So I'm reading through The Craft of Revision and thinking about what I am finding there. Here are some thoughts:
My purpose: To offer an honest rendering of my process of teaching Murray at this point in my career. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone do anything like this... To walk through the book with readers and talk about what I think about with each part--what I like, what I don't like, what I want to hold onto, what troubles me, etc.
Questions/Ramblings
1. Murray has in mind a particular kind of writing, I think, when he writes about writing--non-fiction, essayistic. He's a former journalist-turned-freelance-feature writer. One thing I wonder about is whether everyone needs to have the experience of writing Murray's kind of "essays"--might be helpful to try to define what he or I mean by "essay."
2. Another question I'm thinking about is whether Murray's kind of writing is a kind that is appropriate for first year composition courses.
3. Another question I'm thinking about is whether everyone needs to have the experience of being "surprised" by writing.
4. Another thing I'm thinking about is revision--the act of adding things, moving things, taking things out, etc. I'm thinking of what a challenge that is for students--really reconceptualizing their writing. I think that at a declarative level, many of my students this summer have gotten onboard with the idea that revision is discovery and rewriting. But, I think that once they have had to do it, that's been something entirely different. I'm thinking about a few challenges here:
a. Just the idea that you might discover the meaning of your essay while writing or in conversation after and that that might mean you need to go back and re-see your entire draft, possibly throwing out everything, is, I think, totally new to my students.
b. Significant re-ordering--I think the idea of this is new to students. Very new. With one student, I suggested that one of the last sentences of her essay might better serve as the very FIRST sentence of her essay. This, by the look on her face, seemed like a leap. She may have gotten onboard with this idea, but then what would that mean for the text that followed? What should I do with my existing introduction, then, she wonders?
There is a kind of procedural flexibility that is totally new to students. The idea of unfocusing a draft is anathema because their primary goal is getting the pain over with as quickly as possible.
Throwing large chunks of text away...that's another thing. An example: today in class I suggested to a student that a sentence in his second paragraph might better serve as his lead. His first paragraph was all over and basically gave away the entire story he was about to tell. Okay, he could get onboard with a new first sentence and paragraph...but then what do we do with the existing paragraph? I opened a new document and cut and pasted the old intro paragraph into this new, blank document. "Okay, you might do one of three things with that paragraph now that it is over here in your "throw-aways" document," I explained. "You might a) never use it again, b) use it exactly as is, somewhere else in your draft, c) use parts of it somewhere in your draft, but not all." I told him the likelihood of him doing (b) was not high. But that (c) might be a possibility, as might (a). He looked a bit baffled. "Just leave it over here for now," I instructed him. "You'll know if you need it later, later."
The point/question: is there value in helping students to learn this kind of structural flexibility with regard to their drafts and writing?
5. In Murray, there is this emphasis on discovery and surprise--while these are interesting and can happen with all kinds of writing, including more traditional academic writing, is Murray's version of "writing" like the kind of academic writing that at least I have come to be familiar with, either from my own experience as an academic writer or from my experience looking at WAC writing assignments? In other words, is what he's doing good preparation for the other kinds of assignments students are likely to get in college?
And my sense is that the answer is "no"--that in many, perhaps most cases, academic writing is writing that does not necessarily originate with the writer, but, rather, originates with the projects of the greater academic community and, thus, is in conversation with...sources. Perhaps I could take a random sampling of writing assignments from my SSTW colleagues and look at how they construct the writer and the kinds of work they ask (student) writers to do to see how Murray's version of "writing" is similar or different from theirs. So much seems to hinge on the meaning of the word "writing." Perhaps I need to be able to define how Murray defines that term.
6. Turning "students" into "writers"--but a particular kind of writer, in the essayistic tradition...and yet, still, Murray would have been open to students writing about just about anything that interested them.
7. Purpose and audience in Murray vs. traditional academic writing...on the one hand, students are not really being trained to become "academics" so what is the value of placing too much emphasis on traditional types of academic writing. On the other hand, nor are they probably aspiring essayists, so where is the value in teaching them that kind of writing?
8. I am tempted to say that what Murray is interested in, first and foremost, is construction--getting people to learn how to do construction and reconstruction on writing. "Most beginning writers refuse to rewrite," he writes.
9. I'm thinking about the "dad' test--a simple game I sometimes play with myself when I am struggling with a student who is not discovering anything or being surprised. How would my dad do with what I am asking the students to do right now? Does he "need" to be able to discover things through writing, does he need to learn how to surprise himself through writing? I'm not so sure. While discoveries and surprises were important to me at the time in my life when I first encountered Murray via the pedagogy of my instructors at UNH and while I still find value and fascination in the idea that, through writing, I discover what I want to say, I'm pretty convinced that a) it doesn't work this way for everyone and b) many people live a life without the discoveries and surprises of writing and do just fine.
