Language Awareness Assignment: (4 pages minimum/1400 Words)

Inventing the University

E ducation may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of dis- course, with the knowledge and the powers i t carries with it.

- FOUCAULT, T H E D I S C O U R S E ON LANGUAGL

. . . the text is the form of the social relationshps made visible, pal- pable, material.

- BERNSTEIN, COULS, MODALITIES A N D T H E PROCESS or. CUI.TUKAL REPRODUCTION: A MODEL

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion - invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the dis- course of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our conununity, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a stu- dent, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes - to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and as an experimental psychologist the next; to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argu- ment are both distinct and, even to a professional mysterious.

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From W h e n a W r i t e r Can't W r i t e : Studies i t ~ Writer's Block arrd Ot/rer Conrposing-Process Problems, ed. Mike Rose (New York: Guilford P, 1985) 134-66. I

--- Invcnttng the U n ~ v m i t y - -- -

The student has to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized dis- course, and he has to do this as though he were easily and comfortably one with his audience, as though he were amember of the academy or an historian or an anthropologist or an economist; he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncracy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the require- ments of convention, the history of a discipline, on the other. He must learn to speak our language. Or he must dare to speak it or to carry off the bluff, since speaking and writing will most certainly be required long before the skill is "learned." And this, understandably, causes problems.

Let me look quickly at an example. Here is an essay written by a college freshman. --

In the past time I thought that an incident was creative was when 1 had to make a clay model of the earth, but not of the classical or your every- day model of the earth which consists of the two cores, the mantle and the crust. I thought of these thngs in a dimension of which it would be unique, but easy to comprehend. Of course, your materials to work with were basic and limited at the same time, but thought help to put this limit into a right attitude or frame of mind to work with the clay.

In the beginning of the clay model, I had to research and learn the different dimensions of the earth (in magnitude, quantity, state of mat- ter, etc.). After this, 1 learned how to put this into the clay and come up with something different than any other person in my class at the time. In my opinion, color coordination and shape was the key to my creativ- ity of the clay model of the earth.

Creativity is the venture of the mind at work with the mechanics relay to the limbs from the cranium, which stores and triggers this action. It can be a burst of energy released at a precise time a thought is being transmitted. Ths can cause a frenzy of the human body, but it depends on the characteristics of the individual and how they can relay the mes- sage clearly enough through n~echanics of the body to us as an observer. Then we must determine if it is creative or a learned process varied by the individuals thought process. Creativity is indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed into the future and progress like it should. I am continually impressed by the patience and goodwill of our students.

This student was writing a placement essay during freshman orientation. (The problem set to him was: "Describe a time when you did something you felt to be creative. Then, on the basis of the incident you have described, go on to draw some general conclusions about 'creativity.' ") He knew that university faculty would be reading and evaluating his essay, and so he wrote for them.

In some ways it is a remarkable performance. He is trying on the dis- course even though he doesn't have the knowledge that would make the dis- course more than a routine, a set of conventional rituals and gestures. And he is doing this, I think, even though he knows he doesn't have the knowledge that would make the discourse more than a routine. He defines himself as a researcher working systematically, and not as a kid in a high school class: "1 thought of these things in a dimension of . . ."; "1 had to research and learn

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the different dimensions of the earth (in magnitude, quantity, state of matter, etc.)." He moves quickly into a specialized language (his approximation of our jargon) and draws both a general, textbook-like conclusion - "Creativity is the venture of the mind at work . . ." - and a resounding peroration - "Creativity is indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed into the future and progress like it should." The writer has even picked up the rhythm of our prose with that last "indeed" and with the qualifications and the parenthetical expressions of the opening paragraphs. And through it all he speaks with an impressive air of authority.

