The Languages of the Text: What Even Good Students
Need to Know about Re-Writing

Susan V. Wall

In The Making of Meaning, Ann Berthoff says, in one of her best polemical essays, that teachers of writing should learn to pronounce certain words the way that Southerners do, with the accent on the first syllable: RE-search, RE-cognition, RE-vision—her point being, of course, that these terms then become metaphors for the concep­tual reflexiveness that she calls “interpreting your interpretations” (Forming 154). Without this conceptual dimension, writing may be a skill, but it will not provide the writer with any occasion for learning.

The notion of revision as “RE-seeing” is an idea I find attractive—speaking as both a teacher and a Southerner. It’s also an idea that has gained wide acceptance in composing-process scholarship through the work of writers such as Berthoff, Mimi Schwartz, Janet Emig, Donald Murray, and Nancy Sommers. My practical experience, however, in trying to apply theory in the composition classroom has raised a question about the relationship of process to product: What is t]istinction between re-seeing a topic and rewriting a text? This question is especially pertinent for courses using what Kenneth Dowst has called “the epistemic approach,” in which assignments are sequenced in order to address a central topic, such as “work” or “creativity,” over the entire semester. Each new assignment in the sequence offers an opportunity for the writer to “re-see” ideas in earlier papers in light of new readings, discussions, and writing tasks. In the context of such a course, the distinction between re-seeing and re-writing is, I would suggest, the difference between substitution and combination.

When students write a new paper—one major draft—for each assignment, their substantive revisions are likely to be substitutions of one language for another. The student demonstrates one way of addressing a topic in a short essay and then, in a subsequent paper, _ develops another way as well. Or the later paper suggests a change -of mind, the replacement of one language by another (Coles, Teaching 26): “Earlier in the term I said that about the topic, but now I see it this way instead.” This is the primary meaning of revision in the version of the epistemic approach offered by William E. Coles in books such as Composing and The Plural I.

Good students, however, often produce work that is more ambi­tious than the single-thesis essay, the sort that combines several perspectives--different “languages” about a topic, within a single text. This richness of ideas virtually necessitates multiple drafts to ensure that possibilities in the text are carried through and sorted out, for the writer as much as the reader. Experienced adult writers are likely to regard this kind of RE-vision as an opportunity for invention. But dealing with such richness of language and thought is often a problem for even the best of my undergraduate students Much of what typically constitutes their writing skill is the ability to produce a short essay tightly organized around a single thesis.1 Their rare experience with longer papers and redrafting has usually been confined to that kind of term paper which reports on other people s ideas. In either case, revision has primarily been in the service of what traditional rhetoric calls arrangement, the clarification and sup­port of a single idea rather than a mediation among many. When they attempt a more ambitious juxtaposition of perspectives through extensive drafting or combining of papers, even the more skilled or advanced writers may need a kind of help with rewriting that they don’t know how to give themselves.

To show what I mean, I want to give a reading of a series of texts composed by a highly skilled writer I’ll call “Eric,” a student in one of my critical writing classes.2 I want to do this in some detail because I think that such terms as “skill” and “problem,” “re-writing” and “re-vision” have meaning only when we can locate them in real contexts.

The Evolution of a Student Essay

The story begins with the first reading assignment, which asked students to critique a narrative about a Japanese karate master named Funakoshi, whose teaching strategy was to confuse and even shock his students in order to shake them out of their conventional ideas. Eric seemed excited about defining what the text called the "meaning of karate” and soon after made it the subject of his first major paper, a narrative written in response to the assignment ‘Write about a time when you functioned as ‘a critic.’ In this situation, what did being a critic mean?” Eric’s first draft begins by stating that he has recently “received a promotion from first to second-degree black belt,” but he questions whether he deserves it or not. Then, in the second paragraph, he launches into his own definition of the meaning of karate:
There are myths about the martial arts. I was lucky enough ten years ago to begin learning under an instructor who dispelled the myths immediately so that I learned with a “proper” attitude. As it turns out, the “prop­er” attitude of Karate is much the same as the way Funakoshi described it in his story. It may seem unconventional at first, almost paradoxical, but a person trained to be incredibly violent if the need arises should also be in credibly peaceful if the need doesn’t arise (and it almost never does). And the better that person becomes the more humble he becomes.

Humility, Eric goes on to say, “invites growth,” while its opposite arrogance, “stifles it.” In light of these high ideals, then, Eric tried to give back his promotion certificate because he didn’t feel he deserved it. His instructor, however, “wouldn’t hear of it. . . . He told me simply that he was convinced I deserved it.”

