, sociology, philosophy, and thus forces us to do our teach­ ing in the dark ages. Indeed, some of what literary scholars are presently exploring about persons as readers has enormous bearing on the activity of composition teach­ ers. David Bleich and Norman Holland, for example, are studying the importance of persons in the reading act.l It should be equally respectable for us to consider their importance in the writing act. Let us examine, then, the very serious contention that we ignore the personhood of writers at our peril. How can that be so? What is some of this knowledge about persons which has a bearing on their writing and on our teaching them to write?

Persons as Knowers of Experience One such piece of understanding is that all persons, including teenagers, bring with them "knowledge," an experiential base which can be tapped as material for writing. Various philosophers have referred to persons as "knowers of experience." Scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi speaks of "a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known."2 S^fren Kierke­ gaard says that "knowledge has a relationship to the knower."3 Bernard Lonergan, the Jesuit scholar whose theological system marks him as the modem Thomas Aquinas,

23 2 4 stresses the "self-affirmation of the knower."^ In Insight, the tome which develops his approach to cognition, he stresses the act of knowing and its relation to the indi­ vidual person: "Deep within us all, there is a drive to know. . . ."5 He calls the question "why" the "pure ques­ tion," viewing it as a "primordial drive." He says, too, Though 1 cannot recall to each reader his personal experience, he can do so for himself and thereby pluck my general phrases from the dim world of thought to set them in the pulsing flow of life. . . ./T/he point here, as elsewhere, is appropriation; the point is to discover, to identify, to become familiar with the activities of one's own intelligence.6 Psychologist Carl Rogers says, Experience is. for me. the highest authority. The touchstone ot validity is my own experience. No other person1s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me.7 The point to be made here is that each person has a supply of experience,and knowledge about that experience, which provides content for writing. To be sure, there often are students who appear to have no storehouse of experience or knowledge on any sub­ ject. One of my own freshmen, in fact, a psychology major who had traveled to Europe and dropped out of school to work for a year, maintained that he had nothing to write about. We must not allow appearances to deceive us, however. No one can experience the world for eighteen years, with television, radio, films, without having a wealth of experience and knowledge. No eighteen-year-old has nothing to say. She or he may have nothing to say about some English-teacher or adult-oriented topics. Which average freshman has much to say, for example, about how dictionaries assist readers? Also, the inexperienced writer may admittedly not be in touch with what she or he has to say. Schooling often teaches students to deny— become dissociated from— what they know. Encouraging students to find their inner reservoirs, rather than acquiescing in the belief that they have none, is what is needed. But to assume that the well is dry and needs to be filled up from outside simply because it has never been plumbed is, in my view, a misguided assumption. 25 Yet it is this very point about the person as knower and possessor of experience 'which runs counter to prin­ ciples on which much of our educational system is founded and on which much of the existing theory of our discipline depends. Certainly much of our educational system is predicated on what Jean-Paul Sartre calls the "'nutritive'" or "'digestiveconcept of education® and what I have dubbed the "fill an empty vessel" theory of education— the assumption that our students come to us as empty vessels waiting to be filled from outside. That portion of our theory which comes to us from classical rhetoric appears to take the same view. With its stress on the writer's needing to find something to say, rhetoric does not appear to view the student as knower. Therefore the need for invention, to teach the student how to discover something to say about a subject given to him or her, rather than to assume that a student can find something to say about a subject within him or her.9 Thus, if a freshman who has thought little about, say, the necessary qualities for good teaching writes little on an impromptu in-class assignment about "the main reason why my high school English teacher was ineffective" (perhaps not even being fully aware that said teacher was ineffective), the assumption is made and the incorrect inference is drawn that the writer has no storehouse of internal material and therefore must be taught how to deal with a topic external to his or her own interests and involvement. Thus, students are taught to probe a "subject," something outside themselves, through the process of invention. In Process and Thought in Composition, for example, Prank D'Angelo offers a variety oF questions and approaches for finding something to say on a topic.10 Rather than encouraging students to look to material they bring with them, topics are held at arm's length from students. Perhaps the discrepancy between these two views hinges in part on the meaning of "experience" and "knowing." To be sure, the experience of many of our students does not come from books. Surely that fact does not invalidate the experience. Beyond that, our students are often not able to articulate what they know.11 Also, they usually lack the means for consciously reflecting on their experi­ ence. Without such reflection, there is little apparent knowledge and little meaning given to past experience. Where I would differ with the rhetorical approach of invention is that, rather than encourage students to develop ways of thinking about subjects outside themselves, about which they have no inherent interest, I would encourage them to become conscious of, learn to reflect on, subjects inside themselves which are inherently interesting to them. Kierkegaard says, "Existence constitutes the highest 2 6 Interest of the existing individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality.”12 Certainly I agree that invention will eventually be necessary, but at an early stage of composition experiences, it is more helpful to know that one has within oneself the resources to say something of value. Such knowledge is important in part because a writer needs to be assertive, needs to sound and behave as though she or he knows something. Otherwise, one's voice lacks authority, and one fails to control one's material. If students have been brought to see that they do know some­ thing, they can more easily assume the assertive stance needed for effective writing. Gaining that kind of confidence in themselves, they can move on to subjects about which they truly know little and can use a variety of inventive techniques to deal confidently with those subjects, without divorcing even those topics totally from the self.

Persons and Consciousness Another important piece of information is that persons have the capacity for consciousness. Given what has been said in the preceding section about students often appearing to know nothing, consciousness has an important bearing on the teaching of writing, for through becoming more conscious of what they know, students discover material within them­ selves to write about, learn to make meaning out of their experience, and become more articulate about what they know. It is in part through a conscious awareness of the "inner duration"13 of one's life activities, past and future, that one makes meaning out of life. Educational philosopher and phenomenologist Maxine Greene defines consciousness as 'experienced context'; and each person's life-world is his context as he experiences it. The phenomenol­ ogist makes this life-world central to his thinking and, in consequence, places great stress on each person's biographical situation, on each one's 'standpoint' and the way it affects what he sees.1^ Greene points out, further, that "consciousness is charac­ terized by intentionality: it is always of something— something which, when grasped, relates to the act of consciousness involved as the meaning of that act."13 Two key features of consciousness are reflection and anticipation. The human person continually engages in 27 meaning-making through conscious reflection on past events and through anticipation of the future.

Reflection We create meaning out of our lives through reflection. Through consciously observing how a present event is related to past events in our lives, we come to undexstand our present realities and our past experiences better. Through habitually trying to make sense out of experience, we understand experience. Psychologist George Kelly says in A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Con­ structs tKat his personality theory began with two ideas related to reflection: first, that man might be better understood if he were viewed in the perspective of the centuries rather than in the flicker of passing moments; and second, that each man contemplates in his own personal way the stream of events upon which he finds himself so swiftly borne.16 Sociologist Alfred Schutz, relying heavily on the thought of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, goes so far as to say that only in reflection do experiences have meaning: "only a past experience can be called meaningful, that is, one that is present to the retrospective glance as already finished and done with."1? He continues, It is misleading to say that experiences have meaning. Meaning does not lie in the experience. EatHer, those experiences are meaningful which are grasped reflectively. The meaning is the way in which the Ego regards its experience. The meaning lies in the attitude of the Ego toward that part of its stream of consciousness which has already flowed by, toward its felapsed duration*. • . .It is, then, incorrect to say that my lived experiences are meaningful merely in virtue of their being experienced or lived through. . . .The reflective glance singles out an elapsed lived experience and constitutes it as meaningful.18 It is rare, though, that persons exercise the capacity for reflection without training. Thus phenomenologists contrast the " ’natural attitude,1 ,rl9 that of being caught up in what Henri Bergson terms the "duree"20 of events or what Husserl speaks of as being "immersed naively in the world,"21 meaning an immersion in the present. Until a 2 8 person begins reflecting, they live from one day to the next and are concerned primarily with day-to-day existence. It is not totally clear to me at what point in time reflection becomes a possibility for persons or what happens to move people to a self-reflective stage. Some conjectures and observations follow. Self-reflection seems to follow upon an egocentric stage, a stage in which persons are so caught up in themselves that they cannot see themselves and cannot see others apart from them. During this c cage, a continual mode of operating is projecting--attributlng to others one's own thoughts and feelings,22 does not seem able to see others as beings distinct and separate from oneself at this stageSuch an egocentric stage is thought to occur primarily during early stages of develop­ ment, i.e., in childhood and adolescence. Tet clearly egocentrism recurs, for many adults appear to experience this same "lack of separateness of others from self." There also appears to be an egocentric stage for writing. What impels people to move beyond this stage? Some pos­ sibilities: growing older (although that in and of itself appears insufficient), life crises, a personal need to make sense out of one's experiences. Needing to solve a problem can also supply the necessary momentum here. Greene writes, Sometimes, however, what he individual teacher or student^ has taken for granted suddenly becomes questionable; there is an interference with the habitual flow. 'To solve the problem, whether of a practical or theoretical nature,* writes Alfred Schutz, *we have to enter into its horizons in order to explicate them. * Ordinary ways of perceiving have to be suspended; questions have to be posed. The individual has to be jolted into awareness of his own perceptions, into recognition of the way in which he has constituted his own life-world.25 An important question to be raised here: Are college freshmen capable oz such self-reflection? I consider them singularly capable. In my own teaching experience, 1 have seen students who in journals or on essays have done such self-examining and even entire classes who, when encour­ aged, have done so. Dawn, for example, a not-so-basic Basic Writer from one of my recent classes, writes at the end of the quarter, After this quarter I am transferring to a school back home. I have thought about this a lot and have had to make a choice what is more important to me. The only thing that is holding me here is my boyfriend. 29 I realize though that to get accepted into my field here it would take me a total of five years to complete school. At home I would go to a two year school— which wouldn't have the benefits of a college educa­ tion but Z would be out in 2 years making only about 50C less a hour than I would be if going 5 years. My choice was hard but I am leaving OSU after this quarter. Life is happy and sad at the same time. I can only hope that later on in life I do not regret my decision. Barb, a Freshman English student of a year ago, offers a good example of self-reflection: It was through writing that X got in touch with myself again. I finally took some time to reflect upon and examine my ideas and emotions. I had always felt that writing, just to write, to let things out was a waste of time. I changed my mind. On the outside it is apparent that I've lost--John, Barb, Laura . . ., but on the inside, what I think and feel, I have grown and matured considerably. Two other arguments support the idea that students at this educational stage are capable of self-reflection. The freshman year represents a developmental stage, a breaking away from high school and from the family. This step toward maturity often finds the student lonely, on a campus away from family and old friends, but with no new "significant others." Thus, a life crisis of a sort is occurring with at least some freshmen. A life crisis could precipitate the self-refleeting— could, indeed, be something for the writing teacher to take advantage of. Additional support for this idea comes from the work of Urie Bronfen- brenner, who suggests that developmental transitions have an impact on both the learner and the systems of which the learner is a part, such as family. Such developmental territory, he says, "remains an unexplored and scientifi­ cally promising terrain for ecological research in educa­ tion. "26 The second argument comes from Mina Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations. She notes that late adolescents appear in many ways to be beginning their lives anew. • . .And much of the energy they mobilize for the effort /of acquiring competency^ seems to come from the opportunity college gives them to redefine themselves as young adults who might accomplish something In the w o r l d . 27 Whatever it is that impels reflection, the process creates a rush of insights. It generates self- 30 understandings. The pieces of one’s life fall into place-- or into "a place.” Events not previously understood suddenly gain meaning, make sense. One feels on top of things— on top of one’s past history, in control of one’s present, and ready for the future. Husserl puts this nicely. One becomes "a pure observer"2® of one’s own self— one begins to observe oneself disinterestedly. Lonergan uses the phrase ’’self-appropriation, " which I see as a taking oneself in one's hand and holding oneself there for self-examination.

Anticipation Along with the ability to make meaning out of one * s past, persons have the ability to anticipate their futures. Anticipation is a "reflexive looking-forward-to,"29 "fore­ seeing expectation."30 Our conscious mind allows us to project ourselves into the future as well as into the past. Scientist J. H. Burgers says, . . . we have experience of our life and in particular that we experience our life as something that is continuing into the future. In our thoughts, in our feelings and actions there is not only a reminiscence of past events, but also a notion that we shall exist— that is, that we shall be open to experience and shall act— in the next instant and probably in the next after that, and so on.31 The quality of anticipation carries with it both a looking ahead or forward in time, a projecting ourselves to a time and place not yet present, and an element of creation, of shaping, at times ex nihilo. what that period will be like. Thus we think abouF”choosing a future career and can envision ourselves functioning in that career. And we can create possibilities which exist now only as dreams: new ideas, new ways of relating, new institutions not yet in existence. We can shape and affect the future of our own lives, our institutions, our world. The creation is goal- oriented and involves choice. In a curious sense, Schutz, following Husserl, sees past and future intertwined here: . . • the actor projects his action as if it were already over and done with and lying in the past. It is a full-blown, actualized event, which the actor pictures and assigns to its place in the order of experiences given to him at the moment of projection. Strangely enough, therefore, because it is pictured as completed, the planned act bears the temporal character of pastneas~I Of course, once the action 31 begins, the goal is wished for and protended. The fact that it is thus picturedas if it weresimul­ taneously past and future can be taken care of by saying that it is thought of in the future perfect tense.32 Rather than being immersed in the present, then, one's conscious mind is free to roam ahead as well as to oneTs past. One performs a sense-making act with regard to the future as well as to the past. The future, too, must fall into place for one's life to make sense.

Persons and Feelings--The Affective Domain Another piece of knowledge about persons which we ignore at our peril is that persons have feelings as well as thoughts. If we ignore the affective needs of students, we overlook an area which is vitally important to their wholeness and to their success as writers. Increasingly in recent years we have seen more attention given to the affective domain.33 Yet writing teachers in the main do not subscribe to it. When we turn to psychology, for example, for insights into our writers, we usually turn to cognitive or developmental rather than to clinical or counseling psychology. A recent example bears out this emphasis. Even in 1978, Mary Edel Denman, who has given much attention to the affective needs of student writers, describes herself as "that voice crying in the wilderness of pedagogic methods."3^ It is important to permit our students to be their whole selves rather than to compartmentalize them into mind versus body, thought versus feeling. Psychologist R. D. Laing opposes splitting experience in these ways. He speaks of the fragmentation of the human person: " . . . we are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, and to one another, and to the spiritual and material world--mad, even from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt."35 Wet like the rest of our century, still suffer from a Cartesian dualism. It is important to move beyond such a splitting of persons. Unless students can be whole selves, they can never be fully healthy beings.

Trust in Oneself The affective need which is most apparent in our Basic writing students— and in any problem writer— is the need for trust in one's own organism as a knower of experience 32 and for trust that one's own linguistic resources are adequate to portray that experience. We are talking here about students disaffected or alienated from the self by the schooling experience. Students who are dubbed failures are not likely to think of themselves as having something of value to say, nor are they likely to expect someone (especially a professorial someone) to listen to them. Thus, at the college-freshman level, the task is frequently one of restoring confidence in the self as a knower of experience, restoring trust that one has something to say and that it is worth saying. Students need to discover what they know--and that they know. Kenneth Koch made a similar observation when teaching poetry to young children. He found that his "work with poetry was not so much teaching as 'permitting the children to discover something they already have.'"3® Next, Basic Wtiters need to trust that their own words are adequate to portray their experience, that words will come,37 and that their language is as good as anybody else*s. They need to know that they are not bringing with them to the writing task a linguistically deficient mecha­ nism. Their language might be riddled with what can be viewed as "mistakes," but it will stiff ice for expressing A-nd communicating ideas.3® These students do not bring fewer linguistic resources or fewer cognitive abilities with them. Rather, Basic Writers bring a history of experiences in which these resources have not been tapped and these abilities not developed. But they are there. This is not to say that college students should not be trained in the conventions of Edited American English, but rather to recognize that EAE represents the appropriate domain for an academic communication setting, not a domain which is more adequate for conveying ideas than the language students already bring with t h e m . *9

Feelings about Writing We need to be attentive, too, to student feelings about writing. As Maorie Jean Lederman says, There seems to be a connection between writing and feelings about the self. As teachers of writing, we are in a unique position to help our students to discover things which will permit them to live more comfortably with themselves as well as to communicate more comfortably with us. We are responsible for more than teaching writing; we are responsible for 3 3 interfering, in some way, with the lives of other human beings.^0 Students who have gone through their school lives consid­ ered failures definitely need experiences of success with writing to believe in themselves as writers. These students will probably be anxious about the writing task, finding the blank page an object to be feared rather than a potential source of joy and delight. Choice of topics and writing assignments are ways to alleviate apprehen­ sion.^1 Teacher comments can also help. In his study, "Students1 Responses to Teacher Comments," Thomas C. Gee noted a marked improvement in student attitudes toward themselves as writers and toward writing when praised by the teacher, as opposed to receiving negative feedback or no feedback at all.

Motivation Another important affective area to consider is motivation. Persons operate out of a "needs" Gestalt which impels them toward a variety of motives. 1/e move toward intrinsic or extrinsic rewards: satisfaction, love, grades, money, success, pleasure. Certainly no one would disagree that a student who is not Motivated” will not perform well. We have all experienced our share of indif­ ferent or lackadaisical students; they tend to be frustra­ tions for us as teachers, for they do not allow us to teach. ^ Yet there is another kind of motivation which we too often ignore: positive motivation. The odds are stacked against us to begin with, to be sure, because, for most of our students, our course is a requirement. Thus, students frequently do not bring to the course the requisite internal motivation needed to write well. And there xs some element of internal motivation needed. If a person has little desire to communicate and little desire for success in writing, it will be difficult to teach that student how to wrxte. Thus, I have always believed that students should be permitted to choose the stage in their academic careers (I speak here especially of college students) at which they felt a need to write more effec­ tively. (My hunch is that writing classes would often be frequented by doctoral students struggling with disserta­ tions.) That kind of motivation seems to be the one that will most ensure success. An interesting example of the effect of motivation on writing performance comes from the Ohio State University writing program. In the pilot project for the present Basic Writing program, 115 students with ACT scores of 0-1(1 34 out of a possible pool of 400-500 students with such scores, were Invited to attend a course that Involved four hours of class attendance per week plus two hours of lab worlc as a preliminary to the required composition course. Of the ninety students who attended the special course, eighty per cent went on to do C- or better work in the regular Freshman English course, as compared with twenty per cent in the control group who took only the required course.While undoubtedly the course itself played a substantial role in stmdent improvement, motivation would appear to be important here as well. Donald T. Campbell and Julian C. Stanley have noted the importance of motiva­ tion in this type of study, one which they term the "invited remedial treatment study." They point out that the volunteers are "those likely to be most vigorous in self-improvement, etc.,"^5 i.e., those most highly motivated. Beyond these considerations of motivation, positive motivation needs to be stressed. Although students often are not internally moved to take a required writing course, even when operating under those constraints we can be more successful (never totally, simply more) if we provide positive motivation for students in the course. Those rewards that I have seen work powerfully are these: pleasure, mastery over, or understanding of, something that used to be a problem, and self-understanding. First, pleasure. To tell a student, as one Basic Writing textbook does, that "writing is hell"^6 is the wrong approach to take. Problem writers, many apprehensive about writing at the outset, do not need to hear a treatise on pain. Surely we know that positive reinforcement is a more effective motivator than punishment.^7 This is not to say, of course, that writing is easy or always fun. Writing is hard work. I stand by Mark Twain's oft-quoted "Easy writing makes damn hard reading." But to sell writing as hard work results in "no sale." Rather, writing can be offered as an activity associated with pleasure. It makes good sense to me to use fun exercises in the classroom as ways into writing. The "smells bag" is one such activity. Volunteers distribute a strong-smelling substance (mustard, perfume, sherry, peppermint candy, Vicks) to each class member after all but volunteers have closed their eyes. Students are invited to identify the smell, experience it, and then write about a memory it calls to mind.^8 I have yet to see this exercise produce dull writing. The point here is that we should not make writing unpleasant when we can make it fun. Pleasure is a positive motivator. 35 Next, mastery. One of Mina Shaughnessy*s real insights throughout Errors and Expectations is her under­ standing of the need for Basic Writers, young adults passed over by the school system, to gain control over their errors and their words, Paulo Freire shared a similar understanding in his work with illiterate adults in Chile, To own one's words is to own one's world,When students with serious errors in punctuation, those who have little understanding of where to use terminal punctuation, sud­ denly come to see what a fragment is and where to use periods and semi-colons, a new world opens to them, for they are then in a position of power to influence people whom they could not have influenced before. To see their eyes light up when they make such a discovery about elements of writing as seemingly unimportant as punctuation or subject-verb agreement is to experience great joy as a teacher. In Marie Jean Lederman's study of student projections or. a reincarnation assignment, she noted the connection between "creating through language" and a "sense of mastery": "It is precisely this sense of mastery, of ability to control the world through language, that I found lacking in the papers in our Croup III" ^Eheir "remedial" group, most of whom wished to be reincarnated as birds, creatures with little control over their world^. Jerome Bruner, quoting from psychologist Robert White? speaks of "competence motivation" as satisfying "an intrinsic need to deal with the environment." Bruner goes on to suggest that "there are forms of activity that serve to enlist and develop the competence motive, that serve to make it the driving force behind behavior.m51 Writing can be one such activity. Finally, a powerful motivator for student writers, especially at the developmental stage of college freshmen, is increased understanding of the self. Writing, whether of journals, diaries, or essays on self-chosen topics, affords a powerful vehicle for persons to know and under­ stand themselves better. To sell the activity only as a future-oriented bringer of rewards, as something which will help students to improve their grades in courses next term or something which will help them to succeed on the job four years from now, is to miss the power of this very present-oriented motivator. Lucky Jacobs observes, "As a teacher and poet, I have noticed that if the writing does not involve the writer's Being in some kind of present self-discovery, it tends to reduce itself to semething that is less interesting for both writer and reader."52 Over and over I have seen students respond to this aspect of journal writing. Here are some comments: 36 I've come a long way this quarter, probably more so than any other 10 weeks In my life. 1 think that through writing I have learned a lot, and I have made a lot more of my thoughts and conceptions that were pretty vague in my mind a lot clearer. I've learned that writing has that real advantage. . . . I've matured so much this quarter. I feel more confident with people and myself as a unique person. I've really found myself through all of this writing. (Mark, Freshman English, May, 1977) I think I learned alot about writing and things to write about. 1 always hated to write because I could never think of nothing to write about. This class kind of expanded my mind on what to write about. Tou think deeper into your mind and you find things to write about. (Alan, Basic Writing, March, 1978) Writing thoughts in a journal has taught me how to capture ideas and put them into words. I still need more work but I look back and see I'm coming along. In high school I hated to write papers, I thought the teacher would laugh at what I had to say. Now I realize you can write anything, it only takes practice and some help. (Tina, Basic writing, March, 1978) An additional motivating force is that of viewing writing as a vehicle for genuine communication, of being encouraged to believe that one has something worthwhile to say and of finding others receptive to one's ideas. Lederman notes that language competence comes "as Koch found it did, when the students have a genuine desire to be heard."52 Basic Writers in particular need to see words as vehicles for communication, for these students frequent­ ly bring with them to the classroom their own brand of semantic aphasia,54 of words not counting much. One Basic Writer in my regular Freshman English class used a very repetitious style, as though words simply did not matter. The words were not his; they were somebody else's. Such writers are farther back from unlocking their word hoards than are more experienced writers— farther away from making connections between themselves, their lives, feelings, and what they write down on paper. These writers need to experience writing as communication, for they, like all of us, have much inside them which they can share. If we ignore motivation, we thus bypass a powerful vehicle for greater success with and for our students. 3 7 Uniqueneas of Persona Next, it is important to remember that each person is unique. No one apprehends exactly the same reality or shares the exact personality traits and language use as another does. The individual person on the writing scene is, therefore, all important. Each comes to us with a unique experiential history and unique set of perceptions, both of which provide the student with a body of knowledge to write about that is potentially interesting for us to know and understand. Thus a communication context is generated, one that frees them to use what they have and to be who they are and one that opens us up to receive the gems they have to offer. Admittedly, the diamonds are often rough, but we deprive ourselves and our students of much enjoyment if we do not acknowledge their potentiality. First of all, each human person is, in toto. unique. Our personalities, characteristics, appearance, individual talents and gifts, make each of us different from everyone else, someone to be truly valued in and of ourselves. No one else, not even another member of the same family, can possibly experience the world in exactly the same way each of us does. The oldest child in a family cannot know what it is like to experience that family as a child with an older brother or sister; the youngest child cannot know what it feels like to grow up with no other children ahead of one to look to as role models." Thus the personal reality of each one of us is unique. No one the world over shares our exact autobiographical data, culture, social reality, personality, feelings, and attitudes. Alfred Schutz says, "This other person, this Thou, has his own unique experiences and meaning-contexts. No other person, not even he himself at another moment, can stand in his shoes at this moment."*® Given that overall starting premise, it follows that the background experiences and the perceptions which each person brings to our class are unique. It is our task as writing teachers to be releasers of those unique somethings which our students bring with them.

Unique Background Each person brings with him or her a unique experien­ tial background, a life context, a history which provides him or her with a unique set of somethings to say about various topics, philosopher Roger Poole speaks of 3 8 one's own private perspectival history, which beds down and receives a lasting shape. Every day we filter through a certain set of perspectives (the advantageous or pleasant ones) and these integrate and stick together. We get used to them, they mould us to receiving a certain kind of perspectival reality tomorrow. What is true for the individual is true for him because his precedent perspectival history has shaped him into the man he is.*? Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner share a similar understanding: . . . /W/hat we perceive is largely a function of our previous experiences, our assumptions, and our purposes (i.e., needs). . . .You tend to perceive what you want and need to perceive, and what your past experience has led you to assume will 'work* for you.*® Insightful thinkers stress the primacy of the individual's own experience, psychologist Carl Rogers, for example, says, I can only try to live by m£ interpretation of the current meaning of m£ experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful Interpretation of their own experience.^9 And, Yet it has come to seem to me that this separation of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize his experience in his own way and to discover his own meanings in it,— ^jsic/ this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life.60

Unique Personalities As we have seen, each person's experiences are unique. Likewise, their personalities are different. Calvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey state that in some definitions of personality, the term itself "is equated to the unique or individual aspects of behavior. In this case, it is a term to designate those things about the individual that are distinctive and set him apart from all other per­ sona ."61 Such distinctive features are important for composition teachers to take note of, for the frustration which students sometimes experience with one particular 3 9 teaching approach or another can perhaps be attributed to differences In personality or In brain functioning. I want to suggest some personality features and some differences in brain functioning which are worth attending to by the writing teacher.

Internal versus external Various personality theories focus on the internal and external as key dimensions in understanding behavior. Introverts, for example, are shy and turn Inward, while extroverts are outgoing, affable, sociable. Recent research suggests that introverts may experience greater achievement and interest in creative writing than do their extroverted counterparts; no differences are apparent between the two groups with expository writing, however.®2 David Riesman has posited as character types the inner- directed and outer-directed. Those who are inner-directed are motivated from within; they perform tasks of signifi­ cance to them personally. Other-directed persona, instead, respond “through an exceptional sensitivity to the actions and wishes of othersSimilar to RiesmanTs concepts, the concept of internal versus external locus of control comes from Julian Rotter. Those who respond to an external locus attribute life events to external forces— luck or chance--while those with an internal locus take responsi­ bility for what happens to them. Also, in recent years we have heard more about those who take charge of their own lives, control their lives from within, versus those who do not. Xhe sincere conscientious objector to war is controlling his own life, while the person who says "I was only following orders” is not.

Split-brain functioning Persons function differently in the kind of thinking they use. Some are dominated by right-brain, analogic, thinking; others, by the left hemisphere of the brain, digital thinking, persons relying on the right hemisphere would appear to respond to the visual, to images, to associations. Probably their writing strengths would be an associative mode of organizing (perhaps using analogies or key images as organizational devices) and a use of creative details and images. Reliance on the left hemi­ sphere--the one for linearity, logical thought, sequenc­ ing— would probably lead such persons to a need for out­ lining and to a strict logical order within a paper. Since research in this area has only begun, it is difficult to know with certainty the actual outcomes of split-brain 4 0 functioning, especially in student writing. One can speculate that right-brain students may need more audio­ visual and other kinds of spatial stimulation to under stand concepts; left-brain students may need to outline and to have various opportunities to be very methodical.True, most persons, except for those with learning disabilities, are able to combine the activity of the two hemispheres relatively equally. Nonetheless, the difference in brain functioning may help to explain the frustration which students sometimes feel with a particular teaching method or another.

Openness to experience Frustration with one teaching approach versus another may also be explained by lack of openness to experience and change, as opposed to openness. Gregory Baum contrasts what he calls closed versus open humanism. Closed humanism, he says, does not "admit the possibility of newness and surprise," while open humanism "acknowledges a limitless horizon for the ongoing transformation of human conscious­ ness."^ Some students are more open to ambiguity, tenta­ tiveness, change, than are others. Some of my develop­ mental students, for example, have been extremely uncom­ fortable with change, whether in revising their papers, a procedure mandated by me, or in watching the main idea shift in the early stages of composing.

Tmaginative versus unimaginative persons In addition to other personality differences, a final area to keep in mind has to do with imagination. Not all persons are equally imaginative. I cannot say with certainty that not all can be. In my heart of hearts, I believe everyone has this capacity. But that quality— the response to fantasy— is, I suspect, so beaten out of some persons at an early age that they lose sight of how to use it in later life. In that so much of one's approach to a topic as a writer depends on playfulness, on being Imaginative, persons who do not think they possess this attribute may need special encouragement and attention in dealing with their writing. Jerome L. Singer, after Hermann Rorschach, distinguishes between imaginative introverts and unimaginative extroverts. Unimaginative people, he says, become easily bored and are more likely to be very dependent on the external environment. Any physical fact is more Important to them than their inner workings: "their inner experiences seem less insistent than even the most irrelevant physical fact of their 41 Immediate environment.1*®® persons whose fantasy life or imaginations are weak also have trouble remembering details of events. And they are more likely *'to imitate a teacher directly rather than make use of their own experience, fantasies and memories at school.«®~ Again, how important it would be for the teacher to be aware of how his or her students are functioning. Students who tend to be un­ imaginative will be threatened by approaches calling for a high degree of imagination. It is important, then, for a teacher to be aware of such personality differences, for one or two key reasons. Our own approach to teaching a writing course may respond to one type of personality or another. For example, if we habitually give no topics and leave the students free to choose their own material, we are expecting at least some measure of inner direction. The heavily other- directed person may experience considerable threat and frustration in such a classroom. Similarly, if we habit­ ually give very elaborate prewriting activities, demanding outlines and exercises before a paper is turned in, we may well frustrate the person with internal locus of control, who is accustomed to being in charge of his or her own activities. How to get around this problem? We can recognize that the needs of students will differ and at­ tempt to make adjustments in the classroom. Rotter notes that he and his colleagues have presented considerable evidence that people learn differently in situations where rewards depend upon chance, luck, or the experimenter*s whim than they do in situations where they perceive that skill or their own characteristics determine whether or not reinforcements will occur.®8 It would be helpful to give a test at the beginning of a term to assess these personality dimensions. Then teachers would have surer knowledge to work with.

