on skills

In response to Jamie, Heather writes:

"'Writing as more than a skill' is a way of talking about composition. And, yet, even though I love that idea, I am still troubled by it--because does it imply that if writing were only a skill that it would be barely worthwhile?"

You have to understand the context and history of the field to get the full meaning of the objection to "mere" skills. When non-writing specialists have argued for "skills instruction" in writing, they have usually meant writing instruction organized around grammar and mechanics. However, research has shown that teaching writing by teaching g/m doesn't work and that efforts to contextualize skills in rhetorical, conceptual, and intellectual questions and problems is both more promising and more transferable to other writing tasks. So, when compositionists resist the idea that writing equates to a skills, they are also resisting calls to de-teeth composition courses by making them so skills-oriented that they fail to account for the larger questions that arise when we attempt to put words together.