Beyond Handbooks and Textbooks—Teaching About Writing
By: Randy Koch
Date: September 2007
Summary: Composition instructor Randy Koch argues that the guidance given by most writing handbooks is too general to be useful to students, who need to be taught such basics as how to vary sentence structure and how to show rather than tell—before they start writing their first draft.
My twenty-two-year-old daughter Mary is a good driver, but I sometimes worry that she doesn't know as much as she should about the '93 Honda Civic she drives—that when it comes to understanding how it works, she's still very much a novice. If she had a flat tire, she'd know, of course, that it has to be changed and that the tools she needs are in the trunk, but she probably wouldn't know what to do with them.
I can hear her now, calling on her cell phone from somewhere south of San Antonio and eighty miles from home: "Dad, I got a flat tire. What do I do?" I could, of course, say, "Well, dear, you need to take off the flat and put on the spare." But her exasperated reply would be something along the lines of "Ya think?" She would mean, of course, that I should tell her something she doesn't already know, something more specific and concrete, something that would actually help her.
These texts . . . focus on almost everything but the specifics of how to change the writing to make it stronger.
As a composition instructor for the last sixteen years and the director of a university writing center for the past five, I've seen many composition handbooks and texts and the teachers who use them give the same general, unhelpful advice to novice writers: "Be more specific," they say. "Strengthen this intro." But rarely do they explain or demonstrate how to do those things. Writing teachers—particularly college writing teachers—who are serious about giving students a clear picture of how to improve their writing and a knowledge of how practicing writers work need to reconsider the kind of advice and instruction we provide our students, particularly when we emphasize the "what" of writing process over the "how" of writing skills.
Handbooks and the Writing Process
For over thirty years many handbooks, rhetorics and readers, composition texts, and teachers have recited the mantra "prewrite, draft, revise, edit, and proofread" in the belief that guiding students back and forth through the stages of the writing process is the most effective way to help them become better writers. They reason that if students go through the motions published writers go through, if they identify the purpose of the writing, recognize their audience, and consider the context within which they're writing, they will necessarily produce a better product. We have mapped out the intellectual territory for them; shown them the route—serpentine though it may be—through the potholes of writer's block, the dead ends of poor focus, and the detours of digressions; and now we wait for them in the promised land of evaluation and assessment. Surely when they arrive from this writer's journey, they will be better writers and their writing will have improved. Right?
Probably not. I agree that the process outlined by most texts and teachers is usually an accurate description of what many practicing, professional, published writers go through in the creation of their work. They plan and prewrite by using a variety of methods, such as listing, clustering, freewriting, and keeping a journal. They write a rough draft and then revise, gradually making their meaning clearer by focusing first on the piece as a whole, then on paragraphs, and eventually on sentences, individual words, and even marks of punctuation. This process works for published writers not because it's the only thing they know or do but because they've already internalized what constitutes good writing and the skills required to produce it. Unfortunately, however, process is often the only writing instruction offered to novice writers, who haven't internalized these skills.
Much What, Little How
Take, for example, the advice provided by some of the most popular composition handbooks currently available. All of them reiterate the same benefits of prewriting—how it helps students "collect ideas" (Kirszner and Mandell 2005, 39), "discover ideas" (Aaron 2005, 10), "generate a wealth of ideas" (Hacker 2004, 11), "gather ideas" (Hodges et al. 2001, 44), or "explore any topic" (Lunsford 2005, 36). But they fail to explain what "ideas" are or what distinguishes good, potentially helpful ideas from those that are less helpful and even counterproductive.
Similarly, when it comes to writing a draft, all of these books recommend basically the same thing—"simply . . . get your ideas down on paper" (Kirszner and Mandell, 56). However, most of them offer more advice on tangential matters such as where to write ("Work in a quiet place," advises Aaron [28]), how long to write ("write in stretches of at least thirty minutes," suggests Lunsford [48]), at what speed to write ("relatively quickly," says Hacker [19]), and when to stop writing ("where you know exactly what will come next," according to Lunsford [48]), than about how to write something that entertains or informs or convinces a real audience.