Unique Perceptions Similarly, each person’s perceptions are unique, for perception itself is a creative act, one in which we invest reality with something of ourselves. There is more to perceiving than ’’meets the eyeball,>f according to philosopher of science Norwood R. Hanson: Seeing is an experience. A retinal reaction is only a physical state— a photochemical excitation. Physiologists have not always appreciated the 4 2 differences between experiences and physical states. People, not their eyes, see. Cameras, and eyeballs, are blind. Attempts to locate within the organs of sight (or within the neurological reticulum behind the eyes) some nameable *seeing1 may be dismissed.6* Perceiving is Itself an experience, to which we bring much of ourselves: our personalities, experiences, attitudes, knowledge. What we as individual persons bring to an event influences what we see there and what meaning we take home from that event. Persons see the world differently. At times two people see the same sense datum but perceive it differently. Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brache do not see the same sun­ rise, nor do a Black photographer and a white photographer in South Africa experience using a camera as the same reality.7! At other times, two people do not agree on what is visually "out there." Something in our cognitive or physiological structures causes us to "see" the event differently. Thus some perceive "aqua" as "green," while others see it as "blue." Or take the example of KShler's famous Goblet-and-Faces drawing. Hie object to be observed remains the same, yet some see a goblet, while others see two faces. A recent classroom event brought home to me the reality of this point. Most students perceived a poorly staged "happening," in which two persons disrupted class, as a staged event, a joke, while others were ready to come to my defense, perceiving danger to me there. Also, our culture and language influence our percep­ tions. Our perception of an event depends upon the cul­ tural eyes with which we view the phenomenon. The Azande tribesman in Africa sees his mystical belief in oracles confirmed, no matter how an oracle behaves, while the visiting Western scientist, observing an oracle which fails to perform, notes a contradiction between belief and actuality.7^ Students growing up in the ghetto, accustomed to authoritarian teachers, tend to perceive non-traditional, open-classroom teachers as weak figures, while students from suburban high schools and open classroom settings do not seem to share the perception and are more comfortable with such a teacher. According to the Sapir-Whorf- Korzybski Hypothesis, "language— including both its struc­ ture and its lexicon--represents a unique way of perceiving reality."73 Alfred Korzybski says in Science and Sanity that "language, any language, has at its bottom certain metaphysics, which ascribe, consciously or unconsciously, some sort of structure to the world."7^ The users of a language which relies heavily on verba may perceive reality differently from those who use adjectives extensively. 43 Norwood Hanson wonders if those who speak Arabic and Russian, for example, in saying T,,The sun yellows,,r or '"The grass greens,*” lack the concept "'The sun is yellow."* He suggests that "people using different languages might have difficulty in apprehending the same facts.**7^ Similarly, students whose dialect system in­ cludes an aspectual form of the verb "to be," as in "Jake be dreaming," may view the length of an action as more important than the time it occurred.76 Also, our angle of vision, the vantage point from which an object, event, or interpersonal interaction is viewed, affects what we perceive. In literature, this point is readily apparent in the work of William Faulkner. In The Sound and the Fury and in Absalom, Absalom, the meaning of fche experience differs, depending on whose point of view we are listening to: Benjy does not see things in the same way as Jason does. In art, as one moves around a piece such as Gabo's "Spherical Theme," the object shifts; what appeared to be a solid object originally becomes two halves as the observer does a 90° turn.77 Thus, "a problem has a different construction when seen from various points in conceptual space."7® The R. D. Laing and A. Esterson case study of schizophrenia, Families of Schizophrenics, reveals the various clashing points of view and perspec- tives of members of these families. Parental perspectives contradicted and clashed with one another, as they did with those of other family members. The members who became schizophrenic apparently did so as an easier way of coping with habitual disorient ation.7^ Similarly, in Knots and Interpersonal Perception, R. D. Laing discusses what he refers to as the "spiral of reciprocal perspectives": my view of you and your view of me; my view of your view of me and your view of my view of you, and so on.80 As one moves farther into the meta-perspectival and meta-meta- perspectival realm, the possibilities for meaning-confer­ ring and for misunderstanding become seemingly endless. About this multiplicity of perspectives, Alfred Schutz says, Far from being homogeneous, the social world is given to us in a complex system of perspectives: my partner and I, for Instance, have intimate and rich experi­ ence of each other as we talk together, whereas we both appear to a detached observer in the aura of 'flatness* and 'anonymity'. . . .Here we are not referring to differences between the personal stand­ points from which different people look at the world but to the fundamental differences between my inter­ pretation of my own subjective experiences (self- interpretation) and my interpretation of the subjective experiences of someone else.83- 4 4 Thus, an important part of perception is understanding what Edmund Husserl terms the "perspectival world.” Husserl says, The objects in the world are seen from different perspectives. We move round them, seeing them and experiencing them in different modalities, while other people in the world do the same. We are all conscious that there is only one world, but we are also quite sure that we all see it differently, we all interpret it differently, and we all attribute different meanings to it at various times. The world is a commuxialized set of perspectives. Nothing is ever fixed, everything is subject to the meaning we give to it.®2 The time vantage point of our perception also alters the meaning of an event. Hanson asks if, after years of research, the physicist views an X-ray tube in the same way as he did as a student r "Does he see the same thing now as he did then? How he sees the instrument in terms of electrical circuit theory, thermodynamic theory, the theories of metal and glass structure, therminoic emission, optical transmission."®3 T. S. Eliot says in Four Quartets, There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies. For the pattern is new in every moment.®^ and We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.®3 As Eliot suggests, as one grows older, or gains new in­ sight, the pieces of one's life take on new shapes. Where in one's thirties one set of meanings for experiences "made sense," in the forties a new explanation is generated— one that may encompass the first but moves beyond it. This phenomenon suggests that even our own Interpretation of reality, even the meanings which each of us makes of our own lived realities, are perspectival. Each reality construction, each explanation for a present or past experience, is only one of many possible interpretations for that reality. 45 What we perceive thus results from an interaction between ourselves and the world outside us. Certainly a world of some type exists outside our slcins. We do rub up against data outside ourselves. But the "reality" of that data we very much determine. Joseph Chilton Pearce says in The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. There is a relationship between what we think is out there in the world and what we experience as being out there. There is a way in which the energy of thought and the energy of matter modify each other and interrelate. A kind of rough mirroring takes place between our mind and our reality. We cannot stand outside this mirroring process and examine it, though, for we are the process, to an unknowable extent. Any technique we might use to 'look objectively* at our reality becomes a part of the event in question. We are an indeterminately large part of the function that shapes the reality from which we do our looking. Our looking enters as one of the determinants in the reality event that we see.®® With respect to a world "out there," Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner say, This does not mean that there is nothing outside of our skins. It does mean that whatever is 'out there1 can never be known except as it is filtered through a human nervous system. We can never get outside of our own skins. 'Reality' is a perception, located somewhere behind the eyes.®' Thus, I am not saying that there is no world outside our own skins but rather that what that world looks like is very much a creation of each one of us. Pearce adds an interesting idea here. "Reality," he says, "is not a fixed entity. It is a contingent interlocking of moving events. And events do not just happen to us. We are an integral part of every event."®® Likewise, educator Paulo Preire says, "reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation."8®

Unique Language Use Similarly, each of us uses language differently. According to Jean Malmstrom, "Each human being is as individual in speech as in fingerprints. Each person has his own idiolect, his own individual dialect."®® In my own idiolect, for example, there appeared until I married 4 6 no English lexical items for such words as "washcloth” or "fruit fly." Having grown up in a Croatian-English house­ hold, I knew only the words "patilec" and "moSitsa." Coupled with our idiolect is the distinctive regional or social dialect which we speak, a dialect marked by lexical, phonological, and even syntactical distinctive features. Where most speakers of English say "rubber band" to describe that flexible object which holds items together, Pittsburgh natives say "gum band." Speakers in some areas differen­ tiate phonologically between "cot" and "caught," but natives of southwestern Pennsylvania do not. Some speakers dis­ tinguish among "Mary," "merry," and "marry," while others do not. Syntactically, Black English speakers use no inversion with indirect questions, as in "I wonder can he go." Since each person is unique, since each student brings to the writing situation a dialect, an idiolect, and per­ haps little familiarity with the conventions of the written medium, the errors and problems which each writer faces will also be unique. While spelling, for example, is a problem for many, particular spelling problems vary from person to person. Homonyms are problems for some, but the particular homonyms depend on regional or social dia­ lect. In the South, "oil/all" can be a homonym; confusing "our" with "are" or "there" and "their/they're" is more widespread. Rarely do two persons have difficulties with exactly the same spelling rules and same words. While some writers have difficulty with spelling and punctuation, others do not. Especially is the uniqueness of problems a given in the Basic Writing classroom. Riere, lack of writing experience interacts with a variety of other mat­ ters, such as idiolect and dialect, to produce unique sets of problems.91 In addition, as Chapter Three will show, each person handles the stages of the composing process differently. Persons prewrite, compose, and revise in unique and dis­ tinctive ways. Thus, if we keep in mind the uniqueness of persons as we teach, we will not expect sameness from our students, nor will we expect their writing prowess and performance to approximate ours. At times, as writing teachers, we assume that others handle the stages of the writing process as we do, and we appear to assume that there is one best way to write— ours. Thus, if we use formal outlines, we teach outlining; if we "cook" our writing, ^ la Elbow, we teach students to cook theirs. Rarely do we admit that a variety of ways to handle the various stages of the process are possible. Rather than saying, "This works for me. I don't know if it will work for you or not. Try it," we teach a method as though, 4 7 Inevitably? because it works for us, it will work for others. Similarly, when a student writes on a topic about which we have much to say or on which we would use certain approaches, we project onto the student's paper our thoughts on the subject or our approach, rather than leaving the student free to find his or her own and rather than working hard to see what the student has in mind. Also, at times we do not seem to perceive that persons are not identical to one another. Perhaps because we are adults, perhaps because of the rigidity of the training some of us received as composition teachers, we often tend— or, at least, 1 have— to lump all students into a single cate­ gory— that of STUDENT— rather than to see and appreciate their uniqueness. Yet each one is indeed unique, in personality, in personal history, in perceptions and insights, and in language use. It is Important to recog­ nize and attend to such differences.

Persons as Meaning-Makers Another consideration about the persons we meet in classrooms is that they, like we, are meaning-makers. As the last section has shown through its discussion of perception principles, persons, in addition to being unique, are actively engaged in msking meaning out of their personal and social reality on a day-to-day basis. As organisms, we are geared toward sense-making. Through our very use of language, we exercise this meaning-making capacity. It has become virtually a linguistic axiom that semantics precedes syntax--that semantic information is attended to prior to syntactic information, philosopher Michael Polanyi says that "Even while listening to speech or reading a text, our focal attention is directed towards the meaning of the words, and not towards the words as sounds or marks on paper. Before I turn to further evidence for this sense- making activity of persons, 1 need to address the question, "So what?" Of what use is this information to writing teachers? Such information is important for three peda­ gogical reasons. One, it at times helps to explain why students make the "mistakes" they make in writing, mistakes ranging from actual "errors" to problems with unity and thesis state­ ments. It helps to explain, I would suggest, the common writing problem of the shifting thesis statement: a change in the main idea of the paper from the beginning to the end, especially in an autobiographical narrative. As students begin the essay, the experience has one meaning 4 8 for them; as they write through the paper, though, they discover a new meaning. The end result Is that the student appears not to have understood our dictum that the paper Is to have a single thesis, for the Introduction and con­ clusion contain two radically different statements of the main idea. Cindyfs paper about her problems growing up as a handicapped child is a case in point. When she started the paper, the meaning of the experience was that parents often make mistakes with a handicapped child; by the end of the paper, the meaning had shifted to how much Christ had done in her life as a result of her handicap. Or there was Don, who was obviously the brightest student in one of my Freshman English classes. His facility with words and his ability to draw sharp distinctions orally in class marked him head and shoulders above everyone else. 7et he was unable in his narratives— and also in other themes— to hold to a single thesis statement. I want to suggest that the thesis statement shifts from the beginning to the end of a student theme, not because the student does not understand our directive about a paper developing a single idea, or because the student is stubbornly ignoring that dictum, but rather that the problem is an outgrowth of the student *s attempt at making meaning* Certainly in our own lives we are aware of the multiplicity of meanings and interpretations that can be drawn from a single event, as suggested earlier in this chapter. We need to remember to give students credit for being meaning-makers and integrators of experience, just as we are. Second, the knowledge that persons are meaning-makers is Important because it allows us to treat our students more as equals and thus to accord them greater respect. If we view them as persons who are continually engaged, as we are, in making meaning out of life, then we will not expect them to divorce themselves from assignments but will instead encourage them, as the section on conscious­ ness has suggested, to find meaning in their experiences and to write about that meaning. Thus we would not assume that, when an assignment is given, students will forget themselves and their own sense-making needs and leap into the heart of the assignment* That we are on wobbly ground with this assumption is apparent time and time again when students simply do not do what an assignment called for. Last quarter, for example, when assigned a topic dealing with racial prejudice, one girl in particular who was experiencing some religious prejudice in the dorm wrote about that subject instead, one which was important for her to explore. Tet to do so was to go outside the strict bounds of the assignment* This quarter the problem arose repeatedly with one interesting student who, left to his own devices, turned out paragraphs with interesting details and thoughts, yet almost inevitably off the exact assigned topic. Was he simply failing to read the assignment, or was the problem more complicated? 1 suggest the latter. I suggest that students approach topics in ways different from us as teachers • They lootc first at finding something to say and, if they are sophisticated enough as writers, at finding something that will turn out an interesting piece of writing. We{ on the other hand, tend to get caught up in "the assignment." A student may have nothing to say on the precise question asked but may be able to shine on a related one. In a beginning writing course, shouldn't the student have the freedom to choose his or her own direction and topic, so as to shine rather than merely to flicker? (In answer to those who would respond "no" to this question and who would cite as evidence the fact of poor student performance on tests in other courses, tests in which students must answer a rigid question and have no freedom to go off in their own direction, I would say that the very fact of poor performance is another piece of evidence for the meaning-making capacities of persons. Students write poorly on tests, oftentimes, not because they are poor writers but because they haven't made suffi­ cient sense of the material to have something to say.) Perhaps most important, the knowledge that persons are i irs to use that charac- We can therefore encourage students to use their writing experiences as a way of making sense out of their lives. Thus we can offer writing to them as an activity which brings significant imnediate rewards, rather than rewards in some distant future. What is the evidence that persons are meaning-makers? All that has been said thus far in this chapter about perception suggests that persons make meaning out of their daily reality. If persons see sense data differently, they are obviously making unique meanings out of that data. Out of our experiences and perceptions, each of us invests reality with unique meanings. Each person creates his or her own world. Through our personal histories, our atti­ tudes, perceptions, insights, each of us constructs our own reality. No two persons occupy exactly the same reality. Secondly, each of us continually engages in a variety of complex meaning-making processes. These include ob­ serving, labelling, comparing, contrasting, categorizing events, and the whole arena of information processing. Persons create meaning out of their worlds by labelling — by naming the realities they encounter. To name a part 50 of the world la to better understand it, to own it, and to have power over it. Compare an ancient belief that handing over one1s name to another gives the other person power over one. Identifying a bird or wildflower by name gives me a greater kinship with the creature— allows me to under­ stand it better. Wie accomplish the giving of meaning to reality in part through comparison— through observing an encountered event, comparing it with similar such events in our memory bank, and then categorizing it, so as to label it and understand it. If it is dissimilar, we invent a new category for it. Through this constant process of observ­ ing, comparing, contrasting, and classifying, we make meaning out of everyday events. To this extent, each person is a scientist, for each person performs anew the task of a scientist: hypothesizing about the nature of reality and testing that hypothesis against the facticity of a lived experience. Roger Poole says, Within a world of fluctuating visual and sensory erspectlves, I live in a kind of continual, infinitely fast, alternation between hypothesis and correction. I give provisional meanings to things and within a split second have modified those meanings in the light of further reflection, perception, instinct or dis­ covery. Correction of hypothesis is infinitely fast: I am never conscious of having carried out a correc­ tion because I am already way ahead into the next hypothesis. The whole question of how 'intentional' constructs are set up, and how modified, is, up to today, untouched by even the most primitive explora­ tory investigations.” When a hypothesis fails to cover a newly encountered “fact," either the fact must be discarded as an anomaly, or the hypothesis must be reconstructed.9^ Thus the con­ stant process of living in the world can be viewed as a systematic procedure of unconsciously creating hypotheses and testing them out. Psychologist George Kelly also views each person as scientist— as one who seeks to understand, and thereby to predict and control, the events of his or her life. He even uses the term 1 *man-the-sclentist.M95 This view is consistent, too, with anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss*s view of primitive thinking: "/X/rchaic thought patterns were highly disciplined, intellectual structures, designed to give the world coherence, shape, and meaning.The 51 field of ethnomethodology follows suit here. Ethnomethod- ologists, in studying the methods used by "the folic” to make sense out of reality, automatically view each person as at least quasi-scientist.

Information Processing Further, according to communication theory, each person in a communication act is an information processor. A person's role is thus not inert or passive: "everything that the transmitter takes for granted the receiver has to figure out for himself."97 The strident is not only at any given moment making meaning out of reality according to the complex process we have just been observing but at the same time going through the complicated activity of processing language information. Let us stop briefly to examine that activity. The communication process involves several elements: communicator, recipient, a channel for the message, the message itself, and noise. As Frank Smith says, "At each part of the communication process there is the possibility that a message will be changed in some way,"9** whether this be because of the recipient's lack of skill, because of noise, or because the channel is not successfully transmitting all that it is receiving. It is important to bear in mind, too, that the surface structure of a language message and the deep structure do not correspond one-to-one, so that the receiver of the message contin­ ually must bring to the cotamznication situation a set of translation rules from surface structure utterances to deep structure meaning. This translation procedure brings us to other informa­ tion-processing components. These include a code and the processes of encoding and decoding. Also, we hear of information retrieval and of long-term and short-term memory as storage systems for "chunks" of information. Finally, selective attention is of importance, for the human organism cannot possibly and continually attend to all the data which bombard it constantly. Some mechanism is necessary for focusing on data regarded by the organism as important and disregarding data seen as irrelevant.99 According to Ralph Haber and Maurice Hers hens on in The Psychology of Visual Perception. The major assumption of an information-processing approach is that perception is not an immediate outcome of stimulation, but is the result of processing over time. . • .The processes are usually thought to 5 2 be limited in the amount of information that they can hold or process in a given period of time. . . . Capacity limitation usually leads to selectivity-- not all information can be processed to the same degree within the time available for such proces­ sing. 100 Thus a variety of complicated internal processes are involved in making meaning out of reality.

Social Construction of Reality Also, as social units we construct a social fabric to make meaning out of our lives, whether it be the larger social reality of nation or what Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and William James before them, refer to as a ''subuniverse Z'101 a subculture of meaning. While we share T,commonsense knowledge," there is much that we share only with our particular subuniverse. A friend of mine, a white high school teacher, was rudely awakened to the difference in social realities when his Black students were not over­ joyed by a visit to their school from T.V. idol Henry Winkler ("The Fonz"). As social units, we construct an agreed-on social reality.

Persons and Process Finally, we want to recognize and incorporate into our practices the knowledge that the human organism, as a creature which participates in the ongoing creative act of evolution, has a positive direction, along which it proceeds, unless thwarted or unsupported by negative experiences and institutions. The basic thrust of each person is positive— toward learning, toward growing, toward becoming. As teachers, we need to do all that we can to support and maintain that direction. Carl Rogers puts this well: It has been my experience that persons have a basically positive direction. In my deepestcontacts with individuals in therapy, even those whose troubles are most disturbing, whose behavior has been most anti-social, whose feelings seem most abnormal,! find this to be true. . • .And what are these direc­ tions in which they tend to move? The words which 1 believe are most truly descriptive are words such as positive, constructive, moving toward self-actuali­ zation, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization. . . #/S7he of the most refreshing and 53 invigorating parts of my experience is to work with snch individuals and to discover the strongly positive directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels.102 Rogers finds, too, that as persons become more mature, they move in a similar direction: toward self-direction, toward greater acceptance of others, and toward openness to experience. They move toward authenticity, coming to behave more and more out of who they are, rather than according to any mold or expectation, rather than with a mask or facade. They move, most significantly, toward trusting the self— trusting their own organism as one capable of meeting life head on— and toward trusting their own experience. Rogers says, "I can trust my experi­ ence. . . .Put another way, I have learned ttiat my total organismic sensing of a situation is more trustworthy than my intellect."103

Process of Becoming Part of this positive direction can be described as the process of becoming. Persons, whether teenagers or teachers, are on a journey to self-creation, to self- actualization, to "becoming a more fully functioning per­ son.”1^4 According to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we move toward self-actualization as more and more of the lower needs on the hierarchy, such as the need for food, are met. Rogers continually uses such words as "process" and "direction," for he recognizes that "the good life is a process. not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. "105 t 0 the extent that we are aware that life is a journey of growth and that the persons in our classrooms are as much a part of that journey as we are, our responses to them and our teaching approach can alter, so that the writing classroom becomes a valuable way station on that journey, for both them and us.

Phenomenology and Writing Much of what this chapter has articulated about persons has come from a phenomenological perspective. 1 wish to make that stance quite clear. A phenomenological approach to persons resonates in important ways with the needs of the discipline of composition at this stage of its development. In that phenomenologists are concerned with inner experience * 06 and in that writing involves a person in getting in touch with inner experience and sharing some part of that experience with others, it seems 5 4 reasonable that a philosophy and a psychology which share the same concerns will have much to say to teachers of writing* There appears to be an interesting and important connection, for example, between the phenomenological stress on consciousness or reflection and the act of writing. I would suggest that consciousness is a neces­ sary state for the effective writer. There seem to be stages here* It appears necessary first to objectify the self, before one can respond with authority to data outside oneself. If one does not know where one stands vis-a-vis oneself, how can one know where he or she stands in relation to the rest of the world? A writer who has not achieved consciousness— certainly most beginning writers have not— will likely write haltingly, with an unassertive voice, for that person is not sure of self. Thus a phenomenologi­ cal stance relates to the strength of one's voice in writ­ ing, to knowledge that one has something to say, and to confidence in oneself* The value of phenomenology for writing teachers is clear, too, with the stress on reflection as meaning-mak­ ing. Encouraging reflection enables students to make meaning out of their own lives and to discover that they have something of value to say. Reflecting— making meaning out of one's life--and writing— making meaning with words, out of one's thoughts, feelings, and experiences— seem to me to go directly hand in hand* Similarly, the subjective is a concern of both phenomenologists and writers. The view of the human person which emerges from phenomenological sociology and philosophy is one of an experiencing subject who actively creates his or her world, puts his or her stamp upon it, in interacting with and attempting to understand that world. The essence of subjectivity, according to phenomenologist Edmund Hus­ serl, is that "meaning conferring is an active process."107 Meaning resides within the person. Just as it is virtually impossible to exist as a human person in the world without creating some meaning out of that world, it is likewise impossible to write without creating meaning out of the world. Writers, we are told, experience a "rage for order." Order is one set of meanings imposed on experience. Perhaps the writing task demands a sense-making over and above that in daily life. Thus phenomenology provides an appropriate base for understanding more about the personhood of student writers and about the activity of writing itself, to which the next chapter turns* 55 Endnotes

^■David Bleich. Readings and Feelings (Urbana, 111.: NOTE, 1975; David Bleich; The Subjective Character of Critical Interpretation," College English, 36 (Harch, 1975), 739-755; Norman N. Holland, 5 Readers Re ad ing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); NormarT"N. Holland and Murray Schwartz, "The Delphi Seminar," College English. 36 (March, 1975), 789-800. ^Michael Folanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. xiv. 3S^ren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Post­ script , trans. David F. Swenson ana Walter Lowrie (Prince- torn: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 177. ^Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight (New York: Philosoph­ ical Library, 1973), pp. 319-347. 5Lonergan, p. 4. ®Lonergan, p. xix. 7Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), pp.~?3-24. ®Quoted in Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), p."53. ^Edward P. J. Corbett, one of our leading authorities on rhetoric, comments in Classical Rhetoric for the Modem Student (New York: Qxford IJniversxty press, 1965), p. 94, ^Some times, from his experience, his education, or his reading, the student will already have something to say," and asks, p. 95, "What about the student who has not yet reaped the benefits of experience and study? Is he con­ demned to be Inarticulate? Is there some system that can supply the deficiencies of his resources?" 10Frank D 1Angelo, Process and Thought in Composition (Cambridge, Mass.: Winihrop,1977), ppT 34^35. 11Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1967), p. 4, points to ''the fact that we can know more than we can tell." 12Kierkegaard, p. 279. 5 6 ^3Alfred Schut2, The phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick-Lehnert (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 45. 1^Maxine Greene, Teacher as Stranger (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1973), p. 13T: i5Greene, p. 131. 16George A. Kelly, A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs~TNew York: Norton, 1963), p. 3. ^Schutz, p. 52. *®Schutz, pp. 69-71. 19Greene, p. 132. ^®Schntz, pp. 45-47. 21E. Husserl, "The Essence of Redness," in Rules and Meanings, ed. Mary Douglas (Baltimore: Penguin Books, T9737Tp. 62. 22Schutz, p. 114. ^Jean Piaget, The Language and Thought of the Child (New York: Meridian-World, 1953), p. 115, notes egocentrism in explanations given one child by another: "Hie explainer always gave us the impression of talking to himself, with­ out bothering about the other child." Joseph Church, Langxiage and the Discovery of Reality (New York: Vintage-Random House, 196l), p. 26, defines egocentrism slightly differently. "Egocentrism," he says, "means embeddedness in one's own point of view without an awareness that one has a point of view. ..." And "the child . . . does not experience himself experiencing." am not the first to notice egocentrism in writing. See James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mit^lin,l35ff)",~ p. 19^. 25Greene, p. 132. 2<*Urie Bronfenbrenner, "The Experimental Ecology of Education," American Educational Research Association, San FTancisco, April 1976. 27Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),p. 2$1- 57 2®Husserl, p. 62. 29Schutz, p. 59. 3®Schutz, p. 57. 31J. M. Burgersf "Causality and Anticipation," Science, 189 (July 18, 1975), 195. 32Schutz, p. 61. 33Foll owing Benjamin Bloom and David Krathwohl, psychologist Thomas A. Ringness, TTie Affective Domain in Education (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), p. 5, defines the affective domain as one which "includes all behavior connected with feelings and emotions. Thus, . . . emotions, tastes and preferences, appreciations, attitudes and values, morals and character, and aspects of personality adjustment or mental health are included." He notes, too, p. 5, that "One finds affective behavior in any school situation— indeed, in any situation— but com­ pared to cognitive learning, relatively little affective learning has been deliberately introduced into the curriculum •" ^Mary Edel Denman, "The Measure of Success in Writing," CCC, 29 (February, 1978), 42. 3SR. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine-Random House, 1^67), p. x m . 3®Mar*ie Jean Lederman, "A Comparison of Student Projections: Magic and the Teaching of Writing," College English, 34 (February, 1973), 688. ^Peter Elbow, Waiting without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 24, advises writers to "treat words as though they are potentially able to grow." 58See. e.g., William Labov, "The Logic of Nonstandard English," in his Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 213-217. 39labov, pp. 214-220. ^®Lederman, p. 688. ^John Daly and Michael Miller have developed instru­ ments to measure writing apprehension. See John A. Daly 5 8 and Michael D. Miller, "The Empirical Development of an Instrument to Measure Writing Apprehension,'* Research in the Teaching of English, 9 (Winter, 1975), 242-24$, ancT 3oKn A. baly and m e ha el D. Miller, "Further Studies in writing Apprehension: SAT Scores, Success Expectations, Willingness to Take Advanced Courses and Sex Differences," Research in the Teaching of English, 9 (Winter, 1975), 250-256. Thomas C. Gee, "Students* Responses to Teacher Comments," Research in the Teaching of English, 6 (Fall, 1972), 212-217; 43Hxe idea of students releasing us to teach comes from Charles A. Curran, Counseling-Learning: A Whole-Person Model for Education (New "Torfe: Grune & Stratton, 1972), ppT~99^I7o7 1T2=TT2T. ^Andrea A. Lunsford, The Ohio State University Remedial English Pilot Project: Final Report and Follow-Up 5tuay~-(Uolu5bus. OHIoT June 9, 1977j, p p . 2, 3 1 ^ 6 2 ’. 45Donald T. Campbell and Julian C. Stanley, Experi- mental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research TClTicagoTTfcand teNally, "1963), p. Ifi.------46Charles S. Laubheim, Joan E. Schnell, and Alvin J. Starr, Just— Writing (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Runt, 1977), p. iv. ^7Ringness, pp. 71-72. AO Joan M. Putz, "Permission + Protection = Potency: A T.A. Approach to English 101," College English. 36 (January, 1975), 573. ^Shaughnessy, p. 13. ^®Lederman, p. 688. Jerome S. Bruner, On Knowing (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap-Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 89. ^Lucky Jacobs, "Existential Phenomenology and Personal Writing," CCC, 26 (October, 1975), 294. ^^Lederman, p. 688. 5^The term comes from Melvin Maddocks, "The Limita­ tions of Language," repr. in Language Awareness, ed. Paul A. Escholz, Alfred F. Rosa, and Virginia P. til ark (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), p. 231, who defines it as 5 9 "that numbness of ear, mind and heart— that tone deafness to the very meaning of language— which results from the habitual and prolonged abuse of words." 55Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 26, share a remarkably similar view to that presented in this paragraph. 58Schutz, p. 135. 57Roger Poole, Towards Deep Subjectivity (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 121. 58Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), p7"5RT 59Rogers, p. 27. 6^Rogers, p. 21. eiCalvin S. Hall and Gardner Lindzey, Theories of Personality (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1957), pT TT 62H. W. Kramer, "The Relationship Between Personality Type and Achievement in Expository and Creative Writing," DAI, 30 (1977), 3384A. 63David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 196iy, P* 22. ^Rosemarie Kraft-Ebel, "Split-Brain Functioning," Capital University Reading Conference, Columbus, Ohio, September 1977. 6^Gregory Baum, "Personal Experience and Styles of Thought," in his Journeys (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), pp. 23, 24. 68Jerome L. Singer, "Fantasy: The Foundation of Serenity," Psychology Today, July 1976, p. 34. 67Singer, p. 32. 68Julian B. Rotter and Dorothy J. Hochreich, Personality (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 197^), p. 164. ^Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cam­ bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. 6-7. 78Hanson, pp. 5-8. 71Poole, pp. 117-119. 70Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood , The Reality of Ethno- methodology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975J, p. 10. 73Postman and Weingartner, p. 101. 7^Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (New York: The International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1941), p. 89* 73Hanson, pp. 32-34. 76J. L. Dillard, Black English (New York: Vintage- Random House, 1972), pp. 4-0-447 77Poole, p. 113. 78Poole, p. 127. 79Poole, pp. 127-128. 88R. D. Laing, H. Phil lips on, and A. R. Lee, Inter­ personal Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p p . 36-45;------8lSchutz, p. 8. 82Edmund Husserl, quoted in Poole, p. 90. 8^Hanson, p. 15. 84T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Hare ourt, 1971), p. 26. 85Eliot, p. 59. 86Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (New York: Pocket Books-Julian Press, 1975), p. 1. 87Postman and Weingartner, p. 90. 88Pearce, p. 3. 89FTeire, p. 61. 98Jean Malmstrom, "Dialects— Updated," The Florida FL Reporter, 7 (Spring/Summer, 1969), 47. 91Clare H. Silva j "A Comparative Study of the Needs and Concepts of Individual Students in a Post-Secondary Remedial Writing Program," Diss. The Ohio State University 1977, p. 149. C£. Shaughnessy, p. 40. ®2Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 92. 93Poole, pp. 114-115. 94Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The tjniversity of Chicago tress, 1970), pp. 52-53. 95Kelly, p. 4. 96 Quoted in Pearce, p. 14. * ®7Prank Smith, Understanding Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 19?l), p. 13. 9®Smith, p. 15. 99Edward A. Feigenbaum, An Information Processing Theory of Verbal Learning (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Rand Corporation, 1959), p. lS. 100Ralph Norman Haber and Maurice Hershenson, The Psychology of Visual Perception (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 p- 158. *®*Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1 ------102Rogers, pp. 26-27. 103Rogers, p. 22. 10^Rogers, p. 191. lO^Rogers, p. 186.

lOdsidney m . Jourard, The Transparent Self (CiTicinnati Van Nostrand, 1971), p. 191: Phenomenological psychol­ ogists are "those concerned with man's subjective side, i.e., with his 'self,* his inner experience." 107Quoted in Poole, p. 97. CHAPTER III

UNDERSTANDING THE WRITING EVENT

Introduction We have seen in Chapter Two the complexity of operat­ ing in the world as a human person. The very act of meaning-making in one's daily life is enormously complex. It is necessary in this chapter, next, to examine our model of the writing event, for much of what we think we under­ stand about the activity of writing comes to us from warped or undernourished models. Our teaching and research prac­ tices have often not been congruent with what "writing" actually is. The thrust of the chapter, then, is toward expanding our perceptions and understandings of the. writing event, so as to see it in all its complexity. Such a change in perception can also lead to changes in our teaching and research.1 The chapter approaches writing in a variety of ways. It looks first at types of writing. It turns next to examine the various components of the activity { concen­ trating at length on writing, speech, and cognition. Finally, and substantively, it presents several ways of viewing writing: writing as an interpersonal conxounication event, writing as creation, writing as process. A look first at types of writing stretches our overall understand­ ing of the writing event, for, despite their differences, all types of writing share some commonalities.

