JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

In his work for the British Schools Council Project, published under the title The Development of Writing Abilities (11- 18),¹ James Britton classified types of school writing along a spectrum from transactional to poetic. Expressive writing-that is, writing that is close to the self; that has as its audience the self, a friend, or the teacher in the role of trusted adult; writing that deals with feelings and responses as well as discursive thought-is the matrix out of which the other kinds of writing naturally grow. Britton saw expressive writing as "the relatively undifferentiated starting point from which the dissociation would take place (bearing in mind, however, that mature expressive writing was one of the forms into which it would evolve)" (DWA, 197). This process of dissociation he defined as "a process of progressive differentiation, of learning by dividing" (DWA, 197), and in this case, dividing writing into either a spectator or a participant activity. In Language and Learning Britton explains the difference between "spectator" and "participant" this way: "Both 'spectator' and 'participant' . . . are used in a special and restricted sense: 'participant' is the key word to mark out someone who is participating in the world's affairs; spectator' is the label for someone on holiday from the world's affairs, someone contemplating experiences, enjoying them, vividly reconstructing them perhaps-but experiences in which be is not taking part".²

As the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition has defined "advanced writing," it includes the writer in both the participant and spectator roles. Courses designed to teach technical writing, writing for business and industry, writing for the various disciplines, and general courses in advanced expository writing usually focus on writing in the participant role, in the transactional mode. We teach report writing, clear and forceful types of business communication, research and its presentation in written form, writing to advance a program or defend a proposal or a thesis, writing to explain a complicated process or a new concept. At the other end of Britton's spectrum, we teach creative writing, in which the writer assumes the role of spectator, not now participating in an action but reflecting back over past experiences in order to winnow from them the kernel of universal significance that will serve as the center for a short story, a poem, a play, perhaps (as they say) even a novel.

As people who may teach the several varieties of advanced writing classes know well, our students do write in a way which combines some of the elements of writer as participant and writer as spectator, the kind of writing Britton refers to as "mature expressive writing." James Britton, in his address to the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Washington, 1980, stressed, as in all his publications the importance of expressive writing, both as the matrix from which all other writing develops and as an end in itself. He was disappointed by the level of expressive writing required in the British schools; he noted a similar lack in our own school system. The use of expressive writing at the college level is still not acceptable, despite the efforts of Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow and others to demonstrate its worth. Britton said in DWA that "our disappointment arises from our belief that expressive writing, whether in participant or spectator role, may be at any stage the kind of writing best adapted to exploration and discovery. it is language that externalizes our first stages in tackling a problem or coming to grips with an experience" (DWA, 197).

Expressive writing has been too often seen by college and even elementary and secondary teachers as a kind of meaningless emotional babble without much substance, a sort of school- sanctioned "spilling your guts on paper," as one of my colleagues at the Iowa Institute on Writing put it. Yet it need not and indeed should not be that, for it has real and serious purposes to serve. As Britton says, "We have defined expressive writing as writing close to the self, carrying forward the informal presuppositions of informal talk and revealing as much about the writer as about his matter" (DWA, 141). Britton's opinion on the function of expressive writing is supported by Suzanne Langer's works, Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form. Her belief is that we invent symbols, including language, to express our feelings and emotions, not to convey rational, intellectual ideas. This insight is true not only of our language expressions but of all art and symbol systems, including painting and music. We perceive the outside world, with its objects and events, and we want to react to it, personally and emotionally, from the spontaneity of our feelings. This is, Langer believes, the characteristic that divides human beings from the other species that inhabit the earth, and it explains the relationship between form and feeling. She says that without the symbol-making process, there can be actions and reactions, but there can be no conceptualizing. In her order of things, it is our intuitive symbol-making process, through language, that leads to thinking and conceptualization. Thus it is precisely our expressive use of language that leads to intellectual sophistication. As Britton puts it: "In considering language as a mode of representing experience, our main stress has been upon its use in turning confusion into order, in enabling us to construct for ourselves an increasingly faithful, objective, and coherent picture of the world" (L&L, 105).

