Conversations with Bruce

These are some emails that I wrote to Bruce Ballenger over the last few days, about myself as a writer and my writing process:

2/16

One thought I had here as I read your post was about genre and its impact on what we’re discussing, which all seems a bit fuzzy to me at this point. :) You’ve got the essay, a genre I think we both love and feel some level of comfort with. And then you’ve got the academic article or monograph, a genre I am trying to feel comfortable with, having been trying for some years now. On the one hand, what I think I was reacting against in my email below is this moment that I am currently living in with my UNH book, where, after putting my head down and just sort of writing about what I’ve learned for a long time, in largely descriptive/narrative modes, I am not head up, forcing myself, as I confront the need to write a book proposal, to think more clearly about what the hell it is I’m doing. The impetus for this was picking up another book, Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition, and reading his Introduction and realizing that I’ve been putting off the important “framing” work of my project for some time. By this I mean all those questions that you’re supposed to already know the answers to: 

What is/are my arguments? 

Why is this project significant? 

What does this project help (teachers, scholars, historians) do or do differently? 

These are the big questions that you have to be explicit about when you’re writing an article for a journal or a book for an academic press that you don’t have to be explicit about when you’re working in essay and, in fact, you will largely fail with the genre if you are too explicit about (right?). So part of what I’m struggling with is this shift, I suppose, from a mode of writing that I feel very comfortable in, the personal/exploratory essay, to one that I have never really loved, the academic article/monograph. 

Newkirk said something to me once that has stuck with me. He was reading a draft of my dissertation and he said, “You’ve got to stop writing sentences like ‘In this next section of the chapter, I will look carefully at…’ or 'I want to propose that…’” This was the only time (for better or worse) that he was actually critical of my dissertation. He explained: “Don’t tell me what you’re going to look carefully at, just look at it and tell me what you see, and don’t tell me what you’re going to propose, just propose it. I hate that kind of writing where you’re always telling first.”

While I think there is something to what he was saying, most work in the field nowadays has gone to the far other extreme in terms of its use of metadiscourse. Scholarly writing has, perhaps, become more social sciencey in this way and less essayistic. It’s certainly more traditionally “academic” in the sense that this sort of writing bends over backwards to be explicit and intentional and clear. Reading Palmeri’s Introduction the other day, I realized how I have NOT been writing in that way and how, if I every want to sell this project to anyone, I need to write more in this way.

But there is another thing, and that’s that there is an inventional usefulness to writing a sentence like, “In this project I will argue that…” Writing such a sentence can be a hugely beneficial leap of faith for a writer who has, for too long, allowed what he wants to say to swirl around in his head without being clear about anything. You start writing "In this project, I will argue that…” and you have to come up with an ending to that sentence. You have to commit. Of course, you can change your mind later and rewrite that sentence entirely, but writing such a sentence is not just an act of conformance, I think, it’s also a necessary act of self-clarification and commitment. There, once I’ve said it, it’s out there. Now, is that really what I want to argue? 

The essay is different in that you never say such things so directly. It would be jarring, I think, to do so. And perhaps this is the reason for my comfort with essays over articles: in an essay you’re suggesting, speculating, etc. But you’re not necessarily taking a hard and fast position on something. Maybe I’m more comfortable, dispositionally, in that space. Or maybe I’m just a cop-out and need to learn how to state my arguments and let the chips fall where they will.

It’s been helpful for me to write this this morning. My entire life I’ve been trying to come to terms with academic writing, traditionally-defined, which is, these days, the type that is published in our field’s journals. I was drawn to the field, however, by the writing of folks like you and Lad and Murray and Newkirk—storytellers, and good ones at that. It’s been an interesting journey, and not always a pleasant one. But at the end of the day, I’d like to be able to do both well—to essay and to…article (?). I know this, the rewards and recognition I seek will cause me to need to continue to work at the latter, while the former will be something I’ll always find pleasure and feel confidence in.

2/14

Just wanted to tell you that I read over your typewriter piece and enjoyed it, and then read the reflection on that piece and enjoyed that. But the passage which really struck me is this one:

As part of a research project, I’ve been interviewing advanced writing students, undergraduate and graduate, about their revision practices. One of the things that struck me is how intensively even experienced writers (some of them MFA students) focus on revising the parts of a draft, and often struggle to see how those parts relate to the whole. For example, here’s a metaphor that Alex, a senior English major, used to describe how he understands the process of revision: “I have a friend who was a cyclist, and he said if I were on my bike and if the seat was a centimeter or two higher or lower, I would definitely notice it. It wouldn’t just affect the seat height but it would affect my reach from the shoulder to where you grasp the handle bars. I took that story . . . that small changes can really reshape the piece.” What’s interesting about Alex’s metaphor is his instinct—shared by most of the writers I talked to—that revision begins with the parts: adjust the seat and the whole bike will ride differently. For these writers, a rewrite begins and often ends by focusing on reworking paragraphs, sentences, words. The writers I interviewed rarely work the other way, from the whole to the parts. 

Man, did this get me thinking and if it’s okay, I’d like to share that thinking a bit with you and hope that I don’t ramble on too much.

