It is with unbelievable difficulty that my ideas arrange themselves into any sort of order in my head. They circle there obscurely, they ferment to the point where they stir me, fire me, cause my heart to palpitate; and in the midst of all this emotion I see nothing clearly; I cannot write a word, I must wait. Imperceptibly, the great movement subsides, order succeeds chaos, everything finds its proper place; but slowly, and only after a long and confused agitation.

This passage reminds me of some advice Johannes Brahms is supposed to have given once regarding composing. You should begin work on a piece, he said, but then set it aside for awhile without thinking about it. Upon returning to the piece later, you will often discover that some of the problems that first presented themselves have been worked out, and you will have a clear sense of how to proceed.

From a psychological point of view, Rousseau and Brahms both highlight the importance of the subconscious in the creative process. In their view a successful composition is fashioned, in part, outside the realm of conscious intention. I wonder if there is any place for this creative “non-practice” in college composition courses. Perhaps there are ways to foster a productive subconscious creativity with practices that extend beyond the act of writing itself.

While pondering why this might be so, I stumbled on an article that may or may not be relevant (to the question of why questioning well is hard). In Critical Thinking Development: A Stage Theory, Linda Elder and Richard Paul detail, among other things, some of the traits and implications for instruction of what they call “The Practicing Thinker.” In order for students to become practicing thinkers, they argue, teachers must help them understand that “thinking is inevitably driven by the questions, that we seek answers to questions for some purpose, that to answer questions, we need information, that to use information we must interpret it (i.e., by making inferences), and that our inferences, in turn, are based on assumptions, and have implications, all of which involves ideas or concepts within some point of view.”

The rub is that “The Practicing Thinker” is stage four in what Elder and Paul put forth as a six-stage process through which “every person who develops as a critical thinker passes.” The stages range from “The Unreflective Thinker” (stage one) to “The Master Thinker” (stage six). If there is any connection between this theory and my question, then the students who are having difficulty formulating good questions might be “Unreflective,” “Challenged” (stage two), or “Beginning” (stage three) thinkers, and my job is to move them in the direction of becoming “Practicing” thinkers.

Part of Elder and Paul’s project is to highlight what all of this means for the educational process. I have to admit that I hadn’t thought about teaching in these terms, though I have sometimes wondered whether the seeming lack of critical thinking abilities in some of my students is connected to stages of cognitive development. Any cognitive psychologists or education specialists out there care to weigh in on this?

The basic idea behind the program is that students can gain a firm grip on mathematical concepts by discussing them. Instead of being told outright whether a particular equation or solution works, for example, children are encouraged to discuss whether a proposed approach seems viable, and to explain why they think the way they do.

The results are impressive: “After three years, Project Challenge students were scoring in the nintieth percentile on standardized math tests, even better than their counterparts in wealthy Boston suburbs. Not only that, but their English and language arts scores shot up.”

This interactive approach to learning is of course familiar to those of us who teach writing. That the “workshop”-oriented classroom could be so beneficial to children learning mathematics provides particularly strong support (in case any were needed) for the advancement of communications-intensive education.

The problem with bullet points and slide headings, says Atkinson, is that they typically do nothing more than establish dry, lifeless categories of information. What is usually missing is a story, something “juicy, coherent and full of life.” Hence, “some of the world’s largest organizations have adopted the word ‘story’ as their new mantra for corporate communictions.”

Atkinson cites Aristotle in his definition of ”story”: it should include “action, a plot, central characters,” and even “visual effects.” He adds that classical notions of rhetorical persuasion should also play a part in the formulation of presentations. PowerPoint slides should thus articulate a story, an old-fashioned narrative incorporating ancient ideas of how to be persuasive.

Some interesting food for thought, I think, for those of us engaged in both Humanities and Business education in institutions like Baruch.

A colleague of mine shared some ideas she had on the subject, which I’ll paraphrase here. My colleague’s approach is to require students to rewrite proposals until they pass. The proposal has to follow this format: Paragraph 1=Name the focused topic. Discuss what you find interesting in it and how it is relevant to the course objectives. Par. 2=Pose a main research question. This should be a question for which there is no simple (yes or no) answer. Par. 3=Introduce one solid source. Give full bibliographic data, and indicate how this source will contribute significantly to your project. Par. 4=Same as paragraph 3, but with another source. Par. 5=Outline how you will proceed with and complete the project. Indicate what you are still looking for in research, and discuss any potential stumbling blocks.