Types of Writing To Janies Britton et aL. in The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18), we owe“The clearest treatment”"yet of types ofwritten discourse. Britton has been dissatisfied, as I have often been, with the traditional rhetorical modes of description, narration, exposition, and argument as bases for differentiating types of writing. First, derived as they are from finished professional products, they are prescriptive rather than descriptive of how writing actually occurs. Secondly, the categories are murky. A narrative 63 piece may have a persuasive function, for example, rather than a purely narrative function. A piece of writing may thus ftemploy one mode to fulfill the functions of another,"2 Also, the categories are based on an assumption that pure forms exist, but, especially with regard to description, it is difficult to find such a mode existing in isolation in adult writing. X would add to Britton's thoughts the overall criticism that these modes of development are derived from rhetorical theory, a theory concerned with persuading an audience in a speech situation. Qiven our present understanding of language acquisition and of the distinction between speech and writing, this area seems to me an inappropriate context from which to derive an understanding of various writing functions. Building upon the theory of expressive speech of Sapir and the concept of hierarchy of speech functions of Roman Jakobson*and Dell Kymes after him, Britton classifies writing into three major functions: expressive, transac­ tional, and poetic. He views the expressive as the matrix from which the other two functions develop. By "an expres­ sive utterance," he means, for our purposes, . . . one in which the expressive function is dominant. . . .We would describe it as an utterance that * stays close to the speaker' and hence is fully comprehensible only to one who knows the speaker and shares his context. It is a verbalization of the speaker's immediate preoccupations and his mood of the moment. Centrally . . . it is utterance at its most relaxed and intimate, as free as possible from outside demands, whether those of a task or of an audience.^ Britton sees the expressive branching into the trans­ actional at one end and the poetic at the other. In both cases, he sees a movement from an intimate to a public audience. With transactional writing, the writer partici­ pates in the affairs of the world, so as to influence them. Herein language is used as means to such ends as buying and selling, informing, persuading. It should come as no surprise, then, that informative and conative writing are subdivisions of the transactional. With the poetic, on the other hand, the writer assumes the role of spectator. Language is used here as an end in itself, an end which delights, fulfills a play function, provides enjoyment, "a voluntary activity that occupies us for no other reason than that it preoccupies. The piece of writing is treated as "a 'verbal object,' a construct." Although the substance of the piece may be personal, it is offered to a public audience through the nature of the artifact 6 4 itself; "A poetic utterance may be said to be a special kind of self-presentation: not so much the embodiment of local or particular feelings as a glimpse into a 'lifetime of feeling,' to use Susanne Langer's phrase."5 Given the variety of types of writing, Britton has stated very emphatically that there is no such thing as a "global sense of the ability to write"; Writing a memo is different from writing a sonnet; writing a love letter is different from writing a letter to pie Times. Again, writing about bombs is different from writing about combs is different from writing about tombs. . . True, we are not bora with an inherent writing ability which carries us through all types of writing. And, granted, the task of doing a narrative encompasses differ­ ent skills from those involved in doing a discursive argu­ ment. Yet 1 am not totally comfortable with Britton's understanding here. While I certainly grant that there are clear and discernible differences between transactional and expressive writing, I do not necessarily grant that the qualities requisite for producing the types are neces­ sarily all that distinct. There are enough points of commonality among them that we can learn about one while listening to a practitioner of the other. Especially can we learn about composing processes. What works for a novelist may well work for the doctoral candidate strug­ gling with a dissertation and for a Freshman English student doing a humble two-page theme. For all writing involves the writer— at least he or she who takes the task seriously and therefore invests something of self in it-- in creation. There are comnon elements, it seems to me, in all creative endeavors. Some elements common to various kinds of writing include: need for self-investment in the material; inten­ tion to communicate an idea or feeling to at least oneself if not to another human person; desire to make meaning out of experience; involvement in a process; trust in one's own perceptions and intuitions about language; individual modes of handling the writing process and oneself as a creator. That what is created differs according to the type of writing chosen is unarguable. That is, the product is different. That the most significant qualities required to produce the work are different, I doubt. Let it be clear that the primary type of "writing" with which this dissertation deals is expository writing, in that that is the type most often required in an academic 6 5 setting and the type which I have most experience teaching and producing. As I have said, though, what is said here about expository writing applies in important ways, in my view, to other forms as well.

Components of the Writing Event How little the phenomenon of "writing" has been understood. In writing without Teachers, Peter Elbow makes these observations: People can't agree on a definition or specifica­ tion of what goodness in writing consists of. When­ ever anyone has a promising theory, it always leaves out some pieces of writing that most people agree are good, and includes some others they admit are bad. Even if you wanted to argue that there is a true theory of writing around but people are H o stupid to agree about it, the fact remains that no one has been able to formulate this theory so that when you tell it to a talented person, it enables him to produce good writing.7 What, then, is "Writing"? On the very simplest level, writing involves the capturing and freezing of words by setting writing implement to paper. This section begins with an overall description of what persons do when they write. The writing event involves, first of all, an attempt to capture a thought or feeling inside the head onto a page. One attempts to put that thought into words ; one generates words— language— to match the thought. Second, the event involves physical activity in a complex brain- to-hand coordination, for one must capture the thought with the hand. The hand becomes an extension of the mind. Next is the intertwining of language and thinking, for the attempt to write the thought often causes the idea to develop, to change. Finally, along with the movement toward development of the thought, there is the movement toward developing— rewriting--the physical product so that it is acceptable for viewing by another person. I turn next to consider each component at greater length— the questions, considerations, understandings, surrounding that component. 6 6 Capturing the Thought Often the first attempt to snare that internal move­ ment is unsuccessful. The words we find do not do justice to the thought inside us. So we scrap the sentences and try again. One frequently needs to work toward closer and closer approximations to whatever it is one is really thinking and feeling. Or, another problem, our thoughts race madly ahead of ever-so-slow pens, and some ideas manage to escape in the process, at times refusing to return. Another difficulty in composing arises when we discover that the thought no longer looks like the one we began with. We have changed our minds. Or, in the act of writing, the thought itself has grown, shifted, altered. Not only individual words but larger pieces also slip and slide.

Brain-to-Hand Coordination Writing also involves a complex brain-to-hand coordi­ nation, which is problematic for some students. We are learning from our Basic writers that sheer penmanship is a problem for those who have had little practice with writing. The very business of forming letters is time- consuming and involves muscle coordination— let alone brain-to-hand coordination, which in some has not been developed. Also, there are some students who come to the physical penmanship task stigmatized in previous years by poor handwriting. To overcome their deficiencies and their shame, they at times have taken to printing, often in all capital letters. All caps, as Mina Shaughnessy points out, can be a way to hide lack of knowledge about the proper punctuation.8 At other times, though, it is a way to help readers read one's writing. But printing is slow and time- consuming; also, it may cause the writer to experience a greater-than-normal difficulty in trying to keep up with thoughts and to capture them on paper. Students with little writing practice experience greater difficulty than most of us in trying to keep up with their thoughts. For some, the head moves faster than the inexperienced hand. The hope is that, in time, with sufficient practice, this problem will work itself out. Britton says, It seems certain that in the very early stages of learning to write there is a great deal of concentra­ tion on how the words in the head can be got on to the paper at all, at the very simple level of knowing what letters to use, and even, sometimes, how to make the letters. *niis is grappling with the difficulty, 6 7 rather than awareness of process, and with luck it may soon diminish to the point where a child and his teacher take it for granted that, barring accidents and the occasional spelling problem, he can get down on the paper anything he knows.9

Language and Thinking Next is the coordination between languaging and thinking. It has commonly been assumed--and indeed many writing programs have been built on the assumption— that writing and thinking are virtually identical. Often, inability to think is charged as the cause for poor writing. Certainly writing and thinking are Intertwined, for as the writer sees the thought on paper, the idea at times takes a new shape in his or her thinking. Hie idea then alters the writing, which in turn alters the thought. Tet the connection between the two events is not as sim­ plistic as our words at times suggest. There is no one-to- one correspondence between the two activities. Many, among them Britton and Noam Chomsky, have suggested that languag­ ing may give us insight into the operation of the mind. At this moment, however, we are not at all sure exactly what the connection is. The connection between writing and thinking is more complicated than we often consider it to be.

Ways of Viewing the Writing Event Writing can be viewed in a variety of ways. To expand our perception of the writing event, the chapter moves to take up various perceptions of the activity: writing in relationship to cognition and speech, writing as inter­ personal communication, writing as creation, writing as an organic activity, and writing as process.

writing as Thinking One way of conceiving of writing is as an activity synonymous with thinking. It is important to understand the interconnections between language, thought, writing, and speech, for there is much to learn about writing and about cognition by examining these areas. We turn now to these various interconnections. 68 writing and talking

How does writing differ from talking? There are some clearly obvious differences. Para- linguistic and nonverbal cues accompany speech but not writing. The words on the page must carry the total mean­ ing. likewise, there is an interaction between communica­ tor and recipient possible in the speech event that does not usually occur in the writing event. With public writing, that writing directed to an unknown audience, the reader does not often have the opportunity to raise ques­ tions of the communicator as the message is being delivered. With at least some types of writing, then, there is no immediate feedback. How else do writing and talking differ? One speaks spontaneously, often without much apparent thought. Less seeming ordering of ideas is necessary. Sentences provide ordering, structure, but that ordering is on a micro rather than macro level. With writing there is more need for planning. It is more acceptable for talk to be rambling, inarticulate, disorganized, than it is for public writing to contain these qualities. Writing thus places more of a planning demand on the organism, either internal or external Con paper) planning. Because published writing does not provide the com­ municator with instant feedback, writing also demands greater clarity than does talk. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., says, >fWritten discourse has to make up for its lack of intona­ tion, gesture, and facial expression— most of all, for its lack of tacit situational understanding and active feedback between speaker and listener.rtl® The public writer, in fact, must play the role of communicator and must also internalize the image of the reader, so as to determine if the message is clear and if mechanical demands are being attended to. Writing thus places a greater burden on the conmunicator in the attempt to share the message. One reaches out not only as oneself but also with an internalized image, right or wrong, of who the other is. In interpersonal dialogue, one is sure (rela­ tively) who the other is; in writing, one may not be. The writer must assume a somewhat greater responsibility than the communicator in a speech act. We need to raise the question here of whether a more intimate writing style— writing to the self or to a known other— might not provide a more fruitful writing model, particularly for the beginning writer. 69 What function does writing serve? Many people find writing more time-consuming and less satisfying than talking. Yet more people are writing at this time in history than ever before, given the quantity of books published daily. What function does writing serve? One function is that it allows a communication to reach a wider audience. Yet, a speech to several people, particularly on radio or television, could have the same effect. A piece of writing, though, can also be a projec­ tion of oneself into the future; writing can thus reach not merely more people but also more generations, even eons hence. Writing thus transcends space and time limita­ tions. Second, it allows one to find oneself— to be more in touch with what one thinks and feels. It gives an opportunity to examine one's ideas— even to discover if there are any ideas there. While dialogue can accomplish this end, speech in itself does not. Third, writing affords one the opportunity to examine and organize chaotic, disparate experience. It allows one, by freezing words on paper and the experience they reflect, the chance to reflect on those experiences so as to discover their significance and perhaps to see them in a new light. It affords the opportunity to look again at words and experi­ ence, for the piece of writing can be returned to. Although tape recorders also freeze words, they require necessarily a greater memory load and do not afford the same ease for examining ideas as does writing. In What Do I Do Monday?, educator John Holt says of writing: Good writing, writing that is a true extension and expression of ourselves, helps us to know our­ selves, to make ourselves known to others, and to know them. It gives us a way of getting hold of our thoughts and feelings, so that we may think about them, learn from them, build on them. It can help us break out of the closed-in quality of our own experience, and share that experience with others. And it is still, and will be for a long time to come, one of the most powerful ways to reach other men, and so to make and change the reality we live in.11

Writing, speech, and cognition We can say little with certainty about the connections between written language and thinking, for we lack a window into the brain to see just what the connections are between the written product and our thought processes. Until the day when science (or technology) provides us with humane devices for researching the brain which will give us the kinds of insights we need, our understandings of language and cognition will have to be arrived at by hunch, intui­ tion, guesswork.

Talking and t hinking One intuition, though, is that writing influences the development of a thought, which in turn influences the written product. The researches and intuitions of Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky concerning speech and thought are of considerable interest here for, in understanding how speech and thought influence one another, we gain understanding into writing and thinking. Vygotsky says, “Thought and word are not connected by a primary bond. A connection originates, changes, and grows in the course of the evolution of thinking and speech. Nor is a word “the external concomitant of thought, its attire only, having no influence on its inner life."13 Rather, Vygotsky sees a processive quality to thinking and speaking The relation of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a continual movement back and forth from thought to word and from word to thought. In that process the relation of thought to word undergoes changes which themselves may be regarded as develop­ ment in the functional sense. Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them. Every thought tends to connect something with something else, to establish a relationship between things. Every thought moves, grows, and develops, fulfills a function, solves a problem. This flow of thought occurs as an inner movement through a series of planes. An analysis of the interaction of thought and word must begin with an investigation of the different phases and planes a thought traverses before it is embodied in words.1^ Likewise, he says, The structure of speech does not simply mirror the structure of thought; that is why words cannot be put on by thought like a ready-made garment. Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It does not merely find expression in speech; it finds its reality and form.15 Even speaking, then, a first-order language activity, is not directly linked with thinking on a one-to-one basis. Vygotsky uses interesting phrases such as '^verbal thought" and "meaningful speech" to illustrate "a union of word and 71 thought,As evidenced by such words as "union" and "process," the very phenomenon of talking does not occur in a linear fashion. The linkage between thought and speech, although often viewed as a linear, cause-effect activity, a Harkov chain, just as early granmars were viewedis, instead, more complex. Rather than a thought being automatically translatable into speech, thus: Thought ---- ^ Speech, the model might be more accurately described in this way:

Thought Speech • '*suUU>? One activity feeds into the other, in a continuous spiral­ ling process. James Britton uses similar language to describe those cases where a writer "feels he has not succeeded in representing his thought."^ There, Britton says, "we are back once more with the dialectical inter­ penetration of language and thought."18

Writing and thinking The question to be raised is this: does writing fol­ low a similar pattern? Is there a languaging center within each of us that operates in the same way, whether we are speaking or writing? Or does the translation of thought into written word become more complicated, in that writing is a second-order, less natural language activity? We are not sure. Some speculations follow. Why would the interaction between thought and word be more complicated in writing? In part because writing, unlike speech, is a more premeditated activity. One has to choose to commit words to paper; while one may choose not to talk some of the time, one rarely chooses, save for persons reared with wolves, not to use speech at least some of the time. Also, a piece of writing is a creation. One who is doing genuine writing must get in touch with those procedures and practices akin to the producing of other artistic creations— paintings, symphonies, dance. To some extent, speech is also a creation, that is true, but speech is the natural language event in which persons conduct the affairs of their daily lives. Talk is spon­ taneous, not necessarily requiring premeditation and choice. Part of being human is talking. Because writing as a language activity entails a more premeditative use of language and is more linked with conscious creation 7 2 than is talking, the relationship between thought and writing becomes even more complex. As X have said, we do not understand with certainty what that relationship is. We have seen that one's thought often changes in the process of writing (again, the processive thought-word quality Vygotsky spoke of). We know, too, that often persons do not know what they think until they have "writ­ ten through" an idea— until they have taken the plunge of trying to put it into words or until they have frozen the moment on the page and had a chance to examine it more closely. In the latter case, the page operates as a feed­ back system, at times perhaps in advance of, or in lieu of, another person. Also, we know that writers at times dis­ cover that they have nothing to say when they face a blank page. Britton points out, too, that It is true that a writer may not completely knew what he thinks until it is fully formulated in words, but it is also true that he can tell when the words he has used have not achieved the embodiment of his thoughts sufficiently to provide the satisfaction he must feel before he is prepared to let the completed writing go to the reader.1"

Speech as a way into writing Building on Vygotsky's concept of inner speech, I would posit a language model in which dialogue, whether internal or external, serves as the way into writing. Vygotsky has suggested, contra Piaget, that language in the human organism goes through a progression from social speech to egocentric speech (talking to oneself) to inner speech (thinking for oneself).20 Vygotsky defines the concept as "to a large extent thinking in pure meanings."21 We "'think words.1"22 Also, "The inner speech of the adult represents his 'thinking for himself* rather than social adaptation."2^ He says elsewhere that this form of speech is speech gone "inward."2^ If in fact Vygotsky's concep­ tion of inner speech is accurate, then we can understand that, yes, dialogue with others does provide a way into writing for some people, but that for others, the dialogue that is crucial occurs with themselves. It is a talking silently to ourselves, just as we did as children in our egocentric stage talk verbally to ourselves. Some of the nicest touches I have seen on student papers and in journals come from this talking to oneself or to someone else on paper. Mary Jane, for example, talks to her journal as a person: 7 3 H i , Jaye , I saw you lying over here and thought I’d come and keep you company. Gee, you sure are getting thick. I roust have had more to say to you than 1 thought. You know? After this course is over I might come calling on you more times than a little. Oh yea, I'm baking a cake. Wish me luck. Elsewhere, she discusses a relationship problem with the journal: Hi, Jaye, You guessed it. Jerome and L. I would know how to handle this situation if our problem were another woman, but another man? Noone told me how to handle "this" situation. About dialogue, Britton says, quoting from Hoggart, Writing isn’t simply a way we reach others. It is a dialogue with ourselves. Finding a tone to talk with begins with finding one that seems right to and for us. Talking to others begins with 'talking to your­ self and with ’being yourself in talking.'25 It seems virtually necessary to posit a chain here: thought (fully or fuzzily formed) leads to external or internal talk, which in turn leads to (can lead to) writing. Thus: _ Inner (dialogue *V speech with self)1 Idea --- ^ Talk outer (dialogue

It is as though writing affords us an opportunity to share ourselves with others, when we have no concrete others to share enough of ourselves with. When we do less talking with others, we may write more. That is, if words are being expelled through external dialogue, the self, once having gotten those words out, may have no need to propel them a step further into writing. If the need is to get out our messages, then once they are out, there may be no need (save for the pressures of publishing or perishing> to get them out in a different form. In my own life, the amount of writing I have done has Increased with the absence of concrete persons. Being with others— talking too much— may dissipate energies that can fruitfully get channeled into the creative venture of writing. It is, then, as though writing offers us a vehicle for personal > 7 4 sanity, when we are alone, away from others. We can dialogue with ourselves in writing. We can manufacture a generalized other for ourselves with the written or printed page. What a marvellously creative activity for the human mind to engage in.26 Which brings me back to dialogue as a way into writing. I would speculate that writing, as a second-order language activity, has to pass through the first order, in one way or another. As I have said, it may do so internally or externally: internally via inner speech or private writing to oneself via journals and rough drafts before writing to others; externally via the socially un­ acceptable route of "talking to oneself’* or the more accep­ table path of dialogue with others. This view of dialogue explains some things. It explains why using a tape recorder can be a profitable way into writing, especxally for persons from an oral culture. It explains, too, why group discus­ sion can be a way in. Britton has noted that some students in discussion groups have been observed to leave the group when they are ready to write.27 It explains why people take notes after an especially important conversation with a therapist or friend. And it explains why journals, writing practice, and letters work as a way into writing. The journal, free writing, cooked writing, are written-down dialogues with self— written-down inner speech. In that it is not considered sane and acceptable for persons to speak with no one present, such internal dialogue vehicles have been developed. Letters, of course, work because often they serve as the occasion for generating some much- needed inner speech, in the process of silently dialoguing with someone else. The point here is that a way needs to be found into the activity of writing, into the second- order language use. That way is one form or another of the first order. Along similar lines, for advanced writers rather than Basic Writers, reading can provide a way into writing, for it, too, offers an opportunity to dialogue, after a fashion, with someone else. By seeing rather than hearing what someone else has to say, ideas for writing are generated for some writers. James Moffett's understanding of the role dialogue plays in writing is illuminating. For years I have taken issue with his views', as presented in Teaching the Universe Discourse. "I would like to advance an hypothesis," He says, "that dialogue is the major means of developing thought and language."28 Also, in clearly assuming a "progression from talk to print," he says, "Reading and writing have an oral base, which is another way of saying 75 that monologue emerges from dialogue."29 Yet if one ex­ tends "dialogue" in his thinking to mean external dialogue (with others) or internal dialogue (with the self— inner speech), then Kxs views are very close to mine. That external dialogue does not always lead to writing was brought home to me vividly with a first-semester freshman writing class at Southern University, a class whose dialogue skills improved noticeably over the course of a semester and who frequently discussed subjects in which they appeared personally invested: identity, marriage, dating, women's liberation. Yet, although the class was continually encouraged to write journal entries and themes growing out of the discussions, few students did unless forced to (as on the mid-term exam). The best writing on the discussion topics stemmed from the reflections of Individuals rather than from outgrowths of actual conversa­ tions or comments in class. External dialogue may have stimulated thinking, but almost no one responded on paper to comments made in discussions. Moffett refers to "the internal conversation we call thinking."50 My contention is that it is this conversation, this dialogue, which is most significant for some writers.

Writing as Thinking: Broadening the View Writing as thinking represents one component of the writing event. It is important to see, though, that writing encompasses more than conscious thought. We turn nextj then, to writing and the unconscious, to writing and feelings, and to writing as sense-making.

Writing and the unconscious An important dimension of thinking which is not to be ignored in conjunction with writing is the role of the unconscious. Thinking encompasses both the logical, conscious domain and the domain of the unconscious. Arthur Koestler says in his massive study of the creative process, The Act of Creation, that "Thinking is never a sharp, neat, linear process."^! With regard to the role of the uncon­ scious, he says "the evidence indicates that verbal think­ ing, and conscious thinking in general, plays only a sub­ ordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative act."52 He points to discovery after discovery which show "that an idea may sleep for decades in the unconscious mind and then suddenly return."55 The connection between the unconscious dimension and writing needs to be more fully understood. 76 Writing and feelings Conceiving of writing as an activity synonymous with thinking limits the universe which writing encompasses. In assuming an automatic connection between writing and thinking, we have accepted the Cartesian dualism which Chapter 2 alluded to; we view the human person as a dis­ sociated sensibility. But the writer as person is more than a thinker. We are body-minds, heart-minds. Thoughts do not exist apart from feelings and attitudes. If we use "feeling" to encompass the universe which Susanne Langer encompasses with the term,3^ then clearly writing is a more complicated activity than our thinking-writing con­ nection has made it out to be. What role do feelings and attitudes play in writing? As suggested in Chapter Two, a considerable role. Feelings accompany our investment in a topic and our concerns about a response to our paper. We are excited about what we have to say, or we are bored, frightened. Feelings sur­ round our response to the audience, the setting, the course, and our concern about the response to us. Recall Tina's comment in the last chapter about hating to write because she feared that her teacher would laugh at her. Often we encounter students, too, who find it difficult to accept criticism of their work, who have spoken their piece on the page and are so ego-invested (insecure?) in it that they cannot bear to hear any words of non-acceptance (which is likely how many view our often gratuitous red-penned com­ ments). Others lack confidence in what they want to say— fear risking honesty or speaking their mind in the p a p e r — and may need encouragement and support to open up on paper. Some experience much anxiety. Particularly is this true for Basic Waiters, for whom writing offers, frequently, another opportunity for failure.^ Peter Elbow says, Anxiety keeps you from writing. You don't know what you will end up writing. Will it be enough? Will it be any good? You begin to think of critical readers and how they will react. You get worried and your mind begins to cloud. You start trying to clench your mind around what pitiful little lumps of material you have in your head so as not to lose them. But as you try to clarify one thought, all the rest seem to fall apart. . . .Anxiety is trying to get you so stuck and disgusted that you stop writing altogether.3® Feelings may also affect our content for writing. An interesting phenomenon from the Ohio State University's Basic Writing program suggests this connection. On pre- and post-test paragraphs, students wrote more effectively 77 about their worst teacher than about their best teacher. The reason for this, I would suggest, is that their worst teacher aroused the student*s strong feelings on the sub­ ject, probably anger or hostility, and thus forced to the surface the content within him or her. Thinking about one's best teacher might be expected to bring less violent emotions into play. Students who did well on the "best teacher" topic were probably able to experience some posi­ tive feelings about the teacher and as a result surface some useful content on the subject.

Writing as sense-making: reflection as thinking Over against the view of writer as inert object waiting to be acted upon by a writing teacher, let us posit the following model. The writer is an active intelligence, striving to make sense, through the vehicle of language, out of present and past realities in his or her life. The writer as subject is capable of using writing as a vehicle for reflection: for gaining meaning from and about the past; for remembering, recollecting, sorting out, analyzing what Henri Bergson calls the "duree" of events of one's life; or for making sense out of intersubjective experience. Likewise, the subject is capable of using writing as a vehicle for anticipation and motivation: for looking toward and acting upon the future; for speculating, planning, and dreaming; for directing the course of events of his or her own life.*7

Beyond writing as thinking, other views of the writing event are possible. I move next to discuss the view of writing as an interpersonal communication event, for lan­ guage use does not exist apart from an interpersonal arena. Also, in understanding the writing event, it is important to recognize that writing, even transactional writing, is a creative activity. As such, it throws the writer into coping with feeling states and other personal idiosyncra- sies--into recognizing and dealing with oneself as a creator of something. Finally, the chapter takes up writing as process, for no piece of prose emerges fully formed from the mind of its creator, but rather goes through a complex and often arduous process in the act of being born.

I 7 8 Writing as Interpersonal Communication: Writing and the Self It la perhaps this dimension of writing which is least understood or, if understood, least attended to as impor­ tant. J-fy contention is that, whatever the writing event is, it is primarily an activity of sharing a message from self to self. All genuine writing involves an interaction between self and idea. The writer has something of import which she or he wishes to communicate. There is an investment of self, both in the content and in the desire to share that content with someone else. Wtiting can be conceived of, then, as the act of pulling out what is inside and (at certain times and with certain kinds of writing— some expressive, but mostly referential and poetic) putting it on display for "public" response. Key in any genuine writing is that the writer own his or her topic. It must have significance to him or her; writers must feel that they have something they want to say about their subject and that there is something they can say. There must be an interaction, then, between the self of the writer and the topic to produce genuine writing. We need first to care enough to "get it right with the self"38--to own the subject sufficiently that we are one with it. Next, there is an interaction of self with self. There must be an intention or a reason to share the com­ munication. writing in this sense can be conceived of as what psychologists call an "I"-message. There is something inside us which we want to or need to get out. A related way to view this j also borrowed from psychology, is that genuine writing involves an assertion of self. Even seem­ ingly objective writing, e.g., technical and scientific writing, involves the outreaching of self with a message to others. Deleting feelings and ITs from the written message does not remove the burden on the writer to com­ municate a thought which belongs to him or her to someone else. Expression of self and communication to another are two key dimensions of speech, according to linguist Georges Gusdorf. He says, Thus is formulated a fundamental antinomy of human speech, the self-affirmation of the subject at the same time as the search for others. On the one hand, we have the expressive function of language: I speak in order to make myself understood, in order to emerge into reality, in order to add myself to 79 nature. On the other hand, we have the communicative function: I speak in order to reach out to others, and I can join myself to them all the more insofar as 1 set aside what is mine alone. 9 1 am suggesting that the same two dimensions are also key in writing. Frequently, though, writing is bastardized into a rote activity, one with little or no direct connection to the writer, it is as though the organism doing the actual writing can be turned off or disregarded in favor of concentrating on the outcome itself. Susarme Langer ob­ serves, Input and output in a machine 'correspond to the stimulus and response in a psychological organism . • • and they may be investigated without reference to intervening mechanisms.' But engineers do, in fact, understand the Intervening machine, and their correla­ tions of input and output would have no scientific value— though, perhaps, some limited practical use— if they did not. The 'direct parallel' presupposes, furthermore, that input and output are known, and 'that all individuals are linear systems'— that is, that each stimulus element will keep its identity through its transformation from input to output, so that the total response will be the arithmetical sum of those transformed stimuli.40 Langer clearly considers the input-output model the wrong one, for it ignores the person in the middle.

Writing as Creation In understanding the writing event, it is important to recognize that writing, even transactional writing, is a creative activity, one which forces the writer to deal with the self as a creator of something. What follows are some understandings of the creative process involved.

