Twenty years later I was in graduate school studying Composition Theory and teaching Freshman Writing during another revolution. They were calling it New English. Though my freshmen were blissfully unaware of it--to them, English was English--it was shaking ivory towers all over the place.
Academic revolutions tend to smolder in ivory towers for a long time before the changes leak out--the New English actually began before I got to junior high--but as a grad student I was able to see some of the new methods filtering down into high schools here and there, and I began to suspect that by the time my students’ children were attending school, they might be learning by New English methods.
The current rise in popularity in home schooling does not alter the fact that nearly all of us were taught writing in traditional settings according to traditional methods. In most of our minds, writing instruction was dominated by the English Teacher, whom theorist Martin Joos introduces to us as Miss Fidditch, gray and prim and pathetic. Teaching English has been her only love, and to her, “ain’t” is the four-letter word’s four-letter word. Her quill is dipped in blood, and she practices mercy-killing on every theme that crosses her desk. Her students--or should I say survivors?-- have vague recollections of words like “outline,” “parallelism,” and “dangling modifier,” but they have no idea any more what those terms mean and testify that they “just can’t write.”
For most of us, the days of Miss Fidditch are a fading memory, but if we didn’t learn to “do writing” in school, we may still feel doomed to linguistic mediocrity in life--obviously not a helpful self-image if we are our children’s primary educators. Miss Fidditch’s judgments about our abilities as writers may seem credible--until we look at the bigger picture and the encouraging methods promoted by the New English.
A major distinction between Traditional English and New English is that Traditional English focuses on what’s produced--the “Product,” in English department vernacular--and New English focuses on the Process used to produce the Product. That’s not to say that New English advocates don’t care about the finished product. For instance, I certainly hope that when you read this in print, it will be free of errors. But grammaticality is really a late stage in the writing process. Journalists don’t proofread their articles when they’re at the keyboard. No, they show their “finished” story to the editor who sends it to the typesetter, and then the proofreader looks at it. Asking a writer to punctuate flawlessly before the final draft is complete is like asking a sculptor to polish a piece before putting down the chisel. But if I know Miss Fidditch, she had you so whipped into shape that you hesitate to put down two sentences without “proofreading” the first one to see if it’s perfect before going on to the second. Whether my hunch is accurate or not, I’ll bet you remember the fright that was built into writing instruction.
Most "real" writers have learned that there are ways of grappling with a blank sheet of paper, but many survivors of writing classes don’t know that. Nor are their teachers able to tell them, because they’re often literature buffs and not writers, and so they are rarely familiar with the writer’s process. They go ahead and set their standards of good writing by what they’re used to seeing: Great Works by the Masters of Our Age and All History. They assign a paper to their student, who has tomorrow’s chemistry quiz and Friday’s date in mind, and expect a masterpiece back on Monday. Of course they don’t get it, and they point out the differences between the English Theme and the Great Work in living color--namely, red--all over the page.
Now seriously, who’s that going to encourage? Most students are already painfully aware that they’re not equal to the Masters of the Ages; they’re not even equal to the valedictorian! The traditional English specialized in showing the finished product and saying, “Imitate this!” The New English, although it wants to see excellence, specializes in showing the student the directions and seeing how the student is going to apply them. To present the best directions, proponents of the New English look to cognitive psychologists, who study learning and thought processes, and to writers, who are, after all, the most qualified to talk about their craft.
The cognitive psychologists have told them that we learn how to think. Our thought processes are still maturing well past our high-school years, they say. So if a student’s thinking isn’t at full bloom at eighteen, we can’t expect her writing to be, either. A teacher can’t reasonably dump all the expectations of a mature writer on a maturing student.
Something that many writers know intuitively but may never express is that writing is a method of thinking, of learning. There’s an old saw among college-English instructors that goes, “How can I know what I think ‘til I see what I’ve said?” Though a story, an article, a term paper are products, writing is a creative process, and thinking went on all through the processes that produced them.
So, anticipating unripe thought processes and topics that have not yet been thought through, the New-English teacher will often start with that old foe, the blank sheet of paper, and tell students just to write and not to worry about how anything will look or sound until later. This “free-writing” is a method of discovery, of getting what’s inside the writer’s head out onto the paper where it can be manipulated. What comes out isn’t necessarily long, but it is informative. It isn’t necessarily brilliant, but it is workable.
