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JAC Volume 9 |
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Editor: |
Another Competing Theory of Process: The Student’sKate Ronald and Jon VolkmerLester Faigley defines three “competing” theories of the composing process that he says currently prevail among writing teachers and researchers. He outlines the origins of the expressive, cognitive, and social perspectives on writing processes, explains their tenets, and reviews their strengths and weaknesses, particularly in light of Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux’s Marxist critique of writing programs as skills-oriented and atheoretical. Put simply, the “literary” or “expressive” view assumes that invention is essentially nonrational and that the purpose of writing is to discover “truth,” usually about oneself. The “cognitive” view assumes that a writer’s purpose is to communicate and that invention is an orderly, step-by-step process. The “social” view sees invention as determined by context and community, and it sees writing as a means of establishing membership in different communities. Each of these perspectives variously defines how the writer’s mind works (and therefore how to teach inexperienced writers), the aims of writing, and the kinds of texts writers, especially student writers, should be producing. Faigley argues for a synthesis of all three theories of composing, one based on “historical awareness,” which would “allow us to reinterpret and integrate each of the theoretical perspectives” (537). Finally, citing Stanley Fish, Faigley insists that we must recognize that writing processes are “contextual rather than abstract, local rather than general, dynamic rather than invariant” (539). We would like to add another “competing theory” to these descriptions of the composing process: the student’s. We hope to answer part of Faigley ‘s call for a perspective on composing that takes into account the context, the place, and the dynamics of writing as these factors work for (and against) students in our composition courses. Faigley points out that all process theories have given student writing a value and authority not available in the current-traditional scheme (537). Yet, despite Giroux’ s criticism that current educational practices are not based on sound theory but on what Stephen North would call the “lore” of practitioners, in modem composition studies theory still holds forceful sway over practice. What Fish and Faigley imply, however, is that people come first, writing second. Composition research has shown over the last ten years that approaches that begin with writing, and not with specific writers and writings, are doomed to hopeless abstraction. This is especially true in the field of composition, where the subjects of our studies identify themselves first as social creatures, then as students, and only in small part as writers. Our essay puts writing in its proper place as one small facet of students’ lives, rather than relegating students’ lives to the secondary status of one more influence on their writing. Our work is a result of a semester-long ethnographic project at the University of Nebraska, where participant-observers monitored several composition courses. We studied two variations of first-year composition, one a composition and reading course using a collection of professional expository essays, and the other a writing workshop with no texts outside the students’ own writing. We also studied an intermediate and an advanced composition course. The participant-observers and the instructors for these classes met weekly during the preceding semester to study ethnographic methods, and the team met weekly during the course of the project to report and analyze results. This essay describes results from the advanced composition class. Based on students’ descriptions of their own writing processes, we will try to construct portraits of students’ composing, both in this advanced composition course in the Spring semester of 1987—where Kate was the instructor, Jon the participant-observer—and in the students’ other college classes. Even though most of these students (twenty-three were enrolled in the course) had previously taken writing courses designed on what James Berlin would call the “new rhetorical” model, we find that contemporary composing theories (as outlined by Faigley) have distressingly little relevance to the way students perceive how they actually write, whether for composition classes using the process approach or courses outside composition in which papers are typically assigned and due without any in-class attention to writing. Our conclusion, therefore, calls on researchers and teachers of composition to resist elevating writing