I come back to the idea of deduction (from general to specific) vs. induction (from observation toward generalization). Murray talked about these terms a bit over the course of his career, at various random moments. I have come to feel as though the direction of the way one thinks determines a great deal. Murray’s entire project is to work inductively, to allow meaning or generalization to emerge from particulars, from parts to whole. Theories are not to be imposed upon particulars but drawn from them. 

I feel like this is the thing I’ve always struggled with as a person, a student, etc. I think school often privileges deductive thinking. I think writers, as you note above in your comments about revision, often think inductively. I know I do. 

I am struck by the idea that many of us revise the parts of the draft but struggle to see how they relate to the whole. I think that describes me, to a certain extent. I tend not to think too much about the whole. I think this is why I have such a struggle when it comes to the framing out of articles/books, etc. In order to situate a project within a scholarly conversation, you have to have a pretty clear sense of the whole. I have to force myself to sit down and look at a publisher’s manuscript guidelines and literally type out the questions they want answered at the top of my document: What is the conversation your project is entering? How does it contribute? What argument is it making?

I think that if I began with those questions, my life as a writer might be a lot less frustrating and complicated. But I fight those questions, I put them off. I much prefer to just get into the dirty details, to try to assemble a draft. I tell myself I will think about those questions later, when I have something tangible down. And then I have something tangible down, and I begin to go to those questions, and as I try to answer them, which is a struggle, I begin to see what I’ve got down differently. I didn’t know where I was going when I got all that stuff down. I was just writing, following some sort of intuitive knowledge and sense of direction, but not thinking or trying not to think too much about what it was all adding up to. Then I sit down, finally, to ask: What does it all add up to? And I sometimes come up with some good answers. But I dread it—it’s like something out of childhood, you know that you’re going to have to do it, that someone external to you will make you and you don’t want to, but sometimes there is relief in moving from the parts to the whole and asking: what the hell is the whole that I’m trying to make and what parts will I need to make it?

Is this about outlining—before writing (which I hate and resist) or after writing (which Murray advocates for and so i go along with)?

A Guide To Composition Pedagogies

"What is Composition Pedagogy? An Introduction"

...rare is the teacher who does not blend the practices of many pedagogical philosophies. (6)

Each pedagogy enacts specific motives for teaching and embodies specific ways that we construct students--for example, as communicators, as scholars, as disenfranchised citizens, or as future professionals (Tate). (8)--I have requested this book via ILL.

For about two decades, as they used process approaches in the classroom, scholars sought something like an ideal process that could be taught and would ensure success. Think-aloud protocols and other research conducted with student writers revealed that processes are multiple, flexible, and recursive (e.g. Flower and Hayes). In part because of the field's process pedagogy orientation at the time, our scholarship evolved to suggest that writing is more social than we were even acknowledging, leading to the "social turn" of thought in the field. (9-10)

In wading through the many good but sometimes conflicting choices among composition pedagogies, Gary Tate provides a simple approach: The pedagogy or pedagogies we choose must respond to the goals we want to achieve in our courses, and those goals depend primarily on "how we construct our students" and their needs.

If we see students as mute or semiliterate, then we help them to find their "voices" so that they can speak out. If we view them as unthinking repositories of largely conservative beliefs, then we might decide to help them learn to critique those beliefs. If we see them as college students who need to be successful in their majors, then we will probably help them learn to write academic discourse. And so on. (2) (11)

That last passage really nails it. How do we see students and how do build our classes as a result of these visions...

Process presents familiar, shared territory that we do not want to take for granted and newcomers need to understand; it is the rare teacher today who teaches process without some other operating theory or goal. (14)

"Process Pedagogy and Its Legacy" (Anson)

1. I'm thinking about the stories that others have told, autobiographical stories about their relationships with the process movement...the typical story for Anson's generation is how process was a transformative part of their professional life. Examples of this are Anson's introduction in this chapter but also Tobin and Knoeller (see reference p. 214). I'm thinking about how my story is more like a "born digital" story. Born-process. This is different and notable and perhaps worth thinking and writing about some more. My professional practice was not transformed by process, as Anson, Tobin and others were. It was what I took as inevitable. I had experienced it myself at the hands of those like Anson or Tobin who had, themselves, had the transformation. This is a kind of 2nd generation story.

2. Macrorie may be the vehicle I am looking for in drawing forward the story that Graves tells about children in elementary school. In fact, if you put Graves and Macrorie together you have bookends of the system--what happens to the kids at the start and then what they are like by the time they arrive in college. I think I should plan to use Macrorie to talk more about the tribal story. Even though he was, himself, not a member of the tribe, his narrative is very much part of the tribal lore.

3. In terms of learning the skills and practices of the tribe, I'm thinking about Graves' articulation of community, response, time, choice as one framework and also Murray's from "Teach Process"--those documents are sort of foundational documents that lay out key methods and practices. Use them both.

4. I am struck by this passage: "In its historical context, process resisted the imposition of norms, regulations, and conventions; it was 'decidedly anti-establishment, antiauthoritarian, anti-inauthenticity" (Tobin, "Process" 4; Marshall; Newkirk). (217)

Two things about my orientation towards anti-establishment etc. changed a lot as a result of my work with Genre Studies and with WAC/WAW.

With genre studies, there is really no battle. Genre studies really does not aim at changing the system, rejecting the system, etc. It strikes me as a sort of politically neutral pedagogy...this might be something to think more about.