Writing as organic Langer speaks of art as organic. She compares the growth of a work of art to life process in all of nature. The work of art does not spring Medusa-like from the head of its creator. Rather, having achieved the requisite moment of insight, in which the work exists as an idea in the mind of the creator, it takes flesh through fits and 80 starts, as the creator straggles to match the form to the content, to resolve tensions, to capture the governing feeling which she or he wishes to convey* Creating the work Involves the creator in a process, as it struggles to be bom. Langer says that the formation of images in art ''is a living process, and therefore as complex as all living processes are."41 Much of the following discussion involves the use of self-reporting to describe the activity of creation. My own efforts at writing this dissertation have shown me the organicity of the writing process. At the proposal stage, I had achieved the requisite moment of insight. I "saw" what the interlocking pieces of the dissertation would be and how the chapters would form a unified whole. All was very clear. Then came the writing. Chapter Two went where 1 intended it to go. As X moved on to another chapter, though, the firm ground on which I had been tread­ ing became suddenly jello-like. Pieces began to slip and slide; other pieces appeared anew. Original plans for other chapters began to dissolve or take a new shape. Questions nagged: Should that material go into this chap­ ter? Or Chapter Two? Somewhere? Anywhere? All of a sudden, the baby was becoming a giant--was assuming a monstrous life of its own. Never had I been conscious of this phenomenon happening before with exposi­ tory prose. I had heard novelists speak of characters taking over a novel. Stendhal, for example( writes of falling in love with the Princess and allowing her to dominate The Char ter hous e of Parma. 42 just so, my ideas were growing beyond my control; they were taking a shape I had not envisaged their taking. Because this is an expository piece, X had expected to be able to keep a tight rein on the ideas in the process of writing. Such, however, was not the case. Writing in a more free-writing fashion than ever before with such an extended essay, I watched ideas go places I did not expect and saw new insights arise during the process of writing. I want to go on to suggest that the freshman theme is a microcosm of that grander macrocosm. What is true for novel writing, for book and dissertation writing--for the doing of large pieces— is true also, but on a smaller scale, for the writing of freshman themes. Especially if someone is imaginative and open to the creative spirit, ideas and structures are going to change. One of the tasks of the writing teacher is to encourage openness to such growth and to help students to deal with it when it comes. 81 Students must be encouraged, then, to see all that writing involves. They need to be encouraged to involve themselves in creation and to trust both themselves and the creative spirit.^3 Especially will the task be diffi­ cult for a student whose personality is rigid, one who is accustomed to doing what others tell him or her instead of listening to the self, one who is not accustomed to following an internal impulse down strange and uncharted paths. But unless we share this aspect of writing with our students, we sell writing as a rote activity and thus deceive both ourselves and our students about what the writing event encompasses. Although writing can be turned into something rote, such writing is usually not very good and rarely self-engaging. Such deception, such failure to reveal to students what the entire writing activity encompasses, cheats them, for it does not share with them the excitement of the process and it does not encourage decent and honest self-expression on the part of persons.

The creative process All of us know times when the creative process is not going well. One dissertation writer described this phase as being narrow, almost withdrawn, in scope, pictured as follows: / / versus / /. When the process is going well, one feels expansive. Ideas flow freely; the writer is able to freely and easily associate and connect a variety of ideas and to create new ones. Imaginative metaphors abound. ,rWords speak to words," as Ken Macrorie would say.^ One feels excited, euphoric. There is much to say, and we sense that we are saying it well. That feeling can likely be trusted. Upon casting an objective eye over the material in the revising stage, we may well find need for some changes, but chances are that the product is strong, assertive, and interesting. When the process is not workingj though* one feels cramped, almost confined. This feeling can be likened to a state of withdrawing. In this state, ideas drip rather than flow. Or there seem to be no ideas. One chokes: pen in hand, ready to engage the written word, one finds that none come--or what comes is halting, repetitious, dull. One says the same thing over and over, each time almost worse than the first. Sheets get scrapped. 82 Ghosts and watchers What accounts for the difference in the two states? What factors cause the second state to result? And what can be done about those factors? In general, whatever causes worry , panic, fear, self-doubt brings on the second state. If one is worried about the deadline for a paper, rather than simply being aware of the deadline but focusing on getting into the topic and saying something, one's creative energy is shut off. Panic, an extreme form of worry or fear, likewise turns off the creative tap, as does dwelling on self-doubt. All of us, to be sure, have twinges of insecurity. What graduate students, for example, have never asked themselves if they are capable of getting an advanced degree? Self-doubt in and of itself, though, is not the problem. It is the degree of doubt that is problematic. A healthy twinge assures us of our humanity; a ton crushes the creative spirit. In contrast to exces­ sive self-doubt freezing the creative motor, various forms of faith free it. Some of the things which keep us stuck at the restric­ tive level can be dubbed "ghosts'* and "watcher s. "45 A watcher tends to be a worry: worry in the back of one's mind that the advisor will not get the thesis read in time for summer graduation, worry that the teacher won't like the theme, worry that the paper is not good enough, worry that we won't get a job anyway even if we do finish the degree. Ghosts are parents out of our past who haunt us with unreasonable orders and restrictions. The eighth grade teacher who always demanded formal outlines, even though we never found them personally useful, is a ghost. The freshman teacher who demanded a thesis sentence and tight transitions when we were at the production stage and not yet ready to think about strong transitions is a ghost. The parent who continually reminded us to do our homework, such that we now live in terror of deadlines, is a ghost. Freeing ourselves of ghosts and watchers does much to enable one to reach the expansive state.

Reaching the expansive state Persons find various ways to psych themselves up to write. Some set aside a time of day which they ritualis- tically devote to writing. Others operate on a reward system: ten written pages allows an ice cream cone, a new book, a conversation with a friend. For me, the matter of psyching up involves a variety of things: feeling psycho­ logically good about myself, feeling physically well, and finding a way to generate psychic energy, along with having 8 3 something to say. I literally climb onto a creative plane of imagination. I can feel my writing gears working, whether there is anything I wanted to say at that time or not. I know when 1 am psyched np: words pour out, as opposed to those halting measures we all know at other times. I can write nonstop for over an hour when I am in this state and have something to say. Ways to climb onto the creative plane of imagination must, in the end, be found by each individual person, for what works for one may not work for another. I suggest here what has worked for me and what others have trxed. Anything which brings one to a stage of higher conscious­ ness should work. Because of its physiological and higher consciousness dimensions, jogging, for example, helps to bring me to that plane, as does prayer. 1 turn myself over to the creative spirit and trust that words will flow through me from that source. Similarly, meditation should work. Also, "writing out" of the narrow focus helps. One can "write out" via free writing of the ideas one hopes to deal with— a dry run to get the motor "revved up." Or a letter to a friend can help. Journal entries work for me sometimes. A letter to a ghost or watcher is also a pos­ sibility. The key point is that one frees oneself up to write very often by writing.^® Certainly, whatever reality- testing one can do to get rid of doubts, fears, ghosts, and watchers is recommended. Genuine dialogue also helps, for it releases creative energy between persons. These are some ways to move from the narrow state to the more expansive one. The extent to which hallucinogenics, alcohol, cigarettes, and other artificial stimulants work I cannot say. The natural stimulants mentioned here have worked so well for me that, save for an occasional daily caffeine fix, I have never needed to find out.

Writing as Process One of the key places where X have seen writers, freshmen and near Ph.D. alike, go astray in their dealing with writing is their lack of recognition of writing as process. Rather than understanding writing as an organic, developmental activity, one which allows for starts and stops, deserts as well as floods, they focus on the end product, continually holding it there before their minds as they make the mistakes that we inevitably all make at some early stages in the writing. Not recognizing that mistakes are O.K., because of their own perfectionistic or judgmental personality orientation or because of their lack of understanding of process, they find it very dif­ ficult to forgive themselves for their mistakes. Thus 84 they constantly approach the product in a psychological state unfruitful for producing the free, expansive state Just described, the state which virtually ensures a decent product. Trapped by themselves, by their past histories, and by their limited understandings, they go through their writing lives unhappily, for each new piece of writing is an occasion for self-flagellation rather than for the joy which accompanies any natural creative endeavor. One of the things we can do to help these persons in learning to write is to make them aware of the stages of the writing process. Too often, we teachers also have gotten stuck on the product, rather than understanding the processive nature of the activity we are teaching.

Stages of the writing process "Writing" consists of various stages. At times it may appear that ,,writing,, is simply putting words on paper— penmanship, virtually, the scribal act. For untrained, inexperienced Basic Writers, it often is just that. In actuality, though, there are four major stages in the writing process. These stages have been labelled differ­ ently by a variety of thinkers. Despite the labels, there appears to be a certain unanimity in their understanding of what the stages themselves consist of. The discussion that follows is drawn largely from the understanding of process offered by James Britton.^7 The first stage Britton calls conception. In this stage, one arrives at an idea for writing. One chooses a topic and discovers something to say about the topic. Wilson Currin Snipes says tb§t at this stage, the writer "discovers what he thinks.’"*8 Others calls this stage "prewriting.M This stage may be short or long, depending on time available and on the nature of the project. It is not uncommon for dissertation writers to spend months at this stage. Nor is it uncommon for students in school to use a very few minutes— even seconds— for both stages one and two. Stage two, called by Britton incubation, is an inter­ esting one. Here, the idea germinates underground; it grows. In the growing, ideas do not stay still. Students often need to learn how to trust this below-the-surface germination of ideas, for oftentimes, in the absence of overt activity, the writing appears to be at a standstill, which appearance can generate much anxiety. In reality, much is happening underground. Bertrand Russell describes this stage well: 85 It appeared that after first contemplating a bo ole on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking. Sometimes I would find, after a time, that I had made a mistake, and that I could not write the book I had had in mind. But often I was more fortunate. Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my subconscious, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation.4® This growing or incubation, called by Angus Wilson "•the gestatory period , • "-50 may take place on paper or in the head. Free writing--writing through a chapter— may be necessary for the writer to see where the idea is heading. In this stage, the writer arrives at some plan for executing the approach to the subject. How this plan is arrived at, though, varies from person to person. While some may outline, others would use free writing or a first draft of the paper as a means to finding an approach to the subject. The end result of this stage, arrived at via moment of insight, outlining, or what have you, is an understanding of what the paper will look like. We know where we want it to head and probably what the various pieces will be. Stage three is the production, generation, or execu­ tion stage. The plan formulated in stage two is now executed on paper. Herein lies the actual writing of a draft. One attempts to do with the idea what one had planned to do. This is in part a penmanship stage, but it also involves thought, for as the words are being caught on paper, the idea may well be shifting in the process. One is in a sense both generating the idea on paper and testing the validity of the idea against the reality of the silent sounding board of the page, as a preliminary to the actual sounding board of another person. Britton does not include in his discussion any mention of stage four, but I find it impossible to think of the writing process without the "changert stage of revising and editing. This stage involves beating the paper into an acceptable shape for someone else's perusal. In part it is the size and significance of the change which subdivides this stage for me into revising and editing. Revising involves making gross changes of three main types: addi­ tions, deletions, or alterations. Paragraphs may be deleted; sentences may be switched around; words may be 8 6 added. This is change at the level of manipulation of language. The editing substage involves correction— cosmetic alterations of the text so that it is not offen­ sive or distracting to an educated reader. This is the level of fine tuning— making minor adjustments in spelling, punctuation, word choice, so that the entire piece runs smoothly. Editing is a less creative task than revising, which in turn is a less creative activity than the first three stages. When one is in the creative state described earlier, it is difficult to move into revising, for one needs objectivity, not excitement, at this stage. One needs a certain cut-throatedness, approaching one's own words, as some have said, as though they were written by one's proverbial worst enemy. Thus the recommendation frequently made to allow a piece of writing to "set" for hours or days makes sense. Just as one climbs onto the creative plane of imagination to produce a piece of writing, one has to climb down from it to revise.

Handling the stages of the writing process It should be clear that people handle these stages differently. Indeed, the key difference I have observed in the operation of the process is whether various writers treat the stages as an internal event (occurring in the mind alone) or an external event (occurring on a sheet of paper). The first two stages perhaps lend themselves to greatest individual variation. Journals, lists of notes, brainstorming, dialogue, reading, are some of the many ways to discover a topic and an idea. Incubation, planning the composition, can occur either internally or externally. (There are internal and external composers.) Some writers use notes jotted to themselves. Others do the entire plan­ ning of the composition in their heads. Some— probably few, as we are discovering— use formal, fully developed outlines. In a questionnaire done by Janet Bnig in 1964, Emig asked various professional and academic writers, among them Jerome Bruner, John Ciardi, B. F. Skinner, how they plan their writing. Her data show a variety of planning practices. Only four of the sixteen authors followed text­ book procedures of using an elaborate outline. The majority used a rough outline, which varied from phrases to "fa quick conspectus."' Max Bluestone explains why he does not use a rigid outline: 87 The rough scheme ^Tiis writing plan^ is a map to the territory of my thoughts. The map is never precise, first because the territory has not been thoroughly explored and second because writing is in itself the discovery of a new territory. I usually anticipate discovery in the act of composition.5 At times our thoughts are shapes, forms, imprints only, which cannot be "outlined" until we have had a chance to examine them on paper. This thinking things through on paper may well depend on the stage of our thinking or experiencing at the time of the writing. In "Composition: Teaching a Variety of Ways to Proceed," Sister Agnes Ann Pastva says, When my writing is tortured, the cause is not so much a matter of dangling modifiers and vague ante­ cedents as a vagueness in my thought— the result of unfinished experience. The unclear words fout there* on the sheet are sure signs that all is not well within, that my thought and the substance of what I am attempting to communicate have not yet been brought to integrity.52 If we have fully lived the subject already, we can probably leap immediately to an outline stage. But if we are still immersed in the experience or in feelings about the experi­ ence, such that we cannot objectify the topic, cannot hold it at least somewhat at arm*s length from ourselves, cannot reflect yet upon it, the thoughts are likely to not be organized into a coherent framework in our heads, and we probably are not ready to outline. Outlining itself may be an internal operation. Depend­ ing on the length of a composition, outlines may not need to go down on paper. I doubt if most books and doctoral dissertations survive without some sort of written-down outline. But a writer who is doing the standard two-page student theme and who has either clearly thought through ideas and experience or has discovered them in the process of prewritin§ may well not need to set down on paper his or her organization of ideas. The formal outline then becomes a nicety to please an instructor rather than a felt necessity on the part of the writer. The actual writing and editing must, of course, be largely external acts. With some writers, however, para­ graphs emerge fully formed internally. With others, the writer writes his or her way into and out of the paragraph, focusing more deliberately on each sentence. Here, too, is room for individual variation. Choice of writing 88 environment, for example, varies from rock music to opera and shady trees to well-lit library. Various idiosyncra­ sies and personal preferences play their part in making the writing process a uniquely individual experience. With revising as with prewriting, the internal- external distinction is important. At times I have seen my students frustrated when assignments or even part of their grade called for their having to revise papers. The sources of their frustration may be many and various. As Mina Shaughnessy points out, most students do not view a paper as an occasion for l e a r n i n g ; 53 once the paper is "finished,1* they do not see the value of reworking it, especially if it has caught the idea they wanted it to capture. For others, the paper is a "test" situation; with their finished product, they have either passed or failed the teat. Some of my Basic Writing students were extremely uncomfortable with the changes that occurred to their papers and their ideas in revising. An important group of writers to be cognizant of are those who do the bulk of their revising internally. Two of my Ph.D. friends do very little external revising of papers; they rework sentence after sentence in their heads. Writers who use this **mental editing of ideas'*5^ may find it extremely uncomfortable to have to revise themes in a course, for such an assignment goes against the grain of their usual operation as writers. Key, too, is when the revising is done, another point of individuality. Revision does not necessarily come at the end or near the end of the process. Both for internal and external revisers, revision may accompany composing. Some writers set down a single sentence, only to scratch it out and begin a n e w . Some revise so much during com­ posing that the creative thrust of "composing" is lost. Writers who fight with each sentence and word in the process of their going down on paper will probably not have to do much*fighting with changing those sentences and words later. Although some (Macrorie, e.g.) might counsel that mental editing of ideas should rightly be saved until the final writing stages rather than mixed in with stage two, mental editing is a method used nonetheless even by some English Ph.D.*s. Others revise during composing and during a discrete later stage. Some free write the entire paper and revise only after everything is written; others revise during the writing stage. Depending on the personality of the writer, it is not a mistake to proceed in either way. The important thing to bear in mind about the stages of writing is that the stages are not always discrete and 8 9 the process is not always linear. The division is often messy. Our penchant for clear, separable units drives us to posit three distinct stages. Yet, as X am suggesting, and as Qnig's questionnaire data show, the stages "are not fixed in an inexorable sequence. Rather, they occur and reoccur throughout the process."56 The linear model posited by most texts and in most of our heads does not hold up when tested against the actual practices of real- life writers. There is no "lock-step chronological process.'*57 Rather, there is shift, flux, movement. And the exact quantity and quality of the movement varies from writer to writer. As Donald H. Graves discovered in his study of the writing processes of young children, "the writing process is as variable and unique as the individ­ ual's personality."5® 90 Endnote s

^fuch of what follows in this chapter has grown from my reading of James Britton et aL. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) (London: Macmillan Educationf 1975). Britton1s thinking is similar to mine on many points. Unless otherwise indicated, however, even where there are apparent similarities in thought and expression, the ideas expressed are my own. 2Britton, p. 5. 3Britton, p. 82. 4 Britton, p. 81. e ^Britton, p. 83. ^Britton, p. 1. ^Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers (New York; Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 133f. ®Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations (New York; Oxford University Press, pp. 15, 37-38. ^Britton, p. 40. 1(*E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Philosophy of Composition (Chicago: The University o^ Chicago Press, 1977;, pp. 22-23. 13\John Holt, What Do I Do Monday? (New York: E. P. Dut­ ton, 1970), p. 2131 ^^Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude VaWar OUambridge7 teas s.; The M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 119. 13Vygotsky, p. 122. 1^Vygotsky, p. 125. ^^Vygotsky, p. 126. 16Vygotsky, p. 120. 17Dan I. Slobin, Psycholinguistics (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1971), pp. 8-9. 91 18Britton, p. 47. 1QBritton, p. 4. Cf. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York; Harper & Row, 1962), p. £l: MI believe that we should accredit in ourselves the capac­ ity for appraising our own articulation. Indeed, all our strivings towards precision imply our reliance on such a capacity." 20Vygotsky, p. 18. 21Vygotsky, p. 149. 22Vygotsky, p. 135. 25Vygotsky, p. 18. 24Vygotsky, p. 46. 2^Britton, p. 33. Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole), trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston, 111.’:” Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 115-116, speculates in a similar vein about other compensations for the absence of persons: "The tele­ phone, telegraph, photography, phonograph, moving pictures, radio, and television play a role of ever-increasing impor­ tance in the existence of contemporary man. . . .It's as if contemporary civilization, mass civilization which renders men absent from one another, were trying to compensate for that absence by increasing the possibilities of artificial presence.M 27Britton, p. 30. 28James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968),p. 73. 29 Moffett, p. 31. 30Moffett, p. 82. ^Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964), p. 159. 32Koestler, p. 208. ^Koestler, p. 206. 34Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 196777 I» 55: 92 "Feeling includes the sensibility of very low animals and the whole realm of human awareness and thought, the sense of absurdity, the sense of justice, the perception of meaning, as well as emotion and sensation." 35Cf. Shaughnessy, p. 7. 36Elbow, p. 27. 37Cf. the discussion of reflection and anticipation in Chapter Two, pp. 9-15. See also Gusdorf, p. 37. 3®Britton says, p. 26, "There is also the need to get it right with the self, the need to arrive at the point where one has the satisfaction of presenting what is to be presented in the way one thinks it should be done." ^Gusdorf, p. 50. 40Langer, pp. 38-39. 4lLanger, p. 94. 4^cf. E. M. Forster in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking Press, 1967), p. 28: "Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running away with you— which happens to every­ one— that's happened to me, Ifm afraid." 43Cf. Elbow, pp. 30-35. ^Ken Macrorie, Telling Writing (New York: Hayden. 1970), pp. 202-213. 43Gail Godwin, "The Watcher at the Gates," New York Times Magazine, 9 Jan. 1977, p. 31. 46See the advice given by Elbow, pp. 25-30. 47Britton, pp. 22-37. 48Wilson Currin Snipes, "Notes on Choice in Rhetoric," CCC, 27 (May, 1976), 153. ^Bertrand Russell, "How I Write," in his Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965j^ pp. 211-212. Quoted in Malcolm Cowley, Introd., Writers at Work, ed. Cowley, p. 9. 93 51Quoted in Janet Emig, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (Urbana, III.: NC'JE, p. 43. S2Sister Agnes Ann Pastva, S.N.D., "Composition: Teaching a Variety of Ways to Proceed," CCC, 26 (December, 1975), 283. ^Shaughne ssy, p . 7. 5^Pastva, p. 283. See also Richard Beach, "Self- Evaluation Strategies of Extensive Revisers and Non­ revisers," CCC. 27 (May, 1976), 160-164. 55Shaughne ssy, pp. 7-8. S6Emig, p. 25. 57Emig, p. 25. 58Donald H. Graves, "An Examination of the Writing Processes of Seven Tear Old Children," Research in the Teaching of English. 9 (Winter, 1975), 237. CHAPTER IV

A PERSON-CENTERED DIRECTION FOR THE TEACHING OF WRITING

Introduction In Errors and Expectations. Mina Shaughnessy says, "Teachers must do something onMonday morning, and this reality forces them either to do what their teachers did on Monday morning or to invent English composition anew out of their understanding of the craft and their observa­ tions of students learning to write."3' Like the latter Monday-morning teacher, I aim in this chapter at inventing composition anew. As promised in the Introduction, we move now to the close-up shot, to focus on the person in the teaching of' writing. To the understanding of persons in Chapter Two and the understanding of the writing event in Chapter Three, this chapter adds a teaching direction growing out of those sections which honors first the needs and qualities of the persons doing the writing. The chapter begins with definitions and assumptions about learning and teaching. Then, it focuses primarily on understandings about learning to write, including developmental stages, and on the teacher-student relation­ ship most recommended for problem writers, whether begin­ ning or Basic. The chapter concentrates on orientations and directions rather than on a specific classroom model, for the teacher's understandings and responses are key in working with problem writers. The person-centered direction suggested here could be combined with a variety of the classroom approaches discussed in Chapter One. While the proposed direction would work nicely with a tutorial setting or individualized instruction, such a set­ ting is not necessary for this approach to bear fruit. Although this chapter says more about persons than it does about the written product, let it be clear that in no way is there an intention to divorce persons from products. The teacher is continually working with student papers. It is those very products which offer clues as to which student needs which motivation, which kind of 94 95 support, which writing problem solved. What I mean to say here is that working with products in isolation from the persons who turn them out--an extensTon of the New Criticism to composition teaching— is to operate on assumptions about errors rather than on known facts.2 We must work with our students in order to understand the sources for their particular difficulties and therefore to teach them as much as we can. The reverse is also true. I do not mean that we are to work with persons in isolation from their written products. The two need to go hand in hand.

Learning and Teaching: Definitions and Hypotheses Like the field of composition, education also suffers from the absence of a single, all-encompassing, clearly articulated learning theory to which all practitioners subscribe. Models and theories abound, to be sure, some, such as Jerome Bruner*s and Jean Piaget*s, with more devotees than others, but none is authoritative or gives a single vision to our teaching endeavors. As teacher, one is forced then either to invent one's own theory or eclectically to select from other theories those hypotheses which appear to make the most sense. Thus this chapter begins with definitions and hypotheses about learning and teaching, language learning and composition teaching, rather than with a firm foundation in accepted, tested theory. It is important, nonetheless, to articulate the definitions and assumptions before moving on.

Learning and Teaching First, a clarification of what I mean by "learning" and "teaching." Learning I view as a process which has personal significance for the learner and results in a change in attitude, understanding, perception, or behavior on the part of the learner. Teachers then are releasers, enablers, of persons. Teaching involves the releasing of what is inside persons— a genuine leading forth, from the Latin root of education, "educere." Teachers, then, are persons who, insofar as it is within their power to do so, arrange conditions so that learning might occur. Teachers are persons who share their quest for meaning with their students; authentic persons who are genuinely open and accessible to students; persons who see the limit­ less potential in their students and who do their best to allow students to grow and develop that potential in a climate of freedom and acceptance. 9 6 A key hypothesis governing this chapter is that significant learning begins with an experiental, relevance, or problem base within the person's own needs and desires. This assumption comes from the thinking of such educators as Paulo Freire, John Dewey, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartmer, and psychologists Charles Curran and Carl Rogers. Freire, for example, views significant learning as that which focuses on the present reality of learners and their problems. "Accordingly," he says, "the point of departure must always be with men in the 'here and now'. . . ."3 His problem-posing pedagogy, called conscientization, stresses the learners' increased con­ sciousness of their own situations in the world, so as to become, not objects who are oppressed, but rather sub­ jects who transform the world. For Postman and Weingartner in Teaching as a Subversive Activity, learning "perceived as" relevant-is"Tcey. They state that "regardless of its source, unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place."4 Dewey and Rogers also speak of experientially signif­ icant learning as learning based on one's own experiences and problems. Rogers suggests that "the hypothesis upon which he ^The teacher^ would build is that students who are in real contact with life problems wish to learn, want to grow, seek to find out, hope to master, desire to create."5 In conducting workshops versus teaching required courses, Rogers has seen that "significant learning occurs more readily in relation to situations perceived as prob­ lems. Persons coming to workshops bring with them problems they wish to see solved; students in required courses bring Instead a more passive orientation. Dewey's approach is similarly a problem-based one. In Experience and Education, he speaks of "the organic connection between education and personal experience."7 in How We Think, he stresses problem-solving— thinking— as the way to education. Psychologist Curran calls meaningful learning "self- invested." It "carries with it," he says, "a process of internalization— making the knowledge one's own— which makes what is learned a new growth in the person. . . .A new self is developing, with all the psychological implications that such an emergent process involves."” Like Carl Rogers, Curran measures the adequacy of learning" in the same way as the "adequacy of counseling." For counseling is, after all, simply a specialized example of a one-to-one learning situation. The measure of adequacy, in Curran's words, is 97 the degree to which the person's behavior is modified toward the fulfillment of his more adequate life values, as well as the degree to which he not simply knows more about himself, others, and the world, but also has genuinely and creatively comnitted himself to significant aspects of this knowledge.9 The model for a teaching-learning situation which makes sense to me combines a Rogerian therapy paradigm with Freire's pedagogy. In "Significant Learning: In Therapy and in Education," Rogers sets forth five essential qualities for learning in either setting. First, the learner has a problem and wishes to cope with it. Perhaps she or he is having difficulty changing behavior and needs help to make the change. Next is the congruence of teacher or therapist. They present themselves as real persons, as they really are. They understand and accept their feel­ ings in a given situation. Third, unconditional positive regard is essential. In such a climate, the learner or patient knows unconditional acceptance from the other person. Fourth, empathic understanding. The therapist or teacher attempts to put himself or herself in the patient's or learner's shoes, so as to understand where that person is coming from and what it feels like to be coming from that place. Fifth is communication. The teacher's realness, acceptance of the learner, and empathic understanding are communicated to the learner.10 To this Rogerian model I would add Freire*s stress on dialogue and consciousness.

Language Learning and Learning to Write Several assumptions from sociolinguistics and the field of composition also govern the approach to teaching writing presented in this chapter. We turn now to these assumptions • First, each person possesses linguistic competence. That competence enables us to intuit the language rules for whatever speech community it is we are born into. Given this understanding, from Chomsky, I would posit that within each of us there exists a language mechanism which is responsible for our intuiting not only the rules for speaking and listening but also the rules for the second- order language activities of reading and writing. It follows closely from the first hypothesis that, barring exceptional cases, such as retarded persons, everyone possesses the linguistic competence to learn how to write. Support for this second assumption comes from 9 8 the learning theories of Jerome Bruner and Benjamin Bloom. Fundamental to Brunerian learning theory is "the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively at any stage in development."11 Bloom adds a corollary which focuses more fully on the needs of the learner. According to Bloom, all students are capable of effective learning, if given favorable learning conditions.!2 Some experimental evi­ dence from the field of composition supports the Brunerian hypothesis. Fre- and post-test paragraphs in the City University of New York Basic Waiting program, done over the space of one or two semesters, are at times so radi­ cally different that one would suspect that a different person had written t h e m . 13 Similarly, pre- and post-test paragraphs in our own Writing Workshop, done over a mere ten weeks, often show marked improvement, as evidenced by a rise in holistic scores when evaluated by a team of objective, trained holistic graders who had no knowledge of whether paragraphs were pre-tests or post-tests and who were not part of the Workshop teaching staff. Students moved from learning how to write sentences on a page so as to form a paragraph to developing and supporting a topic sentence. Thus it is that, barring mental retardation on the part of the student, I believe that writing can be taught to persons at virtually any age. A third key understanding is that we do not learn "once and for all" how to write. We are continually in need of retraining and especially of practice. Shaughnessy says, Few people, even among the most accomplished of writers, can comfortably say that they have finished learning to write, nor even that they always write as well as they can. Writing is something writers are always learning to do.14 Another key concept as ground for a person-centered approach to teaching writing is the linguistic distinction between competence and performance. Anthropologist and sociolinguist Dell Hymes says, "An attempt is made to^ distinguish between what the speaker knows— what his in­ herent capacities are--and how he behaves in particular i n s t a n c e s . "l^ What the speaker "knows" refers to the concept of competence. How the speaker behaves in partic­ ular instances represents his or her performance. It is axiomatic that performance rarely equals competence. It is the task of the writing teacher to enhance performance, while recognizing that said performance is not equatable with competence. 99 Finally, it is important to recognize that performance varies. That students write differently on different topics and on different days has often been acknowledged.3-6 Similarly, sociolinguistics research, especially that of William Labov, reveals vast differences in quantity and quality of verbal production, depending on the context of the situation.3-7 Social context thus affects language performance. Language performance varies also according to psychological variables. Psycholinguist Dan I. Slobin notes that "Factors like fatigue, switching of attention, distractability, emotional excitement, drugs, and so on, affect linguistic performance in many ways not envisaged by the linguistic model of competence ."I8 Understanding the social context within which language is being generated and understanding psychological variables at work within a given person can go a long way toward improving perfor­ mance. It would seem to make sense for the composition teacher to do all that is possible to elicit the best performance from each student and to understand what the favorable conditions cure for each individual person to learn to write well.

Teaching Waiting; A Developmental Model Built into the direction for teaching writing pre­ sented here is the view of learning as a process, with the teacher beginning where students are and moving them step by step toward more mature writing. Beginning writing students usually cannot, for example, be catapulted suc­ cessfully into academic referential prose if they have not dealt sufficiently with expressive writing. Rather than set up a barrier against success, teachers need to lead their students from that which they can do to that which they cannot. Thus it is the task of the writing teacher through a variety of diagnostic measures, including writing samples, objective tests, questionnaires, and, where pos­ sible, personality tests and tests of affective-cognitive style, and through observing and listening to the student, to determine at the outset of a term where each student writer is. In order to proceed step by step from whatever starting point, the teacher needs an awareness of the various steps and stages through which to lead a student who is learning to write. While some of these have been discussed in a variety of books and journals, most notably in James Britton’s The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18), James L. Kinneavy1s A TEeory o£ Discourse, and James Moffett’s Teaching tEe Universe of Discourse, nowhere has 1 0 0 the multiplicity of stages been pulled together, which this section of the chapter now sets out to do.

