sidenote

this came across on the WPA listserv this morning. It's not a CCCC address but still relevant to our discussions here, I think (and maybe interesting to teach... ? I've posted it on my Bb site for the fall). Also fun in conversation with Stanley Fish's latest bit of drivel in the Times (linked here)

(also, i'm pleading ignorance on copyright etiquette here... are there rules about posting stuff that is only available to subscribers? hopefully the campus subscription is a get-out-of-jail-free card).

Chronicle of Higher Education
November 7, 2008

Writing Is Not Just a Basic Skill
By MARK RICHARDSON

At many colleges, professors trained in the discipline of rhetoric and
composition are finding that the specialized knowledge they bring to
teaching writing is held in thrall to older notions of how we learn to
write - what Linda Brodkey, an author and director of the Warren College
Writing Program at the University of California at San Diego, calls
"common-sense myths of literacy."

Such myths are pernicious. They poison colleges and universities,
affecting the morale of writing instructors, the attitudes of other
faculty members, and, worst of all, students' acquisition of literacy.
We need to understand such myths and to dispel them, replacing them with
a new approach to first-year composition and a new commitment to
upper-level writing.

Common-sense myths of literacy are akin to other common-sense myths. The
truth often turns out to be more complicated than we thought. For most
of human history, for example, it was assumed that time moves at a
steady, equal pace for everyone (unless you are waiting for water to
boil). Then Einstein showed that time moves more slowly for a clock in
motion than for one that is stationary, and our common-sense observation
of time was proved wrong.

The "common-sense" viewpoint about learning to write was born in the
late 1800s, as colleges adapted to the enormous social and educational
changes taking place: industrialization; population growth and
relocation; social mobility; coeducation; and the boom in knowledge that
led to the birth of the modern academic disciplines. A changing society
brought new students to campuses - students of widely varied social
classes and levels of literacy, eager to fill the jobs created by the
new industrial society. In 1874, responding to the influx of new
students, Harvard University administered an entrance exam in literacy
skills. Over half of the applicants who took it failed.

Colleges responded by creating composition courses. Harvard's new
writing courses were taught not by a rhetorician or an English teacher,
but by a newspaperman, Adams Sherman Hill. None of the other instructors
of Harvard's composition courses had advanced degrees, either. In other
words, "composition" was not a strategically planned curricular
development, nor did it evolve out of scholarship or pedagogical
expertise. It was invented in a hurry to resolve a perceived crisis, as
colleges struggled to adapt to the requirements of a new age. And as
Harvard went, so went the rest of American higher education.

Lacking real expertise, first-year-composition instructors were guided
largely by "common-sense" notions about the acquisition of literacy. But
in the 1960s, a whole new period of social mobility generated an
explosion in rhetoric-and-composition theory and practice. Since then we
have learned many truths that fly in the face of common-sense ideas.
Here are just a few:

Students who do one kind of writing well will not automatically do other
kinds of writing well.
The conventions of thought and expression in disciplines differ, enough
so that what one learns in order to write in one discipline might have
to be unlearned to write in another.
Writing is not the expression of thought; it is thought itself. Papers
are not containers for ideas, containers that need only to be well
formed for those ideas to emerge clearly. Papers are the working out of
ideas. The thought and the container take shape simultaneously (and
develop slowly, with revision).
When students are faced with an unfamiliar writing challenge, their
apparent ability to write will falter across a broad range of "skills."
For example, a student who handles grammatical usage, mechanics,
organization, and tone competently in an explanation of the effects of
global warming on coral reefs might look like a much weaker writer when
she tries her hand at a chemistry-lab report for the first time.
Teaching students grammar and mechanics through drills often does not
work.
Patterns of language usage, tangled up in complex issues like personal
and group identities, are not easy to change.
Rhetorical considerations like ethos, purpose, audience, and occasion
are crucial to even such seemingly small considerations as word choice
and word order.
Writing involves abilities we develop over our lifetimes. Some students
are more advanced in them when they come to college than are others.
Those who are less advanced will not develop to a level comparable to
the more-prepared students in one year or even in two, although they may
reach adequate levels of ability over time.
Those truths, and others like them, have reshaped our understanding of
what writing is and how it is learned. But administrators, faculty
members in other disciplines, and even some academics trained in
traditional English studies still cling to common-sense notions about
literacy education. Those notions see composition as a "basic skill"
that students should have attained by the end of their first year in
college at the latest - first-year composition is therefore essentially
remedial - just as Harvard saw it in 1874. From that perspective,
academic literacy is something that students should have when they
arrive at college. If they don't, then one or two courses are deemed
sufficient to bring them up to speed - never mind that any complex
ability that we do not fully possess, like speaking French or playing
the piano, will not be mastered so quickly.