There is an elaborate but, I will argue, a necessary and enabling fiction at work here as the student dramatizes his experience in a "setting" - the setting required by the discourse - where he can speak to us as a companion, a fel- low researcher. As I read the essay, there is only one moment when the fiction is broken, when we are addressed differently. The student says, "Of course, your materials to work with were basic and limited at the same time, but thought help to put this limit into a right attitude or frame of mind to work with the clay." At this point, 1 think, we become students and he the teacher giving us a lesson (as in, "You take your pencil in your right hand and put your paper in front of you"). This is, however, one of the most characteristic slips of basic writers. (I use the term "basic writers" to refer to university stu- dents traditionally placed in remedial composition courses.) It is very hard for them to take on the role - the voice, the persona - of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. They slip, then, into a more immediately available and realizable voice of authority, the voice of a teacher giving a lesson or the voice of a parent lecturing at the dinner table. They offer advice or homilies rather than "academic" concIusions. There is a similar break in the final paragraph, where the conclusion that pushes for a definition ("Creativity is the venture of the mind at work with the n~echanics relay to the limbs from the cranium") is replaced by a conclusion that speaks in the voice of an elder ("Creativity is indeed a tool which has to exist, or our world will not succeed into the future and progress like it should.").

It is not uncommon, then, to find such breaks in the concluding sections of essays written by basic writers. Here is the concluding section of an essay written by a student about his work ds a mechanic. He had been asked to gen- eralize about work after reviewing an on-the-job experience or incident that "stuck in his mind" as somehow significant.

How could two repairmen miss a leak? Lack of pride? No incentive? Lazy? 1 don't know.

At this point the writer is in a perfect position to speculate, to move from the problem to an analysis of the problem. Here is how the paragraph continues, however (and notice the change in pronoun reference).

From this point on, 1 take nry time, do it right, and don't let customers get under y o u r slun. If they have a complaint, tell them to call your boss and he'll be more than glad to handle it. Most important, worry about

lnumtrng the Univenrty 63 ----

yourself, and keep a clear eye on everyone, for there's always some- one trying to take advantage of you, anytime and anyplace. (Emphasis added)

We get neither a technical discussion nor an "academic" discussion but a Lesson on Life.' This is the language he uses to address the general question, "How could two repairmen miss a leak?" The other brand of conclusion, the more academic one, would have required him to speak of his experience in our terms; it would, that is, have required a special vocabulary, a special system of presentation, and an interpretive scheme (or a set of commonplaces) he could have used to idenhfy and talk about the mystery of human error. The writer certainly had access to the range of acceptable commonplaces for such an explanation: "lack of pride," "no incentive," "lazy." Each commonplace would dictate its own set of phrases, examples, and conclusions; and we, his teachers, would know how to write out each argument, just as we know how to write out more specialized arguments of our own. A "commonplace," then, is a cul- turally or institutionally authorized concept or statement that carries with it its own necessary elaboration. We all use commonplaces to orient ourselves in the world; they provide points of reference and a set of "prearticulated expla- nations that are readily available to organize and interpret experience. The phrase "lack of pride" carries with it its own account of the repairman's error, just as at another point in time a reference to "original sin" would have pro- vided an explanation, or just as in certain university classrooms a reference to "alienation" would enable writers to continue and complete the discussion. While there is a way in which these terms are interchangeable, they are not all permissible: A student in a composition class would most likely be turned away from a discussion of original sin. Commonplaces are the "controlling ideas" of our composition textbooks, textbooks that not only insist on a set form for expository writing but a set view of public life.*

When the writer says, "1 don't know," then, he is not saying that he has nothing to say. He is saying that he is not in a position to carry on this dis- cussion. And so we are addressed as apprentices rather than as teachers or scholars. In order to speak as a person of status or privilege, the writer can either speak to us in our terms - in the privileged language of university discourse - or, in default (or in defiance) of that, he can speak to us as though we were children, offering us the wisdom of experience.

I think it is possible to say that the language of the "Clay Model" paper has come througk the writer and not from the writer. The writer has located himself (more precisely, he has located the self that is represented by the "1" on the page) in a context that is finally beyond him, not his own and not avail- able to his immediate procedures for inventing and arranging text. 1 would not, that is, call this essay an example of "writer-based" prose. 1 would not say that it is egocentric or that it represents the "interior monologue or a writer thinking and talking to himself" (Flower, 1981, p. 63). I t is, rather, the record of a writer who has lost himself in the discourse of his readers. There is a con- text beyond the intended reader that is not the world but a way of talking

THE STUDY OF ERROR .

