Composition Pedagogy

When one writes, revises, and edits, attention to error comes last. Is that a truth upon which today’s writing teachers might agree?

Some of my new colleagues have expressed surprise when I’ve asserted that error comes last. They’ve been startled by my revelation that I carefully avoid marking problems with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage when I respond to early drafts. They assert that students’ sloppy inattention to writing’s mechanical concerns will alienate readers far more quickly than problematic logic or infelicitous organization — and on that point, they’re probably right.

But I argue that mechanics come last as a matter of writerly efficiency: it makes no sense to correct every instance of the passive voice in a thesis paragraph when the logic of that thesis paragraph needs to be overhauled anyway. Students have a limited amount of time to devote to their assignments (even moreso in the case of my overscheduled cadets, who start their days at 5:20 in the morning), and if given a choice between correcting a comma splice and reworking an example for specificity, they’ll choose the simpler task.

Some folks, however, aren’t interested in thinking about writerly efficiency. Errors, as in Ben Yagoda’s obnoxious September 8 Chronicle piece, are “Deadly Sins” that demonstrate to some teachers the vile and debased nature of their students’ lazy and corrupt writerly souls. When Yagoda attempts to establish his ethos by declaring that he has “been teaching college writing since 1992,” I’m saddened that so many students have been subjected since 1992 to the instruction of someone who clearly has not even a passing acquaintance with composition’s scholarship on error.

I’d be curious to hear how Yagoda might respond to the now-canonical Joseph Williams article on “The Phenomenology of Error” (CCC 32.2, May 1981), Richard Haswell’s “Minimal Marking” (CE 45.6, October 1983), or Connors and Lunsford’s “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing” (CCC 39.4, December 1988). I’ve shared these pieces of scholarship and their range of perspectives with my new colleagues, and there’s been some interesting discussion. And at my new institution, we’re blessed with an abundance of technological resources, so this recent Crooked Timber post by Harry Brighouse caught my eye.

Brighouse declares his love for a Microsoft Word feature that I absolutely loathe: the green underlines of the grammar checker. For me, Word’s grammar checker is so often wrong that I’ve turned it off, and in the past I’ve also urged students to turn it off when they’re doing early-draft writing because of the anxiety effect: how can I effectively and efficiently generate ideas when I’m worrying about whether my next sentence will get a little green underline? My other reason for turning off the grammar checker is that it’s a device to which students can turn in the final stages of writing that seems like a nice subsitute for putting in the effort of proofreading and copyediting: if the machine will do it for you, why learn to do it yourself? (There’s some sort of corollary here in the apparent increase of homonym errors that have followed the introduction of the spell-checker.)

How do you deal with error? Do you like the grammar checker? And what do you wish your colleagues knew about error?

Let’s play a game. This is kind of an extension of my question about who would be composition’s Hank Williams a while back, and I hope you’ll help me out: it’s related to a nascent project I’m thinking about working on, but I’m also just curious to see what folks say.

Imagine you’re teaching a section of composition, but you’ve got no grounding whatsoever in composition theory or pedagogy. You’ve got very limited time — classes start in, say, three days — but you want to be the best teacher you can. So you go to your three wise, well-read composition colleagues, and you ask: “What’s the single most important issue I need to think about in my teaching, and what three article-length pieces of composition scholarship are most helpfully representative of the range of current thought on that issue?”

What do your wise, well-read composition colleagues — one of them, or all three — say?

[Naturally, there’ll be conflict and argument among the three, and that’s kinda the point. In effect, this is a poll asking for a hyper-condensed and updated version of a bibliographic collection like Tate et al.’s recent Guide, or — well, OK — of Bedford. For example, one colleague might say, “Error — and you need to read Joseph Williams’s ‘Phenomenology,’ David Bartholomae’s ‘The Study of Error,’ and Andrea Lunsford’s ‘Cognitive Development.'” To which another colleague might groan and roll her eyes and say, “No, it’s plagiarism — and you need to read Rebecca Moore Howard’s ‘Sexuality, Textuality,’ Margaret Price’s ‘Beyond Gotcha!,’ and Kelly Ritter’s ‘Buying In, Selling Short.'” You get the idea.]

Maybe a second’s worth of open-mouthed speechless panic.

That’s what I think I gave The Major when I used the phrase “I came out” to describe to her one of my interactions with students today, and I’ll confess, I’m feeling some impish pleasure in that.

