JAC Volume 9

In discussions about cross-disciplinary writing, the college student is typically described as a novice being initiated into a discourse community of academic experts. Most of the documents generated by this entering writer (1) have transactional functions, to use James Britton’s term; (2) are public—exams, school essays, term papers, resumes, applications for entrance to programs and employment, reports, memos; and (3) are intended for and validated by experienced members of the community (88). This model of novice and expert is a shorthand that has been fruitful in understanding the social contexts of academic writing, but as a metaphor for classroom practice it has limits. First, because investigation has understandably focused on success in academic writing, the professional or academic discourse community is privileged with a sense of integrity and unity overtime, but the novice is not. This discrepancy is not new—typically we have regarded students as newborns at the start of our classes and adults at the end of them—but neither is it helpful. Second, in the novice/expert model, the newcomer writes for only one purpose: to enter the academic community. In effect, the novice writer is seen as having no history, no identity developed over time through other texts, other discourse.

Yet, college students do have histories with texts that they have produced. By the time they have spent fourteen or more years in school, they have perhaps written more for school than for any other purpose. They might agree with John Richmond, who concluded from his work with Jamaican teenagers in London, “A great deal of writing is done in school, maybe too much” (quoted in Goswami and Stillman 17). Even so, students have also written other texts with a variety of purposes, some more private than public in function.

Social Theories and Private Writing

Although there is interest in it, private writing as such is still largely unexplored by composition researchers (Britton 23). Elaine Maimon has noted that composition teachers “blur the distinction between private and public writing, to the detriment of both forms” (132). Expressive or speculative journals written in academic settings, valuable as they are, turn a private form to public purposes; according to Susan Florio and Christopher M. Clark, in one elementary classroom the school setting affected the nature of diary writing (126-27).

Private writing is most often voluntary. It includes personal letters and diaries, as well as many brief, usually ephemeral texts such as lists and personal messages. It also includes course notebooks and other self-initiated writing instrumental to transactional purposes. The immediate audience for private writing may be only the writer himself or herself and at most one or two other persons; but even when it is instrumental to a job, schoolwork, or other public or transactional purposes, private writing has its own conventions and traditions. These conventions may be idiosyncratic; Ann E. Berthoff, for example, has pointed out the “highly personal” structure of grocery lists (56). But they may also be shared knowledge about what makes a list, letter, or diary. Indeed one broad collection of disciplines, the humanities, has recognized private documents as central to its traditions of inquiry. That is, a check register or long-term correspondence has interpretive communities—from the immediate readers to investigators at a distance from the writer’s community—in the same way that a scientific paper or a poem does. Both private and public writing enter into writers’ understanding of themselves as writers and their ability to engage in dialogue with, make sense of, and contribute to not just one but a number of communities. Recognizing both types of writing seems important for all writers but is critical for those who are studying liberal arts, particularly the humanities with their traditional concern for self and identity.

Convinced that knowledge is socially constructed and that writing in our culture can forge both personal and professional identities within communities, I developed an advanced writing course for liberal arts students based on the connections between private and public writing. Developing this course raised an issue related to the emerging social view of academic discourse: the apparent dissonance between that view and the expressive or personal development view of writing. In the extreme, the social model can be represented by a hypothetical writing-in-the-disciplines program that concerns only formal conventions of academic writing; the expressive or personal development model, by a writing workshop that takes up only the personal writing of its members and has no other reading. In practice, researchers and teachers occupy a knowledgeable and humane middle ground; however, emphasizing the dissonance lets us confront some of our assumptions. I agree with Gerald Graff that English teachers must bring the discipline’s conflicts (which frequently have “greater richness and vitality” than the conclusions eventually reached) to their classrooms where they implicitly or explicitly enact their beliefs (14).

