I want to preface this blog post by saying that while I was intrigued topic of Janice Lauer’s “Rhetoric and Composition” (it’s interesting to think about the history of writing and its progression over time), I feel that the execution was a bit lackluster. I understand the need for professionalism in academic papers, but Lauer came off pretty stuffy and a bit pretentious in this piece. (Especially with all those third person references to herself.)
The parts of this reading that I found the most interesting were the ones that made me think about how I teach writing in my own classroom and the way writing instruction has (and hasn’t) changed from what I remember from my years in high school.
The first section of the text, “The Relationship Between Rhetoric and Composition,” gave me MAJOR flashbacks to my own junior year of high school, when I took AP Lang. One of our main non-fiction texts was Everything’s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford and John J. Ruszkiewicz, which was my first introduction to rhetoric. And let me tell you, after a year in that class, if you had asked me what rhetoric was, I still don’t think I’d be able to tell you. My teacher would assign a chapter for us to read, and give us a quiz on it at the beginning of the next class, without ever having discussed the material. We had to memorize information, but never actual put any of it into practice in our own writing. He was a fantastic teacher in every other regard, but we definitely needed more hands-on instruction when it came to this topic. I think my confusing introduction to rhetoric has definitely shaped the way I teach it to my students, and now my crash course on ethos/pathos/logos is one of my favorite lessons all year. It involves a lot of Shaq commercials and me singing “In the Arms of the Angels”. (Badly.)
The section “Studies of Composing Processes” made think about how some facets of writing instruction have remained stagnant over the last few decades, rather than evolving with what we know about how children learn. Lauer states that in the 1960-70s, “Little, if any, attention was paid to helping students get started, investigate ideas, consider readers, receive feedback on drafts, or revise” (112). This is still a huge issue in a lot of high school English classes, for a number of reasons. First, a lot of our curricula don’t have explicit writing instruction built into them, nor are we provided with resources to use. Most writing assignments are analytical essays with a specific prompt, so students don’t get the chance to come up with their own ideas of what to write about. Second, most teachers have a background in the literary rather than the composition side of English, which means they can crank out papers left and right, but that doesn’t always translate into being able to teach writing well. And third, we struggle with time. There is simply never enough of it to accomplish what we need to, so rather than take every writing assignment through the entire writing process, important steps like prewriting and revising are often omitted. It’s been a professional goal of mine for the past few years to spend more time on quality writing instruction. One of the pieces I’m most proud of is our memoir unit, where students spend at least two days per week doing writing exercises to access memories and events from their childhoods, and culminates with them writing a comedic memoir anecdote, in the style of Firoozeh Dumas’s memoir Funny in Farsi. It’s one of the first large writing assignment we do, and I think the students are more likely to engage in quality prewriting and revision since they have a personal investment in what they’re writing.
Finally, in the section “Responding to, Revising, and Evaluating Texts,” Lauer brings up another issue with writing instruction: “In early composition classrooms, students received little advice about revision until after their papers had already been graded, assuming that this advice would carry over to the next papers” (118). I feel that this is still a huge issue in classrooms today, because my experience has been that even when students receive feedback prior to submitting an assignment, they don’t always incorporate that into their revision (if they even revise at all). Many of my students have admitted point blank that they don’t revise their writing before turning it in; many of them don’t even perform a basic spelling/grammar check. This leads to them making the same errors time and time again, rather than internalizing the feedback and using it to improve future writing. So the problem is two-fold: First, how can teachers make an effort to not only make time for revision, but to give valuable feedback to their students? And second, how can teachers get students to buy into the importance of revision as a crucial step in the writing process?
