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W Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review

ADVICE

We Know What Works in Teaching Composition

By Doug Hesse JANUARY 03, 2017

hen I came to the University of

Denver to start a campus writing

program in 2006, I heard many

faculty members say, "A lot of my students can’t

even write a decent sentence." So when I read

Joseph Teller making much the same assertion

in an essay last fall, "Are We Teaching

Composition All Wrong?" I recognized

hyperbole when I saw it.

My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues

in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student

writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the

sentences coded clear and error free.

Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and

valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve

that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their

ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those

things, we could work on.

Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams

Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: "Everyone who has

had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who

could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders

which would disgrace a boy twelve years old." Hill and others devised pedagogies

grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common

sense was another man’s folly.

Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the

founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is

now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing —

and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, "Research

in Written Composition."

Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written

Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer-

reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of

books and well-established journals — including College Composition and

Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching

Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing

Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few.

A 2005 article, "The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing," analyzed why

formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates —

remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence

that they were significantly less effective than other methods.

The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory,

and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a

1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching "lore." Lore

consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience ("what worked

for me") and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to

the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and

generalizable, but more often it is not.

Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having

read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his

approach compares with the most effective national practices.

For example, his assertion, "Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses," might

speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of

other professors. Consider his claim that students "do not use the basic argumentative

structures they need." Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that

broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the

wider literature in the field.

Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that

"pedagogical orthodoxy" assumes that "composition courses must focus on product, not

process." He could hardly be more wrong.

The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product

as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in

specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature

articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the

kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for

example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts,

novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods

make significant use of model readings and examples.

One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I

surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their

writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing

can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what

meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship

between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal

functions.

But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces ("Chopsticks" is

not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a

pianist. So, too, with writing.

Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research:

Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write

frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort.

Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on

students’ existing abilities and experiences.

Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and

critique, formative and summative assessments.

Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the

form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how

to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic

and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and

expectations.

Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the

academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of

form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded,

why, and to what effect.

Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate

and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that

declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance

(see Bullet No. 1).

Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves

those ends.

Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching

writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the

experience of individual teachers like Teller.

However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way "we" are "wrongly"

teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore,

the field they would aspire to correct.

Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor

and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as

president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference

9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher By Daveena Tauber

Help for faculty members who aren’t composition instructors yet are still expected to teach writing.

on College Composition and Communication.

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