Given these conflicting models, teaching advanced expository writing means clarifying values and practices. Theorists like Lester Faigley have distinguished a number of differences between the social and expressive views of writing. For example, Faigley notes the ahistoricity of three main “expressivist” values for writing: “integrity, spontaneity, and originality” (529). Further, citing the Marxist critic Henry Giroux, he suggests that “the expressive view of composing ignores how writing works in the world, hides the social nature of language, and offers a false notion of a ‘private’ self” (531). That is, in classroom terms, when we teach writing as personal development in an expressive workshop, we tend to hide our assumptions about writing, in particular our Romantic notions of individuality and creativity. Part of the social nature hidden from the students’ (and teachers’?) view is the history of inquiry from which expressive courses derive. Yet, as I have said, the social model also tends to ignore history, chiefly the writer’s history, but also the history of ideas about personal growth and cognition that inform much inquiry in the humanities. In preparing to teach advanced liberal arts students, I asked two questions. Is there a way to keep the values of expressive workshops and at the same time show workshop members that these practices have historical and social contexts? On the other hand, can the notion of discourse communities be broadened to recognize and indeed privilege the variety of settings in which advanced undergraduate students have written?

Focusing on private writing is one way to address these questions and the opposing views of discourse. Private writing is not writing without a social context, but writing that differs in context from more public writing. In the humanities, the preservation and editing of private documents belongs to the conventions of treating a single life, or a number of lives, as worthy of study, to be revealed as textual artifacts. Private documents have many contexts and purposes, only some of which are expressive.

Also, private writing differs from personal writing. For example, personal narrative, memoir, and autobiography are recognized public genres and embody certain assumptions about context—facts often overlooked in teaching. Conceptions of autobiography differ according to the writer’s age and vocation, and probably also by time and place. In a study of autobiographical narratives by three groups differing in age and experience, Richard Beach found that younger adolescents’ texts were concerned with action; those of older adolescents and adults with beliefs (62). In their essays, the adults (who were English teachers) were also less likely to retell events and more likely to use description than the younger writers. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky have seen basic writers’ autobiographical accounts as characterized by such patterns as “Boy Makes Good” and “Lessons in Life” (33). Lynn Z. Bloom notes that “Autobiographies focusing on childhood (and therefore ending with the subject’s leaving home, or beginning college, marriage, parenthood, or a job) are seldom written by politicians, athletes, entertainers, or corporate executives (whose autobiographies emphasize adult performance), but mostly by writers and philosophers” (347). Far from being a genre suited mainly for beginning writers, autobiography, as it is interpreted by members of academic communities, carries sophisticated assumptions about strategies, subjects, purposes, and readership. In sum, the terms “expressive,” “personal,” “autobiographical,” and “private” are not synonymous, viewed within a social model of language.

An Advanced Course about Private Writing

The course that I devised attempted some awareness of the social contexts of private writing and certain types of expressive writing, whether public or private. It was a single and partial answer to some of the issues raised here. The course, Advanced Expository Writing, is intended for third-year students in liberal arts and some science curricula; it fulfills the advanced communication requirement at Clemson University. In the spring of 1987, when I first taught it, class members were majoring in political science, English, psychology, economics, sociology, and chemistry; their work and insights are described here. Most said at the start that they took the course to improve their writing and as an alternative to other less liberal arts oriented advanced communication courses.

I sought to embody these themes in the course. First, we explored many types of connections between public and private writing. Using ordinary texts as evidence, we tried to identify our individual writing traditions, bring them to academic discussion, explore the interpretive communities in which they were produced, and place them in a public tradition of inquiry in the humanities. That sense of public tradition came from reading the private writing of others—writing now published and valued by larger discourse communities. In light of the humanities tradition of privileging the self, we also tried to construct views of ourselves as writers and thinkers, that is, identify our own intellectual preoccupations. We attempted to do the same for published writers.

The goal of class writing was not to write polished autobiography, especially given its problematic status, but to see how writing and texts “constructed” us and gave new opportunities to pursue and extend our preoccupations in several of our discourse communities, including those clustered to form a field or a vocation. Writing was a means to have a voice in an academic community, a voice that knew from whence it came.