Second, to identify with the WAC/WID movement is to very much locate oneself within the establishment. It is to say: here is the establishment and here is how it works and while we would like to change it, our job is helping students learn how to acclimate to academic writing of all kinds.

Process and the UNH brand was much built on a rejection of academic writing and discourse. It was positioned as working in opposition to academic language. To embrace WAC/WID is to acknowledge the importance of academic discourse and the importance of helping students learn to produce it well. Academic language is not the enemy in WAC/WID. And teaching students to write in academic ways is not an evil (unlike with in Macrorie, Murray, Tobin, Newkirk, etc.)

Expressive Pedagogy: Practice/Theory, Theory/Practice

For better or worse, our maps of the discipline encouraged us to think that, if we agreed with the social, we must dismiss the alternatives. (Byron Hawk, "Foreward, Neo-Expressivisms," Enculturation 13 (2012)

I became a writer in an expressivist classroom. (111)

As a teacher and a writer, I could not have named the theoretical underpinnings of expressivism. I did not even know that what I was doing was called "expressivism" (111-112)

Expressivism is not dead. It grew up. (112)

Expressivism was in the air. It found me. (112)

...our classrooms are not solely expressivist classrooms, if such a classroom should exist (113).

...it is expressivism's commitment to individual expression that we believe makes our pedagogies work. Expressivism places the writer at the center of its theory and pedagogy, assigning highest value to the writer's imaginative, psychological, social, and spiritual development and how that development influences individual consciousness and social behavior. Expressivist pedagogy employees ferreting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and small group dialogic collaborative response to foster a writer's aesthetic, cognitive, and moral development. Expressivist pedagogy encourages, even insists upon, a sense of writer presence even in research-based writing. This presence--"voice" or ethos--whether explicit, implicit, or absent, functions as a key evaluation criterion when expressivists examine writing. For expressivist teachers, the education of the writer is the central problem. (113)

anti-textbooks (113) all offered counterapproaches to current-traditional pedagogy. This pedagogy used non directive feedback to return the responsibility for writing back to the student (Murray, Elbow). It encouraged students to use their own language and to reject "Engfish," the academic language of schools (Macrorie). It saw writing as more than the product of communication, as a means for making meaning and creating identity. (113-114)

Elbow and the expressionists ... work to subvert teaching practices and institutional structures that oppress, appropriate or silence an individual's voice (114)

Alternate Aims of Expressivism:

Kinneavy claims that through expressive discourse the self moves from private meaning to share meaning that results ultimately in some action. Rather than a "primal whine," expressive discourse traces a path away from solipsism toward accommodation with the world and thus accomplishes purposeful action. (115)

[Gradin] explores a commonly overlooked connection between romanticism and expressivism. Pointing to German romanticism's concern for social justice and political action, she counters the claim that expressivism values individualism to the exclusion of social concerns. Rather, expressivists value autonomy as signaled in their concern to empower people through voice, and they believe in agency and resistance. Individuals can use personal awareness to act against oppressive material and psychological conditions. (118)

...the expressivist classroom where students function as experts and teachers as learners (123).

On Being Smart

I was never good at tests. Multiple choice. True/false. Fill-in-the-blank. Never good at these.

And yet, these were the instruments--at the micro-level, weekly, in the classroom, and at the macro-level, in the form of things like the SATs or the AP test--that provided you and your parents and your friends and your community with information about what you know.

I have felt, my whole life, that I am not intelligent or not as intelligent as others because I have never been good at taking the kinds of tests that are commonly acknowledged to measure what you know and, by extension, how smart you are. Sure, there were occasions in my early schooling when I was asked to write papers to demonstrate what I knew, but these papers were often just tests by a different means.

Something about the way I thought of myself, about my intelligence, began to change when I came to UNH. It didn’t change while I was a business major, during the first year and a half. The old way of thinking was just reinforced by my business classes, where exams where the primary means of assessment and I scored, predictably, average on most. No, it changed when I shifted over to English. And it began, really, in Freshman English.

There were no tests in Freshman English. Writing was the means by which you were assessed in this class and in most of the others I took as an English major. So the first step in feeling different about myself came about as a result of the fact that quizzes and tests has been mostly removed from the picture in most of the classes I was taking. Without quizzes and tests, there weren’t these constant reminders that I was somehow less intelligent than my peers.

But it was not just the absence of quizzes or tests which changed things for me. As I said, before, writing papers was something that I was very much accustomed to prior to the time when I declared an English major at UNH. What replaced quizzes and tests and papers-as-quizzes-and-tests in the English Department was this thing called the weekly one-pager and one-pagers were entirely different (and new) beast.

With a quiz or test, the teacher asked you to demonstrate that you actually knew the thing(s) he or she already knew. With a one-pager, it was the opposite: you were asked to demonstrate not what the teacher already knew, but, instead, what you knew or what you were coming to know or what you were trying to come to know. One-pagers were not demonstrations of mastery, they were openings for conversation. They were not regurgitations of someone else's thinking, they were instances of your thinking written down.

The best part of writing one-pagers was that, unlike the scores I received on tests and quizzes, the feedback I received from my teacher on my one-pagers was almost always positive, encouraging, supportive. Knowing that I was writing one-pagers well made me feel smart in a way that school had not really allowed in the past. A well-written one-pager could be a different kind of demonstration of intelligence, one at which I could, I learned, excel.