With the fifth paragraph, however, Eric’s interpretation of his attitude toward karate becomes increasingly ambiguous:
Years ago I would have believed that. I was naive, and a Karate instructor is like God to a kid. Especially this instructor. But after I got my Black Belt and had my own class, I began to see on a level with him. I saw and used the methods of a teacher and I realized that some of the things teachers say or do aren’t totally honest. In teaching I learned that If I praised some students when they were screwing up, they would feel better about themselves and try harder. And if I cut down others who might have been doing better than what I gave them credit for, then they too would try harder. I also told them things about Karate or about myself just to keep their interest up, whether they were true or not. Thus, with my own instructor I became jaded.

Uncertain of his feelings, Eric went to talk to his instructor:
“Don’t think of the promotion as a test to be passed or failed,” he told me, think of it as an added burden to keep you constantly improving, sort of a continuing test. You have to try to live up to your expectations of what you think a second degree Black Belt is.”
I accepted his judgment in this case because he offered it to me in a way that allowed me to make my own ideas of what he said.

And then he concludes, in paragraph nine (tying Funakoshi to our second reading, a passage from Roger Sale):
I interpreted this situation as myself. I had no thought of ego or pride only my ability to “carry the burden.” I guess I am like both Sale and Funakoshi. I am like Sale in that I am unsure, in a way, of how I feel about Karate (as he is about his writing), but this incident did give me insight I suppose (as Sale’s professor’s remarks gave him insight). And I am like Funakoshi in that I had my views altered by what happened (as he did) and also that I came to maybe understanding better “the meaning of Karate.”

When I gave Eric my reading of this paper in our first conference, I said that it presented two “languages” for defining “the meaning of karate,” one intensely idealistic, the other equally disillusioned. But the relationship between the two was not resolved; they were juxtaposed but not composed. The issues seemed larger here than the promotion narrative that was the paper’s vehicle. Why, for example, did Eric seek his instructor’s advice if his whole attitude had become so “jaded”? He answered that it was because the instructor was the only one he had to talk to—a literal response to my question, an answer which either failed to see the larger issues or deliberately closed them out. I suspected the second reason, judging from all the hedging in the final paragraph: “I guess”; “in a way I suppose”; “maybe.” But either way, it was dear that Eric considered the paper finished at this point. I could have required a revision, but until Eric himself saw the need to work out these issues for himself, rewriting without the motive for “re-seeing” would have been a pointless exercise.

Eric’s second essay had little apparent connection to his first except that they were both about sports—this time, tennis. Paper B described a conflict between critical standards and feelings: he had once, he said, played tennis by the book, believing that form and grace and style were everything. But recently, he had discovered that what he really wanted was to win, to “annihilate” his opponent any way he could.

When assignment C asked Eric to write about someone who had influenced him as a critic, he decided to reopen the subject of his karate instructor. He was reluctant to do this; but I think it was one of those times John Gage is referring to when he says: “When we have intentions, what we seem to mean is that they have us. It is only after we have them that we feel the need to be sure that we understand what they are, whether we wish to have them, and, on the basis of what justifies them, what we must do to see them through” (2). Draft one begins:
I’ve decided to write about my karate instructor, which probably wasn’t much of a surprise. From the time I first started, he has played the most important role outside of my parents in me becoming what I am. I wish, for the sake of this class, that this was not so, because I don’t want to be thought of as “Joe Karate” by always writing about it, but the fact remains that no one else has as much influence on me as he did.

The paper then described how Eric had felt at the age of ten, when he began studying karate with this master. He was, Eric says, “such an overwhelming presence for me at that age that I took it all in and tried to be the way he said to be,” even though “he told us all that he himself was not everything he talked about.” To show what this means, Eric offers examples:
He did not preach to us. As I progressed in age and rank I accepted what he offered because I thought it made sense. What he talked about was and is nothing mysterious. From his own past as a roughneck street fighter he asked everyone he came in contact with not to make the mistakes he made He told us that no matter who you are, you can make yourself better by sheer will power. One analogy that was especially effective for me involved an egg and a peach. lie said that a person tends to be more like one than the other and that the peach is the way to be: soft on the outside, seemingly ~ weak, until you bust your teeth on that hard pit, meaning, of course, that the way to be is to build your strength from the inside, holding it there to let it grow. He said that the egg, on the other hand, looks tough on the inside until you crack the shell and its guts spill out. He was once that way he said, but he had since changed.