Readiness of the Organism A variety of pieces of evidence suggest: that, as the human organism learns language, it progresses through a variety of stages. Not until the person is ready are some things learned. Slobin notes that "the child cannot imitate structures which he is not yet capable of producing on his own."1® From the work of Roger Brown and Ursula Bellugi-Klima comes an illustration. Two-year-old Adam was told to answer this question posed by an interviewer: "Now, Adam, listen to what I say. Tell me which is better . . . some water or a water." Poor Adam at age two has not yet reached the stage where he can handle such a sophisticated request. His response is "Pop go weasel."20 Adam also had difficulty with a less sophisticated request. Asked to say "Where can I put them?", he could respond, out of his own system, only with ,fWhere I can put them7".21 Similarly, a child corrected for saying "he goed" cannot make the correction to "he went" until his or her rule system is ready to pull back from such an overgeneraliza­ tion. Nor does a child understand the distinction between "promise" and "tell" until ready.22 The point to be made here is that learning to speak is a developmental activity. The organism cannot (apparently) be pushed on to a stage it is not yet ready for. Depending on the age level at which writing is taught, readiness of the organism may be a crucial factor. In dealing with college freshmen, physical readiness is not an issue, although psychological readiness, in the way of motivation or positive versus negative self-concept, may well be. The concept is an important one to bear in mind.

Stages in Learning to write One of the reasons that teaching writing is such a complicated affair is in part that the process involves not just one set of stages, but several progressions, probably intertwining. In general, the movement is from that which is viewed as easy to that which is difficult. One set of stages involves the movement from one mode of discourse to another, proceeding from those forms that are seen as simpler to handle— narrative, e.g.— to'the more difficult forms of argument, evaluation, and persua­ sion. Such a progression has validity. Storytelling is 101 an activity which most humans engage in; most students can handle at least simple chronology w e l l .23 While it can be argued that it is difficult to do narrative well, especially expository narrative, the form nonetheless remains one which is easily accessible to most people. A related progression is that from concrete to ab­ stract. Here, descriptive paragraphs and observation exercises are assigned early in a course, in part on the assumption that students find concrete data easier to work with than they do abstractions. Justification for this movement would seem to come from Piaget's concepts of concrete operations and formal operations as stages in the development of childhood thought. Here, too, an argu­ ment can be made against the progression, for many students find it easier to write airy generalities than to come down the ladder of abstraction to the real world of specifics. Nonetheless, it would seem that concrete data, grounded in reality, are an appropriate starting point for thinking and writing. Another set of developmental stages has to do with movement from the self outward, in content, audience, and purpose for communication. With content the movement is from writing about the self and one's own experiences to writing about the world which is external to us. Autobiog­ raphies and diaries are characteristic of the first type; reports and persuasive arguments, the latter. Usually such content is thought of as a starting point because it allows the writer to use first what she or he knows. I would suggest that another reason for starting with such content is that it allows persons to become more conscious of who they are, what they know and value. From there they can move more easily to consciousness of external reality (books, other persons, events, knowledge in general) as it relates to the self. Although it may well be possible to leap immediately to one's response to external reality without dealing with knowing oneself, such a leap often produces shallow writing. How can we know where we stand vis-a-vis the world unless we know where we stand vis-a-vis ourselves? A related progression in content is from material close to us in time (reports, for example) to material,we are farther away from (memories or recollec­ tions).2* The progression with audience moves along an intimacy dimension, from self as audience to a less and less intimate audience, ending, finally, with that awesome unknown "public" of published works. Britton's study shows movement along this continuum. As students grow older, they write more frequently to the teacher as judge than to teacher as 1 0 2 sympathetic adult. Thirty percent fewer students in year seven wrote to the audience labelled "Teacher-leamer dialogue" than in year one, while twenty percent more wrote to the teacher as examiner.25 Also, the purpose for the comounication develops as writers mature. Initially, the purpose is self-expression, with movement toward persuasion of other persons. Another way of describing this progres­ sion is to speak of a movement from expressive to referen­ tial prose, as discussed in Chapter Three. Britton sug­ gests strongly that expressive writing might play a key role in a child's learning. It must surely be the most accessible form in which to write, since family conversation will have provided him with a familiar model. Furthermore, a writer who envisages his reader as someone with whom he is on intimate terms must surely have very favourable conditions for using the process of writing as a means of exploration and discovery.26 Also, he says, . . . /T/t must be true that until a child does write expressively he is failing to feed into the writing process the fullness of his linguistic resources— the knowledge of words and structures he has built up in speech— and that it will take him longer to arrive at the point where writing can serve a range of his purposes as broad and diverse as the purposes for which he uses speech. This, at all events, provided us with a major hypothesis regarding the development of writing ability in school: that what children write in the early stages should be a form of written-down expressive speech, and what they read should also be, generally speaking, expressive. As their writing and reading progress side by side, they will move from this starting point into the three broadly differentiated kinds of writ­ ing— our major categories— and, in favourable circum­ stances , their mode of doing so will be by a kind of shuttling between their speech resources on the one hand and the written forms they meet on the other. Thus, in developmental terms, the expressive is a kind of matrix from which differentiated forms of mature writing are developed.27 I would speculate that a similar movement may well be necessary for any beginning writer, adult, adolescent, and child alike. Britton recognizes, too, that one does not in any sense "move beyond" an expressive stage, but 103 rather develops more mature expressive forms for its interpersonal and exploratory functions.28 Various developmental stages thus are apparent in learning to write. To know which intersection of these stages is most useful for a given student at a given time is next to impossible. The best that can be asked is that teachers recognize that there are progressions in learning to write and do their best to move students step by step along the various continue. Most important, if we accept this developmental hypothesis, it would seem that a begin­ ning writer could not immediately leap into the more advanced of the stages but would rather need sufficient practice with simpler tasks at the earlier stages. On the basis of my own experience in teaching writing, even college-age beginning writers need some experience with the early stages of writing. Rather than have the luxury of taking several years to go through the stages, they must go through them encapsulated into the space of a quarter or less. It is possible that in working with such older students, we can take advantage of their capacity for self-conscious reflection to speed up the process. But, given Britton's insights and my own experience, my view is that, even for the college student, none of the stages can be o'erleaped. Practice is needed in the early stages— free writing, pleasurable exercises, journals— such that students gain confidence in their abilities to communicate in writing and such that they come to enjoy writing as a form of connminication. To o'erleap the expres­ sive stage or other early stages on the grounds that college writing asks something more difficult of the student is to deny students the much-needed support they derive from an initial immersion in an expressive stage and the comfort with self as writer and with the writing act which the early stages provide. A final word about developmental stages has to do with a phase which not all writers experience: that of egocentrism. Just as human beings living in the world go through various egocentric stages, at which they are so caught up in self that they cannot see the distinction between themselves and others, so a beginning writer or a writer of a particular personality type frequently goes through this stage of human and speech development. During this stage, problems with coherence, unity, lack of clarity abound, stemming from the writer's being so trapped inside his or her own skin that he or she thinks a paper is clear when in fact the reader can see few connections from sentence to sentence and cannot understand the writer.29 Such a writer is often startled to discover that the reader does not understand the paper. Often the comment is made, 104 "I thought everyone would understand that.11 Evidence for such a developmental stage comes from my own teaching experience and from the work of Piaget in tracing stages of learning to talk. Piaget's model moves from an egocen­ tric stage of communication to the self (autism) to com­ munication to others,30 i am suggesting that a very similar model holds for at least some people in learning to write.

Development of Intuitions Frank Smith says about learning to read that the learner is continually discovering the rules that apply in the situation.31 The same point might well be made about learning to write. As with so many activities in life, the stated rules and the tacit understandings are likely to be two different sets of rules,32 with practi­ tioners knowing the intuited rules so well that they cannot easily bring them to the level of consciousness so as to pass them on. It is thus the task of the student to discover the "real" rules. Britton notes that It is possible that much of the advice normally given to children about how to write effectively would, if taken, increase the difficulties. . . .If he ^ h e teacher^ then makes precise stylistic demands, gram­ matical prohibitions and admonitions, and insists, for instance, on the looking up in the dictionary of all words where the writer is in doubt, he may bring the conscious choosing and the mediated processes of the writer so much into the forefront of his mind that the production of ideas is interrupted to the point where it dries up. • . . This is not to suggest that it is wrong to try to influence how children write, but merely to say that direct advice during writing is seldom h e l p f u l * 3 3 The question arises as to the precise role played by actual "rules" in learning to write, as opposed to a more intuitive and naturalistic approach. I would suggest that, just as the organism intuits the grammatical rules for the language community into which we are bom, so the organism, through practice and corrective feedback, intuits what does and does not "work" in writing. Through writing and through making mistakes, we learn the demands of the written medium, and we come to internalize those demands so that we can produce them on command* In discussing the value of trial-and-error learning versus preteaching rules, characterized as a "cookbook" approach, James Moffett suggests that teaching writing in "how-to-do-it" 105 fashion, through the "advice, exhortation, and injunction" of textbooks and classroom preteaching, 34 forces students to adopt an error-avoidance strategy. My own experience bears this out. In the Basic Writing program in which I am presently teaching, when students are taught to focus on, e.g., spelling errors, their flow is turned off, and they become paralyzed as they try to avoid errors. On a larger scale, students told what the problems of a partic­ ular assignment are will work to avoid those problems, be they unity, coherence, or whatever, rather than concentrate their energies on the topic itself. Three key difficulties arise here. One is, as Moffett points out so well, that not all writers are likely to make the same mistakes. For them, preteaching and avoiding errors (understood here to mean both the large-scale composition "errors" such as coherence and the minutiae of editing mistakes) is a waste of time. Secondly, the cock- book method does not give students a feeling of success and confidence,35 a damning indictment. And, most impor­ tantly, the cookbook approach encourages students to avoid mistakes rather than to get in touch with what writing is all about: making meaning from experience and sharing that meaning with others. In recommending trial and error as a more legitimate approach to learning to write, Moffett says, I think any learning psychologist would agree that avoiding error is an inferior learning strategy to capitalizing on error. The difference is between looking over your shoulder and looking where you are going. Nobody who intends to learn to do something wants to make mistakes. In that sense, avoidance of error is assumed in the motivation itself. But if he is allowed to make mistakes with no other penalty than the failure to achieve his goal, then he knows why they are to be avoided and wants to find out how to correct them. Errors take on a different meaning, they define what is good. Otherwise the learner engages with the authority and not with the intrinsic issues.3® If students must be encouraged to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes to become confident in themselves as writers, so must they learn to develop their own intui­ tions rather than to follow a set of injunctions about how to write. Here, the advice of Peter Elbow is helpful. Elbow brings to the teaching of writing a profound trust in the self of the writer and in his or her ability to^ find the words to express meanings or to find new meanings in the act of writing. He uses the term "cooking" to describe one method of overcoming writing blocks: four 106 hour-long sessions consisting of forty-five minutes of writing through a subject and fifteen minutes looking over the prose until a central core or "center of gravity” emerges. Elbow believes in writing practice--writing a lot— as a way to learn to write. His trust is impressive. He advises students to "treat words as though they are potentially able to grow. Learn to stand out of the way and provide the energy or force the words need to find their growth process."3' The main advice he offers throughout Writinfl without Teachers is "to start writing and keep writing. 5^ He- trusts that, through such a process, we move past writing blocks and eventually arrive at what we have to say. I cannot agree more. Elbow notes, though, why the old writing model per­ sists, a model which, I suggest, relies on rules, preteach­ ing, rather than on the development of intuitions about writing: And so, because cooking and growing are not recognized as good when they do occur, they don't occur enough. Millions of people simply don't write: they find it too frustrating or unrewarding simply because they cannot make cooking happen. Also there are many people who succeed in following the old model. They patch up, mop up, neaten up the half- cooked and unsatisfactory ideas they find lying around in their head. What they write is boring and obvious. Schools often reward boring obvious /sic/ writing. Then there are the tiny minority of cases in which someone finds already lying around in his head some­ thing brilliant and interesting. And so he too can write according to the old model. One other reason for the persistence of the old model: it promises structure and control and that's just what you yearn for when you're having trouble with writing.

Development of Self-Reflection Self-reflection also needs to be developed, for not all students begin a writing course able to reflect on self and experience. As students become more conscious of their internal and external realities, however, their writing tends to become stronger and their voice more forceful. The stress on self-reflection grows largely out of phenomenology, which emphasizes consciousness and reflection over one's past and present. The student writer is asked lure to examine his or her life, come to under­ stand it better, and then to write about that understanding. 1 0 7 In addition, students are also encouraged to become conscious of their workings as writers— to look at how they proceed to write, at why they commit the errors they make, at why they choose particular topics— and to work on behavioral changes to implement those new understandings of self as writer. Ve have seen in Chapter Two that reflection is an important way of making meaning out of one's life experi­ ences. I am suggesting here that the activity is also of use for the student writer. An analogy from art education helps to illustrate the point. As young artists are in­ volved in creation, they need to internalize standards by which the teacher evaluates a piece of work. Just so with students who are learning to write. They need to under­ stand what the criteria for an effective piece of writing are and need to internalize those criteria so that through practice their own work reflects those standards. It is helpful for student writers to understand their workings as writers— how they are proceeding to write and how that procedure correlates with the finished product. Do they choose topics about which they know enough and which hold some interest for them, or do they choose the first topic that comes to mind? Is the paper that results an effective one? In discussing the utility of self-reflection, art educator Kenneth Beittel says, "Self-reflective learning is thought to have a reformulative base equivalent to that conveyed by the concept of a 'regulated system. '”40 He offers a model from Elizabeth Maccia which incorporates such reformulation in a cycle of stages: production phase (studio period), an evaluative phase with self-reflective feedback and self-correction, a reformulation (studio period2>t another evaluation with self-reflective feedback, and so on.

Journals and self-reflection Students usually are asked to do enough writing to keep a teacher more than busy reading papers in a writing course. Why ask them to keep journals as well? The journal has several positive benefits, in my experience. First, it provides opportunity for writing practice— for making halting starts, for going off in wrong directions on bad topics, for making mistakes in grammar and spelling while still learning to capture ideas. Next, it allows the student the opportunity to act like a writer— to choose topics, to play with style and language, and to see what he or she wishes to write about. Third, it affords the student the opportunity to reflect on his or her life experiences and thus to get to know himself or herself 1 0 8 better as a person. It allows the student to discover that material which she or he has something to say about, material which could be transformed into paragraphs or essays. And, not the least important, although not often discussed, it allows the teacher an opportunity to get to know his or her students better as persons. 1 for one teach better when 1 know who and where my students are. There are various ways to respond to journals and various types of journals. One teacher I know assigns four entries per week on a choice of topics given by him; one of those entries (he recomnends which one) grows into a theme. Another teacher asks that students focus their entries on the classroom itself--on readings done, discus­ sions held, questions needing to be asked. A third asks students, with totally free choice of topics, to select interesting thoughts and events in their lives and write about those. Responses from teachers vary from S-U grades to long personal letters— virtual entries in and of them­ selves— to students. 1 use S-U grades but vary what I ask of students in the journal as the term goes on. At first, 1 will encourage and accept virtually anything written and will praise well-chosen words, specific details, interesting topics. As the term goes on, though, while I continue to praise the same items, 1 ask for more and more structure, greater reflection. And I have found that when 1 ask for it, I get it, but when X do not demand it, I do n 1t . Students tend to respond favorably to journals. My students have usually enjoyed theirs; beginning writers have enjoyed them more than they have themes. Others have come to see that their journals helped them to understand themselves as persons and as writers better. At times, entries have occasioned dialogue between the student and me on a matter that was troubling him or her. I have read powerful entries on drugs, loneliness, and identity crises that have led to discussions between us and at times to reassurance that the student was a worthwhile person. Of course, the student who views the journal as "another assignment" will not reap those benefits or see the activi­ ty in such a positive light as students mentioned here. Of the different types of writing in an expository writing course, the journal offers the greatest potential of evoking personal investment in writing, because of its closeness to the self and its opportunities for self- awareness. Once a student invests self in some kind of writing, investment in other types becomes possible. 109 Increasing consciousness of self as writer Hand-in-hand with self-refleetion comes consciousness- raising— increasing consciousness of self as writer. Unless students' writing problems are surfaced, are brought to the level of their conscious awareness such that they recognize what is actually happening in the writing rather than resting with some faulty notions about their prose or, worse yet, about themselves ("I'm careless" or "I don't take my time"), students will never correct errors and overcome difficulties. That is, unless the student can actually see who he or she is here— someone who does not know the rules for comma use or someone who does make mistakes in subject-verb agreement— unless the student stops trying to defend his or her image of self and can actually look at who he or she is and how she or he writes, there is little hope for error correction. Shaughnessy speaks of the students' need to develop "new eyes," a "shift in perception." Basic Mriters in particular need to look at "the way they ^sentenceaj work rather than what they mean."^ Carol Reed recommends such an approach in a second- dialect- learning situation. In a thought-provoking arti­ cle, "Adapting TESL Approaches to the Teaching of Written Standard English as a Second Dialect to Speakers of Ameri­ can Black English Vernacular," she discusses this approach, one based on raising the students* level of consciousness about the sources for their errors. She uses contrastive analysis, especially between Black English Vernacular and Standard English, as part of the "de-brainwashing process" in dispelling myths about themselves and their culture. She also relies on a variety of Black English discourse forms, such as "toasts" and "sounding." The thrust of the approach is remarkably positive* A note of caution, however, about consciousness of self as writer and language user in this teaching setting. On the surface, Reed's approach would seem to be an ideal one, for it clearly meshes with the understandings pre­ sented earlier. In my experience, however, this approach has been less successful than one would hope, for inter­ twined with it are some important relationship considera­ tions. For the Black teacher working with Black students, such consciousness-raising will work and indeed would help to give the added respect and self-assurance which helps to create good writers. The white teacher in the same setting, though, unless exceptionally assertive, aware, and able to relate well to Blacks, may well experience some feeling from students of cultural invasion— the "how dare you perceive me as Black?" phenomenon. Reed herself 1 1 0 points this out. In that Black English speakers share the misconceptions of the larger society about their "bad grannnar" and "sloppy speech," /i/t can be expected that the Black teacher who is also a native-speaker of the dialect will be at a decided advantage when confronting such attitudes in the student. For if the teacher's attitude toward his native dialect is a positive one, the student will find it much more difficult to deny what he will nevertheless recognize as an obviously shared cultural experience between him and his teacher. He will, in spite of his reluctance, practically be forced to open himself at least to discussion of the ethnic charac­ teristics of his language behavior. And most impor­ tant, if his teacher is Black, he will most likely feel freer about doing so in a classroom setting. If his teacher is white, a somewhat different response pattern can be expected. The student will most likely resent the teacher's calling attention to what he regards as an embarrassing deficiency. He will most likely be wont to suspect racist motives, interpreting his teacher's intent as some subtle new attempt to trap him into admitting what he secretly suspects is proof of his linguistic inferiority. Therefore, the white teacher using these materials should not be surprised if the rapport he or she may have developed with the class seems temporarily shattered.*2 Rather than open this Pandora's box of relationship problems, particularly when one's contact time with the students is limited to a mere twenty to thirty hours a term, it may be better to forgo total consciousness at this stage and thus not to let the student know (unless he or she asks, which is a whole nuther matter) the source of the "errors" which stem from his or her speech community and cultural heritage. It is better at this point to work with less than total consciousness for the sake of effecting surface behavioral changes in editing and most especially for the sake of preserving the modicum of a relationship in which to work at all. However, where the teacher has the time, energy, and other personal resources to work through the interpersonal difficulties which almost assuredly will arise in touching the issue, the overall long-range rewards may be greater if conscious­ ness is striven for here, too. But the teacher needs to be aware of the short-term negative consequences. For the most part, a consciousness-raising approach is valuable. It is consistent with a phenomenological Ill understanding of meaning-making, as articulated in Chapter Two, Fart of making meaning out of the events of one's life involves bringing those events to the level of one's conscious awareness, examining oneself and one's life events as objects— objectifying them— so as to understand them. Kierkegaard's "existing individual," recall, is one who is aware of himself or herself as existing. Just as understanding and meaning-making are not possible while immersed in the day-to-day stream of events, just as one needs a perspectival history, a consciousness of one's past and future, so a beginning writer, while insnersed in a paper, cannot understand why she or he commits errors. The student needs distance, so as to objectify the paper rather than to see it as an extension of the self which produced it. And the teacher needs to present to the student the clear and real possibility of understanding error. It is possible to understand why errors are com­ mitted and, in the understanding, to conquer them. Spell­ ing is a marvellous case in point here. Host poor spellers feel themselves trapped; many offer the excuse that "I've always been a poor speller." As long as teacher and student both believe that to be true and operate with that myth, one step removed from reality, indeed, the problem will never be surmounted. On the other hand, once the teacher presents to the student the possibility of conquer­ ing misspellings by understanding the nature and source of the errors, the student is freed to look at words with that new set of eyes called for by Shaughnessy.

Teacher-Student Relationship As indicated in Chapter One, Basic Writing specialist Mina Shaughnessy recommends a decentralized classroom setting for Basic Writing students, one "where students participate as teachers as well as learners."^3 In such a setting, the role of the teacher is that which Britton calls "trusted adult and Shaughnessy calls "trusted friend or editor,"^5 In playing such a role, the teacher operates clearly on the side of the student. The task of the teacher is to understand what the student wishes to say in a paper and to call forth the best content, form, and expression that are in the student. !Riis role con­ trasts significantly with that which writing teachers have usually assumed and which, in Britton's study, most students placed the teacher in— that of teacher as judge or examiner.Notice what happens when the writing teacher plays the latter role. The teacher is "judge," final authority. The teacher rules on the rightness or wrongness of the communication. The teacher evaluates. Rather than freeing the student to communicate his or her 1 1 2 message, this stance freezes the student into "following rules," "doing what's expected,” "pleasing” an external authority, zeroing in on right and wrong. Rather than releasing energy, this role dams up energies. The de­ centralized classroom entails a special relationship between teacher and student, one which consists of several components •

Components of the Relationship

Relationship between equals In the main, the relationship is one wherein both teacher and student are co-learners, equals, in the class­ room. The relationship, then, is not to be one of power versus powerlessness, one of inequality, asymmetry, oppres­ sion, a "banking" or nutritive*" concept of education,47 wherein "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”48 Such an asymmetrical relationship makes assumptions about persons which are philosophically incon­ sistent with the understanding of persons presented in Chapter Two. It assumes that, rather than persons, sub­ jects, students are passive objects who know nothing, who are not motivated to know anything, and who do not make daily sense out of the reality in which they are enmeshed. It does not allow them a past history of lived experiences which have contributed to their present way of viewing the world, nor does it grant them the insight or question- asking potential to have problems and questions about their world. An unequal relationship damages the well-being of both teacher and learner, for it inhibits and stifles the development of each as persons. Charles Curran says, "Any attitude of superiority of the knower will create the same blocking as is found in the beginning of counseling-therapy for the client where the rI* knows more than the 1myself * and so holds itself superior ‘ ‘ — ^ */'° ” - J-.ts out that "condescension . client. . . ."-50 Paulo Freire says, One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every pre­ scription represents the imposition of one man's choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the man prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriberfs consciousness. Thus, the behavior 1 1 3 of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor.51 The superior-inferior relationship prevents the free flow of energy between persons behaving as who they are, for the learners, thrown into a submissive role of pleasing an external authority or of denying that their experience and knowledge count, are not free to be themselves. Thus, neither teacher nor learner grows fully in this relation­ ship. Bather, the relationship needs to be one in which teacher and student, as co-learners, co-participants, co­ creators, work together to learn with one another in the classroom. The integrity of both as persons is respected. Each empowers the other to be who she or he is, in order to learn. Curran speaks of this as a "mutually respectful and convalidating" relationship, one with "a profound sense of respect for the client," rather than "directing or dominating him.u5^ Instead of assuming a godlike role as teacher, Curran says that The teacher here becomes deeply incarnate in his understanding relationship with the conflicts and confusions of the learners. In so doing he conveys to them a deep sense of their worth as persons. Through this deep person-to-person relationship, increased learning is made possible.53 The atmosphere in the classroom is thus one of mutual respect, such that both teacher and. student are free to grow.

Trust Also important in the relationship is trust. Learners need confidence in their own abilities and in the power of the teacher to help them. The teacher needs also a trust in self to perform the teaching task and a trust in the learner. The Pygmalion effect needs to be guarded against, for expectancy is powerful, whether negative or positive. Shaughnessy says, For unless he can assume that his students are capable of learning what he has learned, and what he now teaches, the teacher is not likely to turn to himself as a possible source of his students' fail­ ures. He will slip, rather, into the facile explana­ tions of student failure that have long protected teachers from their own mistakes and Inadequacies. 1 1 4 Bat once he grants students the intelligence and will they need to master what is being taught, the teacher begins to look at his students1 difficulties in a more fruitful way; he begins to search in what students write and say for clues to their reasoning and their purposes, and in what he does for gaps and mis judgments. He begins teaching anew and must be prepared to be taxed beyond the limits he may have originally set for himself as a teacher of writing. He will need to give not simply more time but more imaginative and informed attention to what his stu­ dents write than he may have given in the days when freshmen had learned most of what they needed to know about writing before they got to college.5^ Also needed is the teacher's trust in the organism of the learner to understand what it most needs and to move toward that goal. Carl Rogers puts this well. The teacher is to have a basic reliance . . • upon the self-actualizing tendency in his students. The hypothesis upon which he would build is that students who are in real con­ tact with life problems wish to learn, want to grow, seek to find out, hope to master, desire to create. He would see his function as that of developing such a personal relationship with his students, and such a climate in his classroom, that these natural tendencies could come to their fruition.55 (Recall the positive direction of the organism noted in Chapter Two.) In most of our classrooms, unfortunately, students have been so socialized, repressed, suppressed, that they no longer know who they are, let alone what their learning needs are as persons or how to behave in congruence with themselves and their needs. Thus, although the organism can be trusted, what we frequently encounter are persons who have rarely been treated in schools or at home as though this principle existed, let alone as though it could be relied upon. The task of the teacher is dif­ ficult: to urge, coax, persuade each person to accept and trust himself or herself as a learner. A teacher rarely knows '*what is best" for another person. Vfe can know with certainty only what is best for ourselves, and even that we do not always know. 115 Anthent 1c 1 try Important, too, is the integrity of each student and teacher as person, the absolute prerequisite of faithful­ ness to who one is and what one knows. This component concerns authenticity, transparency, realness--being who one is, exhibiting behavior consistent with one's real feelings. As a counselor in therapy sessions, Rogers learned that he was unable to help others grow and learn significantly when he appeared to be, e.g., accepting, if in fact he felt differently. He says, In my relationships with persons I have found that it does not help, in the long run, to act as though I were something that 1 am not. it does not help to act calm and pleasant when actually I am angry and critical. It does not help to act as though I know the answers when I do not. It does not help to act as though I were a loving person if actually, at the moment, I am hostile. It does not help for me to act as though I were full of assurance, if actually I am frightened and unsure. Even on a very simple level I have found that this statement seems to hold. It does not help for me to act as though I were well when I feel ill.56

Dialogue Another important component of this classroom rela­ tionship is dialogue. In dialogue, energy, a tremendous potential and momentum, is released between persons, as they say what they really think and share who they really are. According to Gregory Baum, through dialogue we gain new perspectives, both on ourselves and on others. "Dia­ logue," he says, "has the power to change the self-aware­ ness of both partners."57 He says, further, that "we can­ not come to self-knowledge by looking at ourselves: only as we are engaged in conversation with others, and reflect on their reactions to us, are we able to gain greater insight into who we are."58 Persons learn through dialogue by recognizing "that their own viewpoint is inevitably incomplete."5" Curran says, further, that Learning, then, is persons. By this we mean that it is not merely from books or in response to tests or the threat of failing grades that a person really learns. Rather it is the warm, deep sense of belonging and sharing with another person— the one who knows--and with others engaged with him in the 116 learning enterprise that truly facilitates learning and invests it with profound personal meaning.60 All this is not to say, of course, that dialogue is always easy. When people share who they genuinely are, conflict will inevitably arise. Persons run the risk of being changed through such conflict— through hearing and being touched by persons and ideas which do not agree with theirs. Conflict appears to be a necessary stage in reach­ ing greater openness in dialogue. Freire's understanding of dialogue is insightful. He says, Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world. Hence, dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming— between those who deny other men the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. . . . If it is in speaking their word that men, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which men achieve significance as men. Dialogue is thus an existential neces­ sity. • . .It is an act of creation; it must not serve as a crafty instrument for the domination of one man by another. According to Freire, the requisite conditions for true dialogue to occur are: love for persons and for the world, faith in the ability of persons to think and create, humility— an awareness of one's own ignorance, mutual trust, hope, and critical thinking. "Without dialogue," he continues, "there is no communication, and without com­ munication there can be no true education.

Caring The power of caring— love— in this teacher-student relationship also cannot be overestimated. Those hard tasks which in any other setting would be impossible are made possible when one is loved. This insight is a key element in the success of learning in a therapy setting. Rogers borrows from Stanley Standal the phrase "uncondi­ tional positive regard" to mean much the same thing as caring or love. Rogers says, the therapist experiences a warm caring for the client--a caring which is not possessive, which 1 1 7 demands no personal gratification. It is an atmos­ phere which simply demonstrates 'I care1; not 'I care for you if you behave thus and so.1 Standal has termed tKTs attitude 'unconditional positive regard,' since it has no conditions of worth attached to it. . . .It involves an acceptance of and a caring for the client as a separate person, with permission for him to have his own feelings and experiences, and to find his own meanings in them. To the degree that the therapist can provide this safety-creating climate of unconditional positive regard, significant learning is likely to take place*65 Freire speaks of love as a key component in dialogue: Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to other men. . . .As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love,6^ Caring is especially necessary in the Basic Writing class­ room. Students who have experienced years of school fail­ ure need to know that the teacher cares whether or not they learn how to write. On the basis of my own experience and that of other Basic Writing teachers, caring for the student appears to be the sine qua non for success in that teaching situation.

Empathy Closely related to caring is empathy, likewise a very important quality because of its positive effect upon the learner, "ESnpathic understanding," a phrase borrowed from Carl Rogers, means seeing the other's world "from the inside, sensing the client's private world as if it were your own, but without losing the 'as if' quality."65 When the teacher understands and accepts the student— and when such understanding and acceptance are clear to the learner— positive results occur. The student feels worthwhile; she or he then is motivated, stimulated, and, consequently, courageous enough to overcome learning obstacles.66 Rather than arguing against where a learner is or wishing he or she were farther along, those who use empathic understanding respond to the learner in the here and now. Curran says that in counseling, one "knows and understands what another person is trying to say . . . not by doubting and raising objections/./" but rather "by deep 1 1 8 commitment to his integrity. Thus there is involvement in a genuine struggle to grasp his meaning."®7 Psychologist Thomas Gordon points out that When a person is able to feel and communicate genuine acceptance of another, he possesses a capacity for being a powerful helping agent for the other. His acceptance of the other, as he is, is an important factor in fostering a relationship in which the other person can grow, develop, make constructive changes, learn to solve problems, move in the direction of psychological health, become more productive and creative, and actualize his fullest potential. It is one of those simple but beautiful paradoxes of life: When a person feels that he is truly accepted by another, as he is, then he is freed to move from there and to begin to think about how he wants to change, how he wants to grow, how he can become dif­ ferent, how he might become more of what he is capable of being. Acceptance is like the fertile soil that permits a tiny seed to develop into the lovely flower it is capable of becoming. The soil only enables the seed to become the flower. It releases the capacity of the seed to grow, but the capacity is entirely within the seed. As with the seed, a child contains entirely within his organism the capacity to develop. Accep­ tance is like the soil— it merely enables the child to actualize his potential.®** According to Gordon, parents and teachers often assume that they will encourage growth by focusing on some future time in which a child or student will be what they want him or her to be. That does not appear to be the case, though. Tremendous potential for growth is released, instead, if the person is accepted where and as he or she is.