processes to some lofty abstract perch and to pay attention to the context of students’ lives as they write and learn. Part of Kate’s pedagogy is based on self-consciousness, the idea that if one knows what one is doing, one is bound to do it better, to have more control over the process. Throughout the semester, Kate followed Ann Berthoff’s theory that “we teach our students how to form by showing them that they form” (2). The first assignment of the semester, therefore, asked students to describe a recent academic paper, one typical of their composing habits. The class made lists of the steps in the process of completing this task, from the moment they first received the assignment to the moment they handed it in for the instructor’s response. These records of students’ writing for history, biology, sociology, and English classes, along with Jon’s interviews with students outside of class time, as well as Kate’s and Jon’s observations of the students’ behaviors and attitudes, are the basis for the following portraits and discussions of students’ writing processes. Rather than looking only at students’ texts and then generalizing
from them some abstract principles of behavior, we observed the influence
of contexts on the way students produce those texts. In Assessing Writers’
Knowledge and Processes of Composing, Faigley and his co-authors review
current research into writing processes and writers’ knowledge
of those processes. While they point out the difficulties with relying
on students’ self-reporting to generalize about composing processes,
Faigley and his coauthors conclude that what students say they
do is as valuable a tool for studying writing behaviors as observing
what they produce. They assume that the more specific a student’s
description is, the stronger the sense of control over the process being
described. We believe that our analysis of students’ accounts
of their writing processes combined with ethnographic descriptions that
Jon collected from students (he was not the teacher and they felt comfortable
talking honestly to him) provide a rare glimpse of students’ writing
behaviors. In general, we find that students’ composing processes are influenced
more by contextual factors than by strictly textual ones. Most of the
students we observed and interviewed say that they always do their assignments
“at the last minute” and that they therefore feel they aren’t
doing the best job they could. Some say they feel chronically guilty
about it; others are more complacent. As we spoke with students, it
became apparent that the amount of time and concentration allotted to
a paper depended more on the context of the English class in the person’s
life than upon the rhetorical aims and attractions of the particular
writing task. The English class is measured against the other classes
on the student’s schedule, against other priorities in the student’s
life. This is not to say that a good teacher or fascinating assignment
make no difference. Indeed, in interviews students usually volunteer
those considerations first—thinking, no doubt, that that’s
what the interviewer wants to hear—while the primary influences
on the process often emerge first as asides, often apologetic ones:
“I’m not doing as well as I could but I am working 30 hours
a week.” Or raising a family. Or making happy hour. Students’
writing simply doesn’t proceed as smoothly as many process theorists
suggest. Here’s a typical description from a student who is sitting
at her kitchen table, trying to complete an assignment after work: Trish goes on to describe several interruptions, including the David Letterman Show, and says, “I was tired and wrote a jumbled conclusion.” Television comes up frequently as a partner, or nemesis, in composition,
as in this excerpt from James’ description of writing a paper
on Ursula’s character development in Lawrence’s “The
Rainbow”: Writing, despite James’ exaggeration, must be fit in between
television, friends, jobs, family, and other course requirements. As
one student says, “I wish the days could be more uniform. Working
evenings makes planning for writing very difficult.” Yet, most
composition research focuses on the texts in production and blocks out
the contexts for writing by controlling for contextual variables. For
example, Flower and Hayes’ thinking-aloud protocols (“The
Pregnant Pause”) or Rose’s videotaped writing sessions more
or less rigidly set the parameters of behavior for students, and although
these methods yield rich data, the experimental setting does not reflect
what writers do in other environments on their own. Our students report
that balancing the demands of producing a text with the demands of being
a friend, employee, parent, or child is often quite a dizzying act.