Inner strength vs. outer strength. Positive thinking. Humility vs. arro­gance. Respect. Mind over matter. Calmness and patience. Self-control. Self-defense.

These ideas all made a huge impression on a growing kid with an open mind, much more so than on an adult who has already formed his own “way to be.” This is not to say that adults don’t benefit; they’re just a little more wary because they’ve been taken before. Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t been taken, too, but that’s another story, I suppose.

What’s important is my instructor’s influence on me, which I’ll develop later on.

There are too many abstractions here, too many themes, and the paper is both under- and over-developed. But I saw these as signs that Eric was finally willing to take some risks with this topic, that—as his concluding sentences suggest—he might be beginning to see what was at stake for himself in this writing. At that point, then, I felt I could take a more active role as teacher without seeming coercive. I made two direct and specific suggestions: I told Eric that if he were to combine paper A with this draft of C, he would discover that he was actually much further along in this paper than he thought; and I suggested that because the topic he was tackling seemed so large and complex, he might make this re-writing manageable by dealing with the narrative one section at a time, giving the language of each stage of his changing perceptions its due.

The resulting second draft of paper C was, consequently, a putting together of A and C-1, but it was something more as well. It begins:
There are myths about the martial arts. Whether promoted by television and movies or actually by practitioners themselves, the entire idea of karate is not at all what the average lay person has in mind. As it has been explained to me by my instructor and as I have explained it myself as an instructor, karate is a method by which to achieve potential. To me it is not a fighting method, it is not even a self-defense method; it is a philosophy. The martial artist, if he is any good, is not an animal, not a brute, but rather an individual who taps his own resources in order to make himself better in any way he can.

Because of my desire to tap these resources, I have chosen to write about how karate made me what I am.

Let me stop for a moment and point out that here we do have revision as “re-seeing.” Despite the fact that the opening sentence has survived word for word all the way from draft one of paper A the subject of the paper has been transformed. It’s no longer a paper about the philosophy of karate but about “karate” as a metaphor for Eric’s critical attitude towards himself—”how,” he says, “karate made me who I am.” He says, for example, in his third paragraph:
[My instructor] did not talk about the specific mistakes he made. But the impression remained that he had been generally as bad as you can be What he asked of everyone, then, was that we not make the same mistakes To get us to think about such things, he offered “advice.” He spoke of positive thinking and how it had changed him. He told us to develop inner confidence by staying humble rather than strutting around with our chests puffed out, as he had. He taught us how to stay calm and remain patient the way he never was.

These things meant something to us because it was plain to see (I thought at the time) that his philosophy worked for him. He had changed from a person at the mercy of his own self to one in control of himself.

In paragraphs eleven and twelve, Eric adds a new transitional section about a stage when he was fourteen and fifteen. He was not yet disillusioned, but he was, he says, more “realistic.” He saw that his instructor worked in a warehouse, had a wife and child, and drank beer; but he also began to think of himself as a “weird kid” because his interest in the philosophy of karate set him apart from his peers.

Then, in the next six paragraphs, Eric returns to the story from paper A, but now more fully explained. He says, in paragraph fifteen,
Because of teaching, and because becoming a black belt put me on more personal terms with my instructor, I saw that he was much more flawed than I had idealistically thought when I was younger. He tried to practice what he preached, but I knew how far away he was from that pinnacle I started to think that maybe he wasn’t any closer than I was. He had divorce problems, I learned. He collected guns and bows and knives and he showed more of his violent side to me. And I learned about his past in some detail, the barroom brawls and the knife fights and the street fights. I was losing my respect quickly.

Again Eric tells of how he tried to return the black belt certificate and of how he was rebuffed, told to “think of it as a burden” to “live up to.” But now, he concludes:
I thought that there should be some kind of set standard, but now I guess it is a personal standard instead. That realization kind of wrapped it all up for me. I quit looking up to him. I took the things he said and thought about them as I had when I was much younger but now I didn’t feel at all compelled to accept this or that as the way it should be.

