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Teaching writing again has brought me into contact with some English comp people at the university, and I lunched with a few of them last week. As I said at Kitchen Table Math, the conversation was interesting.

Process writing is like constructivism, collaborative work, and a whole slew of other educational methods: It is a powerful pedagogical tool when done in the right circumstances and with the right amount and type of guidance, but is usually poorly (and counter-productively) implemented. So it’s quite possible for me to sit down with these people and have a conversation about teaching for, oh, about fifteen minutes before hitting a logjam.

We were having a perfectly nice lunch, when one popped up with something like, “Oh, I just read an article proposing that we teach grammar! Some people are so stupid!”

I planned to keep my mouth shut, and I would have, except that the other three, like a Greek chorus, chirped their agreement — not with her point about teaching grammar, but that anybody who thought teaching grammar might be a good idea has to be a stupid dolt.

I have been in these conversations before, and I know how not to disagree in these contexts — and how to disagree in order to start a productive discussion. So I said, “But how do you analyze texts and talk about how they were written and why without grammar as a common language?”

I’ve had these discussions many times, and usually, bringing up that point leads to further, productive, and often interesting, discussion. But not this time. The three just looked at me for a minute, and then one said, “What do you mean?”

Given that we had just done the Declaration of Independence in class so it was quite fresh in my memory, I told them what we had done. “Jefferson uses topicalization, active/passive voice, and topicalized cleft sentences, etc., etc., etc., in addition to choosing when to use personal pronouns and not to, etc., etc., etc., to shift the focus from the abstract, to King George III, to the Colonists. If students don’t know what topicalization, or voice, or cleft sentences, or pronouns ARE, how, exactly, do you talk about how the document was written? Indeed, how do you talk about how ANY text is written if you have no common concepts to which you can refer? Sorry, but I don’t see how you can approach a text even superficially without some shared understanding of grammar.”

These three had no idea what I meant — and they’re all English composition teachers. I’m pretty cynical, but I was floored. I have had many conversations with many English composition folks, and nearly all of them are flaky, but never have I encountered any who were such clueless nitwits as these three. They just looked at me with their mouths hanging open. They didn’t have even a syllable in response, because they had no idea what I was talking about. None.

To try to gloss over the rather uncomfortable situation, I asked them, then, what they did in their classes. That did get us past their unease, but it made me squirm. “Oh, we talked about the article in Time Magazine,” and “We talked about the essay we’re going to write about abortion,” and “We talked about plagiarism.”

Not sure that they weren’t just incapable of expressing themselves precisely, I pressed. Yes, they all talked. That’s what they did in their English comp classes. They talked. So what, exactly did they talk about? “What was the topic of the article in Time?” “Why is it misogynist to oppose abortion?” “What is plagiarism?” That’s what they did in class.

I’ve mentioned before the trouble I had getting teachers to write, or even address writing in writing class. That was over twenty years ago in an ESL program. At the time, I pulled ideas and methods heavily from English comp people, because they (well, many of them) were still focusing on writing in their classes. But if these three are indicative, that is no longer true.

I’m going to steer clear of grammar, only because I don’t want to spend all my time defining grammatical terms. But it isn’t a grammar issue. The issue is writing.

Imagine, for a moment, a drivers’ ed class where, for the most part, students sit around and look at videos of people driving, instead of getting behind the wheel and driving themselves. This is what these three are doing in their classes. Reading and writing are bound together, but reading isn’t writing.

The Educration Queen to whom I referred in my piece on projects and activities once sat in on a presentation I was giving to writing teachers. Her approach to writing, other than activities, was to give them a framework (example below), and have them fill it in, and nothing more. I don’t want to be too rough on her, because she wasn’t a writing teacher, but because she was an administrator, a clueless one at that, she caused me no end of migraines.

In conclusion, the three things I miss most about my home country are . . . because . . .