Imenting the University 65 ---

about the world, a way of talking that determines the use of examples, the than those she would address. The writing, then, must somehow transform possible conclusions, acceptable commonplaces, and key words for an essay he political and social relationships between students and teachers. on the construction of a clay model of the earth. This writer has entered the ~f my students are going to write for me by knowing who I am - and if this discourse without successfully approximating it. means more than knowing my prejudices, psyching me out - it means know-

Linda Flower (1981) has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writers ing what I know; it means having the knowledge of a professor of English. The)' have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the k-i- have, then, to know what 1 know and how I know what I know (the interF're- tion between "writer-based" and "reader-based" prose. Expert writers, in tive schemes that define the way I would work out the problems 1 set for them); other words, can better imagine how a reader will respond to a text and can they have to learn to write what I would write or to offer up some approxima- transform or mtructure what they have to say around a goal shared with a tion of that disco-. The problem of audience awareness. then, is a problem reader. Teaching students to revise for readers, then, will better prepare them of power and b e s s e . It cannot be addressed, as it is in most classroom exer- to write initially with a reader in mind. The success of this pedagogy depends cises, by giving students privilege and denying the situation of the classroom - on the degree to which a writer can imagine and conform to a reader's goals. usually, that is, by having students write to an outsider, someone excluded The difficulty of this act of imagination and the burden of such conformity are ko&heir privileged circle: "Write about 'To His Coy Mistress,' not for )'our so much at the heart of the problem that a teacher must pause and take stock teacher but for the students in your class"; "Describe Pittsburgh to someone before offering revision as a solution. A student like the one who wrote the who has never been there"; "Explain to a high school senior how best to prepare "Clay Model" Paper is not so much trapped in a private language as he is shut for "Describe baseball to an Eskimo." Exercises such as these allow out from one of the privileged languages of public life, a language he is aware students to imagine the needs and goals of a reader, and they bring those needs of but cannot control. and goals forward as a dominant constraint in the constr~ction of an essay. And

they argue, implicitly, what is generally true about writing - that it is an act of I1 aggression disguised as an act of charity. What these assignments fail to iddress

is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the Our studentst I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a spe- right of to someone who knows more about baseball or "To His Coy cialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily or ; ~ i ~ t r f f ~ " than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplacff comfortably one with their audience. If you look at the situation this way, the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate. suddenly the problem of audience awareness becomes enormously compli- Linda Flower and John Hayes, in an often quoted article (1981), reported on cated. One of the common assumptions of both composition research and ': a study of a protocol of an expert writer (an English teacher) writing about his composition teaching is that at some "stage" in the process of composing an job for readers of Seventeen magazine. The key moment for this writer. who essay a writer's ideas or his motives must be tailored to the needs and expec- seems to have been having trouble getting started, came when he decided that tations of his audience. Writers have to "build bridges" between their point of teenage girls read Seventeen; that some teenage girls like English because it is view and the reader's. They have to anticipate and acknowledge the readerJs ' tidy ("some of them will have wrong reasons in that English is good because it's assumptions and biases. They must begin with "common points of depar- tidy - can be a neat tidy little girl"); that some don't like it because it is "prim" twe" before introducing new or controversial arguments. Here is what one of and that, "BY ~ ~ d , I can change that notion for them." Flower and Hayes's con- & most popular college textbooks says to students. elusion is that effort of "exploration and consolidation" gave the writer "a

new, relatively complex, rhetorically sophisticated working goal, one which Once You have Your purpose clearly in mind, your next task is to define

analyze your audience. A sure sense of your audience - knowing encompasses plans for a topic, a persona, and the audience" @. 383b3 who it is and what assurnptioi~s you can reasonably make about it - is Flower Hayes give us a picture of a writer solving a problem, and the crucial to the success of your rhetoric. (Hairstoll, 1978, p. 107) problem as they present it is a cognitive one. It is rooted in the way the writer's

knowledge is represented in the writer's mind. The problem resides there, not It is difficult to imagine, however, how writers can have a purpose &fore in the nature of knowledge or in the nature of discourse but in a mental state

they are located in a discourse, since it is the discourse with its projects and prior to writing. It is possible, however, to see the problem as (perhaps simul- agendas that determines what writers can and will do. The writer who can tmeously) a problem in the way subjects are located in a field of discourse.

manipulate an audience (or, to use a less pointed language, the Flower and Hayes divide up the composing process into three distinct writer who can accommodate her motives to her reader's expectations) is a activities: or goal-setting," "translating," and "reviewing." The last writer who can both imagine and write from a position of privilege. she must, of these, reviewing (which is further divided into two subprocesxs, "evalu- that is, see herself within a privileged discourse, one that already includes and sting" and "revising"), is particularIy powerful, for as a writer continually excludes groups of readers. She must be either equal to or more powerful reviews his goals, plans, and the text he is producing, and as he continually

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generates new goals, plans, and text, he is engaging in a process of learning and discovery. Let me quote Flower and Hayes's conclusion at length.