My point: joining the UNH writing tribe gave me a means of thinking differently not just about myself as a writer, but about myself as a person. Okay, I'll say it: my membership gave me the experience of feeling smart in a way which I had never felt before.

---

This is about Tom's essay "The Art and Science of Forgetting."

In this essay, you do something that I feel is very much in the UNH writing tribe spirit or tradition or ethos, something that is perhaps unique to you, but may also be attributed to your membership in the tribe and/or your friendship/colleagueship with Murray and Graves (or maybe its a outcome of all three of these things). This thing you do is something I’ve experienced many times over the years of my association with the tribe and it’s not something I have, yet, found a way to work into my memoir, in part because I’ve not yet entirely found a way of expressing it for myself. But here goes:

So you write this article about forgetting. You start the article by conceding that you have a hard time remembering the things you read and you announce that you want to explore this…issue? Problem? Reality? Whatever. You know you forget the things you read, you are maybe troubled by this, you want to understand it further. 

What is the effect of your words on the reader—on this reader?

I have thought about this topic of forgetting many, MANY times myself. I, too, have wondered why I cannot recall things I’ve read even a few hours after I’ve read them. 

I’ve usually seen it as a deficiency in me. As a personal failure. I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but I’ve sometimes felt alone in it, as I’m sure many of us have.

But when a college professor confesses to not remembering things he reads, when a college ENGLISH professor confesses to this, when a college English professor or your stature confesses to this, well, that somehow changes things. It levels the playing field. And, I suppose here I have written myself to the point I’ve been trying to make: the move of confessing your struggles with comprehension decentralizes or deconstructs your authority. If the authority figure(s) struggle with these things that I struggle with, one cannot help but conclude, than this thing I struggle with cannot just be about me. I think a big part of being a student, though, is feeling that these things I struggle with ARE just about me.

Something else is deconstructed, though, by your piece: you argue that there is good reason why we don’t remember things. In other words, it’s not just that you deconstruct your authority, it’s that you offer an alternate explanation for a very common thing that many people may sort of feel bad about (poor memory).

You suggest that “poor memory” may be the natural state of affairs, and for good reason. This pushes back against the common explanation for how all of this work (i.e. some people have better memories than others), a way of thinking about the problem that makes it very personal, a kind of personal failing on the part of those (like me, perhaps like you) who aren’t able to remember things as easily or as often as they think they should.

So:

Move #1: Deconstruct your Own Authority

Move #2: Help readers understand a very common problem in a way that shifts the…guilt? responsibility? off of the individual and locates it within the activity itself.

Back to Move #1 for a moment: It’s a kind of giving-the-game-away that you do when you share personal things like this and make them the topic of exploration and reflection. And giving-the-game-away is not the typical mode of college professors, at least not in my experience. College professors don’t usually or often pull back the curtain, give the game away on what they DON’T know and CAN’T do (or struggle to do). Teachers must maintain their authority and the way to do so is…not confessing to the things you struggle with. 

Now, here’s the cultural point: this sort of giving-the-game-away thing that you have done in this piece happened ALL THE TIME when I was an undergraduate student at UNH and then again as I got older and went through graduate school. It was a stance, an ethos, a way of being in the world that many of my UNH professors inhabited. It has become something I have come to inhabit and the odd thing is that in inhabiting, I have gained greater confidence in myself as a thinker.

I’ll close with this: a student, a junior, sends me an email this morning. It reads:

"Next, I love my paper topic...BUT I am not coming up with really well thought out ideas for a thesis. I have always struggled with writing a thesis and I don't want to have a mess or bad paper, but what should I do if my thesis is not strong?" 

I know why she is struggling. Finding a well-thought out thesis is something pretty much ALL of us struggle with MOST of the time. It’s inherently a challenging intellectual activity, developing a thesis. It's not about her. I know this. But she doesn't. She seems to understand this problem, as I understood the problem of reading comprehension, as a personal failure or struggle ONLY on her part (or, that’s how I interpret her words).

What the UNH tribe has done for me, I think, and I am reminded of this when I read a piece like your essay on reading comprehension, is it has shown me that a) I am not alone and b) that there are these things that are inherently complex (i.e. reading comprehension, constructing a thesis, etc.). If I struggle with these things, it’s not necessarily (just) about me and my intelligence or ability, it's about the task and how well I've been instructed in it.

Which takes me to the next key point: the UNH tribe doesn't just help me see that I am not alone, doesn't just help me to understand how certain tasks and activities are inherently complex, it also teaches me how to do the thing that I perhaps erroneously assumed I was or am “just not good at.” Tribe members say BOTH a) finding a thesis is inherently hard, AND b) here, watch me try to generate a thesis and see what you can learn. 

In doing so, the tribe empowers. It says BOTH "you are capable, this isn’t about you” AND “here’s how you do it.”

What a gift.

Do we date this back to something as simple as Murray and Graves getting up in front of people and writing, publicly? Is that where these gifts come from? These men? Their generosity?

I honor the gift by trying to pay it forward with my own students. 

