Dear John

John at Jocalo has been writing a lot of terrific stuff lately (and is to be congratulated on his recent award, as well: congratulations, John!), and after thinking about his recent post on The Term Paper Declension, I had to respond.

In his second paragraph, John got my attention with his reference to Ross Winterowd’s characterization of Peter Elbow’s “New Romanticism”. I know and like Peter a lot, and I greatly admire his scholarship, and while I get impatient with some of what I perceive as his essentialism and, well, romanticism, I still had to go to the source to check out what Winterowd had to say after reading John’s post. I was not happy with what I found.

Winterowd, I have to say, gives a one-sided, cartoonish, and ultimately unkind representation of Peter’s work — but one that’s also unfortunately common. Compositionists of a certain stripe often tend to sneer when they invoke Peter’s name in describing expressivist pedagogies as entirely touchy-feely, solipsistic, and anti-intellectual or anti-academic. Those who’ve read more than just the early Elbow (the recent Writing with Elbow and Peter’s own Everyone Can Write are both excellent, complicated, and enlightening) know that such characterizations are entirely in error.

What really startled me, though, was Winterowd’s flat declaration that his “greatest argument” with Elbow “and other New Romanticists regards the foundational notion that composition is the making of meaning. Now, it is certainly the case that when we use language we inevitably make meaning, but no one begins to write (or talk) with the purpose of making meaning” (9). Let me run that past you again: “no one begins to write (or talk) with the purpose of making meaning”.

Hm.

Apparently, this weblog does not exist, and I am no one.

Because the purpose of this weblog — why I write this thing — is to help me make meaning, to help me understand the ideas I’m working with in this dissertation. I do it publicly to try and keep myself honest, and in the hopes that some of it might be of use to someone else, but I hope you’ll excuse my selfishness, reader, in keeping this weblog for the primary purpose of, yes, making meaning, of figuring out — via writing — how I see these relationships between class, computers, economies, and composition.

This question of purpose, of the motivations for writing, is ultimately at the heart of John’s post, as well, which is why it fascinated me so. Catherine Gammon, the best teacher I ever had, once asked our fiction writing seminar: “Why write?” Why do we do this? Vanity and ego? A sense of community? Economics? Because one has fingers and a keyboard? (I owe Catherine a letter, so maybe I ought to include obligation as an additional motivation.) John contends via Winterowd that college English as a profession felt that its highest end was to publish in PMLA, and “that to publish in PMLA one had to write very sophisticated term papers, often commenting on earlier term papers”.

First, I think we need to clarify some, uh, terms. As I read it, the expression “term paper” refers to a paper done for a “term” of instruction; i.e., the final paper of a quarter or semester. Clearly, when John talks about term papers in PMLA, he’s using a different meaning: he’s describing something like a research essay; a relatively brief text that relies upon primarily expository prose to reference other texts and draw some sort of original conclusion. (The writing program where I teach calls it a “documented essay”, which seems to bring its own problems with the focus on documentation, as if the purpose of the essay is primarily properly annotated regurgitation. John addresses this concern, as well.) John differentiates the “term paper” from the five-paragraph essay (which I would prefer to call the five-paragraph theme, since I don’t really consider them essays). In any case: we’re talking about essays, longer than five pages and shorter than twenty, that take a position in relation to other texts and attempt to make some meaning out of that position. John’s definitions are useful here: what he calls a term paper is a place where a student will “abstract a thesis from data”; a text “driven by inquiry” that attempts “to construct a fresh insight from the material studied”. The difficulty, as John sees it, is that the papers students produce often do not do such things, but rather “paraphrase and summarize”. I think the difficulty with what John has written is the blur between the profession of English and the learning of writing.

Let me stake out some of my positions here. First: English is not Composition. The two are historically related, and share an interest in language, but as Robert Scholes has demonstrated, the study of literature has little in common with the learning of writing. Some scholars see such a “Balkanization of English” as something to be lamented, but that’s not my concern here. The second position is related to the first: first-year composition is a course in how to write the essay. It does not deal with so-called creative writing — fiction, poetry — and neither does it deal with reading literature. Both are ends that I see as admirable, having a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing, but they are not the same thing as essay-writing — although one might certainly hope for connections and collaborations. In fact, Winterowd’s book is in a way about these divisions, but it completely misses the contemporary scheme and politics of English instruction. Finally, my third position: since English is not Composition, composition courses need not foster the production of English majors as one of their goals. In most colleges and universities, first-year composition is a universal requirement; every student has to take it. This does not mean that composition instructors, despite our historical associations with English departments, should attempt to evangelize every freshman into majoring in English. And yet, in a course in essay writing, literature scholars give their students Shakespeare to read, cultural studies scholars ask their students to interpret advertisements, and poets ask their students to write poems. Is this bad? Probably not. Because the funny thing about writing is that it’s not just a skill in itself: it helps you do other things, too.

And this is the point that I think John misses in his indictment of the term paper: writing is a mode of learning. John hints at it, certainly, in his remark that “writing actually helped you read more carefully”, but in his laying-out of writing instruction in higher education as leading from “lower division writing courses” that “teach freshmen and sophomores how to write term papers” to “upper division courses” that “require term papers” and so to “the dissertation for the Ph.D.” which is “the highest attainment of an English major”, John sees writing instruction as something that only holds utility in its direct application.

But why do students write term papers for their Latin courses? Are those term papers helping those students be better English majors? Of course not. The cynic will suggest that term papers are methods of surveillance; the optimist might hope that term papers help students to learn course material by synthesizing knowledge and drawing conclusions. Certainly, “once you leave academia, no one asks you to write a term paper”, as John suggests: but that’s a very limited view of what the skills required to write a term paper allow one to do.

Perhaps the institutional contingency felt by compositionists is a product of the nature of our task: teaching writing only has directly instrumental applicability in students’ other classes. Its broader application, as the skills of public rhetoric, are presently so diffuse as to be invisible.

This happened in Rome, as well. I’m working on a paper about it: Tacitus and Suetonius meed Hardt and Negri.