As members of an advanced workshop within a liberal arts college, we also tried to enact some of the discursive practices of professionals in the humanities and social sciences. We wrote informal notes to each other, collaborated on one project, respected writers’ wishes to keep journals private, encouraged speculative “pieces” composed of fragments, valued our preoccupations as special knowledge already developed, and treated our own texts with the authority accorded other artifacts of scholarly interest. I also sought explicit connections between class members’ special interests and academic pursuits, but this was not borne out. The goal of these practices was not to dismiss the social conventions and power relations of the class­room, which as Patricia Bizzell has remarked would be difficult to change even with extraordinary conscious effort (150), but to treat each other more like professionals who typically mix formality and informality in their relations with one another.

Later writing included more public but still expressive forms: a book review, a profile that extended the thinking of an earlier piece, and an exchange of letters with an editor of historical correspondence. Although these genres and subjects are common in advanced expository writing courses, we strove to connect private and public writing, encourage interests formed over time, and understand the social contexts in which specific types of writing arise. For example, reviewing can extend and make public to an implied community an individual’s voluntary, fragmented, or instrumental private writing. Editing assumes an interpretive community that not only values learning about the lives of others, but understands the published work as itself an artifact of time and place, a selected and edited version. Members of that community often write informally to each other about their concerns, and that was the focus of our editing work.

Finally, we tried to recognize that not all writing has an academic end and that bringing private writing to academic discussion might change our views of it. As Richard Rodriguez has observed, “While one suffers a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality”

(26).

Constructing Our Pasts as Writers

In what became the most important personal inquiry, class members reflected on writing from their own histories—a cycle of discussion, writing, and reading repeated through the semester. Over three weeks I introduced several types of private writing or public, expressive writing: journals, diaries, and artistic and scientific notebooks; letters; and autobiographies and memoirs. Where we could, we identified these in our own histories and brought in sample documents. At the same time I brought in published examples from several fields of study, presented as whole books or periodi­cals, that is, in the context in which educated readers find them. I also brought in similar writing of my own.

I wanted students’ artifacts of personal culture and development to have authority within the community of the class in the same way that artifacts generally have for scholars, and I wanted students’ research to contribute genuinely to our knowledge. With private writing, this goal seems possible; class members did make connections between their letters and notebooks and those of other writers, whether local or remote. In particular, from their own past writing class members observed several times that private writing may be time-bound; for example, there are diaries for once-in-a-lifetime trips, and there are flurries of letters connected with certain periods of one’s life. The following excerpt, the opening of a reflection by a student whom I shall call Terry, states that emphatically:
I am not a letter writer. Letters are too personal, too intimate and too pertnanent. However, there have been times in my life when letter writing was a must. One of these times was from February to May of 1982 when I was a Marine Corps Recruit at Pan-is Island, South Carolina. Recruits are not allowed to use the telephone or have visitors, and for three months letters were my only method of communication with the outside world.

Terry, a junior majoring in political science, had never heard of psychologist Anna Freud and was only beginning to become aware of traditions of private writing, but his reflection on the spring of 1982 compares with her reminis­cence of 1943, both cued by examining personal correspondence:
I know from memory, as well as from notes of mine and Iecters I received and answered, what a dark year that was. The war seemed endless.... It took a special person to be hopeful that year.” (Coles 3)

Having considered their own reasons for voluntary writing, class members were able to assess the generalizations of other investigators, such as Thomas Mallon, who also details a rich set of purposes for private writing in A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries (5).

Although I stressed private writing, any documents produced by class members were fair game. Berthoff’s analyses of lists and other informal, often schematic writing gave method to our reflections on a wide variety of items (56-62). The goal was to make connections among some of the items. A writer could also compare his or her productions with others’, and some students did so, as in comparing a set of course notes with those of a former classmate.

Focused on specific texts and their settings, class members did not recreate childhoods or otherwise write extended autobiographical narratives. Examining the texts in their lives prompted reminiscence, but also analysis. Because there was no requirement to write an essay, a number of students chose to take up different items in a series of observations, sometimes ending in a generalization. Likewise, there was no need to examine intensely personal material; choices depended on interest and the availability of their previous writing. Writers were free to find the private and personal in any text of their own making.

