JAC Volume 3, Issue 1/2

Working with writing across the curriculum for the last six years has tempered the enthusiasm with which I began. Writing across the curriculum would revolutionize the attitudes of teachers and students regarding the fundamental role writing plays in learning. All mark-sense test blanks would be burned in public demonstrations. The world would again be safe for education. Now my victories come when one instructor adopts one writing/ learning strategy effectively. I blush embarrassed when a colleague who has been through our faculty writing institutes and should know better rises at a college meeting and declares poor spelling to be the problem that will assure the ultimate demise of western civilization. I spend long hours sympathizing with seminar graduates who are working through the writing projects planned during the summer and confronting so many obstacles that they are questioning the value of being literacy's good soldiers. This work in the trenches has shown me the great effort and cost accompanying even minor progress with writing across the curriculum. I therefore eagerly anticipate any book that promises to help my labor.

Two books have already provided great assistance. For students, Elaine Maimon and her colleagues at Beaver College have published Writing in the Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Winthrop Publishers, 1981), a text designed to spare freshmen the drudgery of the five-hundred word theme and introduce them to the forms and procedures of writing in various disciplines. A process oriented text, it employs contemporary epistemological theories including writing and learning interconnections and collaborative learning. For writing faculty and administrators, Art Young and Toby Fulwiler have edited Language Connections: Writing and Reading across the Curriculum (Urbana, Illinois. NCTE, 1982) which describes and reports the systematic evaluation of the Michigan Technological University program. Describing practice within a sound theoretical framework and reporting the data of the evaluation, Language Connections provides arguments for the effectiveness of writing across the curriculum. Such information helps us use limited energy and resources in fruitful ways.

Helping Students Write Well: A Guide for Teachers in All Disciplines, by Barbara E. Fassler Walvoord (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982) would seem to complete a strategic triad for writing across the curriculum by presenting a compendium of advice and techniques for content teachers using writing. In its comprehensiveness Helping Students Learn Well can serve as a valuable primer for non-writing faculty who want to learn what writing faculty do when we teach composition. However, the book does not go much beyond the mechanics of using writing in teaching. Because it purposely avoids establishing a theoretical framework as the basis for its assertions, the book fails to present an argument that justifies the demands it makes of content faculty. At best it assumes the value of writing to be self- evident. If this were the case there would be no need for writing across the curriculum. At worst, it is a back to basics wolf masquerading as the writing and learning lamb.

The purpose of the text, to help faculty "who must coach and evaluate students' writing" (p. 1), establishes its organization. The first part, "The Writing Process," deals primarily with coaching. Chapters instruct faculty in planning the writing for their courses, helping students through the writing, responding to writing, assignment making and the like. In addition, sections present methods for helping students achieve a focus, develop and support ideas, organize ideas, and develop an effective style. The discussions suffer from the absence of an overview of the process of moving an assignment from writing the topic, preparing prewriting activities, establishing procedures and deadlines for peer critiquing sessions and instructor conferences, and submitting the final paper. Though such a procedure is implicit readers need a flow chart explaining the cycle of an assignment. Such information would help faculty avoid confusion. A chart might also explain why certain things get done at certain times in the cycle.

The information in this first section is helpful. Writing is treated as a process. Teachers are encouraged to write what they ask their students to write and to share the strategies they developed to attack the assignment. Examples of assignments in which writers develop their own topics and address real audiences encourage teachers to take advantage of the positive effects of self-motivation and purposeful communication. Model handouts explaining assignments present guidelines teachers can use to develop their own handouts. The attention given to conscientious planning makes Part One valuable.

The second part, "Grammar, Usage, Punctuation, and Spelling," discusses the problems inherent in evaluating the various basic skills of writing. The evaluating part of "coaching and evaluating" deals mainly with basic skills level problems. Walvoord elaborates several methods that make whatever time an instructor gives to such concerns well used, but she does not discuss whether content teachers have the responsibility to teach basic skills. Her discussion of writing labs, lay readers, and tutors makes me aware of what few resources I have available to assist me.