At the presentation, I was addressing the relationship between reading and writing, and how to use the text, not to address reading (”What is the author’s main point?”), but writing. She interrupted to remind me that this was supposed to be about writing (it was). She could have actually listened to what I was saying, but like the dolts at lunch, she didn’t have a clue what I meant. She figured it out toward the end of the presentation (after she had been listening for a while) when she asked one of my colleagues if she had made a fool of herself and the colleague said indeed, she had.

Let me explain. “What is the author’s main point?” is surely a valid question, but that’s reading, not writing. Reading is extracting the meaning. What is the author talking about? What point is he trying to make? Why does he keep comparing everything to strawberries? But nobody ever learned to write merely by figuring out what the author was trying to say. Reading isn’t enough.

Let’s say for the moment that we have two texts written by two authors, saying more or less the same thing on the same topic. One is poorly written; the other is effective. Writing is looking at the two texts to see what about the writing creates the difference between the two.

Analyzing texts in this way is what is traditionally known as rhetoric. Rhetoric encompasses how the writing and argument are structured, how the author creates coherence and leads the reader from point to point, how the author forces the reader to focus on particular actors or actions, how the author uses language to create a particular attitude in the reader, and so forth.

Reading answers the questions beginning with “what.” Writing answers the questions beginning with “how.”

Watching videos of good and bad drivers is fairly transparent. What makes this guy a bad driver? Well, he cuts people off, he doesn’t use his turn signals, and he passes on the left and right. That’s a valuable part of a drivers’ ed curriculum, but nobody is going to learn how to drive watching videotapes. At some point the students have to get behind the wheel and the teacher has to show them how to drive.

A writing teacher needs to show students examples of good and bad writing, and talk extensively about what makes good writing good, and bad writing bad (the analogy breaks down only because writing is obscure whereas driving is transparent). Students need to learn how to produce an effective paper, so while models are important, they are not enough.

Writing is highly complex and difficult to learn. It’s a lot of hard work. Students need to write, and write, and write, and each time they write, the teacher needs to analyze, and explain his analysis to the student. I prefer to sit down with the student and talk him through the process, rather than just mark up a paper and hand it back, because the student sees the process in action rather than just the result, and can eventually learn how to do it himself — and because if there is anything the student does not understand, he can ask.

The writing teacher has to train students to analyze a text as a writer, and not just read for comprehension. It is by viewing the shape and construction of a text that one learns how to better construct his own. Consider: The Gettysburg Address is not anthologized and taught in English classes solely, or even primarily, for historical reasons. After all, there are any number of presidential and senatorial addresses and texts nobody ever reads. Why, then, has it become an essential part of the rhetorician’s corpus?

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the text is how rich it is, that is, how much meaning is packed into a mere 278 words. In the whole text, there is not even one wasted or gratuitous word. Lincoln also chooses words with rich connotations to pack yet more meaning into the text without adding more words.

Note how liquid the text is, how fluidly one thought flows into the next. “But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” The same meaning could have been written with far less coherence and fluency. The task of the writing class is not to discuss what Lincoln said, but how he said it, and why he said it the way he said it. The Gettysburg Address is precise, powerful, and moving, perhaps bar none the prototype of effective, powerful English writing.

What about it makes it powerful? What makes it effective? You have to re-read it and think about it, don’t you? That’s what I mean when I say that writing is obscure — you have to look at it closely, and read and re-read and re-read it again before you begin to see how the parallel structures add force to his thoughts and how carefully he chose his words for maximum effect and meaning. I have read it hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, and I still marvel at how masterfully it is written.

One doesn’t have to choose a complex text to teach students to focus on the writing, on the “how” instead of the “what.” Nor does one have to wait until students are in high school. Unless they are reading crap, students at any level of proficiency can not only read for comprehension, but focus on the writing. “So you think this story is difficult? What makes it difficult? This story made you sad? Where did you become sad? Let’s look at how the author made you sad.”

Literacy is more than just being able to read. It is also being able to appreciate good writing, and produce it oneself. But as long as writing class consists of nothing but “brainstorming,” or discussing “why writing an anti-abortion paper makes you a misogynist,” or reading for comprehension, literacy will continue to elude our students.

If you want a literate society, bring back rhetoric.

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