Writing Badly To Write Well

This is the article Don wrote when he was invited to speak at the sentence combiners conference.

Don shares his process (there is a connection here with his terror at Berkenkotter's assignment):

As I indicate in the following article, I thought Don Daiker was joking when he invited me to speak before a conference of sentence combiners. I was challenged, however, by the unexpected opportunity and accepted; then, as the date grew closer, I was terrified--a common sequence. (101)

On the importance of sharing our thinking with our students (and a critique of the education system):

This cleaned up thinking, thinking after I know I am thinking, late pre-thinking but still a kind of thinking--a kind of thinking important for our students to know about--that we think as confusedly as they do, when we are lucky, if our education still allows it (remember that Snodgrass poem "The Examination"), they should see it in action, not because they have to learn it, they know it, but because they have to learn it, they know it, but because they should be allowed it... (102)

We see the Murray paradoxical thinking at work:

We don't know enough about how to write badly--and why. (104)

I've got to fail more in my writing. (105)

...our students must have the experience of writing what they do not expect to write. That is the essential writing experience, and if you do not feel that firsthand, you cannot understand writing (110).

You do have to write badly to write well. Of course. Badly in the sense of neatness and completeness, for effective thinking isn't neat and complete. (111)

If it can be studied and understood, perhaps we can learn to teach our students to write badly so they can write well. (119)

Connecting his work to other's in the field, and I find this really intriguing:

Yes, I like Linda Flower's writer-based and reader-based prose but I guess what we have, what I teach, what I force is often too much reader-based prose when the writing I most admire that stretches me because it stretched the writer is writer-based prose, writing that continues to search for a meaning after it leaves the writer's desk and can we tolerate it then in our composition classes? (111)

This passage nicely captures Murray's thinking about his role, who he is, what he does, how he thinks about and describes his own process. And this strikes me as an interesting thread worth exploring or thinking about--Murray was described or "labeled" as an expressivist, but how did he think about his own work and his own purpose or the contribution he was seeking to make? Could I locate passages which help me sketch this out? I could, of course, adn have been doing so all along. This one helps me quite nicely:

What is the instructive line? What is it in a line that leads me on, that teaches me that meaning may lie ahead? Well, it's not something that I think about normally; it's something I do. If you think about hitting a curve, you won't. And so I don't think about it. But if the batter becomes a coach? Alright, I have to think about it. To make money I am led to arrogance. I presume to teach, to find out what I do, and then, no matter how embarrassing or unacademic and unprofound and unintellectual, to expose it, to reveal what is simple and obvious to others. And then to be surprised, for it isn't, apparently, quite so obvious--and perhaps not so simple. (115)

I am really moved by this passage. There are several things to note:

1. The metaphor--baseball, players, coaches. So when Don, himself, thought about his contribution, his work, this is how he thought of it, the movement from player to coach. Makes perfect sense.
2. The part about embarrassing, unacademic, intellectual, unprofound...these all signal his own insecurities about his work and his feelings about his position in the academy.
3. I am moved by the idea of listening to Don--allowing Don to tell us how to think about his own contribution and place in the field of composition. Don listens to the "line"--we listen to him and allow him to speak for himself and partly, perhaps, that's what I'm wanting to do here.

This is the sort of passage that I want my students to hear and perhaps I should start thinking of the "themes" that I want them to hear. This one captures one such theme:

In our desire to be responsible and to make our students write correctly there is a danger that they will misunderstand and think they have to write correctly from the beginning. But language will not be a tool of thinking unless our students are able to allow language to run free and stumble and fall...And writers have to do a lot of falling if they are to write anything worth reading. (118)

But I have other students who write too well too soon, and I have to help them--and I think I too often fail them--to get beyond their correctness, their teacher-induced, parent-induced, society-induced, genetic-induced desire to be correct, as if language could be controlled by rules. The whole spectrum of students I work with--from remedial through graduate students to professional journalists--want correctness before meaning, before voice. If writers are to find the instructive line they must realize it is not only permissible to write badly, it is essential. We have to let language lead us to meaning. (118)

Murray closes the article with a call to research:

A call for research. We need to understand how writing can be made incorrect in a productive way. How do writers write badly to write well? What instructs them in their journal notes, in their mind before there are notes, and between the notes, in their early drafts, what allows them to see what we cannot see? (118-119)