Part Two succeeds most in raising the non-writing instructors' level of consciousness about language and language conventions. Walvoord presents Edited American English as a dialect students need to master because it provides them access to social and economic power. Common non-standard dialect features are discussed to enable teachers to diagnose and offer assistance to students whose writing suffers from dialect interference. Mina Shaughnessy's error pattern analysis informs Walvoord's discussion of diagnosis and remediation of error.

The strength of Part Two lies in its Collection of common sense techniques for dealing with basic writing problems. Walvoord's expertise with basic skills is evident in her discussion of the "never again notebook" which uses a student's own errors to provide material for an individualized grammar and mechanics workbook. The instructor notes a particular pattern of error and directs the student to include it in the never again notebook. The student records the error, corrects it, explains the correction, and writes several pattern sentences to practice avoiding the error. The aim is to "never again" make that error. The notebook is a pedagogically sound strategy for dealing with basic writing skills problems. To what degree a computer science instructor, for example, should use the never again notebook receives little attention. Part Two spends considerable time and effort developing a language to use when discussing error. Readers will learn quite a bit of English-teacher talk and will probably become aware of some errors they have unwittingly been making in their own writing. The problem remains, however, to what degree content teachers are willing or able to use this information. There is potential for superficial understanding or supersaturation. Superficial understanding could lead to misapplication and perhaps student brutalization by the overzealous. Supersaturation can lead to frustration and a sense of futility which could prevent the content teacher's use of writing.

The various strengths of Helping Students Write Well include its comprehensiveness, its concern with planning writing for courses, and its strategies for remediating basic skills problems. But the book suffers a consistent problem with audience. Walvoord's audience includes "the junior college, college or graduate school instructor of economics, physical education, literature, biology, history or what have you . . . the tutor or the teaching assistant in any discipline and . . . the teacher to be" (p. 1). The intent may be good, but the effect of including such divergence within an audience, itself a violation of writing common sense, is confusion. Trying to address the entire academic world often reduces Walvoord to using the language of her own discipline, the language of a writing teacher among writing teachers. At one point she presents a strategy which increases a student's grade if the student revises a paper to eliminate faulty sentences. The principle invoked—rewarding purposeful revision is a sound one which may be lost entirely on a content teacher by nature of the example. I'd be hard pressed to defend such a practice to a chemistry or history instructor. Shifting the example from a concern with error to a concern with content or understanding would illustrate the principle more effectively.

In addition to its problem with audience, the book also puts itself at cross purposes. According to Walvoord, in higher education writing serves three functions. She uses Janet Emig to establish a relation between writing and learning. She cites a colleague from chemistry and a survey of professionals to establish that writing is a task frequently encountered in the world of work and that those with extensive "English" backgrounds enjoy advantages. And she asserts that cross-curricular reinforcement is required if students are to develop and maintain writing skills. All these claims may be true. Here and throughout the book, however, argument and theoretical speculation are sacrificed to practical application. Not questioning the truth of the assertions, she proceeds directly to application. And she establishes no hierarchy among these functions. With all these functions, writing serves no particular function. Without the hierarchy of function, the book lacks a central organizing principle; it lacks an argument. In this, it violates one the central principles of writing advertised in the book, the need for a central organizing principle. Without an explicit central purpose or function for writing, readers can argue any one of the three that she mentions. Thus, when faculty gather to discuss writing in their courses, the basic skills bandwagon can toot its spelling horn, the technocrats can espouse vocational preparation, and those who support writing across the curriculum for its liberal education potential, the humanities scholars, are left to turn toward the window and mutter, "That is not what we meant at all." The book has a responsibility to clearly establish its audience and purpose and to address that audience and argues its purpose. I don't find that task consciousness at work in Helping Students Write Well.

Walvoord does not argue the centrality of writing skills reinforcement above the other functions served by writing in higher education, but her text is most successful dealing with basic skills problems. Thus, basic skills assumes prominence by default. I believe writing across the curriculum has at best a tangential relationship to basic skills. The earliest writing-across-the-curriculum concerns were examining and elaborating the relation between writing and learning, not reinforcing basic skills and avoiding error. Thus, in one sense, Helping Students Write Well has hurt the writing across the curriculum movement. it is not the crucial third link completing the work begun with Writing in the Arts and Sciences and Language Connections.