For example, here is an excerpt from a paper entitled "My Way"
in which the student recounts writing a paper on Fitzgerald’s
short stories. She begins the paper at 7p.m. the night before it’s
due; she writes in the stacks of the library and is accompanied by two
sorority sisters, who are also working on tasks due the next day: Julie continues to tell the story of writing this paper, complete with numerous interruptions, from waking her roommate who was “sleeping in her calculus textbook,” to receiving “airmail” requests for her phone number from fraternity members seated at an adjacent desk. Through the night, she selected quotes from the short stories to weave into her argument that Fitzgerald’s heroines were not “Golden Girls.” As Julie says, “I like quotes. They take up space and do what my high school English teacher, Miss Hobart, always told her classes to do: ‘show me, don’t tell me.'" She ends her account, as most of the students do, with a description of her complete relief at completing the assignment by 4:00 a.m. Like Julie, almost all the students report this last-minute rush to complete a writing task. They identify with the attitude that Sue Lorch describes: “I do not like to write . . . I inevitably view the prospect of writing with a mental set more commonly reserved for root canals and amputations: If it must be done, it must be done, but for God’s sake, let us put it off as long as possible”(165). Procrastination seems to be the universal problem of student writers, who rather than spending time planning their papers tend to rely on theories of “inspiration,” dreading what Mina Shaughnessy calls the “trap” of academic writing (7). Studies comparing experienced and novice writers have repeatedly shown that more planning leads to more and better writing, particularly writing that the author feels control over. Flower and Hayes’ protocol research suggests that experienced writers translate tasks into goals, which in turn are used to generate subgoals (“The Dynamics” and “The Cognition”). Studies by Sondra Pen examine the amount of time student writers spend planning and the kinds of decisions students make during planning. In general, students spend less time planning and have more difficulty constructing goals for writing than do experienced writers. Flower, Hayes, and Perl argue that experienced writers use both the text-in-progress and the rhetorical situation of the writing task to make plans or construct goals. But without enough time for writing, it’s difficult for students to do much planning, and the rhetorical situation may be reduced from thinking about an imagined audience and purpose to the goal of “getting this paper done” for a particular teacher by a specific time. Students’ accounts of writing papers are filled with confessions like this one: “I had strong feelings about the topic of the essay after I read it, but I didn’t give myself much time to get them on paper—about two hours before my 10:30 class.” While such expressions of guilt are common, in many cases they are
mixed with a recognition of the inspirational power of deadline pressure.
This student’s comment illustrates the ambivalence: Another student, one of the best writers in the class, laments while
describing her last academic paper, “It was all my own fault.
No matter how many times in past semesters I had vowed not to stay up
all night, pulling my hair out, making scribble after illegible scribble,
I always end up in this same situation hours before D-Day (due day),
writing furiously.” But later, in an interview with Jon, Kelly
eloquently justifies her late-night, last-minute method, though she
doesn’t attempt to excuse it. The interview was conducted on the
sunny grass of the campus quadrangle at about 11:00a.m. Kelly had not
slept the night before; she’d been writing a paper for an Irish
literature class: Jon: Is that a good feeling? Kelly:[dreamily] Oh, yeah. I was writing sentences and I just wanted to take them out and frame them and put them up on the wall... You get these sentences and you know they’re good. About 2:30 or 3:00 I really got into the groove. [She giggles, adds, mimicking Jon writing in his notebook] “This is an example of what not to do.” Jon: Why do you say that? Kelly: Teachers always say to start two weeks ahead of time and you know you should and you put it off. But you can never get inspired till the night before when the pressure’s on. But you still feel guilty. Several things are apparent in this exchange. In the wee hours of the morning, Kelly had experienced the feeling that most writers yearn for: that kind of writer’s high during which the composing comes easily. (She did receive an “A” on the paper.) Reaching that transcendent stage of writing is perhaps the most profound goal any composition instructor could have for a student, and yet Kelly recognized that she was sinning against the conventional process-oriented wisdom of how-to-write-a-paper and she felt guilty about it. But she cherished the exhilaration, and because of this experience she will certainly be more inclined to write, write well, and write late, with the deadline pushing her. Before this interview had begun, Kelly settled herself on the grass and volunteered: “You know what’s weird? I just spent eight hours concentrating and writing, and you know what? I still feel like writing!” Our teaching practices and the theories that drive them ought to encourage and reward any approximation of this experience, and yet