Such a basic beginning is not as limiting as it may sound. Short doesn’t necessarily mean elementary any more that long means mature. First-graders are perfectly capable of making up whole stories. Granted, the plots aren’t usually very thick; nevertheless, the stories are often complete. Likewise, a senior’s ability to write a twelve-page term paper may not be as good a gauge of his maturity as a writer as would be his ability to analyze a topic thoroughly within the confines of a three-page theme. We do well not to discourage small starts.
Writers develop differently. Spurts and lags are as common in the growth of students’ writing as they are in the growth of their bodies. My mother had reached her full height when she was eleven; my father grew four inches after he graduated from high school. Similarly, I had students in my Freshman Writing classes who came to me pretty sharp and left ten weeks later no sharper, and other who came to me basket-cases and left champs (regardless of how I taught). The fact that I saw both kinds--and many in between--leads me to believe that this new focus on writing as a method of discovering how to think is better than the old focus on writing as a method of comparing the stars to the duds. Parents who came out feeling like duds probably dread sending their children to English class--or worse, having to try to teach them to write themselves. Take heart; you can learn to help your children feel comfortable right where they are as writers.
Another way New English proponents are learning how to guide students is by looking at how successful writers write. Here’s where the distinction between process and product really show up. Miss Fidditch probably made us come up with a concise, cogent, succinct, singular thesis and then construct a detailed outline set out in strict parallelism, which she then corrected and handed back with instructions to build the paper tightly around that outline. The paper likely came out so structured and canned that even you, the author, didn’t feel much like reading past the second line. If you are the victim of such brutal instructional tactics, all I can say is that your children can be saved from a similar fate. Writers rarely write from such strict outlines, and writing teachers are starting to learn that there’s room for individuality in methods of organizing thought.
In fact, when I first wrote this article for a journalism class, what is now the middle was the end. Now, years later as I revise it, I see that I want to organize my thoughts in a much different way. No amount of perfect syntax is going to help you get my message if the message itself isn’t clear. If I’d had a teacher (real or imagined) looking over my shoulder holding me to my original plan, this product would have been the less for it.
Every job--and writing, even to those who love it, is work--requires a system, and just because a writer doesn’t outline before writing doesn’t mean there’s no system involved. Most New English teachers and Traditional English teachers will agree that writing involves pre-writing, writing, revising, and editing. (Or, to put it as I read in an article somewhere years ago, in the writing process there is the author, who is the conceptualizer; the writer, who chooses the words; and the editor, who provides quality control.) There’s nothing steady or stationary about these stages, and writers can learn a lot about themselves by examining the ways in which they handle each stage.
When I taught Freshman Writing, I would ask my students, as a midterm assignment, to examine their writing processes, telling me about everything they did between the day I assigned a theme and the moment they pulled it out of the typewriter. Some students would give me basic answers such as, “My writing process has four stages: thinking, writing, revising, and proofreading,” which was nothing new; I had probably told them as much on the first day of class. Naturally, they wouldn’t do much self-discovery at that depth (nor would they earn much higher than a C).
Other students, though, actually probed the whole sequence of events and ended up giving me conclusions well beyond what I’d asked for: “I guess this revising stage is where I accomplish the most” or something equally revealing, which was exactly the kind of discovery I had hoped they would make without my having to drag it out of them. These were the students who had caught on to the benefits of New English. Traditional English barely gives lip-service to some of the stages, focusing more on the polishing at the end. But what carpenter varnishes after just hacking around a little with an electric saw? Carpenters spend time picturing what they want to build, planning how each initial cut will be made, planing and trimming and shimming before sanding and finishing. Then they have a finished work that they can be proud of. If their work is sloppy, they can pinpoint the stage in the process where they flopped: “I didn’t measure carefully enough” or “I didn’t trim this up the way I should have” or “I didn’t sand this enough.” To determine the problems, they analyze the process. And so it can be with writers:
“I don’t spend enough time deciding what I’d like to accomplish.”
“I just slap down any old thing and don’t go back to think it through again.”
“I never bother to change things at the typewriter. It’s too much trouble.”
“When I pull the paper out of the typewriter, I’m so sick of it I never bother to proofread.”
By determining where the weak spots are, writers can often teach themselves where to focus their energies.
A musician and wordsmith by trade, I don’t pretend to be the best in town at any of the arts I practice. But at the same time, I believe that the arts belong to everybody. If you can modulate your voice to speak, you can sing. You may not want to sing in public, but you do the same kinds of things when sing that you do when you speak. Likewise, if you can speak, say I, you can write. This assertion is a basic presupposition in the New English.