In class last Wednesday, I took almost the entire period to show the students how to develop a question from a text (we are writing a rhetorical analysis paper). I identified four different potential topic areas from the short speech we watched and then I went so far as to identiy a question that, in answering it, you could develop a thesis and then showed them how that thesis might be supported or how I might support it. I did all of this on the screen, on a blank document and when I was done, one of the students came up to me and said—"can I have a copy of that, of what you just did?” I said sure. My guess is he had never seen someone do something like that before. 

Now he has.

But only because someone showed it to me or more importantly, showed me the need to show it to him. 

Synthesis: Objections to My Tribe

This post is informed by a few earlier posts, here, here, here.

1. Transfer or Writing is Not Writing Is Not Writing (i.e. "How are we supposed to use this in our other classes?”). A question about transfer—Murray seems to assume that there are certain fundamentals that transfer across genres and I had come to believe this not to be the case anymore. What Murray advocates may be right for a certain kind of journalistic non-fiction writing, but probably doesn’t go much further than that.

An introduction to WAC and WAC scholarship which helped me to begin to appreciate how different different types of disciplinary writing are and to see that just focusing on process was not going to be enough (faculty in other disciplines will likely not focus on process and without that focus, students will revert to old processes, particularly if assignments are painful or feel meaningless). But also, the feeling that there was/is declarative knowledge that I can teach, from writing studies, in addition to the procedural knowledge that process privileges.

2.  Socio-epistemic rhetoric and the way it resonated for me during a politically loaded moment (Bush Administration/Iraq War/War on Terror, etc.)

3. Sources of Evidence (his own process; published testimony of publishing [creative] writers).

4. On Drawing Implications Too Quickly (The movement from theory to practice—Murray would frequently write an article where he reflects on his own writing practice or some aspect of it and then suggest implications. This increasingly made me uncomfortable.)

5. A rejection of the notion of "process." There are as many processes out there as there are genres of writing.

6. Lack of attention to rhetorical concerns, particularly exigence and audience.

---

And the reason I couldn't believe these things any more it because I wasn't the same person anymore...

1. I was becoming an academic and so could no longer realistically embrace the mantle of rebel or outsider--and nor did I want to...

2. Here's the important point--my sensibility had shifted. Whereas my undergraduate education had instilled in me an essayistic sensibility which shaped how I viewed writing--as a creative endeavor, largely--my graduate education was instilling in me a rhetorical sensibility, where making and defending arguments and considering their effects in and on the world was of paramount importance.


Also, there is the point that I had changed, I was no longer an outsider--it's not just the ideas that I found myself reconsidering, but also the fact that I had changed...I was now an academic. We were a tribe of outsiders, "a UNH writing teacher" was an outsider, we prided ourselves on this fact, but I no longer wished to be an outsider or was frankly capable of carrying myself off as one...

A re-orientation of self—I think Murray and the UNH model is rooted, in many ways, an anti-academic writing epistemology. Academic writing is often even perceived as the enemy of good writing. But it is possible, as I’ve seen and done myself, to write in an academic or professional way and to have that kind of writing be accessible and interesting. In sum, I no longer believed that academic writing is/was the enemy (perhaps because I’m come to produce it myself, to see the value in it, and to feel compelled to engage in it, as a scholar).

In sum, I have become more like an academic and less like a writer. Yes, that’s true. Or, perhaps more fairly, I’ve tried to become more like someone who both values, produces, and sees the need for both academic and writerly writing and feels the need to reject neither.

Waiting for Surprise (from What To Expect When You Are Expected To Teach)

Rereading my own words, written in 2002, just before i entered the PH.D. program, there are a lot of things I notice. The essay begins:

One of the most frustrating experiences I've had teaching freshman composition is reading essays that can't pass what Donald Murray would call the no-surprise-for-the-writer-no-surprise-for-the-reader test. In these essays, students usually tell the story of a "significant moment" in their life and then attempt tot impose some sort of "moral" or "life lesson" upon the story (or sometimes impose none at all). What makes these essays unsatisfying is the fact that, at the moment when the student put pen to paper of finger to keyboard, he or she already know the outcome of the story and had usually already processed the moral of life lesson, which was gleaned from the significant moment. (20)

I then go on to discuss the genre of the sports narrative, "Always written by former athletes and usually written by males (but increasingly popular among female students as well), the sports narrative [...] concerns itself with some kind of adversity the student conquered on the playing field or arena, usually during high school. Its setting is the BIG season, the BIG game, or the BIG play. Its "moral" or "life lesson" is predictable and ranges from "this experience taught me that no matter the obstacle, you should never stop reaching for your goals" to "from this experience I learned that anything is possible with teamwork." (20)

I go on to ask the question why I "cannot stand reading such essays" despite the fact that I, myself, was, once, just the kind of college student who may have written one.  I talk about how, in becoming an English major in UNH, I had to become a new kind of person, the kind who could crank out a more fulfilling essays that more effectively conformed to the moves of the genre.

I note the lack of sources! Just one!!! No Works Cited. Was this the norm for the collection? (It's in the back)

Near the end of the essay, after reflecting on my own experiences in school and coming to forgive my students for not producing more engaging essays for me to read, essays that were full of Murray's surprise or which enacted the self that Newkirk explains such pieces must enact (the writer must be shown in  a "staged process of self-actualization" "the writer needs to present a more malleable self, one that can be 'affected' significantly by experience" (22)) I reach an interesting moment. I began with complaint and gripe. By reflecting on myself and my own experience, I reach the point of understanding and acceptance. And then I write, "So where does this leave me, as an instructor, today" (22). It's an interesting and important question and my answers are telling.