Kelly achieved it, she thought, in defiance of her teacher’s instructions. In fact, most of the students report getting their writing done despite their teachers’ advice about process. For example, throughout the semester, Kate tried to help students avoid writing/editing a final copy before they were ready. Following Berthoff’s description of the dialectic process of composing, Kate led students through three-week sequences of journal entries and exercises that would produce the “chaos” that they could use to formulate ideas for the essay’s draft. She commented on these preliminary writings in process and tried to show the students how they could use earlier drafts in parts of their final copies. Each of the five formal essays in the course followed this procedure, with due dates for preliminary drafts, responses, group reading, and so on. Late in the semester, Jon interviewed the entire class about “what Kate was up to” and how their composing habits might have changed during the fifteen weeks. What we found was that students were willing to play along with Kate’s sequence, but that when it came down to writing the final copy, students used ingrained patterns of composing that had worked for them in the past. Most students said that their writing had made significant improvements and that they were more aware of “how” they wrote as a result of the sequencing of tasks in the advanced composition course. They included the words “process” and “product” in their discussions, but overall the students focused more on editing the first draft into a final copy than on any changes in the actual drafting of a paper, despite Kate’s continual emphasis on working in stages. Some excerpts from the whole class interviews show these patterns. First, fourteen of the eighteen students in class that day admit that they do all their assignments at the last minute. As a group, they seem to rely on what Kate calls “mental writing” rather than the kinds of written invention strategies that theorists and textbooks advocate. The students report that they rarely use English teachers’ prewriting of forming activities outside of classroom exercises: “I’ll only do that to please the teacher, to compete with other students so that my ‘brainstorming’ will be the best. But when I’m home, then it’s me.” They are quite savvy about appearing to follow the processes outlined
in class, but, on their own, the students rely on personal strategies
to compose a paper. As with research into planning, studies of students’
revising usually attempt to control for variables by creating artificial
writing situations. Thus, Nancy Sommers’ conclusion that writers
revise when they recognize “incongruities between intention and
execution” may hold true for writers in experimental contexts,
or for writers with either leisure or discipline, but three hours before
a paper is due, a student doesn’t have the time to discriminate
between what he or she wanted to say and what he or she can say. Our
students seemed to reduce the drafting-revising-editing sequence mainly
to drafting-submitting. One student writes, Practically all the students claim that usually their first drafts
are their final drafts, some going so far as admitting that they sometimes
recopied a paper sloppily in pencil so that they could fulfill the requirement
to hand in a “rough” draft with a final copy. They also
report on the limited amount of time they have to produce these drafts,
either because they’ve put off the assignment or because other
responsibilities interfere with writing. Four hours seems to be about
the maximum time limit for writing a paper for classes, even one requiring
“research,” with one to two hours being the norm. (Note
that the students typically do not “count” the in-class
workshop activities as part of writing the paper, even inside a composition
course.) This next student’s description of his ritual writing
behavior is typical: Much research has been conducted on the effect of rhetorical situations on writers’ conceptions of tasks, on their handling of the tension among purpose, audience, and subject. Flower and Hayes, for example, found that experienced writers generate most of their material by paying attention to the rhetorical problem they must solve—the audience they are trying to reach and the purpose they are trying to serve—while less experienced writers tend to focus more on the topic for ideas (“The Cognition” 30). Little has been written, however, about students’ rhetorical situation in the classroom. James Britton has reported that most writing in school is directed to the teacher as audience, usually in the role of “examiner” (137). The process theories of the “new rhetoric” have sought to undermine that teacher’s role by focusing on the text-in-progress rather than the finished product and by rearranging the traditional classroom format to include workshops, peer response, and conferences. But even in the most process-oriented courses, such as Kate’s advanced composition class, the rhetorical situation is much more complicated than the process theories and research would suggest. At the same time that students must devise a purpose and audience for their assignments, they have to consider the work due for other classes, their conception of the teacher as audience, their classmates as readers, their standing in the writing course, as well as the recurrent question of underlying agenda: what does the teacher want here? As a result, students’ rhetorical situations often become multilayered, with a confusing mix of audiences and purposes operating simultaneously. Perhaps the most significant influence—one routinely ignored