If one studies the process by which a writer uses a goal to generate ideas, then consolidates those ideas and uses them to revise or regenerate new, more complex goals, one can see this learning process in action. Further- more, one sees why the process of revising and clarifying goals has such a broad effect, since it is through setting these new goals that the fruits of discovery come back to inform the continuing process of writing. In this instance, some of our most complex and imaginative acts can depend on the elegant simplicity of a few powerful thinking processes. We feel that a cognitive process explanation of discovery, toward which this theory is only a start, will have another special strength. By placing emphasis on the inventive power of the writer, who is able to explore ideas, to develop, act on, test, and regenerate his or her own goals, we are putting an impor- tant part of creativity where it belongs - in the hands of the working, thinking writer. (1981, p. 386)

While this conclusion is inspiring, the references to invention and creativity seem to refer to something other than an act of writing - if writing is, finally, words on a page. Flower and Hayes locate the act of writing solely within the mind of the writer. The act of writing, here, has a personal, cognitive history but not a history as a text, as a text that is made possible by prior texts. When located in the perspective afforded by prior texts, writing is seen to exist sepa- rate from the writer and his intentions; it is seen in the context of other articles in Seventeen, of all articles written for or about women, of all articles written about English teaching, and so on. Reading research has made it possible to say that these prior texts, or a reader's experience with these prior texts, have bear- ing on how the text is read. Intentions, then, are part of the history of the lan- guage itself. 1 am arguing that these prior texts determine not only how a text like the Seventeen article will be read but also how it will be written. Flower and Hayes show us what happens in the writer's mind but not what happens to the writer as his motives are located within our language, a language with its own requirements and agendas, a language that limits what we might say and that makes us write and sound, finally, also like someone else. lf you think of other accounts of the composing process - and I'm thinking of accounts as diverse as Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory (1983) and Edward Said's Beginnings (1975) - you get a very different account of what happens when private motive enters into public discourse, when a personal history becomes a public account. These accounts place the writer in a history that is not of the writer's own invention; and they are chronicles of loss, violence, and compromise.

It is one thing to see the Smenteen writer making and revising his plans for a topic, a persona, and an audience; it is another thing to talk about discovery, invention, and creativity. Whatever plans the writer had must finally have been located in language and, it is possible to argue, in a language that is persistently conventional and formulaic. We do not, after all, get to see the S m t e e n article. We see only the elaborate mental procedures that accompanied the writing of the essay. We see a writer's plans for a persona; we don't see that persona in

Inventing the University 67 - -

action. If writing is a process, it is also a product; and it is the product, and not the plan for writing, that locates a writer on the page, that locates him in a text and a style and the codes or conventions that make both of them readable.

Contemporary rhetorical theory has been concerned with the "codes" that constitute discourse (or specialized forms of discourse). These codes deter- mine not only what might be said but also who might be speaking or reading. Barthes (1974), for example, has argued that the moment of writing, where pri- vate goals and plans become subject to a public language, is the moment when the writer becomes subject to a language he can neither command nor control. A text, he says, in being written passes through the codes that govern writ- ing and becomes "de-originated," becomes a fragment of something that has "always been already read, seen, done, experienced" (p. 21). Alongside a text we have always the presence of "off-stage voices," the oversound of all that has been said (e.g., about girls, about English). These voices, the presence of the "already written," stand in defiance of a writer's desire for originality and determine what might be said. A writer does not write (and this is Barthes's famous paradox) but is, himself, written by the languages available to him.

It is possible to see the writer of the Seventeen article solving his problem of where to begin by appropriating an available discourse. Perhaps what enabled that writer to write was the moment he located himself as a writer in a familiar field of stereotypes: Readers of Seventeen are teenage girls; teenage girls think of English (and English teachers) as "tidy" and "prim," and, "By God, I can change that notion for them." The moment of eureka was not simply a moment of breaking through a cognitive jumble in that individual writer's mind but a moment of breaking into a familiar and established temtory - one with insid- ers and outsiders; one with set phrases, examples, and conclusions.