Freedom A final component here is freedom. The teacher liberates learners to be themselves. The learner needs to be free to learn according to his or her own affective- cognitive style. Also, the learner needs freedom to grow and make mistakes. Especially in learning a new skill, such as writing, mistakes will occur frequently in the early stages. We are now recognizing, in fact, thanks to Shaughnessy, that there may be a stage when mistakes will increase, because of hypercorrection, for example, so that the student will appear to be getting worse instead of 119 better.69 This is an awkward phase for teacher and student alike, for students are making more mistakes, and teachers begin to feel uncomfortable that students are not benefit- ting from their knowledge and guidance. This stage usually stems from new learnings which the student is trying out for the first time, such as semicolon use. The student may understand imperfectly and need, therefore, further explanation. Or the student may understand the concept at a recognition level but have difficulty transferring the recognition to the level of production. Finally, the student may not have a clear notion of the precise cases to which the concept does and does not apply, such as recognizing the need for -ed's on past tense verbs but not on the past participle. Thus the student produces "He prejudiced the audience" but ,fHe is prejudice." In a climate of acceptance and freedom, such mistakes can be sorted out, so that the student does learn. Shaughnessy recommends "a classroom model that grants . . . students the kind of social independence they need in order to think and speak and write for themselves."70

Listening to the student Probably the two major features of the teacher-student relationship have to do with the stance the teacher takes toward the student, as shown in listening to the student and in giving feedback to the student. It is not at all uncommon for us as writing teachers to listen to what students are saying in their papers but to miss the emotions connected with those papers--the fears, uncertainties, anxieties, insecurities— and to overlook the insights students can provide for us about the mistakes they make and about why a paper is in the shape it is in. This section suggests that one key feature of the co-equal relationship with our students involves listening to the insights and clues they have to offer us.

Empathic understanding and linguistic analysis Ehipathic understanding applies in a variety of strange and interesting ways to the teaching of writing. First, the under standing involves approaching a student's paper from much the same vantage point as that from which we honor works of literature. Assume that the writer has something of value which he or she wishes to communicate; proceed from there to attempt to understand the communica­ tion. Try to get inside the writer's skin, so as to see where the writer is— not where we would be coming from on 120 that topic or where we1d like him or her to be, but where she or he actually is standing. In that way, we can better perform a genuine teaching function. Next, empathic understanding extends to a kind of linguistic analysis of the writing process itself. Shaughnessy says, the teacher must try to decipher the individual student's code, examining samples of his writing as a scientist might, searching for patterns or explana­ tions, listening to what the student says about punctuation, and creating situations in the classroom that encourage students to talk openly about what they don't understand.71 When a paper is faulty for one reason or another, we must try with the student to understand where she or he has gone astray. If the imperfection lies in organization or coherence, it is our task to see where the student was leading, such that she or he thought the paper was coherent. (No one, after all, intentionally produces or turns in a paper which lacks coherence— save for those done at the last minute.) Were there some bridges in the student's head which never reached the page, so that connections are missing there? If the student is having difficulty choosing a topic or pointing a paper toward a thesis state­ ment, our task is to understand with the student how she or he is deciding on a topic. What process is being used? Why are interesting topics being discarded? Does the student not trust what he or she knows? Does the student understand the meaning of thesis statement? If yes, why does the theme lack one? (Cf. Chapter Two.) If the prob­ lem is the more recalcitrant one of mechanics, we need to understand why the student is doing what she or he is do­ ing. In that many possible reasons exist for a single error,72 what is this particular student's rationale for using a comma between subject and verb? Is the student operating with a false rule or with one learned incomplete­ ly? (Most "mistakes," as Shaughnessy is now helping us to see, and as linguists would concur, are rule-governed.)7^ Or is the writer using linguistic analogies where they do not apply or "being linguistically consistent or efficient at those points where the language is not"?7^ Admittedly, some of the answers here will not be immediately accessible to the student. Some lie below the surface of the student's conscious awareness. Nonethe­ less, the questions are worth asking, for if the student can begin reflecting on why she or he is operating in writing as he or she does, eventually the answers surface. 121 She may remember that an eighth grade teacher warned her against long sentences, and that warning may connect up with her present problem of punctuating dependent clauses as sentences* Or he may recall that his twelfth grade composition teacher said that the thesis statement of a theme always had to come at the end of the first para­ graph, “andtherefore he has trouble with first paragraphs; he's locked into a "have-to" which is preventing him from exploring the natural demands of his material. Even if no such startling information does rise to the surface, at least the student will know that we think there are reasons somewhere for his or her behavior, apart from being "dumb," "illiterate," "incompetent." No language user has problems with language without a good reason for those difficulties. Thus the teacher, by listening empathetically and observing astutely, can serve as what Kenneth Beittel calls "a releaser of ideas, values and feelings in the . . . stu­ dent."^ Uncovering answers to such questions allows the teacher to see ways of helping students in a genuine way to deal with writing problems. Without asking students to join him or her as teacher in the sense-making endeavor of understanding why things are going awry with the stu­ dent's writing, the teacher inevitably operates in a vacuum— on the basis of guesstimates, assumptions, half­ knowings, rather than with sure and certain knowledge of what is actually there. Without the student's awareness and answers to these questions, a communication gap exists— one that we alone as teachers can never fully bridge, for if we accept, with Alfred Schutz, that inter­ subjectivity is an impossibility— that no two people in actuality see the world with exactly the same set of eyes, that no two people inhabit exactly the same universe— we can never fully understand where another person is unless that person tells us.76 Shaughnessy says, One of the great values of the decentralized class­ room where students participate as teachers as well as learners is that it opens up the students' 'secret' files of misinformation, confusion, humor, and linguistic insight to an extent that is not often possible in the traditional setting. However commit­ ted teachers are to starting from 'scratch,' they have difficulty deciding where 'scratch* is without this kind of help from their students.77 A third component of empathic understanding is under­ standing the student's feelings about the paper. To get at such feelings, we can ask such questions as these: "Is this paper doing what you wanted it to do?" "Are you 1 2 2 happy with the product?" "Are you glad you chose this topic?" ,fWhat did the paper accomplish for you?" "Did you learn anything about yourself or about writing in doing this paper?" Important here is that the teacher is able and willing to understand the student's frustrations, disappointments, fears,78 and to support and encourage the student through those trials. This need was brought home to me in my early Basic Writing years. I recognized then that students needed encouragement in facing the writing tasks before them. Inexperienced writers with many mechanics problems, they were scared of the writing they were being asked to do--worried that it wouldn't turn out well enough, afraid that they couldn't find a subject to write on, fearful of saying what they really thought. Some of my developmental students were extremely uncom­ fortable with discovering that even in the very writing act, ideas shift. Roderick, for example, one of my bright­ est students of a few summers ago, continually became frustrated at ideas changing, whether in revising or com­ posing. Even for a writing teacher like myself, someone with thirteen years experience teaching writing, someone who has done a Master's thesis and three years of journal writing, not to mention general exams and letters to friends, this process can be scary. Such fears are real— and need attention. Finally, we need to listen to the student's insights. In one class or another we inevitably encounter the student who says "I know what I want to say, but I can't put it into words."7^ Admittedly, this can be an excuse, a cop­ out to avoid doing any real work. Yet I think that here, as elsewhere, a measure of empathic understanding and linguistic analysis holds. In the past, when my col­ leagues and I heard such a lament, our immediate unthinking reaction was to say, "They don't really know what they want to say," or "They don't know how to think." In a sense we were right. The student who is verbalizing a problem with finding words does not know fully and completely what he or she wants to say. Yet how can we presume to know more than the student that there is nothing inside which wishes to come out?80 Rather than attacking the student's com­ ment , our approach here, as elsewhere, should be that of listener, the empathic understander— one who trusts the student's self-reflections as comments worth hearing and learning from. To be sure, when student verbalizations do not match their writing--when there is considerable discrepancy between what students say and what they do-- we may be in a situation wherein the students do not really know themselves. Our task may then be to help them dis­ cover who they are. Barring that exception, I now think that our response to this typical student problem should be 123 to recognize that the student is telling us about a common human phenomenon. Our response should be, "Try." That is, by empathically understanding the students and the existen­ tial situation in which they find themselves and by knowing the nature of human communication, we can recognize that people everywhere cannot always find words for what they have to say— or cannot find words that really capture what is inside. Only by encouraging students to try can we help them to succeed in this at best difficult enterprise. Only by attempting to capture what one has to say does one go through the successive approximation stages often needed to find what one really has to say. Often we think we know— and we do know on one level. But what we really intend is at times hidden at lower levels. Only by trying to put words to the thoughts and feelings do we eventually get to what we really have to say. Without the attempt, certainly no communication is possible.

Feedback to the student It would not be amiss, too, to examine our role as teachers in the process of giving feedback. We do not always give our students the kind of response needed, nor do we always communicate as clearly with our students as we might. Often this problem stems from our expectation that students know the words we are using or are motivated enough to look them up and discover their meanings. In the Basic Writing classroom, this expectation is frequently dashed. At other times, of course, student laziness and lack of motivation may be the culprit. Expecting them to understand and act accordingly, we are naturally frustrated and at times even angry when they do not. Very often, however, the fault here is with our expectation and not with the student, for at times our vocabulary and even the explanations in our texts speak only to the initiated, and we do not realize the resulting lack of communication. One correction symbol, for example, which causes particular problems is "mechanics. " I have yet to meet the freshman student, especially the writing novice, who fully understands what that word means. But how much a stock-in-trade it is. Our terminology in refer­ ring to sentences— such terms as "predication"— likewise at times obscures rather than illuminates. Also, a text often sends a student to a section on punctuation when in actuality an understanding of sentence structure and the section thereon is what is needed. Or students are sent to the definition of "Coh" on the theme folder, but the definition does not explain the problem fully enough for them to understand what the term means. Even our pointed 1 2 4 and well-written comments sometimes do not succeed as well as we would like them to. As semanticists tell us, even comnon words can mean different things to different people. With our marginal marks and comments, students often assume that items on their paper are "wrong,** rather than under­ standing that such marks are frequently suggestions for greater effectiveness rather than demands for correctness. At times, too, we need to give feedback more effectively. The remainder of this section takes up that point.

Responses and reactions As discussed in Chapter Three, writing is a communica­ tion act in which the self reaches out to share a message with another person. Consider, then, that the reader is responding to the self of the writer as presented on paper. The teacher has a choice of responses to make, and the writer has to deal with the response. First, the teacherfs response. The one used most frequently, of course, is that of grades. What a strange response to the communication of a message. If mothers responded to our early speech fumblings in a similarly evaluative fashion, many of us probably would still be stuck at a babbling stage. As someone asked me recently, "Why would anyone grade writing? It * s so personal." Indeed, any genuine writing— writing owned by the writer, writing in which the creator has invested self and has an urge to communicate the message to someone else— is in­ tensely personal, whether written in first person or not. It deserves a response as one person to another. Yet the communication, at least student writing, most often receives the response of a grade. Granted, most teachers provide an extensive verbal or written comment to accompany the grade. That is certainly helpful. Yet the feedback does not remove the problem of grades, for in a school setting, those numbers are the currency of value. Grades are what tell students if they measure up or not, if they*re "O.K." or not. MI understand you" and "I love you*1 in a comment will in most cases not carry the weight of a grade. Sad but true. Yet, certainly, without a grade, those who are not internally motivated suffer, for they do not know "where they stand." Maybe our task here is not to succumb to grade pressure but rather to do more to encourage self-investment in writing, so that students do not rely on this artificial response. The problem, of course, is that with grades student writers often suffer, particularly those who are insecure 1 2 5 or whose self-images are low. Although the quality of their performance does not equal their capability (remember the competenee-performance distinction) and although the grade represents a mark on a draft of a paper at a point in time, the mark is often sufficient to discourage even self-motivated persons. The point here is that there is a dilemma, for evaluation is an inappropriate response to make to a language learner, yet without a numerical evalua­ tion, many students will not be pushed to learn. Building ravising into the evaluation system, using S-XJ grades, and contract grading are some ways around this dilemma. Next, the problem of the writer's dealing with feed­ back, a sensitive and complex area. A variety of fears are associated with the response to the message transmitted by the self. As just discussed, one fear is that of the evaluation itself. What does the teacher or the grade say about us as persons and as writers? What does it tell us about our abilities? Another fear has to do with the reception of our content. Tina articulated in her journal one such fear of the beginning writer: will the teacher laugh at me? The same fear can be articulated with peers. What will happen to me as a person if I divulge a part of myself? How will they respond— what will they do— with this information about me? Will they treat it gently? Will they understand me better, or will they laugh at me, ridicule my thoughts— or, maybe worse yet, grade them, pull them apart, red-ink my spelling and commas? What will become of me as a person if I reveal what I really think and really feel to others?®1 Then there are the anxieties connected with delayed feedback. Cases such as dissertation writers who must wait on the mail to bring word from advisors on vacation or miles away at a new university or students whose teach­ ers have an unbearable paper-grading load come to mind. We become nervous when letters go unanswered or papers go unreturned. We wonder what we have said or done wrong. This restlessness, this need for response, is one of the best arguments I know to illustrate that writing is a communication event. We need some kind of response to what we have said. With talking, the response is usually instantaneous, unless the topic is intensely intellectual or personal and requires much thought. "Will you marry me?" does not always elicit the inmediate "Oh, yes I" response my husband accuses me of having made. The response to writing usually requires more time. Most people, espe­ cially teachers, find it difficult to respond to a paper on a first reading. This need for a response but having to wait for it is uncomfortable. 1 2 6 It is important to understand these various and sundry fears and anxieties which student writers experience in waiting for a response to their words, because as teachers we often need to support more fully this reaching out of self to self. It is not easy to tell others who we really are and what we really think. If that activity were easy, whether in writing or in speaking, we would not see assert­ iveness-training courses or such books as Why Am I_ Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? appearing. People tend,"Th the main, to be shy. We tend to protect what is deepest and most personal about ourselves. Writing, though, calls for self- exposure or self-disclosure.®^ That is rarely— save for the exhibitionist— easy. The tendency for students is not to reveal anything very close to the self, until they know the climate is safe for such revelation, and for us as teachers to get so caught up in the demands of academic writing that we do not see the need even there for honesty and self-revelation. What happens, on the other hand, when persons do receive a response? How do they deal with that? That may be an even more precarious situation than no response at all, especially if the person responding continually makes such responses as "awkward." Students find it difficult to divorce comment on a paper from comment on themselves as persons, for the paper is an extension, a creation, of ourselves. To criticize that extension "feels like" a criticism of us. How we hear the response depends in part on how secure we are as persons. In my own experience and that of others in attempting to publish an article, for example, it is not at all uncommon to "hear" a request for revision as a rejection of the article. Carl Rogers has noted that, in order to preserve the integrity of the self, persons respond to data by integrating it or by ignoring, denying, or distorting it.®^ Clearly, distortion is at work in the above example. How often this must happen with our students, too. Those who do not like them­ selves must often ignore our genuine praise of sections of their papers in favor of our suggestions or negative criticisms. I wonder if those students who say that they have no problem with spelling when their papers are riddled with spelling errors may not be denying the feedback they are getting. To ignore the response is perhaps more dif­ ficult, especially when revising is built into a course grade. Yet revisions returned to the instructor with little altered from the original may be the result of ignoring (along, of course, with misunderstanding) our comments. Where do we go from here? We recognize, first of all, the need for response other than a grade to the 1 2 7 writer, in that writing is a conmunication event. Next, we recognize that the giving and receiving of feedback are sensitive activities which often call into question the worth of the self. In part we deal here, too, with image management „84 a student who got A's and B's in high school thinks of himself or herself as a "good student" or a "good writer" and has a stake in maintaining that image. Such students may do all that they have to (includ­ ing ignoring, denying, or distorting feedback) to maintain that image. It is important to understand, then, that feelings— self-doubts, doubts of one's own worth or of the sense of what one is saying, and fears--do enter into the feedback process and must be dealt with.

Facilitating communication Three aspects of giving feedback help to facilitate comnunication with the student. One such aspect is that of teacher as reflective mirror. The teacher holds a mir­ ror up to the student so that the student can better see who and where he or she is. Closely related to empathic understanding, this element of feedback goes a step beyond, for it returns to the student the teacher's understanding of the student. By paraphrasing what the student has said on paper or what the student has verbally articulated, either about the content of a paper or the process by which the paper was produced, the teacher helps the learner to discover where he or she actually is vis-a-vis the paper. The student may discover that what was said on paper is not what was meant at all. Most of us have probably experienced this problem of finding that our words, either spoken or written, were not capturing our thoughts. At times we recognize this discrepancy ourselves. At other times, though, particularly when we are caught in an ego­ centric stage, we think that we are expressing what we mean. Not until someone tells us what we have actually said do we discover otherwise. A second element in feedback is the authenticity of the teacher's response. Giving an authentic response to a student's paper is often easier said than done. The type of response a teacher finds easy to give probably varies from teacher to teacher. One who hates students probably finds it easy to be sarcastic. A perfectionist finds it easy to point out deficiencies in a paper but hard to dole out praise. An unassertive person finds it easy to encourage the student for even partial success but hard to say "here you miss the mark." Tet the type of response that is called for is an authentic response— one in which the teacher genuinely, yet lovingly, points out 1 2 8 how she or he is responding to the paper. Does he or she understand it? What are the honest strengths perceived? Its legitimate weaknesses? (Certainly the more secure a teacher is as a person, the easier it is to give this kind of loving yet balanced response.) And the better the teacher is in touch with his or her feelings as a person— the more congruent the teacher is— the easxer it is to give honest yet caring feedback. Dishonesty does not help. If, for example, a teacher gives only encouraging comments yet perceives hugh weaknesses in a paper, the student will detect the artificiality of the response and will feel cheated or deceived. The student may then not trust the teacher in other areas. Authenticity of feedback--authen­ ticity as a function of what we know about ourselves as persons and what we believe as teachers— is worth striv­ ing for. A third aspect of giving feedback which facilitates comnunication is that of checking reception of messages and checking perceptions. We need to "check out" with the student whether or not the message we are sending is being received. If it is not, noise on the channel needs to be cleared up. With perceptions, the teacher*s percep­ tion of the student1s writing needs to be checked against the student's perception. Do their views agree? If they do not, the teacher needs to understand why they differ. It is important for a teacher to know, for example, that a student is pleased with a paper that the teacher gave an F to. Why should the student be pleased with that paper? The difference in perceptions here may well tell the teacher something important about the student's understand­ ing of writing. As well, if the student felt good about a paper which the teacher evaluated as very weak, the student will probably experience a natural disappointment and even frustration at seeing the teacher's response to the paper. Such feelings need to be dealt with if the student is to learn from that teacher. Conversely, if the student habitually feels negatively about papers which the teacher views as above average, such knowledge can allow the teacher to help the student develop a more realis­ tic self-concept, in and of itself a very important piece of learning.

Stages of response I would suggest as well that a teacher needs to respond to a paper at whatever stage he or she perceives it to be in. There are stages in responding to a paper, as well as stages in the composing process and in learning to write. I would have teachers vary their responses to 129 a group of students on any given set of papers, for some papers will be nearly finished products demanding the instructor's full arsenal of editorial weaponry, while others will be at a much earlier stage of development— perhaps even a "having chosen the wrong topic" stage. In my experience, it can be harmful to push students too much here. When a student or a paper is not ready for editorial assistance because she or he is still incubating an idea, such assistance can be threatening and downright harmful. The paper should be pushed along in terms of conceptualization at that stage, rather than edited. When a student has thrown a paper together which little meets an assignment, it can be a miscarriage of justice to give much editorial advice— unless the paper is well-done none­ theless. And to demand writing for the purpose of persuad­ ing others when the student needs to gain comfort with writing as self-expression--sharing of the self— can be to turn the student off to writing. In such cases, rather than being permitted to use the writing act to fulfill his or her own needs, the student's needs must be ignored. I have seen Basic Writers frequently enjoy the self-expres­ sion afforded them in ungraded journals yet dislike having suggestions for improvement come back to them on essays. It was a big enough step for them to get something out, a something which they were proud of, without their having to think about correcting, revising, improving. I want to suggest, too, that, depending on our own personalities and our own stage of development (egocentrism, for example), there are times in our lives when the teach­ er's criticism— albeit kind and helpful— is detrimental to our growth as writers, for we are not ready for it, not ready to take it into our systems and use it. Teaching becomes art when a teacher knows when to give and when to withhold criticism, evaluation, advice. Finally, it would be far easier to assess a student's precise needs for feedback and stage of writing development if the teaching of writing were removed from the sphere of a graded activity in schools, an activity with success or failure attached to it, but rather became an activity which everyone in this society genuinely expected everyone else to master, just as we do with speech. As writing teachers, we would then not feel compelled to rush the student to a new stage of development before the student is ready, nor would we feel compelled to respond to all papers as though they were at the same stage of development when in fact they are not. Certainly, if writing teachers taught fewer students, it would be easier to assess individual student needs and stages of development. 1 3 0 Individualization All that has been said in this chapter suggests a writing program with heavy emphasis on individualization. This I believe to be very necessary. Various studies and experiences support the need for individualization. A study by Clare Silva of the errors specific to individual Basic Writing students finds support for an instructional approach which perceives and works with individual differences in basic writing programs. Recognition of the great range of differentiation amon£ individuals makes it obvious that it is a waste of time and endeavor for all remedial writing students to * study* the same material.85 Silva1 s results show that each Basic Writer has a unique set of problems which deserve individual attention. She says , further, I have found that the students I work with benefit most from getting individualized attention, not only in the form of review conferences, but during class sessions— working with them as a consultant, goad, interested reader, and supportive critic while they are thinking, writing, proofreading, and revising.®6 Shaughnessy in Errors and Expectations observes that Basic Writers have a variety of problems. Xs she says, "There are styles to being wrong."87 Indeed, I would suggest that it is crucial that greater attention be given to the problems experienced by individual writers, especially in the early stages of learning to write. My own experience in teaching Basic Writing has shown me that virtually no two students bring with them the exact same set of problems or causes of problems. Each needs the linguistic analysis suggested earlier. Each needs, too, to know that there is someone who cares that she or he learn to communicate in writing. For these reasons, individualization appears virtually necessary. A note of clarification as to what is meant here by the term "individualization." The term is often taken to mean a response to a single person as an n of 1, rather than as a response to an individual as a unique person. The thrust of this dissertation has been to call for atten­ tion to the uniqueness of each person: in perceptions, in personality, and now, in this chapter, in writing problems, errors, and sources of errors. 131 Where such extensive individualization is not feasible, another route to travel is using the class members as sources for empathic understanding and feedback. This approach calls for small-group work and work in pairs. It calls especially for such qualities as a high level of trust among class members, courage to say, "I didn't under­ stand what your paper said” (taking the risk of showing oneself to be "dumb” or "obtuse"), openness to other per­ sons, confidence in one's abilities as reader and teacher- substitute. Where it is possible to build such caring and conmunity in the classroom, I believe in making the attempt. Under the constraint of required courses in school settings, though, this approach will often prove frustrating. If persons in fact do not trust, are not open to one another, are not willing to take risks, and do not have much of self invested in being in the course at the outset, there may at times be little the teacher can do to facilitate the proper environment. The teacher can attempt facilitation, but where such persons are in a majority in the classroom, moving them along will be slow, and the teacher needs to recognize that fact and go easy on himself or herself if this approach does not work. It may be objected that an approach to teaching writing which focuses so heavily on individuals does not take into account financial or personal realities. Admit­ tedly some universities have been caught in a numbers crunch of increasing enrollments. With such an increase and with unrealistic class sizes (I think especially of large lectures), devaluing the person is easy and perhaps even necessary for the survival of individual teachers who, given present teaching methods, cannot possibly establish interpersonal relationships with— care for— 500 students a day. Thus a whole reform of education is in order. If this society truly valued education, such that more dollars were spent on the enterprise, reform would more easily be possible. As mentioned in Chapter One, composition teachers have continually borne the brunt of work loads in most English departments. Their work load has always, in my view, been unrealistic. If, however, we were to demand fewer and smaller classes and make the case, as I have attempted to do, that without more attention to the individual student, one cannot teach writing effectively, especially in the beginning stages, and if society is truly interested, as even a recent one-cent stamp suggests, in its members learning to write, then perhaps we could convince university deans and stage legislatures to bestow more dollars on our programs. I'd like to think so. 132 Endnote a

^Mina p. Shaughnessy, Error a and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 197T), p. 120. ^Donald C. Freeman, “Toward *Relative Readability1: a Criterion for Good Writing,” rev. of pie Philosophy of Composition, by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Ihe Chronicle or kigEer Education. 3 April 1978, p. 18, notes eight different types of subject-verb agreement errors out of thirteen examples of the error. 5Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Herder and Herder, l^Vl)7 P* 72. ^Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Delacorte Press, 196$), p 7 ~ 5 2 ;------5Carl Rogers. On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 259. ^Rogers, p. 286. ^John Dewey. Experience and Education (New York: Collier, 1973), p ,~25Z ^Charles A. Curran, Counseling-Learning: A Whole- Person Model for Education (New York: Grune & Stratton. 157277 p T 2 2 . ------^Curran, p. 12. l^Rogers, pp. 281-284. H Jerome Brtmer, The Process of Education (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1963), p. 35T 15Benjamin Bloom, Human Characteristics and School Learning (New York: McSraw-^Hlll. 1 9 / 0 passlmT 13Shangtxnessy, pp. 277-280. 1^Shaughnessy, pp. 275-276. 15Dell Hymes, Pref., Directions in Sociolinguistics. ed. John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. vii. 133 ^-^Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, Research In Written Composition (Urbana, 111.: NCTE, 19TOTp. 6. 17William Labov, "The Logic of Nonstandard English," in Language in the Inner City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania !Press, 1972), PP- 204-213. 18Dan I. Slobin, Psycholinguistics (Glenview, 111.: Scott, Foresman and Company,1971), p. 7. l9Slobin, p. 59. 20Slobin, p. 54. 21Slobin, p. 52. 22I)avid McNeill, The Acquisition of Language (New York: Harper & Row, 19^0), pp. 99-101 ;"Slobin, pp. 49-50. 23 Harvey S. Wiener, "The Single Narrative Paragraph and College Remediation," College English, 33 (March. 1972), 660-669. See James Moffett, Teaching the Universe of Discourse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 55-36. 25James Britton et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) (London: Macmillan Education, 1975), p.' 13l.------26Britton, p. 82. 27Britton, pp. 82-83. 28Britton, p. 84. 29cf. Moffett, p. 195. 50Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar“(Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1962), p. 18. 31Frank Smith, Understending Reading (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1^71), p. 1827 32 See the distinction made by Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (New York: Chandler, 1964), pp. 3-12, between TTogic-in-use " and "reconstructed logic."

33Britton, p. 37. 1 3 4 3Sfoffett, p. 201. 35Moffett, pp. 200-202. 36Moffett, pp. 199-200. 37Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 2 3®Elbow, p. 30. 39Elbow, p. 72. ^®Kenneth R. Beittel, Effect of SeIf-Reflective Train­ ing in Art on the Capacity for Creative Action (Washington. D.C.: Office of Education- HEW, n.d.),p. 4. ^Shaughnessy, pp. 128-29. ^Carol E. Reed, "Adapting TESL Approaches to the Teaching of Written Standard. English as a Second Dialect to Speakers of American Black English Vernacular," TESOL Quarterly. 7 (September, 1973), 294-95. ^3Shaughnessy, p. 40. ^^Britton, p. 66. 4 5Shaughnessy, p. 84. ^Britton, p. 131. ^7Freire, pp. 62-63. ^®Pre ire, p. 58. ^Curran, p. 98. 50Curran, p. 99. 51Preire, p. 31. 52Curran, p. 99. Curran, p. 5. 5^Shaughnessy, pp. 292-93. 5^logera, pp. 289-290.

56Rogers, p. 16. X35 57Gregory Baum, "Personal experience and Styles of Thought," I n Journeys, ed. Gregory Baum (Mew York; Paulist Press, 1975), p . *T. 58Baum, p. 9. 59Baum, p. 10. 60Curran, p. 23* 61Preire( pp. 76-77. 62Freire, p. 81. 63Rogers, pp. 283-84. 6*Freire, p. 78. 6^Rogers, p. 284. ^^Curran, p. 20. Curran, p. 52. 68Thomas Gordon, P.E.T.; Parent Effectiveness Training (New York; Wyden, 1970), pp. 30-31. ^Shaughnessy, p. 119. 70Shaughnessy, p. 83. 71Shaughnessy, p. 40. 72Freeman, p. 18. 7^Shaughnessy, p. 13 and passim, uses the term "the logic of their mistakes." 74Shaughnessy, p. 110. See also p. 118. 7^Beittel, p. 13. 76Alfred Schutz, The Fhenomeno 1 ogy of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 135. 77 Shaughnessy, p. 40.

78Rogers, p. 87. 1 3 6 Mary Edel Denman, "I Got This Here Hang-Up: Non- Cognitive Processes for Facilitating Writing,M GGG. 26 (October, 1975), 306. 88Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 91, says, "I believe that we should accredit in ourselves the capacity for appraising our own articulation." 81Janet Emig. The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders (Urbana, 111.: WC'lt, 1971), p. 49, notes that Lynn, one of the twelfth graders studied, felt **more comfortable writing about facts rather than feelings.” 82The term ”self-disclosure” comes from Sidney M. Jourard, The Transparent Self (Cincinnati: Van Nostrand, 1971), p. 3 and passim. 83Carl Rogers, quoted in Don E. Hamachek, Encounters with the Self (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 66. 84Renneth E. Boulding, The linage (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks-The University of Michigan Press, 1961), p. 8. 85Clare M. Silva, **A Comparative Study of the Needs and Concepts of Individual Students in a Post-Secondary Remedial Writing Program,” Diss. The Ohio State University 1977, p. 149. ^ Silva, p. 11. 87Shaughnessy, p. 40. CHAPTER V

A PERSON-CENTERED DIRECTION FOR COMPOSITION RESEARCH

Introduction Just as a fuller understanding of persons is important to our conception of the person in the writing act and to our approach to the teaching of writing, so is a more complete understanding of persons important to our research in written composition. The close-up shot focuses now on specific research directions emanating from the theoretical perspective of Chapters One through Three. The main thrust of this chapter is to focus on research questions and approaches growing out of the theoretical construct and on ways to disconfirm or falsify the theory presented. But before turning to those research directions, it is necessary first to give an overview of the meaning of research, for what we understand the domain of investigation to be and how we understand the activities of research will also determine what we learn from the research enterprise itself. There is a need in our profes­ sion to understand more about empirical research, so as to begin to answer key questions about composing and about teaching writing. It is necessary also to devote some attention in this chapter to key problems in composition research, for, like teaching, research in this field is a complex enterprise with many variables impinging thereon.