What I would like to argue , then, is that in addition to our traditional courses in advanced writing which offer instruction, practice, and evaluation of the forms of transactional writing and of poetic or creative writing, we ought also to offer advanced writing courses in expressive writing. Since its function is to turn confusion into order, to enable us "to construct for ourselves an increasingly faithful, objective and coherent picture of the world," and since it is "the kind of writing best adapted to exploration and discovery," it seems reasonable to believe that it is, therefore, the kind of writing most likely to lead to the sort of intellectual growth and development of writing ability that we would like to see in our students in an advanced writing class. In fact, if you don't like the "gut spilling" connotations of the term "expressive writing," then you might want to call it what I think it really is: exploratory writing.

Let me attempt to synthesize some of these ideas I have been discussing by putting them together in a five-point definition of exploratory writing that leads us to consider the pedagogical implications for advanced composition classes. The kind of writing I have been describing has the following characteristics:

Such exploratory writing is a means of discovering and ordering experience, of taking a step back to look at a series of events we have witnessed or participated in, of asking ourselves: What does it mean? How does it fit into the pattern of my life? Where have I encountered it before? What is new to me? How does it challenge values or beliefs I have held in the past? How does it strengthen my existing values and beliefs? How do I evaluate this experience? What can I-and possibly others-learn from it? This kind of exploration and inquiry are what we truly should mean by education in the original sense: to bring out of the student-in this case through writing-an awareness of where he or she fits in the events of one's life and the world at large. Much knowledge comes from within rather than from without. Exploratory writing is a way to tap those inner resources that lead us from information to knowledge. Like an explorer searching for a mountain or a lost tribe or the source of a river, the writer begins in known territory, moves by an undefined path that offers man possible options, takes risks, and encounters obstacles and smooth avenues, and finally reaches his or her goal to discover at the end something unknown at the beginning of the process. Only when writers have undergone this process of exploration and discovery can we reasonably expect them to move to interpretation, analysis, exposition, persuasion. They have to understand the experience first before they can begin to communicate it to someone else, and their first audience is themselves.

If to write is to learn, if writing does indeed shape our reality, if we are what we write, then I think it possible that assisting our students in the process of interpreting their lives to themselves is one of the serious responsibilities we have as teachers of advanced writing. By the time students get to our classes, they have learned, for the most part, to be relatively literate in the language they have been speaking since they were two years old. In high school and in freshman English they have been taught, re-taught, and sometimes over-taught grammar, usage, and the rhetorical forms, and while they may not have learned all these things to our satisfaction or to the satisfaction of our colleagues in the other disciplines, we must seriously ask ourselves as teachers of advanced composition whether we want once again to run the plow over the same old ground, replanting the same crop with last year's seeds of learning. Perhaps it is time to provide the students in our classes with an opportunity to explore new land, the relatively untapped resources of their own important experiences.

What kind of pedagogy, then, leads to exploration of new territory? Like any pedagogy, it is based on the interaction of the three basic elements of a class: teacher, students, subject. Britton describes teachers as performing several roles in the, writing classroom: trusted adult; one-half of a teacher-learner dialogue; examiner. Clearly the teacher who asks his students to write about subjects that may cut close to the bone must create a sense of trust with the students. And, because intellectual development is one of the goals we aim for, the teacher must participate in a teacher-learner dialogue with the students, in a real conversation about the writing from which both may-in fact, inevitably will-learn. A class in which students are engaged in exploratory writing is not the place to sharpen your skills in academic one-upmanship or to hone the double-edged sword of satiric wit. If you're going to ask your students to take risks, to venture into unknown territory in terms of subject and style and form, you must be a guide, not the Great White Hunter, in either the male or the female version.

