One issue I often encounter in student writers is a tendency to waste time on generalities. You know what I mean: “Different people have various ways of dealing with difficult situations”; “Fiction is a very powerful thing,” to cite two examples from recent papers. In my comments on such passages I try to encourage students to be more specific, to claim something with some real arguing-power. I’ve recently started wondering, though, how I could become more specific myself in such commenting. How do you get students to get at the essence of something interesting and fruitful?

I may have stumbled upon an answer. A recent issue of The New Yorker (Oct. 9, 2006) contains some fascinating observations by Milan Kundera, under the title “What Is a Novelist?: How Great Writers Are Made.” I quote from the opening section, entitled “To Understand, We Must Compare”:

When the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch wanted to block out a character, he first seized on the character’s essential position and then progressed to his more individual traits. From the abstract, he moved to the concrete. Esch is the protagonist of the second novel of Broch’s trilogy “The Sleepwalkers” (1931-32). In essence, Broch says, he is a rebel. What is a rebel? The best way to understand the phenomenon, Broch goes on to say, is by comparison. Broch compares the rebel to the criminal. What is a criminal? A conservative, who relies on the present order and wants to join it, who considers his thefts and his frauds to be a professional activity that will make him a citizen like everyone else. The rebel, by contrast, fights the established order to bring it under his own domination. Esch is not a criminal. Esch is a rebel. A rebel like Martin Luther, Broch says.

I’m not necessarily trying to produce great writers (or great novelists) in my composition classes, but I wonder if this technique of developing understanding through comparison might help students move toward better development of their own essential positions. Has anyone out there tried anything like this?

In his book Saints and Scamps: Ethics in Academia (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), Steven M. Cahn espouses a traditional view of the professor as an expert who is responsible to “lead students to master appropriate subject matter” (10).  Cahn criticizes teachers who “minimize their own importance and emphasize how much they have learned from the insight and imagination of their students” (9).  Instructors who abandon their authority in favor of more “egalitarian” classroom practices, he argues, are shirking their responsibility.

Communications pedagogy seems to embrace much of what Cahn criticizes, probably because Writing Across the Curriculum and similar programs have their roots in the egalitarian movements of the 1960s.  The peer review process common in many composition courses, for example, directly counters the hierarchy of the master-pupil relationship: here students can learn from one another without a great deal of intervention from the “expert,” at least on peer-review days.

I’m wondering if there is any dialogue going on regarding this issue, and if not, whether there should be.  Are most writing instructors on the same page about this, or are there voices out there who would restore the preachers to their pulpits, so to speak?  I ask because I hear students complaining from time to time that they get little out of such things as the peer review process.  Their colleagues aren’t proficient enough to offer any meaningful guidance, they say.  I confess wondering sometimes whether the older pedagogical model is perhaps more beneficial to students than we tend to assume.