Think, for a minute, of writing as speech on paper. It’s not the same thing, I admit, but let’s pretend for now. When you talk, you use a different tone of voice toward your spouse than you do toward your parents, toward the bank loan officer, toward the boss, toward your children. You adapt your word-choice, your subject matter, your level of assertiveness. You don’t tell the children that their puppy got hit by a car the same way that you tell them the third time to take out the garbage. Professors of New English call this variation “voice.” Voice, in speech, is something you develop. You learn by trial and error, as you did the first time you smarted off to Mom or Dad and got disciplined for it. That day you learned that your voice needed to be different toward a parent that it might be toward siblings or friends. In school you spoke differently to the principal than to your homeroom teacher, most likely. It was you speaking each time--uniquely you--but each situation reflected a different facet of your many-sided self.
Of course hardly anyone writes exactly the way they talk, but you can see the similarities between spoken and written expression: a letter to a sweetheart sounds vastly different from one to a fly-by-night firm that cashed your check and then didn’t produce. Your language, your sentence-structure, your degree of authority or deference all go into your voice.
You may notice voice more in fiction. In literature classes they called it “style.” Ernest Hemingway had a different style from William Faulkner. And certainly Erma Bombeck is a far cry from either of them. None of them is necessarily the “best writer,” because none of them are in the same league. In the same way, just because you couldn’t please Miss Fidditch with your dazzling analysis of Othello, that doesn’t mean you can’t write; maybe it just means that you didn’t develop the proper feel for the specialized scholarly voice as quickly as you did for the speaking-to-parents voice that you discovered when you got disciplined that first time. Different voice is something you develop an ear for just the way you do for distinguishing English from a foreign language or for telling two people apart on the phone.
Tied to consideration of voice in the process approach to writing is a focus on the writer’s audience. Research in the theory of composition and communication is telling teachers that communicators--writers, speakers, filmmakers--create mental images of audiences to whom they want to communicate. Success comes to a writer when the real audience is very similar to the imagined audience. If I imagine that you’re a parent who is not necessarily an academician but is nevertheless vitally interested in your child’s education, then I’ll have adapted my content and my word choice for you, and if I imagined right, you’ll be interested in what I have to say. You’ll finish, understand, and appreciate this article. If I rattle on about the implications of Piagetian theory on composition pedagogy and on Moffett’s observations on developmental English education, I bet you’ll tune me right out because I’ll have presumed that we share inside information that we don’t share at all. New-English-inspired teachers try to get their students to become more accurate in imagining who their audiences will be. If all goes well, they’ll write directly to those audiences and probably be more clear and informative more of the time.
Sometimes it’s important for students to be able to write in the formal voice of schools and other institutions. But it is far more important that they develop a feel for appropriate language and learn to be adaptable. They can do that by seeing everything they read everywhere as something that has been written by someone for an audience and with a purpose. Seeing writing as something all around them can demystify writing for children, freeing them in ways that the generation before them never enjoyed. In my short career of teaching Freshman Comp, I got good results using New English concepts. More importantly, a lot of established and influential instructors and thinkers are getting results as good as and better than mine by using this revolutionary new approach. More and more of them are designing entire English curricula around it, and those designs are being discussed in more and more educational settings. The revolution is gaining momentum; if it keeps being successful, the next generation may be spared the agonies of blank-paper-phobia and the awful feeling that “I just can’t write.”
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Several pacesetters in composition theory have written textbooks that work well outside of the classroom:
How a Writer Works by Roger Garrison (Harper & Row, 1981): I used this textbook in my Freshman Composition class. It is very short, with some chapters only two pages long. It is not very “textbooky,” but for those who like to think about what goes on inside writers’ heads, it may prove more informational than “how-to” textbooks that exist.
Telling Writing by Ken Macrorie (Hayden Book Co., third ed.1980): One of my very favorites on the topic of writing, this college text is marvelously easy to read and uses a multitude of amusing examples from student writing.
Writers Writing by Brannon, Knight, and Neverow-Turk (Boynton-Cook, 1982): This excellent book, as lighthearted as the others listed here, has long examples with each exercise. The stories and journals alone were inspiring enough to keep me engrossed.
Writing the Natural Way by Gabrielle Lusser Rico (J.P. Tarcher, 1983): Anyone who enjoyed Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain will probably like this book as well. Rico’s brainstorming technique of “clustering” is particularly useful.
Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press, 1973): Scholars Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie probably influenced each other more than either is willing to admit. This book is shorter and, I think, less engaging than Telling Writing, but the lessons are laid out less like class assignments, so if the idea of school intimidates you, you may like this one better.
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