Likewise, the students must be brought into a true community of writers. Exploratory writing demands the writer's workshop where every writer can turn to every reader for an intelligent, sensitive, and helpful response. Cleo Martin once wisely remarked that, in a class where everyone can write, everyone can also read, so there is no reason under heaven why the teacher should be the only person who responds to papers. Honest, direct response of both the positive and the "constructive criticism" variety should be made by every member of the group. As the teacher, you will no doubt have to lead the way, conducting whole-group workshops at first to demonstrate how it's done, later turning to small group and one-on-one response groups. It is difficult to establish the right atmosphere in a writer's workshop of students who have had their papers duplicated and handed out in a class only when their instructions were to "see how many things you can find wrong with this paper," a situation where the class "tears apart" a single student's paper. You need to head off this tendency from the very beginning- perhaps by editing out errors in spelling and grammar from papers you duplicate early in the course to force the participants to attend to content and form, perhaps by suggesting a certain specific method of response to papers, such as Bob Lyon's PQP- Praise, Question, Polish-as a model for them to follow until they see their own light. The last thing you want to do in an exploratory writing course is to go error hunting, to focus on the superficial editorial manners rather than on the matter at hand.

Finally, there is the question of subject-in this case, writing; specifically, assignments. What kind of assignments are appropriate for a class which encourages exploratory writing? There are many-in fact, I can think even of a few (though very few) published texts you might use in such a course, anything by Ken Macrorie, Bill Coles' Composing II or The Plural I , Miller and Judy's Writing in Reality, and best of all, Gene Krupa's new hot-off-the-press book from Wadsworth, Situational Writing. However, if you prefer (as I usually do) not to let another "authorial voice" into your classroom, creating good opportunities for exploratory writing can be a great deal of fun. The most important thing is to remain open to possibilities that may not have occurred to you before, to keep the assignments open-ended so that each student will be able to respond and to follow his or her own direction in fulfilling them. in essence, what you are likely to end up doing in such a class is creating a heuristic to get them started, and then guiding each one through successive stages in developing whatever kind of paper his or her own experiences and attitudes suggest.

One heuristic I frequently use is the "Steppingstones" exercise from Ira Progoff's Journal Workshop. In class I ask the students to list the memorable "steppingstones" in their lives that have brought them to where they are now: events, occasions, images, people, moments-beginning with "I was born." When they have completed their lists (and by the way, I do this exercise-and most writing assignments-with the group and share my writing with them as I ask them to do with me), I ask for volunteers to read their steppingstones out loud. After several have done this, and we have talked a bit about the different kinds of lists people in the group have generated, I ask them to pick one steppingstone and write about it for twenty minutes or so. Again I ask them to share their responses. Then, to generate further writing, I ask them to take their lists and whatever they have written home for a few days, reflect on them, and either go on with what they started in class or pick something else from the list to write about. When they bring in these drafts, we share them in workshop and make suggestions about what direction the writing might take from here: personal essay, short story, poem, description, narration, or even persuasive essay. And whatever they decide to do is their next task. Out of their initial expressive writing, then may come a piece of mature expressive writing, a piece of transactional prose, or a piece of poetic writing, depending on the inclination of the writer, the response he has received from the group, and the direction in which the subject developed. The possibilities are many, and what began as a group assignment has evolved into whatever the individual writer deems most appropriate.

This is just one example of the kinds of writing that can be done successfully in an exploratory writing class. An assignment that begins with the personal experience of the writer-however we may define that (it could be, for example, the reader's personal experience, reading a piece of literature or listening to a lecture given on campus), explores through reflection, finds a form that is appropriate to the subject, and is written in "natural language"-is a piece of exploratory writing. The modes of transactional-expressive-poetic may blend together; in expressive writing, Britton says, the language is "free to move easily from participant role in spectator and vice versa; mutual exploration, the pursuit of 'togetherness,' may proceed equally by the pleasurable reconstruction of past experiences-a traffic in values- or by the exchange of opinions about the world and information with auto-biographical relevance, and the borderline between the two modes will be a shadowy one" (DWA, 82).

"A writer," says Britton, "draws on the whole store of his experience, and his whole social being, so that in the act of writing he imposes his own individuality" (DWA, 47). Only through the encouragment of individuality do we escape the formulaic, the banal, the trivial, the superficial. The potential is there for teachers of advanced composition. We have only to make it happen.