The pedagogical context: I’ve repurposed the first essay from my UMass syllabus as the second essay in my syllabus here. Both are variants of the analytical complication of the personal essay, with the UMass staff syllabus and Text-Wrestling Book calling it “The Contexts that Make Me.” The UMass assignment asks students to reflect on the complicated intersection of events and circumstances from their past that produces certain character traits in themselves that they see as somehow unique. The assignment as I’ve revised it here asks cadets to reflect on the past causes and possible consequences of a certain character trait they see in themselves. However, because of the staff text I’m using this semester (Ramage et. al’s Writing Arguments), the assignment has a considerably different feel: the portions of the text I’ve been able to assign (both as background and as example) in my current modification of the UMass assignment deal much more with linear, logical cause-and-effect relationships, rather than the complex and recursive (and sometimes messy) relationships to which the Text-Wrestling Book pointed.

Whether I correctly anticipated the pedagogical consequences of that shift remains to be seen. However, I attempted to compensate for those consequences by suggesting explicitly in the assignment that the cadets’ audience for the assignment would be civilian college students likely at least a little suspicious of typically Army-associated examples and values. And said suggestion was what led to the interaction I described to The Major: after some discussion and caveats on my part about how to not come across as “uncritically Hooah” (or, as one cadet put it, as “an Army tool,” with tool meant in well you know what slang-pejorative sense), with accompanying examples, I got the frustrated question: “Sir, were you ever in the military?”

See, I’d been careful not to reveal that information to cadets, largely out of curiosity as to how they’d perceive and respond to a civilian professor at a mostly military institution. But, yes, I came out to them and admitted that I’d served, which seemed to give them a sense of satisfaction — and I’m not sure that was an ambiguity I’d wanted to resolve, which is why I mentioned to The Major that I “came out” and gave her such apparent consternation. I think the cadets want to do that linear cause-effect analysis on me and say to themselves, “Oh, he served; we can be comfortable in certain common assumptions and beliefs,” and that’s precisely the sort of thing I originally wanted the assignment to complicate.

Hence my smugness at The Major’s apparent OMG teh gay! reaction: Maybe I gave her something startling that made her re-think her assumptions about me, I told myself. And that’s what I want my cadets to do, as well, about themselves and about others. They want simplicity; they want demonstrable and logical cause-and-effect relationships. They want right answers that are clearly and readily apparent.

They’re not gonna get any of that in Fallujah or Sadr City.

I’ve just finished grading and handing back the first in-class writing. Among my West Point sections of first-year composition, the grades ran the gamut from F to A minus, with the average somewhere around 74%, just below a middle C. That’s about four percentage points lower than the first-assignment average in my FYC classes elsewhere, although those elsewhere grades were much more tightly clustered around the C plus / B minus range. Part of that I ascribe to the fact that this was an in-class one-shot rather than an out-of-class revised essay, so my slow composers were at a disadvantage: the overwhelming majority of essays were four or five paragraphs long, with quite a few clocking in at three paragraphs, and only two or three going longer with any substantial development.

And yes, I gave Fs on their first essays; essays which I likely would have given a C minus at my previous institution. Now, these were half-credit Fs rather than zeroes, but they were Fs nonetheless, and they were Fs for a single reason: the cadet failed to meet the requirements of the writing prompt. The prompt, in nuce, was this:

The Army has a number of very specific values to which it attaches rhetorical importance (West Point’s “Duty, Honor, Country”; the four Cs of courage, competence, candor, and commitment; the seven Army values of loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage). Come up with your own quality, one that people might not ordinarily associate with the Army, and define it at length and make an argument for its significance at West Point.

Some of the qualities cadets chose might surprise: there were essays on humor, on kindness, and more than a few on humility. But the essays that received Fs were universally a product of failure to read closely: in every case, the cadet who failed defined and argued for the importance of an already-extant Army value or quality, rather than coming up with one of his own. And that was the reason for the failing grade.

Tough? By the standards of my teacherly experience, yes.

Unwarranted?

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For the past eight years, I’ve taught composition classes where students turn in final portfolios rather than taking a final exam. That changes this year: at West Point, cadets are required to compose a final three-hour timed writing during exam week, called a Term End Examination essay, or TEE. (The Army loves its acronyms.) The composition TEE is an odd and interesting thing, because the department writing program’s rhetoric is ostensibly so invested in the writing-as-process revision-based model, and then we go and put a one-shot do-or-die capstone on it. Furthermore, the cadet TEEs are randomly and anonymously group-graded by three faculty members each.