I’m wondering if anyone else out there has tried this kind of approach. I’m not sure if it would be appropriate for all writers. For some people, the focus seems to come only through the process of writing the actual paper. Any thoughts?

A (that’s me): “Hi! What are you teaching this semester?”
C (colleague): “Nothing. I finally have some time to work on my own stuff. What are you teaching?”
A: “A business writing course.”
C: “Oh, that’s really great! You don’t have to deal with . . . you know, the ideology.”

The ideology my colleague was referring to is the theoretical framework behind the program’s basic composition and expository writing courses. Instructors teaching these classes have to adopt a fairly prescriptive approach, both in terms of assignment sequencing and instructional methodology. Such requirements are understandable and perhaps inevitable, given the large number of instructors, most of whom are adjuncts. There has to be pedagogical coherence if thousands of students are to be held to the same rigorous standards.

The business writing course, on the other hand, allows instructors a greater degree of autonomy. There certainly is coherence and rigor in the curriculum, yet there is also a refreshing freedom. I suspect that there is more to this than the fact that a smaller pool of instructors (in business writing) requires less directorial oversight. The requirements and standards of the business writing course result from, and represent, goals that are more non-academic in nature. The ideology behind the more traditional writing courses (basic composition and expository writing) is connected to their “background” in the Humanities, while the “idea” behind the business writing course is to prepare students for success in the “real world.”

Yet the Humanities, it seems, cannot serve purely academic interests. In an environment of assessment and academic accountability, the Humanities, struggling to survive in a largely business-driven world, have little room for failure. They must produce results at once satisfactory to the academy and, in some way, relevant to the “outside” world. Administrators of courses like basic composition and expository writing thus have all the greater need for top-down quality control. The relative autonomy of the business writing instructor, in this view, corresponds to the entrepreneurial freedom of the real-life business person, who may create (to an extent, of course) his own means to a purely practical end.

The issues raised by all of this are particularly interesting to me in my work at Baruch, a business school with traditional Humanities requirements. In the upcoming installments I’ll explore how the different institutions I’m associated with are reinventing the traditional liberal arts education, specifically with regard to writing and communication.

Much later, Webster’s was still criticized for its egalitarian tendencies: “In this magazine [The New Yorker], Dwight Macdonald complained that Webster’s Third had debased the language ‘in the name of democracy.’  The dictionary’s editorial staff had called for a show of hands to make decisions about words and usage.  Macdonald challenged both the method and its premise: ‘If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States…were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point’.”

Lepore continues: “It’s probably a good thing Macdonald isn’t around to browse through the Wiktionary, the online, user-written dictionary launched in 2002 by Wikipedia, and billed as the future of lexicography.  There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary.  There’s not even an editorial staff.”

The implication seems to be that opponents of the “legitimatization” of common usage in language would criticize “Wiki” developments simply because they’re “democratic.”  Yet linguistic inclusiveness surely does not lead inevitably to the acceptance of all sources of information as (at least potentially) valid, I would think.  Aren’t Wikis problematic (potentially) on other grounds?  I wonder what Noah Webster would make of the Wiki phenomenon. 

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?

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.

Clearly this “instinct” produces, first and foremost, spoken language. Writing, which Pinker characterizes as “an optional accessory,” requires some kind of formal instruction.

I’m wondering whether the idea of spoken language as instinct could mean anything for writing pedagogy. Can writing skills be improved by focusing on effective speech? How closely is writing—a cultural invention(?)—related to the instinct to acquire spoken language? Is anyone aware of some current research on this?

For those of us involved with communications education, this would clearly be an argument in favor of content-rich initiatives like Writing in the Disciplines. Yet I can’t help but wonder what the “matter” of effective writing actually is, outside of the content the writer is attempting to control. More importantly, if there is writing knowledge per se, how is it acquired? I would guess that it is learned in the same way that spoken language is: through imitation. If so, the richer our contact with good writing is, the richer our writing will be (at least potentially).

Is there anything to this? Does anyone know of any studies investigating the relationship between how well one writes and how much one has read? What role should reading play in our efforts to improve writing skills?

He then discusses his observations of underlife in the writing classroom, noting the creative aspects of what might seem like disruptive behavior: in many cases, private conversations during class, for example, showed students applying class concepts quite accurately to their own interests. The suggestion is that these “disruptions,” actually assertions of creative independence, are vital steps in the process of building identity, which, in the end, is “the business we [as writing teachers] are in.”