Students who looked only at graded school papers were more judgmental and dissatisfied with their writing than students who looked at any type of voluntary writing, even if it were a calendar, course notebook, or check register. This was true regardless of the student’s academic success with writing. For example, Mark was accustomed to earning A’s and B’s on his papers, but he said of them, “They are like barroom chats: pleasant, fun, but speckled with flaws and very, very indulgent—superficial in their simulated passion.” He went on: “Though they were written at different times, the same errors in the first are the same errors present in the last. I was very persistent in my ignorance.” Dennis, whose academic writing had received a number of C’s, began in the same vein, dissatisfied with his school writing; yet, he wrote this of his voluntary productions:
In the drawer at home where my coin collection sits are countless papers with records of how many, how much, and when. The lists were constantly updated to keep up with a growing collection. Often the lists were rewritten for the sole purpose of nearness. The coins were always something that interested me and that’s why I enjoyed doing the writing that went along with the collection. I was also proud of the collection which is why I kept all the writings neat.

He noted that he continues to make precise lists for other collections, in particular his record albums and tapes. These lists not only aided his own searches but also let him keep track of borrowed works. Dennis’s private writing is part of his identity within a discourse community that understands his interest and whose members seek him out. Most important, his reflection in writing began to make him aware of that identity, by using some of the discursive practices of the academic community. For Mark, who had no choice but to take the role of the usual teacher-reader as he examined his papers, these discursive practices remained largely unhelpful in constructing any positive sense of identity from texts.

Several students examined their course notebooks, marginal notes in textbooks, desk calendars, or check registers. Class members who had been mediocre academic writers sometimes had only these types of voluntary writing to examine because they wrote little outside of school. But in spite of stated doubts and criticism, everyone noted definite habits and made specific comparisons either with their previous writing or other students’ similar writing. All took credit for discovering patterns, even a writer who learned from her calendars that she was now less organized than she had been as a high school senior. Humor also crept in: a check register reminded John of “the countless numbers of pizzas” that he had eaten. Observations were not limited to what is usually called writing, or to examination of the text itself. One class member was struck by the graphic sense of her voluntary writing—scrapbooks, coloring books, and drawings; yet another speculated about the conditions that preserved a piece of his childhood writing that he had found taped to the underside of a dresser drawer.

Nor is the commonplace book dead. Two class members observed that they routinely copied quotations or pasted clippings, poems, and other texts into their journals or diaries. Louise also kept her school papers in her journal. Rod observed that he sometimes wrote about items after copying or pasting, and he related quoted texts to his own development:
Amidst this character change, smaller but significant changes also occurred. A quote from The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner states that • ‘a nigger is not a person, so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.” This came at a time when I often pondered my bigotry and racism and struck me as an appropriate definition to a word I then used often and wanted to erase from my vocabulary.

For these writers, like those of an earlier time, the object character of personal books testifies to the important parts of life. Commonplace books also provide connections to a self conceived by reference to wider communities, implicitly through the selection of items and explicitly by writing about them.

Two class members revealed themselves as “impelled” writers, in Bntton’s sense (218). Their journals were self-initiated, as several others were, but these students wrote nearly every day and at length. Both wrote their entries with the ultimate purpose of shaping imaginative works, either short stories or poems; they regarded the journal work as preparatory. Neither had published any of their creative work so far, and although they had friends with whom they shared some writing, the journals were private. The sheer effort, as well as the voluntary nature of their writing, made them very conscious of their habits. Both wrote detailed observations of working habits. Daniel’s reflection began, “My writing is a very important personal tool.” Beth’s journals were separate, validated artifacts, which she called “this book” or “this collection.”

The impelled writers made extended connections between writing and self; in fact, they identified strongly with their writing, but this was not news to them. In the course of this reflection, two other class members made sustained intellectual and emotional discoveries in connecting writing and self. Terry, whose piece about boot camp I mentioned earlier, went on to describe differences between letters to his mother, which he named “eyes only” letters, and those to his family as a whole. Each feature of the letters, such as the lack of dates or the presence of postscripts, was interpreted to create a portrait of a young man who did not know how deeply his facade of bravado was cracked or how much his cryptic explanations worried the very person he wanted most to reassure. It was a moving but analytic examination of intensely personal materials.

