The third speaker at the Spilman Symposium on Issues in Teaching Writing at Virginia Military Institute was John Schilb, Professor of English at Indiana University.

Referring to Earthquake, a movie early 1970s in which the seats shook when the earthquake struck (a feature called sensurround), Schilb stated,

We in composition face an important sensurround, with the challenge of defining to the larger society, exactly what we do, the value of what we teach, and what we teach.

Schilb asserts that this issue of defining the field of composition is important because unlike in the life sciences, important bodies of people, such as the Spellings Commission, didn't pay attention to us.

Using the phrase aggressive modesty, he stated that while being modest about what we do--we don't teach all kinds of writing--we should aggressively promote what we do, which is teaching students how to write, at least to write better than they did before entering our classes.

Although good composition programs include many kinds of writing, he believes that what is essential to our discipline is teaching analytical argument. That is,

you tend to persuade an audience to accept your claims on issues by accepting your evidence and warrants.

Teaching students means teaching them

how to craft arguments to persuade the audience to accept a certain interpretation of a text.

In teaching analytical argument, he noted that the the biggest shift from high school to college is that the student writer has to go beyond the obvious to a question that has no obvious answer.

Teaching students to go beyond the obvious means motivating them to take risks in their writing, develop tentative claims that you may not immediately know the evidence for.

This assertion is somewhat problematic for me. Much of academic writing is based on interpreting evidence. That is, you already have the evidence, but you may not have a clear idea of what it means or how it fits into your models of writing. Thus, you develop "tentative claims" concerning the evidence you have--not evidence you don't have.

For Schilb, a corollary to developing ideas for written, analytical argument is "close reading," that is, a rhetorical invention process of finding issues by

• making predictions on how the text will turn out
• investigating differences between one's own experiences and the text
• thinking about how these differences affect your response to the text
• looking for patterns in the text of repetition, of opposition, of beginning and end
• considering alternatives that the author could have done but didn't and what those choices mean
• generating questions with more than one possible answer

Close reading seeks to ambiguate the text, to make it less clear, to find puzzles, mysteries, and enigmas in it. These are the bases of the issues.

In defining composition studies, Schilb ended on these four points:

1. We emphasize this kind of writing.
2. Where does literature come in?
3. What are the specific moves that we want students to work with?
4. What strategies can we provide students with to come up with interpretations on a text?

As Schilb noted, composition has historically been situated in Departments of English and overshadowed and influenced by its elder sibling, literature--thus, the question about "Where does literature come in?" That inferior position has created an image of composition that, as Nancy Sommers, former Director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University (quoted in Bartlett) noted, "it's janitorial cleanup or service work." For myself, although literature can be an excellent tool for the close reading that Schilb recommends, it should be treated like any other discipline, as the focus of composition is writing, not literature, and writing that must prepare students for their own disciplines.

This perception of composition as "service work," accompanied by compositionists' desire to be seen as academic equals is one reason for its prevailing focus on concepts and thinking. Naturally, these abilities are crucial for good writing. But where has our focus on language gone? Susan Peck MacDonald, associate professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, in her recent article "The erasure of language" notes that attention paid to language has decreased significantly in sessions at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the premier conference on writing in the U.S. Before her, Robert Connor had lamented the turning away from sentence pedagogies. From the abstract:

This article examines the sentence-based pedagogies that arose in composition during the 1960s and 1970s—the generative rhetoric of Francis Christensen, imitation exercises, and sentence-combining—and attempts to discern why these three pedagogies have been so completely elided within contemporary composition studies. The usefulness of these sentence-based rhetorics was never disproved, but a growing wave of anti-formalism, antibehaviorism, and anti-empiricism within English-based composition studies after 1980 doomed them to a marginality under which they still exist today. The result of this erasure of sentence pedagogies is a culture of writing instruction that has very little to do with or to say about the sentence outside of a purely grammatical discourse.

As Connor asserts, the decline of these pedagogies was due to a massive piece of wish-fulfillment" due to composition being based in English departments in which "antiformalism, anti-behaviorism, and anti-empiricism" reigned, leaving the field with a "Distrust of scientistic empiricism [and] ... few proofs or certainties not ideologically based."

This shift away from writing instruction to ideology has created a disconnect between the field of composition and most outside of it. In the discussion following Schilb's presentation, a journalist and visiting scholar at VMI described incoming students as needing remedial instruction on writing, to which Schilb replied that he didn't like the term "remedial." After all, half of his students were in that category, and we have to deal with it. Yes, we have to deal with it, but does that mean that the instruction we are providing is not remedial?

Googling the phrase "Why Johnny can't write" turns up 969 hits. In the academic world, Bartlett writes, "Many top colleges fear that their students lack basic [writing] skills." In business, we keep reading about students who, going into the world of business, can't write a coherent paragraph. The National Commission on Writing has issued three reports in the last five years on the issue of writing, that students are entering the work force with a lack of writing skills. As Heather Mac Donald, John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal, wrote in a lenghty article,

One overlooked corner of the academic madhouse bears in particular on graduates' job-readiness: the teaching of writing. In the field of writing, today's education is not just an irrelevance, it is positively detrimental to a student's development. For years, composition teachers have absorbed the worst strains in both popular and academic culture. The result is an indigestible stew of 1960s liberationist zeal, 1970s deconstructivist nihilism, and 1980s multicultural proselytizing. The only thing that composition teachers are not talking and writing about these days is how to teach students to compose clear, logical prose.

The problem of students not mastering writing cannot be laid at the feet of composition alone. As Sommers stated (in Taggert's review of her talk at CCCC 2005),

outside the core writing curriculum, the study indicated students rarely are offered any writing instruction and are equally rarely asked to revise.

Thus, to help students master writing, we need to provide guidance on thinking conceptually and analytically, as Schilb recommends, but we also need to consider ways in which (1) to integrate writing in not only core writing courses but in most of their courses and (2) to give feedback to students that teaches them how to write "clear, logical prose." Much easier said than done.

References:

Bartlett, Thomas (Jan 3, 2003). "Why Johnny Can't Write, Even Though He Went to Princeton." Chronicle of Higher Education, 49 (17).

Connors, Robert J. (2000). The Erasure of the Sentence. College Composition and Communication, 52, 96-128. Available for subscribers at CCC Online Archives.

Mac Donald, Heather (1995). Why Johnny can't write - teaching grammar and logic to college students. Accessed at FindArticles: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0377/is_n120/ai_17379682

MacDonald, Susan Peck (2007). The Erasure of Language. College Composition and Communication, 58, 585-625. Available for subscribers at CCC Online Archives.

Taggert, Amy R. (Mar 24, 2005). Review of Nancy Sommer's CCCC 2005 presentation "Across the Drafts: Responding to Student Writing—A Longitudinal Perspective". Accessed at http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/reviews/cccc2005/viewmessage.cfm?messageid=95.

Turner, Rich. Why Johnny (and Jane) can't write - Part I. Accessed at http://www.grammarmudge.cityslide.com/articles/article/307084/20998.htm.