The question is how to foster this tendency toward creative distancing, how to capitalize on the underlife so essential to writing. Brooke’s answer is that the institutional model has to be changed, from one where students learn from the “authorities” to one favoring more “student-directed projects, peer interaction,” and so forth.

I wonder, though, whether such reform is necessarily in the best interest of students. If learning to write is a process of building identity, couldn’t one argue that students in fact need the authority figure, with all of her rules and judgments, in order to find their own voices? Isn’t separation effected most successfully when one knows precisely what he is separating from? Is there a danger here that by dulling the sharp points of resistance we may be engendering a new kind of conformism?

Gottman has become quite adept: after viewing only a short segment of a conversation, he is able to predict with 95 percent accuracy whether the couple will still be together in 15 years. Often Gottman’s analyses defy common expectations. An apparently healthy relationship may turn out to be essentially unhealthy, and vice versa. Gladwell writes that when he (Gladwell) tried his hand at analyzing conversations he was able to predict correctly only 50 percent of the time, that he “would have done just as well by flipping a coin.” The difficulty is that the cues–guarded words, fleeting expressions, frowns, changes of tone, and so forth–are numerous, subtle, and often ambiguous. What makes Gottman so accurate, Gladwell discovers, is that he simplifies his task, focusing not on every last detail, but on the more obvious, and more obviously important, cues, which he calls the “Four Horsemen”: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

Perhaps I’m just obsessed with communications pedagogy, but I’m wondering if any of this could be applied to the teaching of writing. Gladwell doesn’t mention (at least in this chapter) whether Gottman applies thin slicing prescriptively, and of course Gottman’s subjects wouldn’t be able to change behavioral patterns as easily as Gottman can recognize them. Yet it would certainly be helpful (I would think) for a marriage partner to know when s/he is being contemptuous, and to know that such behavior can undermine a relationship.

Similarly, it would be extremely helpful for student writers to know what they consistently do that undermines their writing. Might there possibly be writers’ “Horsemen,” tendencies that could be verbalized in more concrete terms than “unfocused argument,” “gaps in logic,” “organizational problems,” and the like? Might it be possible for an instructor to “thin slice” student writing, to quickly read through a short passage and be able to recommend, in a phrase or two, something that would have far greater consequence for the student than a close reading of, and copious commenting on, an extended essay? This would greatly reduce the labor-intensiveness of teaching writing, as well as more efficiently addressing the needs of the student. But perhaps this is an overly “pipey” dream.

Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best—I’m sure it is the most religious—for I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

Sterne goes on to speak of how the “plan follows the whole” (as opposed to the work following a plan, presumably) and though admitting that he “intercept[s] many a thought which heaven intended for another man,” he obviously prefers intuitive, discursive writing to something more planned or ideologically driven. (Pope seems to be his target of criticism here.) The approach Sterne describes is pretty much mine too (even in academic writing), though I generally don’t invoke God unless I’m trying to meet a tight deadline.

This brings up a tension I’ve just begun to think about: I teach my students to write a thesis statement, plan ahead, outline paragraphs, etc., yet I’ve never written a paper that way. Could I do an informal survey? How many of you out there begin a paper with a plan, and how many begin by simply starting to write? (I don’t mean free writing here; I mean writing something with the intention of making it work somehow.) Does anyone have any success stories about teaching academic writing in non-traditional ways?

The upshot of the resolution is that the Oakland School Board adopted an approach to teaching Standard English that takes “students’ vernaculars into account,” rather than “ignor[ing] the vernacular altogether,” as conventional approaches have done. The success rates of this approach have been impressive: the “Contrastive Analysis approach in which SE and Ebonics features were systematically contrasted through explicit intruction and drills showed a 59% REDUCTION in [students'] use of Ebonics features in their SE writing after eleven weeks, while a control group taught by conventional methods showed an 8.5% INCREASE in such features.”

There are some striking parallels here to the arts. I don’t know if Rickford intended to imply such a connection through his title, but there is certainly an Ebonics/SE kind of tension between, say, African American “vernacular” musics (jazz, rap) and the canonic “Standard” still commonly offered in introductory music classes for the non-major. Does anyone out there have any experience in (or ideas about) applying the Contrastive Analysis linguistic approach to other disciplines?