These texts are similarly vague when discussing revision, and they focus on almost everything but the specifics of how to change the writing to make it stronger. They address "writing a title" (almost one full page in Aaron [33]); "adding visuals," such as photographs and charts (almost two pages in Kirszner and Mandell [59–61]); and "file management" (another two-and-a-half pages in Aaron [34–36]). And on page twenty-eight of her 585-page text, Hacker says this: "Most of the rest of this book offers advice on revising sentences for clarity and on editing them for grammar, punctuation, and mechanics," which means that students and teachers have less than thirty-five pages on producing content and over 550 pages on correctness. Predictably, this is also the focus of the last 330 pages of Lunsford and the last 400 pages of Aaron.
The cursory description of the writing process and its instruction included in these books assumes that teachers and their students, who are novice writers, already know what constitutes good writing and suggests that we only need to teach them the process for producing more and making it correct in order for them to be successful writers.
Questionable Logic
We don't wait for the context of the dance recital to show ballerinas how to pirouette.
Of course, the texts cited here are only samples of the books available, but they're far too typical. As a result, instruction in specific skills is then the responsibility of instructors. The problem, however, is that when these skills are taught, they are often not introduced until the revision stage of a graded essay because, many teachers argue, instructors need to address these problems—just as we do grammatical correctness—"in the context of students' own writing."
This is questionable logic and suspect pedagogy. We don't wait for the context of a football game to show linemen how to pull for a sweep or to show receivers how to run a post pattern. We don't wait for the context of the dance recital to show ballerinas how to pirouette or do an arabesque. And we shouldn't wait for the context of the revision stage of a piece of writing to show students how to write a strong introduction or conclusion, how to vary sentence structure, how to use action verbs rather than helping and linking verbs, how to show rather than tell, or how to rely on specific details and avoid the abstractions and generalizations that litter the prose of inexperienced writers.
The focus of writing instruction should be not only on the when, where, and how-fast concerns of the writing process but on teaching students—before and during the production of an evaluated piece of writing—both to recognize what constitutes good writing and, specifically, how to produce it. Then, like aspiring football players and ballerinas, novice writers are more likely to get more of it right from the beginning. Granted, many K–12 teachers do engage in such preparatory instruction in the form of minilessons, but many college composition instructors let the handbook do the writing instruction for them as they focus their lectures and discussion on analyzing literature and essays, an approach too often ineffective in helping the novice become a confident, competent writer.
Few Nuts and Bolts
Many aspects of strong writing are simply ignored by these process-oriented handbooks. Attention to verbs, for instance, is viewed primarily as a grammar or ELL concern. However, verb choice has a huge effect on the quality of the writing. I want my students to be able to recognize that the sentence "Clarence stumbled out of the bar" is preferable to "Clarence was drunk," and at the core of the weaker sentence is the linking verb "was." I want students to understand this independent of the context of the writing assignment they may be working on at the moment.
A student also should not have to wait until he writes a sentence like "The sunset is beautiful," before he is helped to understand that a more engaging alternative might look like this: "The sun smeared the western sky with orange and pink." A student may want to argue that "capital punishment should be stopped because too many mistakes have been made," but going in, she needs to know that evidence is essential to supporting this claim. Yes, such deficiencies can be considered in revision, but students will be better prepared to tinker with a piece if they are given direct instruction in advance.
Some of these handbooks may advise students that their introduction might "begin with an anecdote," but this is hardly enough to send them very far along the road to writing a strong hook. I take time to teach students that these stories are easily weakened by qualifiers like "often" and "usually" and made boring by general nouns like "people" and "teenagers." Choosing these abstractions doesn't work nearly as well as focusing on one specific event that supports the writer's claim. "Begin with an anecdote" won't lead students to introductions that present moment-by-moment detail, sensory images, and realistic dialogue—components that can make an otherwise flat introductory anecdote far more compelling.
