How to Teach Writing?

Clancy Ratliff, author of the blog Culture Cat, wrote the following, and I feel compelled to use this juicy tidbit as a springboard for this post:

"On a somewhat related note, I have a confession to make. I have now been teaching writing and studying composition theory for just over ten years. Over the years, I have come to realize that I have no strong opinion one way or another about How Writing Should Be Taught. I honestly think that students can learn useful skills in an expressivist course, a rhetoric-heavy course, a writing-about-literature course, a current-traditional course, a cultural studies based course, etc. I can't decide if this makes me a terrible writing program administrator or an excellent one."

Reading this comment was especially freeing to me as someone who has taught first year composition as a t.a., adjunct, and assistant professor for the last eleven years. Even in that short amount of time, I have seen perspectives shift within the profession regarding what approach to writing is best for our students. And I've tried several--believe me--here are some of the course content formats I've experimented with, beginning with my earliest days as a teaching assistant:

Writing about Generational Theory
Writing about Education in America
Writing about Language, Power, and Society
Writing about Literature
Writing in Response to Essays

These approaches, I would argue, worked just fine as far as creating a class that fulfilled all of the goals of a first year English course, one of which is to link the four language arts: speaking, listening, reading and writing. Students did all four, perhaps sometimes unsure of how every activity or assignment would aid them, but still, they completed their assignments. For the past five years, I have taught our second semester composition course as a writing about literature course, which is in adherence to the department's standards. Some of the original arguments against using second semester comp as "writing about literature" (see the Lindemann/Tate debate for more explanation) focused on the problems with the trend of having students read literary works and then, with no modeling or scaffolding of the writing process, produce essays that were nothing like what they were reading. Others argued that because first year composition should stand alone and not as a service course for upper level literature courses, the readings for these courses should not be comprised of fictional works. My experience in teaching 1302 as "writing about literature" has been that with enough modeling, students can successfully produce essays in the same genres they would produce in a course that does not use literature as the main reading content.

In teaching writing the one thing that I am absolutely sure of, and which is in accordance with the findings of Ronald Kellogg, author of The Psychology of Writing, is that in order to become better writers, students need sustained, repeated practice at writing in environments that are as distraction free as possible. This may seem like a small and obvious revelation, one that I should have come to early in my teaching career, but in truth I think that realizing this has allowed me to shut out some of the noise of the "Students should read/respond to this specific type of text in order to improve their writing skills" arguments that come and go.

One of the pitfalls I've discovered in teaching first year writing relates to that gray area of having students write about what they are interested in, which is, I think, I noble goal that most of us strive to reach, but a difficult road nonetheless. Students' interests shift constantly, and simply telling them something along the lines of, "This next assignment allows you to write about a topic you have an interest in" is generally not enough to ignite inspiration in students who (1) may have an undecided major, (2) may have already bitten off more than they can chew in taking too many hours. The idea of writing and having that writing critiqued is intimidating enough, but the idea of writing about a subject you genuinely are passionate about and giving that writing up for critique is downright scary. Furthermore, a student who begins the task of a research essay on, say, gender bias in the workplace, which he or she cheerfully assures you is an issue near and dear to his/her heart, may grow to despise that topic as the demands of prewriting, researching, annotating, and drafting pile up. This shift in attitude toward the topic (which I often see happen in our second semester first year composition course, which requires a significant research component) does not discourage me as it did when I began teaching. Instead, their frustration, I think, mirrors the frustrations of any serious writer who takes on a significant project and, along the way, has their own ideas challenged, runs into writers block, or, conversely, feels filled with too many ideas and no sense of organization, and sits down to draft at times when they would much rather be doing something else. I go through the exact same process (several cycles) with every article I write. And, as with most of my students, I go through the process hoping that what I am producing will be of value to someone else--that it will simply be read. My aim in teaching first year composition is not to make it "fun", necessarily, although I do my best with my classes to excavate whatever fun might be lurking beneath the mountains of work in a sixteen week semester, but to instead help students through what I know to be the processes that will lead them to produce work that showcases their best efforts.