Draft C-2 ended here, and when Eric showed it to me I told him that I thought he’d accomplished some wonderful things. Re-writing had given him a chance to sort through the changing perspectives of his experience, seeing how the act of remembering experience through writing can bring it alive and yet allow the writer to reflect on the distance between past and present understandings: “It was plain to me (I thought at the time) that his philosophy worked for him.” But I also told Eric that his paper still lacked a final stage, his current language for representing the mean­ing of karate. At this point he made a decision on his own to go back to paper B, the one about the dash of form and feeling in playing tennis, and to incorporate not the substance but the essential concept of that paper in a kind of coda or epilogue to his story:
I realized this change of heart most directly in my attitude toward kumite, or full-contact sparring. By nature I am not a violent person and I do not like to fight. As a kid I tried to spar the way we were taught: a calm­ness of mind, a relaxed body, good form and style, solid contact.

But recently, he goes on to say, he’s been sparring regularly with one opponent who
... is so ferocious a fighter that he always beat me into the ground. Even after we both reached black belt I usually had to go against him. I was trying to fight with good form and he was trying to kill me.

Then one night, not so long ago, my childish idealism collided headlong with realism. Just before we were ready to start our sparring match and we both had our guards up, my opponent doubled over as if he was sick. I took a step forward to see if he was all right, and he suddenly straightened up and took my head off with a punch.

Since that incident my own sparring has changed. I have thrown away what I should believe in and should try to perfect, and I have become a vicious fighter. I force myself to be ferocious, I gear myself up to over whelm my opponents. Whether I actually do crush them or not is not the important thing, it is that I now want to crush them.

If it wasn’t for my involvement as an Instructor, I probably would have quit some time ago. For some reason I feel I have a responsibility to my instructor to keep trying to teach better, but for myself, I can’t say that I care a whole lot anymore. I no longer have much faith in some of the ideals because I haven’t seen them work yet. I try to believe in them, and perhaps some time later I really will, but for now I am a hypocrite who doesn’t practice what he tries to teach.

The Challenge of Teaching Rewriting

I think Eric’s final essay is an extraordinary piece of work. In fact it won a certificate of honorable mention in our undergraduate writing competition that year. I have chosen to describe the work of a skilled writer in order to make a point the challenge of teaching re­writing can sometimes come not from having to deal with the inex­perience of writers or from some form of “theme writing,” but from two problems that almost always arise when I teach composition.

One has to do with the nature of thinking and its relationship to writing, the other with culturally imposed notions of what writing is good for. The first may be universal, but the second, I want to argue, is a product of our profession’s particular history.

In the first case: when I consider all the different texts that went into the creation of Eric’s paper over months and months—the three drafts of paper A and the four drafts of paper C, plus the two ancillary texts, the originating one on Funakoshi and paper B on tennis—what I see is the tremendous difficulty the mind has in entertaining more than one point of view, one language about a subject, at any given time. I think this is true for all of us, teachers and students alike. But among students, it’s often more evident in the work of skilled writers, whose ability gives them the confidence to take intellectual risks. And it’s all the more a problem when the issues are also as emotionally charged as they are here. The challenge for the teacher, then, is to try to turn the brain’s “one-track mindedness” into an advantage for the writer. At the beginning, I was trying to urge Eric to expand the scope of paper A; but once he decided with paper C to do this, I concentrated on helping him make the process more manageable by composing the narrative in stages and rewriting to combine separate texts into one longer one.

That final paper combines languages that might ordinarily exist in the writer’s mind as separate, even competing languages. To use an analogy suggested by the paradox of Eric’s title for his final draft “Paper Tiger,” the finished version is like those illustrations in the margins of medieval manuscripts in which we find beings that are never found in nature: monsters that are half human, half animal—centaurs, mermaids—or creatures that are composites of several different animals—griffins or manficores. The intellectual point of the analogy is not particularly original; I’m certainly not the first to point out the difference between the nature of thinking and the artifice of writing. But I want to pursue that analogy a bit further because it can also illustrate a second pedagogical problem that we recognize less often.

The creatures of medieval fantasy may be wonderful, but they re also disturbing. We feel them as violations of the order of things, a fact acknowledged when mythology attributed their origins to some incestuous, bestial, or otherwise unnatural coupling. And that is also how Eric felt for a long time about this continuous project of rewriting, that it was a violation of the proprieties of composing. His resistance was more than the mind’s need to separate and categorize in order to keep order; it was also an attitude that he'd learned from that whole combination of New Critical and utilitarian tradition that regards academic compositions as separate, freestanding artifacts, each a complete statement unto itself, each given a grade according to its formal perfection. Eric was a good writer; he knew this. In fact, I think we can read the whole concluding section of “Paper Tiger” as a description of him as a writer as well as an athlete. Just as there was an Eric who wanted to annihilate his opponents, there was a writer who was in the grip of issues he had to work out. But as the opening paragraph of draft C suggests, there was also Eric the formalist, the stylist, who was appalled by what was happening. Much of our conversations for a long tune consisted of my reassuring him. Yes, it was legitimate to combine two different assignments; No, I wasn’t going to be bored by Joe Karate” or impatient with unfinished drafts; Yes, it was normal for good writers to spend a month and a half working on what was ostensibly the “same” paper.