Skill Building as Early Intervention
The more skills students understand and can apply early in the process, the better their initial drafts will be, which inevitably leads to better final drafts.
If skills such as these are taught in advance of drafting, students will find that more of the draft they just produced is worth keeping. The more skills students understand and can apply early in the process, the better their initial drafts will be, which inevitably leads to better final drafts.
Many handbooks are equally unhelpful on the topics of revision and editing. True, they devote hundreds of pages to matters of correctness, but the advice and instruction offered are sometimes as hazy and unhelpful as my telling Mary, who is still waiting south of San Antonio, "Take off the flat and put on the spare." All of the texts mention conciseness, but some do so in such vague, general terms that they offer the novice writer virtually nothing specific to look for. For example, Lunsford provides four methods of improving conciseness—"Eliminate unnecessary words," "Eliminate redundant words," "Eliminate empty words," and "Replace wordy phrases" (200–202). The vague redundancy in this list makes one wish the author had provided some specific symptoms of clutter. Since she doesn't, however, teachers need to show students how to revise sentences that contain such symptoms of flabbiness (e.g., sentences starting with "there"; action verbs preceded by "would" or "was"; adjectives qualified with "very," "rather," "somewhat," etc.). If students are aware of how to treat these ills as they create their drafts, they are more likely to produce stronger writing at all stages of the process. Of course, some handbooks do include some specifics, which serve as starting points that teachers can use to show students specific ways to recognize and strengthen weak writing as they draft. However, the more students know about good writing from the beginning, the more likely they are to develop into critical, confident, enthusiastic writers.
My criticism of these handbooks often comes down to a matter of emphasis. For instance, while their discussion of sentence variety is limited to four and one-half pages in Aaron and two pages each in Hacker and Lunsford, all address in detail the grammar—though not the drafting benefits—of appositives, absolutes, relative clauses, participial phrases, and so forth. The placement of discussion of these sentence tools in sections about punctuation (see Aaron, page 346 and Hacker, page 276), grammar (see Lunsford, page 223), and phrase and clause identification (see Kirszner and Mandell, pages 677–78) only reinforces the idea that sentence structure and variety is nothing but window dressing, something the writer adds once he or she has already said what needs to be said.
If, however, we introduce sentence-combining skills in conjunction with the other skills mentioned above, we can give students—as they plunge into a draft—tools that help them produce better prose. An exercise that shows students how to turn the sentence "My sister made fun of my clothes" into "Joanna, my fourteen-year-old sister, made fun of my clothes: the white western shirt with ivory snaps, the silver belt buckle the size of a saucer, and the ostrich-skin cowboy boots" can help students create more engaging, fluent, and readable drafts from the beginning. Granted, sentence combining can be overdone, but without instruction in these specific skills early in the writing process, most students won't appreciate the range of choices they have and will ignore interesting details because they don't know where to put them. As a result, they continue to write simple, vague, underdeveloped, unsophisticated sentences.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, many composition handbooks contain too much unhelpful, vague, process-based advice about writing—the equivalent of my telling Mary, "Jack up the car, take off the flat, and put on the spare." However, novice writers need something comparable to what Mary needs: "First, while you're sitting in the driver's seat, step in the parking brake with your left foot. Then, go to the trunk and take out the jack and the tire iron, the L-shaped tool with a socket for the lug nuts on one end. Set the jack under the car about a foot ahead of the flat rear tire." And so on. Soon she'll be on her way home, and with the right kind of help, our students will be on the "write" track, too.
References
Aaron, J.E. 2005. LB Brief. 2nd ed. New York: Pearson Education.
Hacker, D. 2004. Rules for Writers. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
Hodges, J.C., R. Miller, S. Webb, and W. Horner. 2001. The Writer's Harbrace Handbook. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College.
Kirszner, L.G., and S.R. Mandell. 2005. The Wadsworth Handbook. 7th ed. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
Lunsford, A.A. 2005. The Everyday Writer. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.