As faculty, we’ve done grade norming, and it’s good to know that we’re all pretty much within a half grade point of one another when it comes to student essays: standards are clear and consistent. But being a portfolio person, I felt some unease looking forward to the TEE, so I assigned an early practice-run timed in-class graded writing exercise today. Interesting results, and a much wider range of apparent writerly skill than I’m used to seeing with drafts and revisions — which means I’m going to need to offer my students some timed test-taking essay-writing strategies.

Which is where you come in, dear reader: I’d like to ask you for your help. What are the most successful strategies and pieces of advice you’ve been able to offer your students for writing under time constraints? Certainly, the process approach is an invaluable and welcome luxury — but what best advice might I offer my cadets when that approach is not an option?

The format is fairly consistent: given three hours and a specific audience, read a ten-page article and draft an argument that in some way responds to that article, usually proposing some course of action. And in such a format, I’m horribly inexpert, and hoping for guidance: in such situations, what do you offer students that helps them to succeed?

It’s common practice, as far as I know, for colleges to alternate 50-minute M/W/F classes with 75-minute Tu/Th classes. The Point is a little different, and has an elaborate alternating class-day schedule of 55-minute classes. Cadets are (over-)scheduled from early morning formation, physical training, and meals through business-day class times into athletics practices, evening meals, and mandatory evening study times — and, over the past two afternoons, I’ve just met my sections.

They’re amazing. They’re forthright. They volunteer, and offer information in response to questions without needing to be called upon. And, yes, even this early, they’re pushing the limits, testing the boundaries, trying to see if they can punch my buttons, and I’m happy about that.

One of the questions I asked in my initial writing survey exercise was this: “What rumors have you heard about this class?” There’s a (likely self-fulfilling) persistent rumor among the Corps of Cadets that all instructors fail every cadet’s first essay assignment, and so the best course of action for said assignment is to blow it off and not waste any time on it. Sure enough, a couple cadets mentioned that rumor, and characterized it as advice from senior cadets in relation to the ubiquitous overscheduling. Which makes me wonder: have the senior cadets dutifully read their Foucault and decided to exercise Power at the capillary level in their advice to plebes? Is this brilliantly counter-curricular counter-hegemony?

Sure, maybe I’m overthinking things. But consider the circumstances: every class period begins with the cadet section marcher calling the class to attention and rendering the report (“Cadets Smith and Snuffy unaccounted for, Sir”), at which point I come to the position of attention, return the salute, and we start. Cadets live together, and fully know how overscheduled they are: in fact, one of my duties is to log on to the computerized attendance management system each day and note who was absent, late, or departed early. The information goes to the cadet chain of command in the cadet barracks, who deal with it wholly out of my sight — which is actually quite refreshing, and makes matters much easier for me. The cadet chain of command knows which absences are excused (sports, medical) and which are unexcused, and the cadets know they have to arrange with me ahead of time to make up missed work. No end-of-semester tales of heartbreak and woe.

Today, two cadets were absent: one I knew ahead of time had already resigned from the Academy, and the other was unaccounted for. I appointed my section marcher when she walked into the classroom at 2:46 (somewhat arbitarily: she asked me if she had missed any pre-first-day homework, and I figured if she was asking me that, she likely had her act together), and by 2:54, she had the procedures down and had taken a backup attendance sheet for me (standard practice for section marchers), and at the :00 mark of 2:55, she called the section to Attention and delivered the report (nearly) flawlessly.

Essentially, they’ve shown me their awareness of the strictures and conventions and boundaries within which they must live, and then their subsequent actions have done everything possible to call into question and test those boundaries. One cadet’s answer to my question about rumors they’ve heard about the course: “I hear that classes are mostly conducted in English.” Humor? Or a subtle attempt to correct me for asking cadets to violate the Army value of Loyalty by ratting on one another?

It’s gonna be an interesting semester.

Classroom exchange:

Me: “OK, we’re doing course evals for the first part of class today. Put down your answers to the questions, tell me what you thought about the class, what was useful about it, what wasn’t, what could be improved, what you thought about my teaching, what could be improved,” et cetera.

Particularly smart student: “Do our answers affect you?”

Me: “Sure. And I don’t see them until after final grades are in.”

(Pause.)

Particularly smart student, holding back a grin, in that kind of I-dare-you half-ironic tone: “So what are we doing for the rest of class today?”

Me, airily: “I’m giving away free money. And beer.” Big smile.