In a different type of reflection, Marie traced a broad pattern of intellec­tual change in her life by examining several pieces of writing since eighth grade: a diary, a copy of Walden with passages that she had underlined, and a required journal from a women’s studies course. She noted that underlining, a habit from high school, had carried over to college, particularly to her women’s studies course the semester before she enrolled in advanced writing.

While reading Dale Spender’s Man-Made Language, she began to respond to the writer’s powerful argument, and her underlining became annotations, at first one word and then a passage “at the end of one chapter that is not connected to any one thing, but is indirectly connected to the whole chapter.” She wrote, “This writing and underlining became a major force in the journal that I was required to keep for the same class. My margin writing expanded into page after page of journal entries” and “sparked” personal revelations. She ended, “While I didn’t change the world with that entry and although my thoughts were incomplete and underdeveloped, I did show myself that I do have the ability to be an independent thinker.” She saw herself developing over the whole set of writings presented, from selfish interests in the diary to “social consciousness” in Walden to writing as “an active thought process” in her journal. Marie’s and Terry’s pieces sustained and built up a related series of discoveries that others also made more briefly. Their works were also autobiographical essays in the literary and textbook sense.

These pieces were read by other class members, and for some this was their most valued writing. The students treated this assignment with care and enthusiasm. Why? In part, because the investigation was real and enabled each writer to contribute new, analytic knowledge to the class; but I think there is another reason. No one, not even the impelled writers, had had anyone publicly recognize the existence of their private writing. Students’ and indeed most adults’ private writing is rarely acknowledged, except for its being instrumental to public writing. There is no place for students to learn why private writing is valued by a segment of the academic community (a segment to which college students might aspire to belong) because they have rarely had the chance to reflect in an academic way about it. School is geared to weeks and months, not years, and that also works against recognition of sustained private writing, whether by students or writers held up as models. It is ironic that such writing is a primary source of document-based inquiry in the humanities. In a classroom, two or three isolated journal entries or letters must usually stand for the slow accumulation of trials, essais, repetitions, dead ends, renewed efforts, compelled and impelled thinking within the intellectual life of one person.

Afterthoughts

The course suggested several insights and many questions about the relations between private and public writing. Judging from writing over the term, I found that class members did not easily construct selves from texts, but insofar as they did, voluntary writing had a compelling part. More often than not, they related voluntary writing to actions outside school or formal preparation for a career. And voluntary writing often arose from and led to action rather than more writing. Class members regarded graded academic writing, even in a major subject chosen for its interest, as having a different, more tenuous relation to what some called their “true selves.” In making this

distinction, a number seemed to suffer that “diminished sense of private individuality” which Rodriguez has called the price of assimilation, in this case into the public communities of professional life (26). These writers had not achieved “public individuality,” although several may have been on the brink. Researchers like Lucille Parkinson McCarthy have begun to study college writers over a period of a year or more (234).Voluntary writing might also enter into such research.

As writing teachers, we can examine our assumptions about disciplinary knowledge. If as scholars we value life study, we can make writing sustained over time part of classroom investigation of texts and treat students’ texts with the same seriousness and persistence that we accord others’ texts. By asking writers to reflect on it, we can encourage voluntary writing in whatever settings it occurs. By employing the idea of a private self that adapts in different settings but endures nonetheless, we can show that texts construct us and impel not only further writing but action. That is, we can help our students construct a sense of public individuality. To reconceive the metaphor of the novice from the standpoint of inquiry in the humanities, the writer’s identity from and in texts is important. In this re-conception, the writer is not a humble aspirant to a cloister who must renounce his or her past, but an authentic voice, prepared to reflect on his or her history and the ways in which it relates to a community. It should be possible to make the classroom a place for such reflection.

Clemson University

Clemson, South Carolina

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