The Murray Formula
Self-Deprecating Humor: "The more I realize my friend, colleague, wife may be right, the more I resist, maintaining an aggressive loyalty to my stupidities. (2)
Autobiography
There is a lovely little snippet about Murray's father:
My father wanted to see his face in his shoes. Beside the glare from his shoes, he wanted his shoes shined, his socks held up by garters, his pants with a knife edge crease, his shirt collar stiff, his tie knotted to the latest style. When I was a boy, wearing my own costume of sloppiness, I felt my father was a phony who dressed so the world would not see him as he really was, a well-meaning failure.
Then as I revised the description of my father I began to understand he dressed this way to hide the fact that his father and mother had worked in the factory, that he had not been allowed to go to high school. He dressed as if he came from a "better" background than he did.
His formal dress was designed to fool people and I began to see it was heroic in a way. He was trying to make something of himself, to look at least like a boss instead of a worker--and he pulled it off. He achieved it into the middle class, just barely, but his son went to high school and college, he owned a car and a single-family home with a lawn and backyard. By writing I had revised my revision of my father and understood anew what he had done for me. (4-5)
I never return to a reader who doesn’t make me eager to get back to my writing desk. (35)
Mort Howell, my freshman English teacher at Tilton Junior College, was my most important writing teacher, but his way of teaching paid no attention to my learning style. He criticized, marked over, rewrote everything I wrote. I hated it but respected it because what he did to my writing made it better, damn it.
After the war Carroll Towle, my writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire, held weekly conferences in which he puffed clouds of smoke at me from a vile corncob pipe and delivered clouds of rhetoric in mini-lectures I couldn't understand at the time. They seemed to have no relationship to my poem lying on his desk. But when i was writing that night--or a week or a lifetime later--I would find myself improving my draft because of something I half-remembered he said. (42)
---
The Craft of Revision and, by extension, Murray, boils down to two simple ideas:
- Writing and revision are about discovery and surprise.
- Revision is a complex operation that most students don't understand and have not experienced.
One point that I feel myself wanting to make is about radical revision--that there is a benefit to this, I believe, but that it's naive to think that teaching students about the procedural elements of revision using a paper they are interested in and want to write well will transfer to what one might consider typical writing situations in college, where students are not given leeway in their topic-choice, where there is usually no real scaffolding from the instructor, and where students will likely revert to their previous practices of avoidance and procrastination. If they lack the motivation to get writing right, and they will likely lack that motivation in many academic writing situations, they will skip the whole process. (quote from Marjorie). So, do we forge ahead anyway in the interest of giving them a positive experience? Or, will the radical revision ultimately have a negative effect in that, even with their high level of motivation, the average 18 year old is just not up for radical revision--of anything. Could the radical revision demand become just as oppressive as the constraining topics that students face in other contexts.
Does wanting students to have "a good experience" with writing really matter that much?
What is likely to happen in future situations:
- Students may not feel the levels of motivation they feel for writing in the Murray model because the topics of their writing, the content, will frequently originate outside of themselves and will not necessarily take up issues from their own life or questions that they feel a need to answer.
- Faculty will likely not provide the kind of scaffolding that students got in Freshman Comp because a) they don’t know how, b) don’t have the time, c) don’t see it as their role to do so.
I am still an apprentice to the writer's craft and continue to learn from my daily writing, from my colleagues and editors, and from a lifelong study of the testimony of other writers, living and dead.
- how effective writing is made
- and how it can be taught
Here he clarifies the process of writing, as he imagines it:
The chapters in the fifth edition move through the writing process as the student:
- finds a focus,
- chooses a genre
- erects a structure
- documents each point,
- develops the draft
- tunes its voice
- and clarifies the final draft
On Personal Experience:
Chapter 1, "Rewrite Before Writing," comes directly from my own experience as a daily writer. I became aware of the vast amount of rewriting I do before I write and share this process with my readers. (xii)
Who Can Use This Text
We have been astonished and delighted at how The Craft of Revision has been used in diverse learning environments. It has been adopted for first-year English courses in universities and community colleges, and has been popular in advanced composition programs.
The Craft of Revision has been used in middle and high school classrooms. In college remedial and honors programs, in graduate seminars, and in teacher training courses and workshops. It has been adopted by corporate and governmental training programs. It has been studied by the writing staffs of newspapers and used as a supplemental text in creative writing courses. And it has been used by individuals who are teaching themselves to write (xiii-xiv).
Students will only be invested in revision when it gives them something. They must have an opportunity to revise to discover new meaning. They must have an opportunity to revise to discover new meanings, to explore subjects of importance to them in greater depth, to experience the surprise writers feel when the draft reveals how much they didn't know they knew. (xiv)
Above all, attitude motivates the learning of new skills. The instructor should reinforce a constructive attitude towards revision. (xiv)
...experience the discovery that is possible with revision (xvi)
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