On Fox, Perl & Tobin

Mem Fox's "Towards a Theory of Why People Write" was a very engaging piece of writing for me for several reasons. It veered me time and again towards thinking about my own writing practices, both implicit and explicit. Further, it actually practised what it preached-- it is very clear that Fox is "ach[ing] with caring over what [she is] writing" (Fox 113); that she is writing because it matters, and that the piece is a result of huge investment on her part. Fox's list of why people might want to write may not be exhaustive, but it does provide a solid platform to enter the discussion, or, to use Fox's martial metaphor, the fray. She provides three basic reasons why people should/might want to write and contains and explicates her arguments along those moot assumptions.
What Fox says about writers aching with caring over their writing seems to be, as she herself identifies later, the most important reason of the three. Frankly, I think it will be a challenge getting students in a writing class to care about what they are writing. As Ben very pertinently pointed out the last day in class, they might not care about things we care. On the other hand, even if we attempt to rise above our limitations to interest ourselves in what they care to write about, it might not always come through (I can foresee what a quandary I will be in if some of the students in my class decide to write gleefully on baseball, basketball or one of the other inscrutable sports that are so integral to American life). However, since identifying the problem is the first stage of solving it, one can still feel hopeful, and after reading the passage Tobin quotes in his essay from Donald Murray's Learning by Teaching (Tobin 5), I am all for hope.
The point Fox makes about writing as comradeship follows directly from this premise:"there's always someone on the other side, if you like, who sits invisibly watching me write, waiting to read what I've just written. The watcher is always important" (Fox 116). If the writer should be aching to care over his/her writing, it helps if s/he can believe that the reader is equally aching to care to read what s/he has written. Mere publication or financial reward --while by no means unwelcome!-- is not enough. This I can understand from my own experience. The writing sample I submitted as a part of my application packet to KSU was supposed to be published in an internationally refereed journal. It was refused by the referee. Twice. However, the fact that one of the professors at the University of Calcutta I respect and admire had appreciated it before the refusals came about meant much more to me. And since all contributions to the journal were unremunerated, it has always been a comfort to think that even if it did get published, I would not have been a cent richer for it (not to forget the fact that the petite piece had succeeded in wangling what it was to do along with the rest of the application packet--getting me chance to pursue PhD at KSU, with an assistantship).
Something else I liked about Fox was her insistence that form matters in writing. ("In the end they must be able to spell and punctuate; they are powerless without those skills."--Fox 124) i.e. while she does not say that form is the be-all and end-all of writing, she does not overemphasise content over form. As she concludes by saying:" Interaction, not action" (Fox 124). One must not neglect the rules in order to interact, let alone to forge that interaction into a tool of 'power'.

Sondra Perl's "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers" begins by outlining ambitious goals (Perl 417), and by the time the essay is over, it is clear that she has progressed a good deal in achieving them. Perl's methodology attempts to represent in quantifiable terms the process of how unskilled writers write. Her analysis of Tony's writing process, especially her discussion of 'miscue categories' with regards to encoding and decoding helps indicate in concrete terms the hurdles an unskilled writer faces while writing. The primary characteristics Perl identifies, such as-- too much editing that hinder fluency and/or logical continuity of thought; unease while writing about subjects too far-related to the writer; an egocentricity that takes meaning for granted resulting in imperfect articulation seem to stem from as much a lack of confidence (too much editing) as from an overabundance of misplaced confidence ('the meaning is clear already, I need not explain any further'). One of the most interesting of Perl's final observations was her corrlataion between "the number of problems remaining in the student's written products" and "the number of miscues produced during reading" (Perl 434). It identifies a critical lacuna in the writer's writing process which, it seems to be the job of the teacher to help the writer identify and address appropriately.

Lad Tobin's "Process Pedagogy", while it offers a perfectly competent and animated history of the subject itself from an engagingly personal point of view, does little else. the only idea I found helpful was his decision to start off a semester by asking the students to write an essay on a subject of their choice on which they would not be graded but receive only feedback. This, I thought, might be a good idea to begin building a writing relationship with the students. Other such methods may include asking them to write a review/reaction to an artefact from their immediate environment or popular culture (the most interesting advertisement in the Daily Kent Stater of the day? a Madonna video? Tina fey's imitation of Sarah Palin?). And then, get down to doing my job, which is "not to tell the writer where she had gone wrong or right but to help her see what she had accomplished and what the essay might become in its next incarnation" i.e. to read "not for error and assessment but for nuance, possibility, gaps, potential" (Tobin 6).