What I’m describing here, in other words, is not just a case of a student learning how rewriting can enable invention and offer a means of coming to terms with conflicting ideas. I think the context in which this learning took place can also be described as a case of conflicting theories about the purposes and values of writing interacting to generate a text. Eric brought to my course a solid training in what Richard Young has called “the current-traditional paradigm,” an approach to the teaching of composition which emphasizes the formal and stylistic qualifies of the written text while ignoring the issues of how and why that text was produced. His responses to reading similarly suggested the influence of what has historically been that paradigm’s theoretical partner, the formalist or New Critical tradition of textual interpretation. These two traditions have come under attack in recent years, but I don t want to make this paper just one more occasion for tradition bashing. I could see how much is still valuable in those approaches to reading and writing from how little I could teach Eric about close reading and attention to the nuances of style that he didn’t already know.

But the tendency of these traditions not only to look at the product of writing and not the process, but to value the written text primarily for its formal qualifies, meant that Eric’s ideas and values about writing collided squarely with mine. The epistemic approach imagines composition as a process through which the writer might learn something, and it includes reading as one form of such composing. It draws, in other words, on contemporary critical theories which look for gaps and ambiguities in texts in order to ask what else they might be made to mean.3 One approach sees texts in terms of static, fixed meaning; the other sees them as indeterminate, open to further interpretation.

Eric’s drama, in other words, is really our profession’s dialogue with itself. This is why I have chosen to describe a good writer, one who had learned his lessons well. Too often when students resist what we would teach them about the writing process, we blame them, as if they were lazy or reluctant to learn. We need to see their problems instead in light of the larger confusions our changing field is experiencing. Like the mythical illustrations of my earlier meta­phor, composition classrooms can produce some strange combinations when different traditions collide. The important thing to remember when this happens is that whether the resulting writing is monstrous or, as in Eric’s case, something wonderful, the creature is one of our own making.

Boston University

Boston, Massachusetts

NOTES
1See, for example, the conclusion of Wall and Petroeky’s survey of freshman writers: “[T]he higher their level of placement, the more their writing processes and values are adapted to one very narrow, specialized kind of writing—the short impromptu explanatory essay” (120).
2Strictly speaking, this was not an advanced composition course. Most of the composition courses at the university where this section was offered are open to any student who has placed out of basic writing. The critical writing course is, however, considered more challenging than the others, and usually at least a third to a half of the students who enroll are upperclass students taking their second or third writing course. A second-semester freshman with plans for a writing major, Eric had taken a course in writing the short story but not in nonfiction composition.
3For a discussion based on contemporary theory of the role of reading in an epistemic writing course, see Bartholomae and Petrosky’s title essay in Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts and Mariolina Salvatori, “Reading and Writing a Text.”

Works Cited
Bartholomae, David, and Anthony R. Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/ Cook, 1986.
Berthoff, Ann E. Forming/ThinkingWriting: The Composing Imagination. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1978.
—.The Making of Meaning. Upper Montdair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1981.
Coles, William E., Jr. The Plural I. NewYork: Holt, 1978.
—.Teaching Composing. Rochelle Park, NJ: Hayden, 1974.
Dowst, Kenneth. ‘The Episternic Approach: Writing, Knowing, and Learning.” Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition. Ed. Timothy R. Donovan and Ben W. McClelland. Urbana: NCTE, 1980. 65-85.
Gage, John. ‘Towards an Epistemology of Composition” Journal of Advanced Composition 2(1981): 1-10.
Salvatori, Mariolina. “Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations Between Reading and Writing.” College English 45(1983): 657-66.
Wall, Susan V., and Anthony R. Petrosky. “Freshman Writers and Revision: Results from a Survey.” Journal of Basic Writing 3(1981): 109-22.
Young, Richard. “Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Inven­tion.” Research on Composing: Points of Departure. Ed. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana: NCTE, 1978.29-47.