First, I imagine, I might just ban sports narratives from my class.

But then I reject this notion because it's not so much the sports narrative that is the problem as it is the larger genre of the personal or expository essay. The genre, I write, requires the writer to both surprise the reader, to offer him or her something unexpected, some new wisdom or insight about...whatever, and it needs to do this in a way that is clever, interesting, and engaging. Students, I conclude, have many many other things on their mind that take precedence over saying something new or surprising for their English teachers (and I was no different).

Having eliminated the first solution -- I don't want to ban any topics from my classroom. I'm not that kind of teacher, I settle for a solution that is far from satisfying. I will wait (hence the title, "Waiting for Surprise"). I will wait for the students to learn how to surprise me and I will "try to be more patient with those sports narratives." I close with this:

I have learned this: that to expect my students will learn how to "surprise" themselves in writing--how to make discoveries through the act of writing--in one semester, when it took me several years to learn is simply unrealistic. Like my students, I, too, will have to wait for the surprise to come, and while I won't give up on the importance of discovery and surprise in a piece of writing, and I won't give up trying to foster it in my students' work, I won't be disappointed if, in the span of a single fifteen-week semester, it doesn't come. (23)

The solution that I seem to come to here is that the problem is actually NOT my students or their writing. And the problem is not the sports narrative. The problem is me. I'm impatient. I need to be more realistic about what I or we who assign this genre of writing to our students are asking them to know how to do. It takes time, I am saying. Be more patient. Wait.

On the one hand, this seems reasonable. It's a taking stock moment and teachers do this all the time. Is this thing that is bothering me about me or them? I am asking. It's about me, I am concluding.

On the other hand, what is notable to me as I reread my own words a dozen years later is the lack of other options that I seemed to see in my situation. When I write, "So where does all this leave me, as an instructor, today?" I don't seem to be able to entertain the notion that a freshman composition course might not include an expository or personal essay. I am so invested in recreating for my students my own experience, where I came to relish the experience of discovering what I had to say, frequently about myself, through the act of writing, that I can't imagine what else I might ask students to do with writing in a freshman composition class. I have learned enough, via the work of Tom Newkirk, about why my students may be struggling to write engaging essays (i.e. they aren't yet the kind of people who can create, on the page, a "staged process of self-actualization," who can present a "malleable self" that can be "affected significantly by experience"). But I can't imagine what else I might ask them to do or what else, if not self-actualization and the shaping of a more malleable self, a freshman composition course might be about.

But I was about to find out...

More on Things About Which I am Dissatisfied with A UNH Writing Class

The passage comes from Murray:

Yesterday a student asked me in conference, “What are you doing?” It was a fair question. I was dressed in what passes for University of New Hampshire faculty style—L. L. Bean shirt and Dunham boots—leaning back in my chair, feet on my desk, chatting about old cars and how he felt about them. It might not seem that I was doing anything, and he was paying for the course out of his own pocket.

“I'm following your piece of writing.”

He looked puzzled.

“To see where it may take you.”

“But I'm kind of tired of it. I don't know if I want to write about that old Volvo any more.”

“Fine. No need to. I'm just kind of interested in that guy who is so involved in that car he can describe it in hundreds of details. I can see the car now, in this draft, but I'm getting more interested in the guy who saw a vision of a fine car in that rusty hunk of junk. It might be a story.”

We sit quietly for a couple of minutes. 

“But I can't write a story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well I don't know exactly what I want to say. I haven't got any themes. I mean writing fiction, you have to know so much.” He draws a huge map in the air, “Like Tolstoy. A whole world. How everything fits in.”

We chat about how writers discover what they have to say, how little they know, how essential is my ignorance of what happens in the next chapter of the novel I am drafting. I point out that he may discover an article on rebuilding junk cars, on mechanics who gouge the unsuspecting, on how to save money repairing a car. We even discuss the possibility of a girl who waves to the fellow working on the car which makes him write a story in which there is no Volvo at all. Our fifteen minutes is up. He turns at the door, “What do you want me to do?”

“Write.”

“Well, what? What do you expect me to do?”

“Whatever you want. I want to be surprised. You don't know what you're going to write, how can I know? It wouldn't be any fun if I did.”

---

The problem here for me comes from the passage in red. Here is the familiar idea that writers discover what they have to say through the act of writing. I still believe this to be true--in virtually every kind of writing. It's often not until we are knee-deep in the act of composing that we figure out where we are going and what we want to say.

Where I begin to have trouble is with the passage which begins "I point out..." Here, Murray provides the student with a list of writerly options--an article on rebuilding junk cars, on mechanics who gouge unsuspecting customers, on how to save money repairing a car...even on the possibility of a girl who waves to the writer and leads his words in another direction entirely.

On the one hand, I believe that any of these topics might emerge from what the student has written. And Murray is hugely generous in trying to model how non-fiction writers of the kind he once was discover things to write about. During the years leading up to his arrival at UNH, Murray was a freelance journalist and a magazine writer, publishing countless pieces in the most popular magazines and journals of his day. What he is showing this student writer is a way of thinking about how writing works and where it begins that he, himself, learned and practiced and honed over many years as a freelancer. He is right to believe that sometimes, writing works in the way he describes it.

