I had to give a little speech the other day in one of my classes about the kind of writing I want from my students. I don’t know if this is something particular to English majors or if it is something that other folks in other disciplines run into with student writing. The speech goes something like this:
I am begging you. Please. When you write, I want boring. BOR-ING. Dull. Uncreative. I am not a failed novelist. I am not a closet creative writer with a novel in my desk drawer. I am trying to make sure that you can write using the conventions of the “academic essay,” and that, for many of you, will mean boring. No flowery language. No epic similes. No cutesy fonts. No archaic language or elevated diction. No “Thee.” No “Thou.” No flights of poetry. Just plain boring. Talk to me about the text and what the text means and why you think it means what you think it means.
It seems to me (and I may be wrong here) that many of my students have never been asked to do this. My sense is that they have been taught for most of their educational history that they need to “catch the reader’s attention” with their “art,” or, even worse, they need to “just be creative.” The result is that they have often sacrificed argument or analysis for “writing creatively.” One other issue with all of this is that younger students have sometimes never been asked to respond to a text without talking about themselves and their personal responses to it.
For the first time, though, I didn’t end my speech there. I went on to tell them that I am increasingly coming to think that students are placed in an impossible and terribly unfair position. My rule in my class is that if they try to do an assignment and screw it up, I will tell them what they did wrong and ask them to do it again. Everything is, potentially, a draft. This sometimes creates more work for me, but I think this is important. When I give my students a writing assignment, the amount of information they have to process is pretty remarkable: what tone should I take? What diction should I use? Should I employ long or short sentences? Do I write in a way that professor Z liked, or do I write in a way professor A liked, but that professor Z hated? Professor L wanted everything in 10-point courier. Professor K wanted everything in 12-point Times New Roman. Professor B didn’t seem to care. Professor C wanted me to talk about my own personal experiences and how that tied into my argument. Professor Y didn’t.
And on, and on. Each professor has his or her own pet peeves. They sometimes have different understandings of the rules of grammar or citation (to be fair, students also sometimes hear something quite different from what the professor actually said).
The result is that, as Donald Bartholomae puts it, every time the student sits down to write, he/she has to invent the university (the discursive conventions of that professor, in that class, at that university, at that time, in that country). Even worse, no one ever really tells them what those conventions are. You just learn them as you go. This, I explained to them, is horribly unfair, since it puts them in the position of having to read my mind and then being punished for not getting it right.
I did my best to make it clear to them that I’m not saying all of this to make them feel bad. I’m not. I’m saying all of this to try to help them. To throw them a rope, as E. B. White puts it. To remove the anxiety of feeling like they need to wow me or impress me with their artistry. I assured them that I will be positively ecstatic over a boringly written argument that is well-constructed.
But not all of them take it that way. Some of them will, undoubtedly, feel like I am attempting to keep them from being “creative” or taking away some freedom that they have enjoyed in some other class. I am. I admit it. And what I don’t tell them in this little speech is that far, far too often, “creative” just means “I want to write it my way,” which is more often than not some strange mixture of “I have always written this way,” “All of my other teachers liked it” and “How dare you fail to recognize my genius?!”
A few weeks ago, I had a meeting with someone from the county school board, and a few things that I’d always suspected fell into place. The first was that students have very little experience writing analytical essays of literature where they don’t talk about how it made them feel. I knew this. Some bastardized form of reader -response theory has been deployed in nearly every literature class they’ve ever taken. The second thing hit me like a ton of bricks: not only have students probably never read the kinds of texts we teach in freshman composition (argumentative non-fiction prose), they have probably never read an example of the kinds of things they are expected to write. Anywhere. At any point.
And so it’s worse than I had imagined. Not only do they have to invent the university, they have to invent the genre of “college analytical writing” itself without having any models for doing so.