Literary Versus Scientific Research One of the problems which our discipline faces is a lack of training in and understanding of doing empirical research. Trained as literary scholars, with little clear understanding of statistics or experimental design, English scholars often bring few of the requisite tools or under­ standings to the task of doing composition research. Uhile a variety of ways of knowing and types of research exist, the English professional, as presently trained, faces the task of understanding the difference between empirical or

1 3 7 1 3 8 scientific research and literary research, whether of the sort described by Richard Altick in The Scholar Adventur­ ers, the bibliographical search engaged in at one time or another by virtually all literary scholars, or the sort done by literary critics. None of these types of literary research approximates the activity of doing empirical research; the purposes and methods are different. It is important to differentiate between the epistemological grounds and methods for literary research and those for empirical research.

Differing Epistemologies One key difference is in the object under study. The reality studied by a literary scholar is that of a single literary artifact, while the matter investigated by a scientific researcher is the nature of a larger reality. The objects differ in kind as well. A literary work, a language creation, has a more tenuous, less stable existence than does the reality studied by empirical researchers. Ren£ Wellek and Austin Warren note in Theory of Literature, The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge aui generis which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (physical, like a statue) nor mental (psychological, like the experience of light or pain) nor ideal (like a triangle).1 Also different are the method used and the intention governing the research. Where the literary scholar scours libraries and documents to amass information about a given literary work or works, the scientific researcher is engaged in discovering or testing hypotheses about the nature of reality, usually by designing and conducting experiments. The literary scholar is usually concerned with understanding the meaning of a work or a body of works, at times to be generalized to an author*s entire corpus. The scientific researcher, however, is concerned with the extent to which the workings of a person, method, or event can be generalized to other persons, methods, or events. Here we rub shoulders with the scientific intent to explain, predict, and control. When dealing with a literary artifact, however, this intent has no meaning. Finally, a key distinction is that doing literary criticism and research and doing empirical research are grounded in different epistemologies. What is fundamen­ tally different in the two areas of study is that the literary critic does not advance a truth claim, while the 139 scientist does. Less concerned is the literary scholar with the truth value of a literary work— what it "really" means /T£ in fact one can even speak in such ternm/^ or even what the author intended it to mean— but ratKer with his or her reading of the work. What construct of meaning does that work provide for him or her? What evidence from the work can he or she amass to convince others of the validity of his or her reading? While it could be said that in both cases there is a concern for internal validity, there is none for external validity with the literary scholar. "Truth" per se has little to do with one reading being superior to another. That reading may tell us more; it may enhance our experience and understanding of a given work, but only insofar as it explains more of the data. The literary critic does not say, "This is the way things are," but rather, "This is the way I read this work," or "This is the reading that makes best use of the parts of the work." For the way things are is not the pursuit of the literary critic. Incompatible readings may both be well argued, well evidenced, and even well accepted. One is not more "true" than the other. The approach to knowing is thus one founded in creativity and imagination, rather than grounded in an objective attempt to arrive at truth. Not so with the scientific researcher, though, who seeks to know what Michael Folanyi in The Tacit Dimension refers to as a ’'hidden reality."2 Einpirical researchers have faith in a knowable "nature of things," "truth." The researcher recognizes full well that what is accepted as truth today is governed by the accepted paradigm of the day;3 this "truth" will change with new discoveries of tomorrow. Although only a piece of the truth is known at any given moment, the effort is made to come as close to the total "truth" as possible.

Scientific Method: Discovery and Verification In part because Literary and scientific research differ in nature, we come as literary scholars to the task of doing empirical research with the awe accorded science by the rest of society. Thus we do not see in full what the scientific method encompasses or where physical sci­ ence methods are inappropriate for the domain of composi­ tion research. A large gap in our understanding is the need for an awareness of the two sides of the scientific method: discovery as well as verification. Some who speak of the scientific method see these as totally distinct sides, one called the logic or context of discovery, and the 1 4 0 other, the logic or context of verification. Philosopher of science Norwood R. Hanson, for example, says that "the 1logic of discovery' can be construed as a study of the reasons for entertaining a hypothesis, in contrast with the logic of proof, which deals with the reasons for accepting a hypothesis."^ Barney 6. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss distinguish between generation versus verification of theory.5 The purpose of research in a context of discovery or generation of theory is to discover theory. Some characteristics of discovery research are as follows: an intent to describe phenomena rather than to attribute causality; field research rather than laboratory research (in the sense of artificially constructed situations); up-close, in-depth observations of a few cases, as opposed to large numbers. In contrast, verification research is conducted so as to test— verify— hypotheses emanating from a clearly articulated theory, ultimately to confirm or falsify the theory itself. The most frequently used research strategy in verification research is that of the controlled experiment. Where a strict experiment is not possible, quasi-experimental designs are used. It is important to note that verification research follows the establishment of a clear and coherent theory. Where such a theory does not exist, research which falls under the context of discovery is the more appropriate research form* While it is the post-theoretical context of verifica­ tion, with the experimental method as the most common research method, with which we are probably most familiar, the pre-theoretical context of discovery plays a key part aa well in scientific research. For theories are not spun out of thin air but rather are generated out of a context of experiencing, observing, listening to hunches and intui­ tions. Once a theory is established, then offshoots from that theory, better known as hypotheses, are tested in an attempt to verify them. Scientific research does not arrive at verification, however, without discovery. Other philosophers of science view a strict dichotomy between verification and discovery as a falsification of reality. Thomas S. Kuhn, for example, has found applica­ tion of the terms "extraordinarily problematic•" He sug­ gests that the very distinction between the two is itself part of a theoretical construct.® In the process of arriv­ ing at new knowledge, he sees discovery and verification as intertwined rather than easily divorced from one another. Whether or not discovery and verification are totally separable processes, the point remains that the scientific method encompasses both. Recognizing this fact, we look then at research needs in composition in relation to these 141 two processes* Given the new Basic Writing frontier, with the many questions being generated there about composing and about teaching writing,7 we must acknowledge that some of our most important research needs fall into a discovery context. In the area of composing processes, for example, it is simply too soon to test hypotheses, for we need more information about how a variety of writers handle the process before we can arrive at sound generalizations to be tested. Rather than leaping too quickly to verifica­ tion, we need to lay more of the necessary theoretical groundwork through discovery. We need not be embarrassed, though, about the discovery research in which our disci­ pline needs to engage, for such research is a legitimate part of the scientific method. Nor need we feel con­ strained to limit ourselves to experimentation in the strict sense of that term. All this is not to say, of course, that there is no place in composition research for studies emanating out of the context of verification. Clearly such research has a place, for it is useful to know if one pedagogical strategy produces superior results to another. An empirical inves­ tigation with a test group and a control group to determine whether or not, for example, sentence-combining has any measurable impact on writing effectiveness is the appropri­ ate form of research to answer this question. The point here is that experimentation can tell us something useful about the efficacy, or lack thereof, of composing methods and teaching approaches. We need to be sure, first, that there is an adequate theory for testing the method. What is key, then, is the research question being asked and the existence or absence of an adequate theory from which to proceed. Some of our composition questions fall under the one context, while others more properly fit the domain of the other. Questions concerning the efficacy of tutorial versus classroom methods with Basic Waiters fit the context of verification, while broad questions about the nature of composing fit the context of discovery. In discussing research in composition, it is important to understand which context we are operating in.

Physical Science Methods and Composition Research It is also important to recognize that, while the general approach of the scientific method is a valid and useful approach to knowing, not all the aspects of that method, particularly those used by the physical rather than the social or behavioral sciences, can be incorporated 1 4 2 wholesale into our research endeavors. The social sci­ ences— -sociology , anthropology, psychology— are more likely to provide us with fertile research models for a greater understanding of researching human beings. Specif­ ic aspects cannot be adopted unthinkingly in such areas as these: reliance on groups rather than on individuals, reliance on numerical data for statistical analyses rather than on qualitative data, and reliance on instrumentation and methodologies which stress groups and numbers. If our major overall concern is understanding how persons write, what problems writers experience, and how students best learn to write, then our approach has to differ significantly from the physical sciences model. What is wrong with relying on physical science methods for composition research? Several things. I submit that physical science methods are inappropriate for research into writing, first, because they are inappropriate for our subject matter. Science, especially natural science, deals with inert objects or creatures which provide little input into the conduct of an experiment. The physicist can operate with a stimulus-response model quite nicely, for there is no organism to contend with. Even the biolo­ gist can operate rather effectively with the stimulus- response model, for non-human creatures do not (insofar as we know— which may suggest a gap in our knowing) bring their own input of feelings, attitudes, consciousness, to an experiment. The organism which we are studying, however, differs markedly from physical realities studied by physical scientists. Our subjects have powers of anticipation and reflection; they are capable of motivation. Also, persons can hold a variety of perspectives, both on themselves and on others.8 Unlike inert chemicals, human beings are capable of interacting with an experimenter, and the inter­ action is capable of clouding the results. Likewise, they possess attitudes, personalities, feelings--which can never, in my view, be controlled sufficiently. Too, we as researchers are of the same order as our research animal. That sameness, in addition to the vastly greater complexity of our experimental subject, dictates that radically different approaches be used.9 Margaret Mead suggests "that the extension into the human world of the methods of the physical sciences can be stultifying and dangerous.1110 Susanne Longer says, Here, I believe, lies the weakness of our present psychological researches: we do not really grasp the data we propose to deal with, because we are trying to transfer methods of observation simply and directly from physics to psychology, without taking account of 143 the fact that the intraorganic character of the mate­ rial presents a special difficulty and does not lend itself to those methods. Finally, the approach to reality and knowing assumed by the scientific canon of objectivity is untenable. The canon of objectivity assumes a world "out there," the meaning and structure of which is divorce able from the stance of any given observer of that world. As has been suggested in Chapter Two, such an approach to reality does not hold. Fhenomenologists and ethnomethodologists are showing us that reality work, construction of a personal as well as a social reality, is done by each of us. Our particular vantage point on the world gives each of us a unique set of meanings and a unique construction of the world. Joseph Chilton Pearce says, It used to be thought that the physical was a fixed entity 'out there,' unaffected by anything our transient, incidental thoughts might make of it. . . • Yet there is a way in which physical and mental events merge and influence each other. A change of world view can change the world viewed.13 The reality which each of us perceives is different. All this is not to say that composition research has nothing to learn from a scientific approach to knowing, for, indeed, we do. We can learn the art of asking a different kind of question from that asked by the literary scholar, and we can understand how to assess a goodness of fit between question asked and research methodologies used. We can learn which questions fit which research context. And we can learn much about experimental design and other key considerations of research. We need, though, to assess carefully which features of the scientific method are useful for our domain and to discard those which are not.

Problems in Composition Research Before turning to research directions, it is important to examine some key research problems in the field, for composition research, like the act of writing itself and like the teaching of writing, is a complex enterprise, affected by a variety of variables and considerations. As the previous section has suggested, the subjects under investigation in composition research bring the totality of themselves to an experiment and thus are capable of altering or clouding the results. Not only that, but the unexpected input provided by subjects frequently makes the controlling of variables a difficult task. We turn, then, to problems in composition research.

Key Difficulties Researchers into written composition experience three key difficulties. One is that we have no adequate, sure­ fire methods for gaining insight into how someone writes. Because we lack a clear window into the brain to observe the interaction between thought, language, feelings, and written word, our methods must inevitably be second-hand. Thus we turn to secondary methods— to interviewing, ques­ tionnaires, case studies, participant observation, and whatever other methods provide illuminating data for our most interesting questions. No method is foolproof, though each method has certain problems and shortcomings (to be discussed later). A second key problem is the lack of clear agreement among English teachers about what constitutes effective writing. As Peter Elbow says, People can't agree on a definition or specification of what goodness in writing consists of. Whenever anyone has a promising theory, it always leaves out some pieces of writing that most people agree are , good, and includes some others they admit are bad.1 A commonplace among English teachers is that the same piece of writing will receive any grade from F to A, depending on the individual grader. The very concept of holistic grading is an attempt to deal with just this inter-rater variability, for it is present.15 Where one grader values a creative approach, another values correctness. It is difficult to legislate an objective response, even when graders agree on the criteria to be used. In terms of research, the problem becomes, further, one of finding ways to objectify the features of good writing, to operationalize the concept of effective writing Until and unless a researcher finds something to count, it is next to impossible to do an experiment. Yet those items which are countable (T-units, for example) often do not tell us enough about the actual quality of the writing itself. 1 4 5 Other Difficulties Another source of difficulty with composition research Is that there Is so little of what can be called genuine research. Some persons consider 'Vhat works for me In the classroom" articles as research. While I In no way mean to denigrate the value of such articles for illuminating our understanding of composition pedagogy, their generaliza- bility across classrooms may be limited. Further, as pointed out by Michael F. Graves in "Practical Problems of the Beginning Researcher," few persons in English education as a whole actually do any research. Doctoral disserta­ tions comprise the bulk of the activity, which is done by persons who, according to Graves, "then go out and never do so much as another single piece of research."16 Also, there is a problem with dissemination, as noted by Dwight Burton, for even that research which is done (again, doctoral dissertations) rarely reaches the classroom teacher.17 We need, then, to know far more about asking certain kinds of questions and more about adequate, appro­ priate means of seeking answers to those questions. And we need to develop more adequate means of disseminating those answers which we already have. A related problem is that one cannot turn to write-ups of research reports by English scholars with any sure and certain hope of learning exactly what the experiment attempted. Too little is spelled out quite frequently in composition research reports.18 A recent article offers a case in point. While I strongly agree with the hypothe­ sis offered in Mary Edel Denman's "The Measure of Success in Writing" and with the author's focus on noncognitive processes, the article itself is a disappointment, for it includes too little concrete information about the experi­ ment. While it says what was done in experimental sections, it gives no clear description of what did or did not happen in control groups. Further, little actual data is included in the article; it is thus not possible to compare numbers across groups or to assess the statistical test used. Nor is it possible to replicate the experiment. One leaves the article with little knowledge of what really happened in the experiment, and thus, if one is to buy into the results, one has to do so virtually on faith alone. Yet the article strongly asserts that "these results strongly indicate the remarkable effectiveness of utilizing humanistic and non­ cognitive processes for improving student writing."19 While I certainly want to believe that assertion, those results are not presented fully and cogently on paper. Undoubtedly the presentation is in part a function of the literary audience for whom it is intended. Nonetheless, the absence of concrete data fails to illumine for those 1 4 6 who could understand It what actually occurred In the experiment. Greater rigor and clarity are needed, then, in writing up research results. Another problem not often cited is time: time needed for language growth and time for long-term studies to assess such growth. Time may be one factor too little taken into account in assessing growth in writing. The familiar refrain of "no significant differences" in composition experiments may be accounted for in part by a too-early measurement of a skill that needs more than a few weeks to g r o w . 20 Longitudinal data, such as that obtained by James Britton and the Schools Council research team for The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18) ,2J- depends on the availability of a group o£ researchers and on adequate funding, both problems for our discipline. Another major problem has been a lack of rigor in experimental design. The many studies investigating the efficacy of one teaching method over another, including the multitude of studies on the effect of teaching formal grammar versus teaching no grammar on writing improvement, reveal "no significant differences." We have a sense that something somewhere must make a difference. Yet the studies show none. Such nugatory results can perhaps be traced in part to lack of rigor in experimental design or lack of understanding of statistics.22 Recall that the Braddock, Jones, and Schoer report criticized our research for its lack of knowledge and care.2^ In an article on research, Doris Gunderson "points particularly to lack of specificity in basic postulates or assumptions and to the frequent lack of explicit, logically derived hypotheses."2^ Likewise, controlling of variables has represented a colossal problem, in that so many variables exist to be controlled. One has but to turn to the five best research studies in the Braddock, Jones, and Schoer study to see the problems exemplified. Although these studies are undoubtedly head and shoulders above others, even they contain serious weaknesses. The Earl Buxton study, for example, mixes a variety of variables: no grades, no marginal marks on student papers, and no demand for revi­ sion versus a system of revision in which students redid papers for grades.2-* How can one determine whether it is the presence or absence of a grade, the presence or absence of marginal marks and comments, or the fact of revising or not revising papers, which leads to the results found in the study? It would be far more significant as a starting point to know the effect of each of these variables independently rather than in tandem. Thus there is a continual need for greater rigor in even the best composi­ tion research. 1 4 7 Research Directions With all the foregoing aa background, we turn, then, to the heart of the chapter: research directions which focus on the centrality of the person in the writing act. Consistent with the theory presented in this dissertation, two main research threads emerge. One is in the direction of qualitative research (context of discovery), particu­ larly case studies of Basic or problem writers, so as to gain greater understanding of the composing process. The other is in the direction of experimental research (context of verification), testing the main hypotheses emanating from this theory.

Qualitative Research If the self of the writer is indeed central to the writing act, it follows from there that research methods, like teaching approaches, should focus on writers as individual persons. Qualitative research, the research which retains such a focus on individuals, is the type of research most needed here. Qualitative research affords an up-close look at the phenomenon in question. Also, the look is in greater depth; we can observe more, note more variables, see more details than when researching a numerically larger group. What we give up in size of sample we more than make up for in size of data acquired. Also, the data may be potentially more interesting than quantitative data, for out of reams of notes we can see hunches confirmed or disconfirmed, questions arise, possibilities for further research emerge.

Qualitative research: the case from sociology Recent sociological thought provides ground for qualitative research in composition. Phenomenological sociologists or ethnomethodologista have begun the exciting activity of studying, not "strange” cultures, as has been the wont of most ethnographers, but rather of studying everyday life: "In his own culture, the ethnomethodologist seeks to treat 'obvious' and 'uninteresting' interactions as anthropologically strange in order to examine the £§cit knowledge that produces their commonplace character."2o Building on the understandings of phenomenological sociol­ ogy, ethnomethodologista seek to understand how that everyday, commonsenae, taken-for-granted world is built up. By making "problematic" what the culture takas as "obvious" the ethnomethodologist seeks to understand how persons arrive at their tacit, taken-for-granted knowledge. 1 4 8 Harold Garfinkle, one of the founders of ethnomethodology, defines the study as one of "a member's knowledge of his ordinary affairs, of his own organized enterprises, where that knowledge is treated by us as part of the same setting that it also makes orderable .**27 All this is to say that sociologists have become more egalitarian in their view of their subjects. They have come to see that the scientist has no comer on the market of understanding the reality being studied. Rather, whatever culture is being studied, members also have access to the rules which organize and govern their behavior. As David Silverman says, "Phenomenology . . . suggests that the constitution of the world by acts of interpretation applies equally to participant and observer (sociolo­ gist)."2* At times, social scientists construct explana­ tions for behavior which do not mesh with the understand­ ings of the participants, the "emic" or insider's under­ standing. It is now considered important to seek out the understandings which members have of interactions in which they are involved. Of what significance is this qualitative trend in sociological research for research in composition? Considerable. As teachers, we frequently approach our students as though we are the only "kaowers" in the room, as though we have all the answers. We assume we know where the students are and exactly what their writing and language problems are. To adopt the decentralized class­ room which Chapter Four discussed, though, to become learners with the students, it Is necessary to check our perceptions with them. Such reality testing can be a crucial step in our understanding, for at times we make untenable assumptions. A paper with many spelling errors, for example, may result from spelling ignorance, proof­ reading ignorance, ignorance of teacher expectations, or haste. By assuming that we know and understand the sources of error and of other writing difficulties, we take the same tack toward our students as does the traditional sociologist toward subjects when he or she assumes knowl­ edge of how members are organizing their reality.29 We, as they, may be wrong. It is important to have access to the insider's view.

The group versus the individual i the case from psychology Is it the group which is of paramount interest to us, or is it the functioning of individuals? While, to be sure, composition teachers are certainly interested in improving the writing of as many students as possible 149 within a class— and thus it may appear that it is the group which is of primary interest— in actuality at least two instances arise in which the Individual rather than the group la of greatest interest. First, In understanding how persons write, the logical place, it seems to me, is to ask individuals* Here, we are not interested in reduc­ ing answers and procedures to the average, in reducing individual differences, but rather in discovering the wide range of individual differences, in seeing the vast variety of ways by which individuals arrive at a finished product* If all persons are unique and if persons handle the various stages of the writing process in their own individual ways, then it follows that group measures (quantitative statis­ tical measures), with their assumption of levelling individual differences, will give us little insight into the writing process, for such measures will cancel individ­ ual differences. Yet it is the individual differences that are of greatest importance* Individual variation is the subject of interest here, rather than the nemesis. As has been suggested in Chapter Three, writers do proceed dif­ ferently. It would be a mistake to assume they do not. Once we have gained enough insight into how varieties of individuals compose, we can then go on to generalize to larger populations. Until we begin with individual writers, however, our generalizing will be premature. Second, it can be argued that even in the very teach­ ing of writing, one is predominantly interested in improving the performance of an individual, despite the appearance of that person in a group setting. For the teaching of writing, like the learnings in therapy, in­ volves, as in any good teaching, the establishment of an interpersonal relationship with individual class members as well as with the entire group. In Single Case Experi­ mental Designs, Michael Hersen and David Barlow suggest that in therapy learnings, measuring the success of a treatment with an entire group often nullifies success for some patients and covers failures for others, even in groups which are apparently homogeneous on the basis of the disorder treated. They point out that ten obsessive- compulsive patients bring to that disorder a variety of causes and personal histories which cause differences in their responses to treatment; "That is, some patients will Improve and others will not. The average response, however, will not represent the performance of any individ­ ual in the group*"30 As in a clinical setting, the writing teacher is interested in effecting a behavioral change. But, depending on many personal variables, ranging from personality, prior language experiences, to perceptions and attitudes, what succeeds for John may well not succeed for Susan. It is the individual who is ultimately of 150 greatest importance here. Juat as a clinician must deter­ mine, on the basis of a client's internal variables, wheth­ er or not a given treatment is likely to work, so in an ideal composition setting the writing teacher would make a similar judgment, so as to use the most effective approach to the individual student. Aa pointed out by Hersen and Barlow, at a later stage of experimentation, once we know with assurance what works with John and Susan, or what works for John and others like him but not for Susan, we can turn to large groups to see how far we can extend our findings. Problematic to much composition research is that we immediately either leap to extend the findings too far, or, conversely, we use the loophole so often cited in dissertation abstracts: "This study cannot be generalized beyond those subjects to which the treatment was administered." Important to bear in mind here is a historical note which lends insight to the tribute paid in statistical research to groups rather than to individuals. In dis­ cussing the work of R. A. Fisher, Hersen and Barlow note that Fisher's work was done on agricultural plants, the loss of any one of which was insignificant in determining the overall crop yield of a given field. But is that the same situation we are dealing with in our research, or are our research subjects and interests different? The latter, I would submit. What do we want to know and what is our research situation? These are crucial questions to bear in mind in any research endeavor. All too often, teachers and researchers commit the sin of applying a perfectly valid construct to a situation vastly different from that for which its use was intended. It is crucial that we learn to see distinctions in situations. I would not want to go on record as saying that quantitative research can play no useful role in composi­ tion research. It can play a role in one of two ways: either at a later stage in our research, after descriptive work on a one-to-one basis has been done, or as codings of individual responses. Overall group measures, though, will not provide the needed insight at this research stage (context of discovery); what is needed is an up-close examination of the individual organism to see how it is operating. Thus, because we need the views of writers themselves, so as not to impose our perceptions on them, and because individuals are of paramount importance to us in providing insights into the composing process, our research into the writing process needs to be qualitative research. 1 5 1 Research questiona Given the present state of our understanding in the field of composition, broad, complex questions about the nature of composing, about the person doing the composing, and about the interaction between that person and a teacher or other students in the context of a classroom need to be raised. That is, our questions need to move beyond those which assume a one-to-one correspondence between words on a page and the mind or linguistic abilities of the writer. We need to broaden our vision so as to include and examine the many factors impinging on the writing event. If we are to learn as much as we can about the process of composing and about the writing event in the context of a writing course, we must broaden our vision to include a new set of questions. Since research questions determine research strategies, we turn next to research questions from a variety of investigators which are consistent with the theoretical framework offered in this essay. An example of the kinds of questions to which we need answers was offered by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd- Jones, and Lowell Schoer in Research in Written Composi­ tion. Under "Unexplored Territory ,M Hiey proposed such questions as the following: "What kinds ox situations and assignments at various levels of schooling stimulate a desire to write well?" "What are the sources of fear and resentment of writing?" "What do different kinds of students prefer to write about when relieved of the expecta­ tions and requirements of teachers and others?" "What is involved in the act of writing?" "Of what does skill in writing really consist?"31 Henry C. Meckel in N. L. Gage's Handbook of Research on Teaching suggested research "that will throw”!i'ght on Hie relationships of different facets of personality to writing behavior, particularly on the dynamics of such relationships and on the dominant patterns of personality involved."32 He raises questions about the interconnec­ tions between personality factors and such matters as quantity of writing, amount of specific detail, skill in organization, and use of active or passive verbs. He asks about security and insecurity of personality in relation­ ship to writing and about the function of personality predispositions in writing situations: "Specifically, what patterns of attitude and emotion function in school writing situations?"33 Like the questions raised by Braddock, Jones, and Schoer, ironically in the same year, these remain "unexplored territory." 1 5 2 With the emerging needs of Basic Writers and our increasing awareness that we do not know enough about Basic Writing, Mina Shaughnessy has pointed to a variety of areas as fertile territory for exploration. We do not at present, she says, have an adequate description of the Basic Writing student. Nor do we have a full description of the writing of that student population. Research is needed as well on the nature of academic writing and on "how student writers typically behave or how they ought to behave."34 In a recent article, Shaughnessy raises these questions for research: "What are the signs of growth in writing among adults whose development as writers has been delayed by inferior preparation but who are then exposed to intensive instruction in writing?" "What subskills of writing, here­ tofore absorbed by students over time in a variety of situations, can be effectively developed through direct and systematic instruction at the freshman level?" ,rWhat skills have we failed to take note of in our analysis of academic tasks?" And, that key question, "What goes on and what ought to go on in the composition classroom?"35 In another recent article, Lee Odell raises some interesting questions which deserve careful research atten­ tion. He asks whether or not systematic inquiry is useful for all people in learning to write. That has always seemed to me a key question. Even if the answer to that question is yes, further questions remain unanswered, as Odell points out. One is whether or not systematic inquiry is useful for various writing tasks. Another is a question of stages. Where does systematic inquiry fit into the composing process? Also, what form— individual or group— should such inquiry take? Two key considerations, one suggested in Chapter Four of this essay and one elsewhere in this chapter, are also raised by Odell: "I suspect that we shall have to determine whether the processes of conscious inquiry are important in the act of writing a draft."3® And, in terns of examining cross-outs and instances of re-scanning so as to gain access into an understanding of conscious inquiry and composing, he says, "we could note the instances in which a writer paused for, say, more than a second and ask a particularly insightful writer what he or she was thinking about during those pauses."37 In addition to these areas, specific questions of a phenomenological orientation deserve our research atten­ tion. In terms of both researching and teaching composi­ tion, we need to understand the experiential reality of our student writer-subjects. Unless we know their feel­ ings and attitudes, their experiencing of reality, especially the reality of our classrooms, we understand 153 insufficiently the meaning and origin of whatever marks they make on a page. We need answers to specific questions such as the following: 1) How do student writers perceive the writing process? 2) What are the student writer*s perceptions of self as writer? a) self-concept: Does the student have a positive or negative self-concept? b) view of writing self: Do they see themselves as good or poor writers? What problems do they perceive they have with writing? 3) Reciprocity of perspectives: Does their perception of self as writer mesh with the teacher*s perception? With their perception of the teacher's perception? With their view of self as writer in high school? With their view of the high-school writing teacher's perception of them as writers? 4) How do student writers perceive the teacher— as tester or trusted adult? 5) How do student writers perceive the writing task itself? What do they think "writing" involves? Is writing perceived as a school game, an exercise, a test, a means to self-expression, or a way of making meaning? Is s elf-revelation perceived as part of the writing task? What do students perceive themselves doing as they write? How do they sort out what goes onto the paper from what does not? 6) How do student writers perceive particular assignments? What do they think about when grappling with an assign­ ment? To what extent do they keep in mind directives from the teacher while doing the actual writing? How do they decide on a topic? We need to understand, then, as much about the writer as actor as possible. If we understand the phenomenological reality of the writer, we can better understand both the overall writing context as the writer perceives it and the causes of "errors" and other problems that writers have. In my mind, the two most fruitful questions for composition research have to do with how persons compose and especially with the nature and sources of error, writing blocks, and other writing difficulties. Unless we know more about how persons compose and understand why individual students experience various writing problems, we as teachers cannot do the most effective job possible in assisting them with their writing. As stated in Chapter One, we know too little about the processes writers, especially student writers, use in composing. Sach of us understands (to some extent, at 1 5 4 least) how we ourselves write. We can describe some of the conditions and behaviors: using blacic ink or blue felt- tipped pens, typewriter versus handwriting, time of day or night. But it is unwise to extrapolate from ourselves to our students, for they and we are not identical, as Chapter Two has indicated. To teach more effectively, we need to understand how various persons write. What prewriting, composing, and revising processes do they go through? Likewise, we do not know with certainty the connections between writing, languaging, and thinking. We know there are some connections, but, apart from Lev Vygotsky's suggestion that Language and thought are intertwined, we are unable to describe the precise connections. How does a thought get from the mind of the writer to the page in its rudimentary, let alone finished, form? We do not know. On the nature and sources of error, I would suggest that Basic Writers are not the only persons who commit a multitude of errors. In actuality, two very different kinds of writers have difficulties with errors. One is, to be sure, the remedial writer, the person who has little experience with writing, little training in written expres­ sion, a weak educational background. A plethora of errors occur on the papers of these writers: external punctuation errors (a wealth of fragments, run-ons, comma splices); internal punctuation mistakes, especially with the use of the comma and with capitalization; usage problems; absence of morphological endings; subject-verb agreement errors; spelling mistakes. Another writer who commits many errors, I wish to suggest, is a very different type. This person tends to be creative— to be concerned with presenting an interesting approach to a subject rather than with the niceties of editing. Many spelling mistakes and punctua­ tion problems will likely appear on such papers. Apart from spelling and various proofreading difficulties, however, such papers are not likely to be salt-and-peppered with fragments and comma splices. In terms of assessing why a student is committing errors, it is extremely important to understand which type of student we are dealing with. Such an under standing is insufficient, though, for our research. We need to move beyond that to assess also particular errors on individual papers. The reasons for the error will vary from student to student. In a recent review of G. D. Hirsch's The Philosophy of Composition. Donald C. Freeman noted that in his own research with a graduate student into subject-verb agreement errors, thirteen examples of such an error yielded the incredible discovery of ,fnot one type of error but eight."38 It is precisely this kind of research which is needed. Such research is, at least 1 5 5 Initially, qualitative: it will involve more than simply counting constructions. Rather, it will involve talking to flesh-and-blood students to discover what they thought they were doing when they produced such constructions. It will involve a linguistic and psychological attempt to explain what is happening on the paper of an individual student. A similar point can be made about understanding writing blocks and problems with composing--with the larger units of composition. Again, the cause of a problem varies from one student to another. Needed are research methods which will provide access to data from individuals on their experiential reality as writers and as students in writing classrooms. Understanding what is true for the "average” student will give us little insight here. Finally, we need to know with greater assurance which teaching methods work best for which students. Although studies continually show no difference in the effectiveness of one teaching method over another, are some individual students helped more by, for example, tutorial methods, than are others? Beyond the Basic Writer, who sinks with­ out a good measure of individual attention, can other personality types or kinds of writers be identified who perform better under one pedagogical strategy or one type of teacher than another? It would be extremely important to know.