But not always. 

In representing the writing/discovery process in this way, Murray fails to present it in a way that is, perhaps, more common in the world outside of journalism (which is to say the world that most of us inhabit). Murray locates the locus of the writing within the writer. He will decide whether to write about rebuilding junk cars or customer-gouging mechanics. And if he becomes a journalist or a magazine writer, as Murray did, he will be well-prepared. 

But if he ends up like the vast majority of people out there, he will write not out of the storehouse of topics he might discover but, instead, out of the myriad rhetorical situations he will find himself in--at work, in school, in his community. What does this mean and how is it different from Murray's vision of discovery?

What it means is this: most of us spend most of our time engaged in types of writing that might be categorized, per Doug Hesse, as "obliged"--meaning, writing for school, for work, or for our own advocacy in our communities. The obliged sort of writing doesn't necessarily emerge from the writer and her desires. It often originates outside of the writer, in what Keith Grant Davie refers to as a rhetorical situation. As Grant Davie argues, usually there is an exigence for the writing, a need, something in the world that calls forth its existence (e.g. a need to explain to an admissions committee why one is qualified for admittance to college X). There is a primary audience for the writing (the admissions committee), and possibly secondary or tertiary audiences (the admissions committees of colleges Y or Z). There is a writer or a rhetor who is rooted in a place and time, playing any one of an infinite number of roles as he or she writes (a college student playing the role of a well-rounded and civically-minded young person who is the very kind of individual that college X is looking for). And there are a set of constraints within which the writer operates--things the writer perhaps has going for her (all that community service she has done, or a parent who has already helped several children through the process of writing the college essay) and/or going against her (a lack of familiarity with who sits on a college admissions committee, an unclear understanding of college X's mission). In sum, for most of us, most of the time, we don't so much discover our topics as they discover us. Writing is a social act, shaped by the social settings in which people travel and the various communicative needs, tasks or activities within those settings. For most of us, most of the time, writing is not an act of choosing in the way that Murray seems to present it. It is an act of navigating, an act of negotiating within a given set of parameters that have preceded us or been defined for us.

The Two Things that Got Me Over the Hump (or, How To Organize the 2nd to Last Section of My Essay)

1. Thinking With Anne Beaufort

In her essay “College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later,” Anne Beaufort revisits her earlier research and attempts to rethink her proposal for a writing curriculum. One of the corrections she offers has to do with her failure to account, in her earlier work, for how the curriculum she was proposing would “fit” with curricula writing instructors were already using. Beaufort identifies a series of six values and assumptions, any one of which, she asserts, may underlie the work of a writing course. These are:

1. The expressivist goal, facilitating self-expression, finding one’s voice, one’s personal truths; 

2. The critical theory/cultural studies goal, facilitating critique of social hierarchies and cultural 
hegemonies; 

3. The democratic, rhetorical goal, facilitating informed participation in civic issues; 

4. The pragmatic goal, facilitating successful written expression in school and work contexts; 

5. The aesthetic goal, facilitating an appreciation of the craft of writing and a love of language; 

6. The process goal, facilitating growth in managing writing tasks. 


Beaufort concedes that its completely possible that these goals might be interwoven in a given writing class and this is definitely true for the UNH writing course that I experienced as an undergraduate student and sought to teach during my early years in the classroom. A UNH writing course was guided by these three goals (in this order of emphasis):

The expressivist goal

The process goal

The aesthetic goal

During graduate school, both at Iowa, for my MAT and at UNH, for my doctorate, I was exposed to and persuaded to experiment with a writing course guided by two new goals while simultaneously carrying forward a goal from my earlier teaching. These courses were shaped by these three goals (again, in order of emphasis):

The critical theory/cultural studies goal

The democratic, rhetorical goal

The process goal

Today, if forced to choose, I would say that my teaching is informed by these goals:

The pragmatic goal

The process goal

I say “if forced to choose” because I am fortunate, today, to teach a range of writing courses and not just, for example, first-year writing (FYW). When I teach FYW I am undoubtedly guided by the pragmatic and process goals, having long abandoned the expressivist and aesthetic goals of my UNH tribe. But elsewhere, in other kinds of courses, with other kinds of assignments, I am able to operationalize these other kinds of underlying values and assumptions. For example, in a public writing course, I engage with the democratic/rhetorical goal of participation in civic issues. Same for a digital and multimedia writing course that I organize around the theme of sustainability. In a course on food and food writing, I engage the critical theory/cultural studies goal as I work to help students think critically about our food system and its power in their lives. In this same course, I engage the expressivist goal by asking the students to write personally about their experiences with food. In sum, I am able to emphasize different values and assumptions in different pedagogical contexts, and not confined to just one type of writing course guided by one set of values and assumptions.

Also:

Although there is a long tradition in first-year writing courses of starting with a personal essay (such as the literacy autobiography), I now realize that including this genre in an academic writing course takes away from the limited time available in a 10 or 15 week course to emphasize academic writing skills and genres. Those whose goals for freshman writing are expressivist would disagree with me (Elbow “Reflections”). I understand. But my goals for academic writing courses are different from the goals expressivists have. Personal narrative is seldom encouraged outside of freshman writing and creative nonfiction classes. Its genre conventions, purposes, and critical thinking requirements are much different than academic writing. So I no longer include any personal narrative assignment in an academic writing course.

