Roger Shuy hits upon an issue that continues to concern me as I prepare to teach. Shuy, who was a composition teacher himself, admits “I can well remember the ambiguity behind which I hid my scribbled, cryptic remarks on the papers of my students. My briefly noted monot or awk screamed an authority and logic which, if the student had only challenged, would have crumbled with only the vaguest definitions and explanations.” (105) In terms of defining good writing, I've generally found myself taking the Potter Stewart approach: I know it when I see it. So I'm in the same boat as the younger Shuy. I too will easily be able to pinpoint when my students' writings are monot or awk, but if pressed as to why this is the case, then I'm going to be in a tight spot.
How do you define good writing? It's always struck me that written language is such a complex machine that any attempt to encapsulate 'good writing' will be either hopelessly vague or so enormously specific as to be unwieldy. Shuy gives examples of such failed readability formulas, like the notion that short is easier than long. This is a clear oversimplification since “two short sentences can be less compressible than one long one with clear connectives.” (107)
Shuy's general argument is in favor of a holistic, or constructionist means of learning. This approach to learning stresses context as vital to understanding and utilizes a bottom-up rather than top-down methodology. Shuy sees constructivism as beneficial for teaching reading, writing, and foreign languages.
Regarding foreign languages, “This research show that good language learners begin with a function, a need to get something done with language, and move more gradually toward acquiring the forms which reveal that function.” (106) I can definitely see how this would be the case. If I have a tangible goal in mind, i.e I need to learn to ask for and understand street directions in a foreign language, then I will be much more likely to experiment, form mental connections, and gain an overall grasp of said language than if I were to study conjugation tables or lists of words in isolation.
However, I don't see how this relates back to “good writing.” Let's say that my students begin their papers with a function in mind. They think to themselves, “I will argue that Whinny the Pooh is actually evil,” or whatever. They write paper after paper, consciously keeping the function of their papers in mind. Presumably they will acquire form along the way. But is this really the case? And even if it is, how does that help us understand what good writing, or good form is? I'd argue that a paper can make an overarching, sound argument even if it does have problematic variations in the amount of inference required from one sentence to the next.
I'm not trying to punch holes in Shuy's armor here. I'm genuinely curious. It seems to me that Shuy is purporting to answers one of my major questions and I simply can't wrap my brain around what that answer is. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? Does anyone else have an insight?
Thank you Alex for articulating some of my own dilemmas about the two readings. I get the "holistic" approach both Shuy and Hartwell are advocating, but I remain deeply apprehensive about the upshot of their arguments. Their arguments boil down to the fact that good writing is not good grammar and prose but meaningful insights bound with a tight logical cohesion and that as composition teachers, we are not supposed to conflate the two. Point well taken. I was not going to.
ReplyDeleteSo we disregard grammar, orthography--in short-- form, and focus on the content, right? But what if tangible defects in form get in the way of communicating effectively whatever content there is? I read in Anita's comment to Lindsay's post that if the problem persists, she will probably direct attention to it later. And Lindsay is of the opinion that we should , in such a case, ask them to go to the handbook. There is no one solution to this problem, and both Hartwell and Shuy are silent on this issue. (They seem very vocal about the fact that schools nowadays focus on the part above the iceberg too much. Well, if not in school, when? Is someone supposed to pick up grammar all on his/her own?)
But who decides when the errors in form have started to impede comprehension of the content? And more importantly, whose comprehension?
Let me give an illustration. When I came in here about a month ago, one of the non-native speakers of English I met was told by my friend, who is a non-native English-speaker himself, to "enunciate" better so that he could understand him (this friend speaks English with a near-perfect American accent). The funny part was, I could understand almost 90% of what the other guy was saying, even though he was speaking really bad English in terms of grammar. So my point is, whose comprehension? Because I might think that a piece is well-written since it makes perfect logical sense to me, but to another person, it might be lacking in cohesion. I guess this is the part when Hartwell will come in and say that this is what he has been saying all along, that there is no one literacy, that it is not "out there" (what IS that supposed to mean? All I get in my brain when I read that phrase are scenes from X-files and Starwars!), and that he is so happy that I have reached the stage where I can say --"oh, so that is how it is!".
However, my problem is that that does not answer my question. Worse, it evades it.