by composition theory and research—is grades. Our students report
that grades are the biggest obstacle to focusing more attention on the
rhetorical situation within their texts. Here are some answers from
students when Jon asked them what motivates them to write for all their
classes in the university: When I get an assignment I usually don’t rush right out and do it. I’m not a last minute person since I usually give myself enough time to complete an assignment. But the motivation that I use is not just focused on that one paper. I know my grade is dependent on the work I do, so I take an overall view, starting with my GPA, then break it down by class, then by test, and then by assignments. Occasionally, I really want to write about something, but usually I’m indifferent. I’d write differently if I weren’t graded. I could be more free. I do assignments because if I don’t I flunk—that is my motivation. I rarely find an assigned topic that I like and when I do it isn’t pleasurable because I must dig for what will please the teacher. I do want to get a good grade. That’s my main motivation. Even if the class isn’t in my major, I work at it. Most papers I have to tackle are boring essay papers. Of course I would rather be doing something else, so l wait till the last minute—unless the assignments intrigues me. Only once before this semester did I write a paper weeks ahead of time. Because I had a genuine interest in the subject, I wanted my paper to be “perfect.” I had to make sure it said exactly what I wanted to get across. I did not want to be misunderstood—I wanted to make sure I got my “voice” in. These students are telling us, of course, that grading writing is not teaching writing, and that, as Britton says, students should write about something that matters to them to someone who matters to them (196-98). More importantly, we would argue, these students are telling us that our theories of process are incomplete. All the theories of composing that Faigley describes, as well as the textbooks based on those theories, assume that students are most concerned with producing a document that satisfies their desire to communicate or express something (what Emig and Britton would call “self-sponsored”). And much of the theory and practical advice seem to suggest, despite continual insistence that the steps are recursive, that the process can be reduced to a four- or five-step system. The NCTE Commission on Composition, to cite a typical case, offers this official version of process in its 1984 “Position Statement”: A Writer: 1. We could complicate this model by adding variations from specific researchers. Flower and Hayes’ model, for example, would include “translating” material from long-term memory into a “text produced so far.” Donald Murray’s would include “collecting, focusing, ordering, and clarifying.” Berthoff’s would begin with “chaos” and lead to “finding oppositions.” Britton’s would move from “conception, to incubation, to production.” All these models stem originally from the movement away from examining finished products to asking what happens during the process. That certainly is all to the good, and process models are extremely useful for teachers as they try to intervene in students’ writing processes by analyzing where students get stuck and when they need help. However, as any teacher knows and as our observations document, although students do engage in a “process” of composing, it is not nearly so tidy or self-assured as theorists or textbooks often seem to imagine. To the extent that any general model at all can be constructed, a more accurate version might look something like this: A Student Writer 1.
We don’t intend this to be a cynical or deprecatory version of the writing process. While it more honestly conveys the teacher-sponsoredness and emotionality of the process of real student writing (at least at the large state university where this study was conducted), it nevertheless fails—as the NCTE and all schematized versions fail—to do justice to the great wealth of contextual divergence among individual writers. And, we would argue, Faigley’s descriptions of the “competing theories” fail to do justice to the classrooms we teach in. Moreover, the cognitive, expressive, and social perspectives that Faigley describes can be seen as agendas for setting up the rhetorical situation students must navigate. But none takes into account the actual rhetorical situations outside the classroom from which students must operate. The competing theories from composition research get translated into teachers’ agendas for the kinds of assignments they give, the kinds of texts they reward, the whole environment they create in their classrooms. Indeed, examining these theories can be extremely useful in helping teachers identify their own assumptions about students’ writing. But what about students’ assumptions? We distinguish “experienced” writers from student writers by saying that experienced writers pay more attention to rhetorical situation and make more useful, global plans about their writing. But student writers operate in very real, complicated rhetorical situations, ones that they know quite well how to manipulate, situations where plans, goals, and performance have different values from those outlined in published