Learning to Write or Writing to Learn? Callie
Hello! I know I have already posted once for this week, but I believe I am missing a post, and thought it wouldn't hurt either way to do another one!
I have taken writing classes in other languages - Spanish, for example - but never in a language so convoluted. Having to consider each word for tense, gender, number, declension, or conjugation is bad enough, but when you start to look at phrases, sentences, and finally style, it becomes so incredibly dense as to be almost impossible. Trying to write a speech in the style of Cicero or a narrative in the style of Livy is impossible if you cannot work through your first tricky clause. You can't consider the bigger picture, or learn anything from your work, if you spend all your time fighting through each sentence. In other words, if you can't see the forest for the trees, you certainly can't learn anything from observing the forest (I know it's a tortured metaphor, go with me - it's the Livy).
I've been thinking about this in the context of my students - when I assign them papers or reflections, I've been assuming that they're writing to learn. Of course they are focused on their research, and using this paper as a vehicle to show me their work. But this is often not the case, and I imagine some students feel the way I do about Latin whenever they write a paper in rhetoric, or for the writing center. If I assign a research paper, as I just did yesterday, in which students are assigned to analyze the rhetoric of both sides of a political issue, I am assuming a level of fluency and comfort which is perhaps unfair.
Students cannot learn to write unless they are actively writing, but they cannot actively write until they learn to do so effectively. There must be a way to assign a healthy combination of the two, so that students can grasp basic writing and style principles, but also begin writing with a larger goal, and learning from writing. To me, that feels like a basic level of mastery.
I have taken writing classes in other languages - Spanish, for example - but never in a language so convoluted. Having to consider each word for tense, gender, number, declension, or conjugation is bad enough, but when you start to look at phrases, sentences, and finally style, it becomes so incredibly dense as to be almost impossible. Trying to write a speech in the style of Cicero or a narrative in the style of Livy is impossible if you cannot work through your first tricky clause. You can't consider the bigger picture, or learn anything from your work, if you spend all your time fighting through each sentence. In other words, if you can't see the forest for the trees, you certainly can't learn anything from observing the forest (I know it's a tortured metaphor, go with me - it's the Livy).
I've been thinking about this in the context of my students - when I assign them papers or reflections, I've been assuming that they're writing to learn. Of course they are focused on their research, and using this paper as a vehicle to show me their work. But this is often not the case, and I imagine some students feel the way I do about Latin whenever they write a paper in rhetoric, or for the writing center. If I assign a research paper, as I just did yesterday, in which students are assigned to analyze the rhetoric of both sides of a political issue, I am assuming a level of fluency and comfort which is perhaps unfair.
Students cannot learn to write unless they are actively writing, but they cannot actively write until they learn to do so effectively. There must be a way to assign a healthy combination of the two, so that students can grasp basic writing and style principles, but also begin writing with a larger goal, and learning from writing. To me, that feels like a basic level of mastery.
Your description of your tortured writing process in Latin and some of your students' dysfluent writing processes reminds me of my favorite quote from Mina Shaughnessy's book about basic writers, Errors and Expectations: To basic writers, "writing is but a line that
ReplyDeletemoves haltingly across the page, exposing as it goes all that the writer doesn't
know, then passing into the hands of a stranger who reads it with a lawyer's
eyes, searching for flaws."
That's an interesting and important problem to tackle. To argue from the other side, why should students wait for a level of fluency in order to begin contributing to important research or to begin communicating interesting ideas? Any research paper is a synthesis of quite a few goals: analysis, research compilation, "communication" (the dreaded word we're not allowed to say), and others. I'd argue that teachers should be careful about being overly-protective gatekeepers, as it were. I know you're not, of course!
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