A related common-sense myth of literacy acquisition sees first-year
composition as a way to prepare students for writing in other
disciplines. However, as Sharon Crowley, a rhetoric-and-composition
instructor at Arizona State University and author of Toward a Civil
Discourse (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), and David Russell, a
professor of rhetoric and professional communication at Iowa State
University and author of Writing in the Academic Disciplines (Southern
Illinois University Press, 2002), have pointed out, writing experts have
learned that disciplinary genres differ.

To take just one small example, most humanities-based writing handbooks
tell writers to avoid the passive voice, but chemistry-lab reports
advise students to write only in the passive. And it is not just usage
issues that vary from discipline to discipline; genres, styles,
resources, approaches, and habits of thought all do as well.

Of course, one could argue that all academic writing should have some
qualities in common: clear organization, detailed development,
mechanical correctness, evidence of critical thinking, and so on. But
literacy studies have shown us that problems with such issues tend to
emerge or recede as students move from genre to genre, so that Bill
might write a narrative paper in first-year composition with no
organizational problems and then go on to write a philosophy paper with
many. Every composition teacher has seen students whose abilities seem
to deteriorate rather than improve as the course proceeds. The new
problems are just fault lines exposed by the pressure of an unfamiliar
genre of writing.

Moreover, a particularly pernicious common-sense myth of literacy
acquisition is that because writing is a "basic skill," almost anyone
can teach first-year composition - newly minted graduate students in
English literature, journalists, high-school English-literature
teachers, even M.A.'s in other disciplines - and that those faculty
members don't need to be paid well, because what they teach is so basic.
But the viewpoint shaped by 50 years of research, analysis, and
experimentation views composition differently. Indeed, writing experts
see in composition a body of knowledge as rich as any other
discipline's. Thus first-year composition should be an introduction to
the discipline of rhetoric and composition (just as Psychology 101 is an
introduction), generating knowledge that students can learn and on which
they can be tested and evaluated through their writing.

From that vantage point, first-year composition is only indirectly
preparatory to writing in other disciplines: What a student will learn
is somewhat applicable to writing a history or psychology paper, but
significant gaps in preparation will remain. Psychology professors who
want students to write effective papers, even at the introductory level,
can't count on first-year composition to have done all the preparatory
work.

Academics who would like their students to become effective writers must
work with professors of rhetoric and composition not only to design
effective writing assignments and writing instruction within their own
courses, but also to create discipline-specific versions of advanced
composition courses and require, or at least urge, their majors to take
those courses. Such courses should be paid for collaboratively, with the
discipline requiring or recommending the course contributing its fair
share.

Finally, expertise in writing theory argues that those who teach
first-year composition should be as credentialed as those who teach
Introduction to Sociology, World History, or Environmental Biology, and
should be paid comparably. The most destructive common-sense myth about
literacy acquisition is that since it is "a basic skill," it ought to
come quickly and cheaply. It isn't, and it shouldn't. Blinded by a
common-sense myth, colleges have perpetuated what Ms. Crowley aptly
calls an "underclass" of writing instructors who are underpaid,
overworked, and often unprepared to teach the subject that students must
learn: rhetoric and composition.

So let's dispel the myths, and with them, first-year composition itself.
Farewell, basic skills. Hello, Introduction to Rhetoric and Comp.

Mark Richardson is an assistant professor of writing and linguistics at
Georgia Southern University.