Thoughts on Working with Students' Writing
Writing is a social process. Most of our schooling nurtures the idea of the writer as the lonely hermit, solely responsible for composing a text. But writing seldom works that way. Walk into a newspaper building and you see far more talk than you see writing. The final copy is often the result of many conferences among writers, section chiefs, and editors. The same principle works in professional scholarships. Writers in academic fields are constantly relying on their peers and professional editors for helping them develop and refine their texts. Most businesses follow the same practices. The Writing Center is dedicated to cultivating an exchange of ideas in the writing process. The Writing Center is an institutional cafe, a space where people come to drink coffee, eat Jolly Ranchers, and talk about ideas. One of the easiest ways to learn how to write is by talking about the writing: let the tongue compose meaning.
Process and product are important. Our consulting often concentrates initially on how the writing is produced. Our job is to "highlight" the strategies good writers use. In many instances this involves helping students to become aware of what they are doing. An author's reliance on instinct is both attractive and absolutely necessary, but the practice of a conscious technique is essential for getting most jobs done. Someone once wrote: "Develop an infallible technique and then place yourself at the mercy of inspiration." Our job is to help student writers develop a technique so they are better prepared to listen to the muse when she chooses to sing.
The writing process is cyclical and recursive, not linear. Good writers often behave like sheep dogs, moving backwards and sideways in order to move the ideas forward. Students need guidance and support as they move back and forth between planning and revising, drafting and editing, outlining and rethinking. The writing process is a series of loops, not a mechanical sequence from note cards to outline to finished draft. Frequently in the CWC our task is helping the student to back off from closure on a text (evident, for example, when a student asks for a paper to be proofread, wanting us simply to check for spelling and grammar errors) and reconsider the paper from a larger perspective: to recircle the paper in a new way.
Improving writing is improving reading. When we work with students and their papers, we are helping them read what they have written. When they can free themselves from their initial "writer-based" orientation, it is easier for them to see how to make worthwhile revisions. You might keep in mind this distinction between "writer-based prose" and "reader-based prose" (the terminology comes from the researcher Linda Flower). Writer-based prose is written to fulfill the needs of the writer. Good first draft writing is often exploratory, egotistic, incomplete, underdeveloped, and lacking in transitions. Writer-based prose is written to fulfill the needs of the writer: to get something, anything, down on paper; and to discover what it is he or she wants to say. The good writers are those who can transform their writer-based prose into reader-based prose, writing that fulfills the needs of and audience. Reader-based prose stresses communication, completeness, development, clarity, effective transitions, etc.
Where are we and what are we doing? Make certain you and the student understand the assignment. What has the teacher asked the student to do? The answer to that one question often drives everything that occurs in a conference. All student texts are, from the instructor's perspective, intended for a specific context. We can't be of much assistance to the student if we can't find out what are the instructor's explicit instructions. If the student does not know, then probably a search for that information (a call to the instructor?) becomes the first order of business.
Do not confuse rewriting with error-hunting. It is not necessary for you to be an authority in spotting all errors. Even college professors frequently miss dangling participles, and you will discover that what is a serious error to one instructor is inconsequential to another. Both beauty and errors are in the eyes of the beholder.
The secret to improvement is good revising. We can do a real disservice by placing too much emphasis on the editing of surface errors (spelling, punctuation, etc), especially when we are working with early versions of a paper. Students often need to rethink the fundamental issues in a paper, a task few eagerly seek. For the majority of papers, we could "correct" all the grammatical and mechanical errors and the piece of writing would still not substantially improve. We all need to practice reading our papers as revisers, not editors. This does not mean, however, that we ignore editing errors. Even in papers when you are addressing fundamental issues in the development or organization of a paper, it may also be useful to help the student identify significant problems with sentence structure, word usage, punctuation, etc. Every paper offers many doors for entering into a discussion of a text. It will often occur that we can get to the big issues most effectively by beginning with a small issue and then following where that path may lead us.
When dealing with errors, look for patterns. If you do find an "error" pattern (recurrent instances in spelling, grammar, sentence structure, etc. where the students' texts do not conform to the conventions of Standard English), seek the cause of the error. One approach is to ask students if they know why they wrote the passage that way. Was there a language rule they were instinctively following? You should keep in mind that there is usually a logic to students' writing errors: there will be reasons why students do what they do. If students can discover why they make their errors, it increases the likelihood of those errors not reappearing in the future.
Deal with errors and writing problems in terms of meaning, not grammar rules. We can address most writing issues by seeking to clarify the meaning of the sentences or to strengthen the impact of the writing on the potential reader. When writers write, they should concentrate on meaning: "Am I saying what I want to say as completely and clearly as I can say it?" A consultant's focus on meaning will increase the likelihood that the writer can use this knowledge in the future. Following this guideline is not always possible or practical, but working in this direction can boost your success as a consultant.
Encourage students to solve their own problems. We should remember that many failed papers are the failures of performance, not intention. The student often knows, just as we do, that the paper has not worked. A major purpose of the conference is to learn what the student thinks about the paper you have read. Thousands of writing conferences languish because the teacher or consultant never discovers how the student perceives the student's own text.
Enable the writer to set the conference's agenda. Here we come to a fundamental tension because, as writing consultants, we are often working in two opposite directions. One fundamental rule of conferencing is to guide a student in recognizing and addressing the most significant issues for improving a paper. Simultaneously, we must allow the student to determine the priorities for any further revisions. After all, it is the student's paper, not the consultant's. These two contradictory forces must be renegotiated and resolved with each new conference.
A consultant's task is clarifying options. Your task in the conference is not to tell the writer what to do but to enable the writer to see why the writing is not affecting you, the reader, in the desired ways. You help the writer see the available options, but let the writer make the decisions. What counts is the student writer learning to make writing decisions. Sometimes writers make bad decisions. And that can be okay; we can learn as much from failures as from successes. Don't get mad or frustrated or depressed because a writer chooses the "less good" option.
Good papers deserve demanding readers. All drafts are imperfect and incomplete. If you read the paper through one time and it sounds perfect, then read it again. Attack the text, be relentless in searching for possible weaknesses. Be particularly aware of gaps; even the best papers frequently suffer from the sins of omission, avoiding tough issues, skirting around topics deserving analysis. Push yourself to ask questions. Even if you don't uncover any significant problems, you can demonstrate that you took the paper seriously and you thought long and hard about the text's meaning. Good papers deserve demanding readers.
This is a people operation. Our primary purpose is to serve and support fellow students, to help make their college experience more interesting, more liberalizing, more rewarding. In some instances this service will be rendered as we talk with them about their composition assignments, but in many instances the most pressing issues lie beneath or beyond the writing. We are not a professional counseling agency, but we can be good listeners and demonstrate a willingness to respond to each student's needs.
Our goal is to create better writers. In the Writing Center, our object is, to quote Stephen North, "to make sure that writers, and not necessarily their texts, are what gets changed by instruction. In axiom form it goes like this: Our job is to produce better writers, not better writing." This does not mean that we are content with students producing error-ridden texts, but it is a reminder that our primary focus should be on the person. The people who come to the Writing Center are more important than their assignments or the papers they are writing.
Eschew Obfuscation.
"By writing much, one learns to write well." --Robert Southey
"There is no one right way. Each of us finds a way that works for him. But there is a wrong way. The wrong way is to finish your writing day with no more words on paper than when you began. Writers write." --Robert B. Parker
"Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing: If an idea does come between 9 and 12, I am there ready for it." --Flannery O'Connor