Research instruments If, as this dissertation has argued, each individual writer is unique, then techniques and instruments need to be developed so that a teacher and a researcher can obtain a full picture of each person as an individual. We need to develop instruments or use a battery of instruments that will give us a view of the whole person. There is ^ need to know not only where a student begins a course vis- a-vis language performance, linguistic awareness, writing stage, writing experience and background, and attitude toward writing; there is need to know also of cognitive style, personality characteristics, feelings and attitudes toward the self, and degree of motivation. I would recom­ mend the development of generalized instruments to give us data about the uniqueness of individual writers. 1 5 6 Research strategies Various research strategies are especially useful in qualitative research. Those with promise for research in composition will be discussed next.

Ethnomethodological methods One method used by ethnomethodologists to bring to the level of consciousness the regulative or constitutive rules governing our day-to-day, "taken-for-granted** behaviors is called a "breaching experiment," an experiment which overturns the subject's reality. The classic example, from Garfinkle, is that of persons pretending to be boarders in their own homes. They converse with family members in far more formal ways than usual: "Mrs. Smith, would you be so kind as to please pass the butter?" (this said to one's wife or mother). Another instance is that of the experimenter in a restaurant who insisted on treating one of the customers as the maitre d*. Hugh Mehan and Houston Wood point out that these experiments were later refined, so that the subjects were unable within the investigation to revalidate their realities and thus behaved as schizo­ phrenics dissociated from reality. Hence, such investiga­ tions are to be considered immoral tactics, although they do permit the researcher to uncover the presuppositions of the subjects.39 Another method used by ethnomethodologists is that of "indefinite triangulation." Aaron Cicourel says, I use the expression 'indefinite triangulation' to suggest that every procedure that seems to 'lock in' evidence (thus to claim a level of adequacy) can itself be subjected to the same sort of analysis that will in turn produce yet another indefinite arrangement of new particulars or a rearrangement of previously established particulars in 'authoritative,' 'final,* 'formal' accounts. The 'indefinite triangulation* notion attempts to make visible the practicality and inherent reflexivity of everyday accounts.^0 By using such methods, the ethnomethodologist hopes to understand more about the processes by which we weave that apparently unanimous social fabric of taken-for-granted knowledge • 1 5 7 Case studies As suggested by Braddock, Jones, and Schoer, case studies appear to provide the most fruitful approach to composition research,41 because they allow an in-depth, up-close look at what is happening with an individual. Methods useful in case studies are self-reporting, inter­ viewing, and participant observation.

Self-reporting,— Just as self-refleetion has played an important part in our understanding of who persons are and in the teaching direction discussed in Chapter Four, so self-reflection plays a key role in our research direc­ tion. Of the variety of research strategies available, self-reporting offers us a unique opportunity to learn what we most need to know at this stage in our understanding of the composing process: the insider's view of how persons write. As suggested by some of the student comments inter­ jected at various points in this dissertation, student writers frequently are in touch with problems they are experiencing as writers. Comments such as "I don’t have anything to write about” or ,rMy mind works faster than my pen” can be illustrative to us of important problems writers are having. The students1 sense of what is happen­ ing with them as they write can provide a valuable source of understanding more about the composing process.42 In using self-reporting, we would ask writers as they were writing what they were and were not doing. This might be done through interviews after composing, through journal- keeping, or through questionnaires. We need to ask both good student writers or professional writers and beginning or Basic Writers, to gain access to the developmental spectrum. Good writers will tell us how writing can operate; problem writers, what goes awry in the process. In other words, if we observe and listen to the organism at work, we have one powerful tool for understanding more about composing. It is important to note that some persons are more capable of self-reporting than are others; some type of breaching experiment might be needed to enable some persons to see more clearly what they do when they write. As with other research methods, self-reflect ion is not without its problems. One key problem is epistemologi- cal. By reflecting on his or her own writing procedures, does the writer in fact alter those processes? Does self- reporting, by its very nature, change the person and the 1 5 8 process being reflected on? As we have seen in Chapter Two, reflection is an important feature of consciousness and of making meaning out of one's life. Does becoming more conscious of the writing process one uses alter the way in which that process is handled? (And, if it does, does that matter, for our purposes?) Another problem with this strategy, as with any type of interviewing, is a potential distortion of the data. The writer may not be fully conscious of all that she or he is doing in the act of writing. Or she or he may strive to please the experi­ menter by trying to "psych out" what kinds of answers are being sought. That there are problems with self-reporting does not mean, though, that the strategy does not offer useful insights, particularly if used in conjunction with other research methods.4^

Interviewing.— Like self-reporting, interviewing offers us the insider's view of experience. For that reason, it promises to supply useful information, depending on our choice of informants or interviewees.

Who makes a good informant?--Although it has at times been suggested to me that in doing case studies one wants to have a broad representation of interviewees from a variety of ability levels, such a suggestion I think to be unwise at a discovery stage of research, for it ignores the very nature and purpose of interviewing in case studies. We do not interview for the purpose of seeing what holds true for the mythical "all" (and, with writing, very few generalizations will hold true for "all"). Rather, we interview to gain insights about the operation of a process— to understand how some persons write. Given the purpose of the study, we can then proceed to make intelligent choices about whom to interview. In a most helpful article, "Fruitful Informants for Intensive Interviewing," John P. Dean, Robert L. Eichhom, and Lois R. Dean suggest three basic categories of helpful informants: those who are "especially sensitive to the area of concern," those "more-willing-to-reveal informants," critical cases, and trained persons in the field.44 Among these, some suggest themselves to be especially good possibilities for the composition researcher who wishes to understand more about the nature of composing. One is the "naturally reflective and objective person." Not all writers are able to reflect self-consciously and articulately on their composing processes. Some, though, observe how they are working, notice problems they are having, and comment on what they are doing. These are more natural candidates 159 than are others. A subtype of the "willing-to-reveal" Informant also, in my experience, has shown promise. That is the frustrated person--the person who, for one reason or another, whether because of prior learnings in high school or because of unsuccessful attempts to follow the current teacher's rules, is not succeeding to his or her satisfaction and level of expectation. Such a person makes an excellent candidate for interviewing, for this person is usually eager to talk about his or her writing problems, eager to describe how he or she is proceeding to do a paper, in hopes of solving those problems. A related candidate here Is one who has experienced problems but has now gone on to solve them. Such a person can make an excellent informant, especially if the interviewer suggests that this person has something to teach the interviewer. Another related type are those students who worry more than others, are more perfectionistic, expect to get every­ thing right the first time. Such worries inevitably slip out in an interview setting.

Participant observation and interviewing. — It can be argued that Interviewing alone is not a suftIciently pregnant or pertinent source of information about writing. Howard Becker and Blanche Geer in "Participant Observation and Interviewing: A Comparison" argue the case for combining Interviewing with participant observation: In short, participant observation makes it possible to check description against fact and, noting discrep­ ancies, become aware of systematic distortions made by the person under study; such distortions are less likely to be discovered by interviewing alone. Participant observation combined with interviewing can indeed provide a check on meanings of words as used by interviewees and can help to demonstrate the truth and consistency of interviewee comments. Clearly, interviewing can provide an important source of information about how students write. It may be necessary, though, to combine the method with some observation of writing activity. A second problem with interviewing is that some things are so "usual" or ordinary in the lives of the interviewees that they cannot get at them; nor, then, can the inter­ viewer. Becker and Geer state that Many events occur in the life of a social group and the experience of an individual so regularly and un­ interruptedly , or so quietly and unnoticed, that people are hardly aware of them, and do not think to 1 6 0 comment on them to an interviewer; or they may never have become aware of them at all and be unable to answer even direct questions. Other events may be so unfamiliar that people find it difficult to put Into words their vague feelings about what has happened.46 Herein lies the problem of getting at the tacit dimension, the taken-for-granted, the presuppositions under which the interviewees are operating. According to Becker and Geer, resistance on the part of the interviewee can also present a problem. People may simply not wish to divulge to the interviewer all that the interviewer wants to know. This may occur, Becker and Geer say, because they do not want to, feeling that to speak of some particular subject would be impolitic, impolite, or insensitive, because they do not think to and because the interviewer does not have enough information to inquire into the matter, or because they are not able to.4? Interviewees may be unwilling, then, to reveal sensitive data. A very important problem governing the interview situation is the problem of reactive measures. As Eugene J. Webb et al. point out, error from the respondent and error from £Ke“Investigator can result in improper inferences drawn from the data.48 Interviewees may alter responses because they perceive themselves as subjects or because of a desire to please the investigator. Role selection can also be a problem. In composition research, I can see interviewees asking themselves how much they should seem to know about their own writing habits. Of course, interviewer bias because of race, age, or sex could also be a problem. Finally, how does one know if the interviewee is telling the truth or not? John P. Dean and William F. Whyte have some insightful comments here. They consider it a false assumption that an interviewee has a "real" or underlying attitude or belief to which she or he is com­ mitted. They point out clearly that interviewees may well have internally conflicting opinions. Behavior and opin­ ions may not mesh, not because the informant is lying but rather because of a basic conflict within the interviewee. Rather than worrying the question, the researcher should attend to the various factors which might influence the interviewee's responses in a particular interview situation: 161 such factors as ulterior motives, desires £o please, bars to spontaneity, and idiosyncratic matters.^ These, then, are important problems to bear in mind when considering interviews as a research strategy. Inter­ viewing nonetheless offers a powerful tool for obtaining access to data from the insider's view.

Validity considerations Because of the desired focus on individuals, sample sizes are necessarily small in qualitative research. What about validity— generalizability--when sample sizes are small? This is indeed a problem to be reckoned with. In the absence of a large enough sample for statistical analysis, there are alternative measures which can be used. I find it sensible to heed the advice of Webb et al. to use a variety of measures, at least one of whicK is non­ reactive, to get at the same research question.Another possibility suggested by Michael Hersen and David Barlow is that of repeated measurements over time with the same subject or with similar subjects.51 with sufficient time and funding, such measurements could also include testing with a variety of experimenters and in various settings. A third check on validity is the practice of using multiple observers for a single phenomenon and cross-validating their reports. Are they seeing accurately and reliably?52 Other checks on validity are these: replication with dis­ similar subjects, longitudinal studies, multiple data- gathering devices, validating the etic or outsider's view with the emic or insider's view, and multiple perspectives or indefinite triangulation. As long as we recognize that it is not responsible to generalize from what works (statistically) with a group to what works (in reality) with a given individual, we should worry less about sample size and proceed to research the questions and hunches which we need to test, despite a limited sample.

Research examples Some research is already being conducted which is consistent with the guidelines and direction proposed here. Janet Emig, for example, is the first researcher of note to follow the suggestion of Braddock, Jones, and Schoer that "the psychological dimension of writing needs to be investigated by case study procedures ."53 in studying the oral composing processes of eight Chicago twelfth 162 graders considered by their teachers to be above-average writers, she observed actual writing behaviors, taped oral comments while they composed, gathered autobiographical writing data, and interviewed subjects. The insights offered in the research write-up are of much interest, particularly the profile of Lynn, the most interesting of the eight subjects.5^ Following Emig's groundbreaking effort, other inves­ tigators have begun to use case studies with somewhat greater frequency, although not many have emulated the oral-composing aspect of Emig's study, because of its obvious problem of creating an artificial writing situa­ tion. Some investigators have focused, like Emig, on high- school-age students. Charles Stallard compared the writing behaviors of fifteen high school seniors designated by their performance on the STEF Essay writing Test as "good student writers” with the behaviors of fifteen randomly selected twelfth graders, using a quasi-case study approach. Stallard's research deserves further description for its, at times, surprising insights. Observations plus interviews yielded some surprising and some not-so-surprising differ­ ences between the groups. For example, only one student out of both groups used an outline. No student claimed to think about form or organization while composing (a factor which lends some credence to a persistent hunch of mine that writers focus on meaning and that form follows content, at least in the initial stages of composing). Cood writers reported more concern with mechanics than they had in Emig's study. Ten of fifteen good writers were concerned with mechanics as they wrote, compared to seven of fifteen average writers. While all students expressed a concern with communicating, only a third of each group thought much about the intended reader. Other results were not so surprising. Those identi­ fied as good writers spent more time prewriting and more time writing. Also, they stopped to read their productions as they went along. Stallard suggests that this stopping may enhance conceptualization of the message. As might be expected, good writers revised more than did the average group, with greater emphasis on word choice and some differences in paragraph alterations. Good writers also showed more concern for a purpose for the communication.55 It would be helpful if Stallard's research also demonstrated how effective were the compositions written by these students. Did the average group need no more revisions than the rewriting which they actually performed? Did the good writers prewrite more on paper and therefore need to revise more? Does concern for the audience 1 6 3 relate to personality variables rather than to anything else? And how effective an Indicator of the ’’good student writer" is the STEP Test? Despite the questions, Stallard has done some useful observing and researching. In a case study which replicated Emig's oral-composing and Interviewing techniques, "A Case Study of a Twelfth- Grade Writer/' Terry Mischel emerged with a profile of a single student writer. Again, the insights offered are interesting. Yet the research report feels incomplete, for Mischel gives little indication of why he chose to study Clarence. From the pieces quoted, Clarence is not a very interesting writer. He and Emig's Lynn are worlds apart in the quality of their compositions. Lynn's writing is more sophisticated. She plays with language and word choice, while Clarence does not appear to do any playing with words or much revising, although Mischel does say that Clarence changed some words. Clarence appears almost hostile to the act of writing, or, if not hostile, rather indifferent, seeing the activity— or the study, as Mischel himself suggests56--as not worth his time. While the comments and insights provided by Clarence are of value, it would be useful to know more about him. for, as a twelfth-grader, he appears remarkably similar m attitude and in quality of composition to many of my college freshman Basic Writers, especially to those who come from lower-class Black environments. There may be far more to learn from Clarence than Mischel has given us. Other researchers have preferred to concentrate on elementary students or competent adult writers for case studies. Mot many of either category, however, have yet appeared in print. Two are noteworthy. Donald H. Graves, winner of the 1974 Promising Researcher Award of NCTE, has observed the writing processes of seven-year-olds. His case study of one or the children, Michael, led to two very interesting conclusions: that a variety of vari­ ables contribute at any given time to the writing process and that "the writing process is as variable and unique as the individual's personality."-5? Charles Cooper and Lee Odell, in raising the question of whether attention to sound plays a part in the composing activities of adult writers, have used questionnaires and interviewing with eight selected professional writers. While their results are somewhat inconclusive, the researchers have raised some useful questions which deserve further research.5® Yet very little has been done with case studies of college-age writers. One interesting quasi-case study with this population was done by Richard Beach. He studied the revising strategies of twenty-sir Junior and senior 1 6 4 prospective English teachers at the University of Minnesota. Each student was classified as an "extensive reviser" or a "nonreviser," following assessment by two professional editors of the degree of revising done on two short papers written in a "free-writing" mode. Follow­ ing the classification, Beach studied the taped self- evaluations of each draft supplied by the students. While interesting differences between the two groups emerged, the nature of the assignment itself may have affected those differences. Students who felt they had no need to revise the free-writing may have been responding more to the nature of free-writing as a discourse style rather than revealing their own revising methods. Thus it is not clear what we can learn definitively from the study, even about the sample studied.59 Nonetheless, it is a beginning at studying revising processes. Few if any genuine case studies have been done with problem writers at the college level. Given all that Mina Shaughnessy has said about what we do not know about our Basic Writers, this group would seem to provide imnensely fertile ground for case study research. Recall that Shaughnessy has noted that there are few descriptions of these students and few descriptions of their writing problemsSome descriptions, to be sure, have appeared. John Higgins, for example, has classified the errors of Basic Writing students, as has Clare Silva.61- But case studies have not been done on these writers to survey their composing processes. 1 submit that such case studies might tell us much about the composing process, for they would show in bold face where the process goes a w r y . 62 i n a sense, we would have here a natural rather than an artificial breaching experiment (those experiments, recall, done by ethno- methodologists which violate normative behaviors to get at the tacit rules for structuring daily activities). Rather than artificially disrupting member behavior, we have before us case upon case m which the normative behavior of "doing writing" (insofar as we understand that normative behavior) has, for whatever reason, already been disrupted. We would do well to take advantage of those disturbances for what they can tell us about the writing process as it should or can work.

Falsifying the Theory I would be remiss in presenting this piece of composi­ tion theory without also suggesting ways of falsifying the theoretical construct. Such falsification--proof of 1 6 5 claims not being a possibility63— demands rigorous testing of key hypotheses. The hypothesis central to the theory is that students learn to write more effectively, and have a more positive attitude toward writing and toward them­ selves as writers, when attention is given to their unique­ ness as individual persons. As we have seen, that unique­ ness encompasses a variety of dimensions: personal history and experiences, perceptions, personality, language use, handling of the composing process, writing stages, writing difficulties, and reasons for error and other writing problems. A "crucial experiment"64 would, as experimental treatment, give attention to these various qualities of individual students, either in the same experiment or in separate experiments, while a control group received more standard instruction, with all students responded to as carbon copies of one another. Offshoots from the theory include hypotheses such as those that follow. Students learn to write more effective­ ly and feel more positive about writing and about themselves as writers when: 1) the teacher treats them as co-learners rather than as subordinates. 2) the teacher cares for them. 3) given practice initially in the early writing stages, such as expressive writing. 4) given instruction in writing as a process rather than instructed solely in the characteristics of the product. It will be noted that each hypothesis contains a cognitive and an affective component. As a writing teacher who for most of her adult life has been afraid to write but who now delights in the activity, X would argue that the affective is an equally important dimension here. Where pleasurable feelings toward writing and toward self as writer can be enhanced, such that people will want to write, it is hardly possible that their writing will not eventually improve, for they will practice writing, and practice is one of the necessary prerequisites for writing improvement. I take the position here taken by Mina Shaughnessy, who states quite clearly that we do not learn once and for all how to write.6* Rather, the skill is one which we continually are in the process of perfecting. Thus, where positive attitudes can be enhanced, the like­ lihood is great that continual learning will occur here* Another point to note is the vagueness with which the hypotheses are stated. A clear and concrete way must be found to demonstrate "write more effectively" and "feel more positive about." Is "write more effectively" to mean higher frequency of examples, longer T-units, more 166 embeddings per T-units, or higher holistic score? The individual researcher will have to state a concrete method for measurement. Such specificity is crucial.

Beyond that warning, it is clear what measures need to be used here to test the central hypothesis and secondary hypotheses. I would recommend a pre-test/post-test experimental design, in which as many test sections as possible are exposed to the treatment. An equivalent number of control sections, taught in more standard ways, is needed. Groups should either be matched for sex, race, and l.Q., or, where that is not possible, randomized by computer scheduling. The same teacher, where possible, needs to teach both control and test groups; at least three different teachers should be used in the experiment, so as to deal with the teacher variable. Time of day should be consistent— 10:00, for example, for both experimental and control sections. The same teacher might do one experi­ mental and one control group in the morning and the same in the afternoon. Evaluation of writing effectiveness would be done by pre-test/post-test essays graded by a team of holistic graders who were not themselves involved in the teaching. Papers should be randomly distributed, with all dates and other identifying paraphernalia deleted, so that readers cannot discern pre-tests from post-tests. Appropriate statistical measures should then be used to assess whether or not significant differences have occurred.66 Similar procedures should be followed with the affective component, with a pre-teet/post-test question­ naire substituted for the evaluated essays. One note of caution concerns time. It may well be that over a ten-week period, the length of time of the standard university quarter, significant differences will not occur. That fact in and of itself is insufficient reason for discarding the hypothesis. It may need to be tested on a different population. Or the difference may simply need more time to emerge. If students could be exposed to the treatment for an entire year and then tested, that time period would more nearly approximate the ideal. Where that is not possible, a semester would be preferable to a quarter. As noted earlier, because language skills take time to develop, a change may not always show up imnediately. Also, as noted in Chapter Four, students often pass through a hypercorrection stage. Should that phase coincide with the post-testing, results will be unclear but will not necessarily mean that no positive change has occurred. Attitudes may be easier to measure, through questionnaires or some combination of questionnaire and self-reporting (interview, journal entries, 167 self-evaluation). Such experimentation with a variety of samples and over a long enough time span should be suffi­ cient to establish or disprove the theory offered here* These, then, are the directions in which I see a need for research to move in order to be consistent with the theory proposed here* 168 Endnotes

^Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. (New York: Rareourt, 1956), p7 156. ^Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension. (New York: Anchor-Doubledayt 1967), p. 24. 3See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The Unxversity ot Chicago Press, 1970), for a fuller understanding of how paradigms govern what is viewed as truth. ^Norwood R. Hanson, in Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (New York: Chandler, 1964), p. 17. ^Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (Chicago: Aldine, 1967), pp7 12-15. Kaplan, p. 15, uses the terms "logic of discovery" and "logic of proof," but his meaning is much the same. ^Kuhn, p. 9. 7 Mina P. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 293. ^Leonard Schatzman and Anselm L. Strauss, Field Research: Strategies for a Natural Sociology (Englewood Cliffs, N.' T.: ^renTtice^iall, 1973)7 p. 5. 9In describing the properties of persons which they consider significant to the understanding of researchers, sociologists Schatzman and Strauss, p. 5, note that "the human scene exhibits special properties in addition to those which might be attributed to non-human contexts. These properties indicate a different order of thinking about man, and a different method for studying him." l^Margaret Mead, "Towards a Human Science," Science, 191 (March 5, 1976), 905. HSusanne K. Longer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 19677, I, £5. 12David Silverman, "Introductory Comments," in Paul Filmer, Michael Fhillipson, David Silverman, and David Walsh, New Directions in Sociological Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: The MlT Press, T§73)f p. o, states, **As Pollner (1970) has noted, the basis of science is the assumption of a world 'out there' whose existence is independent of 1 6 9 the processes through which it is studied and understood* The world, then, 'presents itself as an essentially preconstituted field of objects which awaits explication."' 13Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (New York: Pocket Books-Julian !Press, 197T), p. 2. **^Peter Elbow, Writing without Teachers (New York: Oxford University Press, 197$/," p". 1TSZ l5Paul B. Diederich, Measuring Growth in English (Urbana, 111.: NCTE, 1974), pp. 5-10. See aTso Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, Research in written Composition (Urbana, 111.: NCTE, 1963), pp. 10-11. 1

RE-VISIONING COMPOSITION: SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The approaches and considerations raised throughout this dissertation represent a sketchy framework for the discipline of composition. Rather than "mere pedagogy," an is often charged, the field of composition represents . solid body of theoretical and practical knowledge, both present and prospective. As the frontier of Basic Writing opens, more and more questions are leading us to acknowl­ edge that there is still more to know. Part of the present excitement in the field is that, despite all that we do know, there is still more to discover. 1 There is more to know about who persons are, for persons, as seen in this dissertation, are central to our composition theory and practice. We need to be cognizant of the best that is known about persons from psychology, sociology, philosophy. Persons, we need to remember, are meaning-makers. Through their very language and out of the daily events of their lives, persons make meaning. Further, people process information. External reality is not simply a given; rather, it is processed, interacted with, by the perceiving organism. Finally, persons come to the writing event with a multiplicity of attitudes, feelings, and personalities, all of which impinge upon the classroom experience and upon the event itself. Psychology and sociology have made important beginnings in our understanding here, but there is further to go. We need to be more aware of the complexity of the writing event. Writing is not simply the interaction of penmanship and cognition. It is too facile to see in conscious thought alone the origins of writing; so much more enters into the picture. The thoughts and feelings of the writer are important, as are his or her understand­ ings of reality. It is important, further, to recognize that writing is a communication event, one involving a sharing of self with at least one other person. Attendant on that sharing are feelings and fears, which play an important role in the nature of the event and in the content of the communication. Writing is a process. We

173 174 are not b o m as mature writers, just as we are not b o m adult speakers. The process consists of a variety of stages: developmental stages, stages in composing, and stages each time we turn our thoughts into a finished or "published11 piece of writing. Wbiting is an organic, creative process; attendant on the writing act are those idiosyncrasies of behavior which are attendant on the production of any creative piece, be it symphony or paint­ ing. Even expository pieces are creations. Thus we need to be aware of feeling states which do and do not enhance personal creativity. There remains still more to discover about the complexity of the writing act. We need to be more aware, next, of teaching methods and learning theory. If teaching involves freeing people to be who they are, we need to understand how to translate that view into a writing class, so that we respond to persons as individuals within that class. How do we encourage each to reach higher, to release more of who he or she is, while yet responding to each as unique persons? We need to listen to our students and to work with their various perceptions of self, course, and writing. We need most especially to work closely with individual students so as to understand individual causes for writing problems and sources of error. Finally, we turn to research to give us insights into how persons compose. First, though, we need to understand more about research— the nature of inquiry, research methods and considerations, asking research questions. We need to understand which type of research fits which need. And we need to have before our eyes new research models, models coming from the social rather than physical sciences, to give us greater insight into the writing event. Such research as that done by Janet Emig, Donald Graves, James Britton, needs to be duplicated in a variety of settings and with various kinds of writers. Of all the facets of composition, it is the area of research which needs most attention.

Training the Teacher of problem Writers Just as the body of knowledge discussed in this dis­ sertation provides a set of knowings for composition as a separate discipline, set apart from literature, so, too, does a different view of the training of writing teachers provide support for such a discipline. A final considera­ tion in this essay, then, involves the training and preparation of writing teachers, especially those for problem or Basic VAriters. The teacher of writing, 175 especially of problem writers, needs a variety of personal qualities and approaches to students, much knowledge about various facets of language use, and an understanding of the struggles and joys of writing that come with being a practitioner of the activity oneself. I turn first to qualities and attitudes, because my own experience as a Basic Writing teacher has shown me that without the proper affective orientation and relationship with students, no matter how much the teacher knows, he or she will be less than successful in this teaching situation. What are the requisite qualities which such a person needs to possess? 1 would suggest several, most of which can be equally useful for any teacher of writing. Some will be familiar as qualities discussed in Chapter Four. The teacher of problem writers must possess empathy, the ability to see and feel where others are. He or she must be able to support and encourage others in their struggle to write more effectively. In this struggle, the teacher needs to show caring for others and needs to, where necessary, supply positive motivation. With some Basic Writers, a "kick in the pants" is literally needed; with others, a more gentle approach works better. The teacher needs the astuteness to determine who needs which motiva­ tion. The teacher should be non-oppressive, one who genuinely views students as equals and who is willing to create the decentralized classroom discussed earlier. A writing teacher is one who is concerned with freeing others to name their world, with enabling others to share what they think and who they are with others. To do this, the teacher must first know himself or herself well enough to understand how best to relate to others, particularly to others who write less well and bring to the classroom less conscious knowledge about language than does the teacher. A supportive, intelligent person who cares about others and is capable of encouraging them, yet is assertive enough to be demanding, can make a successful writing teacher. The writing teacher of course knows much. The effec­ tive writing teacher for the problem writer brings to the teaching situation a set of knowings which are different from those we have traditionally encouraged. In addition to knowledge of rhetoric and literature, this writing teacher needs to know much about psychology, linguistics, and communication theory. Along with logic, poetics, literary theory, the teacher needs to understand language variation, language acquisition, the relationship between thought, speech, and language, and ways of teaching composition in a variety of educational settings. The 1 7 6 teacher needs an awareness of dialect differences and a healthy appreciation for linguistic relativity. While demanding that students work toward the conventions of Edited American English, especially at the college level, the teacher needs a firm grasp of dialectology to under­ stand possible sources for various errors, such as copula omission. The teacher needs an understanding of the various causes for errors. Also, knowledge of research techniques is needed to unearth these causes. As well, the teacher should be one who loves to write— one who knows the pains, albeit, but the delights as well. The teacher should probably be one who does at least some self-initiated writing, as opposed to doing only academic writing on demand.2 Being a writer himself or herself, the teacher will also need an eagerness to share writing with others in a fashion similar to that in which mothers share the gift of speech with their off­ spring. Such sharing is done, not to enhance the teacher in the eyes of the other, but rather to encourage the learner to grow and develop. A similar spirit is needed in this teaching setting. If I were designing a program to train teachers of writing, especially Basic Writing, I would want the program to include heavy components of these areas, in addition to literature and rhetoric: psychology, sociology, communica­ tion theory, and linguistics, including psycholinguistics for an understanding of language acquisition and socio­ linguistics for knowledge of language variation.

A Separate Discipline To the ends of preparing such teachers and of under­ standing composition more thoroughly than we understand the process at present, I would create a separate university department. The department would encourage a cross-disciplinary fertilization of minds and ideas and would support theorizing and basic research in composition. Courses in departments such as psychology, communica­ tions, linguistics, and education would be of great use in this program. From psychology and communication could come a variety of courses: personality theory, adolescent psychology, the psychology of creativity, interpersonal communication, small-group conmunication, communication theory. Linguistics would provide language theory, language variation, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. From education would come a 177 variety of teaching techniques and grading possibilities, along with study in learning theory and curriculum theory. Certainly courses in the composing process and in doing research, courses in rhetoric, semantics, and poetics, vould be needed. A practicum for prospective Basic Writing teachers, including practice with essay analysis and class­ room experience, is vital. Training in literary study, although less necessary than for teachers in more advanced writing courses, would enhance sensitivity to language use. Too much attention to literary study, however, often leads to overly perfectionistic demands on students, whose work is, by their very immaturity as beginning writers, naturally far less well done than literary masterpieces. The writing teacher for the problem writer needs above all a sensitivity to persons and communication and an under­ standing of the process of writing and of language use. My hope is that the day will come when such a department or separate discipline will indeed be a reality. 178 Endnotes

Mina F. Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations (New York: Oxford University Fress, 1977) >_P- 293, says: ’’And. having done all this, he ^the teacher/ will then have to admit that it is not enough, that he does not know enough about how people learn to write. He will want to venture into fields where he is not a scholar— into psycholinguis­ tics, perhaps, or learning theory, or discourse analysis— in search of fresh insights and new data. He will wish for more precise descriptions of the behavior called writing, for models of the ways in which learners of dif­ ferent ages acquire the sub-skills of writing." 2Cf. Elmer F. Suderman, "The English Teacher as Writer,” CCC. 28 (December, 1977), 356-358. 3John G. Gerber, "Suggestions for a Commonsense Reform of the English Curriculum," CCC. 28 (December, 1977), 315, recommends phenomenology, structuralism, semiotics, and hermeneutics, among others, as training for graduate students in English. See also the many disciplines and readings suggested in Gary Tate, ed.. Teaching Composition: 10 Bibliographical Essays (Fort Worth, 'Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY

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