research. People, as we said at the outset, come before writing, not vice versa. Rather than attempt to make our students conform to an abstract version of the writing process, we should make our abstractions conform to our students’ actual writing processes. Inferior as these processes may be to the ideal conceptions, we must admit, if we are honest, that they are all we have. In fact, it seems to us that honesty is the key. Both students and teachers have become adept at pretending that students are interested above all in using writing to communicate, or to express themselves, when in reality these desires are jostled among a hundred others in the greater context of students’ lives. Let’s stop dissembling and admit that writing runs the gamut from enrapturing to excruciating but tends more toward the latter; that it may be inspired but is more often coerced; and that any which way that gets it done is, finally, the best process. Earlier we said that students identified with Sue Lorch’ s description
of her own writing process. Students’ responses to her essay reveal
their surprise and delight in discovering that a “teacher,”
a “real writer,” suffers and procrastinates through an assignment: My first impression of this article was one of sheer delight. It really makes me feel good to know that an expert as well as myself bites pencils, twists hair, chews lips, and despairs. I thought I was the only person alive who stayed up the night before a paper was due acting so childish. Recognizing this connection between students’ and teachers’ writing may provide a useful perspective from which to look at these students’ apparently depressing revelations about how they go about writing. These student accounts may confirm some things about teaching and students’ writing that we only rarely acknowledge; but in our more honest moments, we must admit that, like the students, we procrastinate, chew pencils, or walk away from computer screens in despair. What we have, perhaps, that students don’t is a faith in the process itself, a belief borne from experience that the work will get done. But we must also remember that our writing exists in a very different rhetorical situation from that of our students: we are not on deadline every week or two, at least not required to produce meaningful, thoughtful texts that reveal something about ourselves, or communicate some important idea, or tag us as members of our communities (memos notwithstanding). The writing that really matters to us takes time; although we ask students to care about their writing, we give them very little time. Donald Murray says that this year he’s having his students work on one extended piece of writing all semester. That seems closer to the kind of writing we as teachers/researchers do, and perhaps that may be one answer to the dilemmas students describe here of being rushed and dissatisfied with their final products. Yet, aren’t writers pretty much always dissatisfied and apologetic when they must turn a piece over to an editor, a reading group, a committee? These students sound very much like writers we all know. One of the themes emerging from our students’ descriptions resulted from Kate’s asking students to be self-conscious all semester about their writing processes. Jon’s interviews created even more self-reflexivity. And at the end of the course, these students claimed substantial improvement in their writing even though they still confessed to last-minute drafting and little revising. Perhaps the self-consciousness that came from the class structure, and from Jon’s participant-observer activities, helped students think of themselves as writers. Thus, although they lived in the student role of procrastinating, worrying about grades, and being interrupted by the conflicts in their daily lives, they were engaging in the kind of planning that Pen, Flower, and Sommers observed in their writers. Perhaps, too, the sequence of notes, drafts, and preliminary readings helped students to carry on the kind of “mental writing” that Kate teased them about but that ultimately helped them plan, consciously, for the deadline rush. Planning for that frantic time right before deadline also seems very much like a writer’s behavior. Thinking of our students as writers, then, as people who face the conflicts between interruption and inspiration that we know as writers ourselves, may help close the gap between “us” and “them,” between theory, research, and practice. Most of the research on writing processes is aimed, finally, at describing the composing habits of our students so as to change those processes, or at least help them gain more conscious control over them. It seems logical, and honest, therefore, to begin by discovering exactly what our students’ writing processes are, not only in experimental studies, but also in the contexts in which they operate every day. Our study, then, suggests further research in classrooms, dormitories, students’ writing places in general, rather than in controlled environments. The authority of students to describe what they actually do must have a place beside the authority of researchers to describe what students do. Their voices have too long been silenced and controlled in what Stephen North calls the “land rush” to stake out territory in composition research (17). University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska
Ursinus College Collegeville, Pennsylvania |
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