2. Historicizing “A UNH Writing Course”

The basic point here is that conducting historical inquiry into the UNH program helped me to see a UNH writing course as a product of its time/context and not as “the way” writing should be taught.

• Who can help me make this point about the historically-contingent nature of all approaches to teaching writing?
• How can I show/explain a UNH writing course as a product of its time/era but also of its key founders/shapers? (for example: Murray was not an academic, so academic writing, traditionally defined, didn’t play a large role in a UNH writing course; same for rhetoric)

Sections I'm worried about

In the late summer of 1996, I traveled west to enroll at the University of Iowa, to learn how to become a high school English teacher and to further my education as a writer. These were the two identities I held most strongly at this point in my life: pre-service teacher and writer. The first I shared with others (if asked), the second I kept mostly to myself.

But during my two years at Iowa, my sense of self, and, subsequently, my intentions and desires began to shift. As I traveled to my first academic conferences, worked as Dr. Sunstein’s research assistant, attended lectures by visiting scholars, read and began to experiment with scholarly writing, taught first-year composition, and met and socialized with doctoral students, I gained access to a side of higher education about which I had previously known very little. I felt drawn to this new world. I was a serious student and I sensed that graduate education, beyond the terminal Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree I had come to Iowa to pursue, was the ultimate opportunity for rigorous academic study. I began to think I might make a good professional student.

And yet my desire to pursue further education, to stay on, say, for a doctorate, was complicated by my sense of myself as a member of the UNH writing tribe, which, at this point, I associated primarily with teachers and writers (the latter of the creative sort). These two identities, teacher and writer, seemed to conflict with this other identity I was beginning to imagine for myself, scholar. I associated the first two identities with practical matters, rooted in the real world (which I perceived to be a good thing). I associated the identity of scholar with abstraction and with theory (of which I was suspicious). Despite the example of my mentor, Bonnie Sunstein, and of several other members of the UNH writing tribe whom I was meeting on the pages of the books and journals I was reading (and sometimes in person), I struggled to envision a way that I could be all three things at once—teacher, writer, and scholar. I somehow couldn’t imagine that in becoming the latter (scholar), I wouldn’t have to give up the former (teacher, writer).

These boundaries I was drawing up in my head shaped virtually everything I did during my time at Iowa. As I fought to maintain allegiance to my limited understanding of my UNH writing tribe identity, I simultaneously began to tentatively give myself over to new more scholarly ways of being. This process of negotiation manifested itself in conversations with friends, in the classroom, and, perhaps most interestingly, on the page.

Writing researcher Roz Ivanic has actually looked into what I’m trying to describe here. Ivanic studies the way writers construct and negotiate identity during the act of writing. Her central thesis: writing is an act of identity. When we write, Ivanic argues, we work to construct a vision of ourselves on the page, work to be a certain kind of person, while we simultaneously work to align ourselves with or distance ourselves from different audiences (31). In the framework Ivanic has developed to analyze writing and identity, there are three elements to consider. First, there is what she calls the autobiographical self, which “is associated with a writer's sense of their roots, of where they are coming from” (24-25). The autobiographical self is the totality of the experiences a writer has had in her life when she sits down to write, as well as her cumulative sense of who she is as a person (i.e. a person who is committed to social justice, a person who is a cut-throat deal-maker, a person who struggles with authority). We inevitably bring our autobiographical selves to each act of writing, Ivanic claims.

Second, there is the discoursal self, which is the “impression—often multiple, sometimes contradictory—which [a writer] consciously or unconsciously convey[s] of themself [sic] in a particular written text” (25). The discoursal self is the person we are trying to be when we write (e.g. a recent medical school grad trying to be a doctor, a college student trying to be a member of her major, a job applicant trying to be the solicited employee). The discoursal self is shaped by what Ivanic calls the “possibilities for self-hood” in a writing situation, which is to say the social context. When constructing a discoursal self, we write as the person the situation requires us to be.

Finally, there is the self-as-author, which refers to the extent to which, in a given situation, a writer feels “enough of a sense of self-worth to write with authority, to establish an authorial presence” (26). The authorial self, Ivanic asserts, is shaped almost entirely by a writer’s sense of confidence in her ability to successfully navigate a given writing situation (i.e. a student writing an essay about a book she hasn’t read vs. a student writing a personal essay about her own life, a job applicant who is not really qualified for the position she is applying for vs. an applicant who is over-qualified, a manager who has worked in an industry for twenty years vs. one who has just promoted to her first management position). For Ivanic, one’s sense of self-as-author is shaped by the degree of experience and self-assuredness one brings to a specific writing task. When one’s autobiographical self meshes well with the discoursal self that a writing situation requires of her, the writer will build a sense of self-as-author that is convincing and persuasive. Often, though, as Ivanic points out, this is not the case—the person we feel we are does not jive with the person we are asked to be on the page. From the perspective of the writer, this is when writing becomes a challenge. From the perspective of the researcher, as we will see below, this is when writing becomes interesting.

If I draw on Ivanic’s framework to better understand my experiences at Iowa, I would begin by trying to reconstruct the autobiographical self I brought to the page each time I sat down to write.