I'm not offering a criticism of the morals or manners of the teacher who wrote the Seventeen article. I think that all writers, in order to write, must imag- ine for themselves the privilege of being "insiders" - that is, the privilege both of W i g inside an established and powerful discourse and of being granted a special right to speak. But I think that right to speak is seldom conferred on us - on any of us, teachers or students - by virtue of that fad that we have invented or discovered an o n p a l idea. Leading students to believe that they are respon- sibIe for something new or original, unless they understand what those words mean with regard to writing, is a dangerous and counterproductive practice. We do have the right to expect students to be active and engaged, but that is a mat- ter of continually and stylistically working against the inevitable presence of con- ventional language; it is not a matter of inventing a language that is new.

When a student is writing for a teacher, writing becomes more problematic than it was for the Seventeen writer (who was writing a version of the "Describe baseball to an Eskimo" exercise). The student, in effect, has to assume privilege without having any. And since students assumes privilege by locating them- selves within the discourse of a particular community - within a set of specif- ically acceptable gestures and commonplaces - learning, at least as it is defined in the liberal arts cuniculum, becomes more a matter of imitation or parody than a matter of invention and discovery.

To argue that writing problems are also social and political problems is not to break faith with the enterprise of cognitive science. In a recent paper reviewing the tremendous range of research directed at identifying general cognitive skills, David Perkins (in press) has argued that "the higher the level of competence concerned," as in the case of adult learning, "the fewer general cognitive control strategies there are." There comes a point, that is, where "field-specific" or "domain-specific" schemata (what I have called "interpretive strategies") become more important than general problem-solving processes. Thinking, learning, writing - all these become bound to the context of a par- ticular discourse. And Perkins concludes:

Instruction in cognitive control strategies tends to be organized around problem-solving tasks. However, the isolated problem is a creature largely of the classroom. The nonstudent, whether operating in scholarly or more everyday contexts, is likely to find himself or herself involved in what might be called "projects" - which nught \x anything from writing a novel to designing a shoe to starting a business.

It is interesting to note that Perkins defines the classroom as the place of artificial tasks and, as a consequence, has to place scholarly projects outside the classroom, where they are carried out by the "nonstudent." It is true, I think, that education has failed to involve students in scholarly projects, proj- ects that allow students to act as though they were colleagues in an academic enterprise. Much of the written work that students do is test-taking, report or summary - work that places them outside the official discourse of the aca- demic community, where they are expected to admire and report on what we do, rather than inside that discourse, where they can do its work and partici- pate in a conunon enterprise."his, however, is a failure of teachers and cur- riculum designers, who speak of writing as a mode of learning but all too often represent writing as a "tool" to be used by an (hopefully) educated mind.

It could be said, then, that there is a bastard discourse peculiar to the writ- ing most often required of studenb. Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia (in press) have written about this discourse (they call it "knowledge-telling"; stu- dents who are good at it have learned to cope with academic tasks by devel- oping a "knowledge-telling strategy"), and they have argued that insistence on knowledge-telling discourse undermines educational efforts to extend the variety of discourse schemata available to student^.^ What they actually say is this:

When we think of knowledge stored in nlemory we tend these days to think of it as situated in three-dimensional space, with vertical and hor- izontal connections between sites. Learning is thought to add not only new elements to memory but also new connections, and it is the richness and structure of these connections that would seem . . . to spell the difference between inert and usable knowledge. On this account, the knowledge-telling strateby is educationally faulty because it specifically avoids the forming of connections between previously separated knowl- edge sites.

Inventing the University 69

It should be clear by now that when I think of "knowledge" I think of it as sit- uated in the discourse that constitutes "knowledge" in a particular discourse community, rather than as situated in mental "knowledge sites." One can remember a discourse, just as one can remember an essay or the movement of a professor's lecture; but this discourse, in effect, also has a memory of its own, its own rich network of structures and connections beyond the deliber- ate control of any individual imagination.

There is, to be sure, an important distinction to be made between learn- ing history, say, and learning to write as an historian. A student can learn to command and reproduce a set of names, dates, places, and canonical inter- pretations (to "tell" somebody else's knowledge); but this is not the same thing as leaming to " t h i n k (by leaming to write) as an historian. The former requires efforts of memory; the latter requires a student to compose a text out of the texts that represent the primary materials of history and in accordance with the texts that define history as an act of report and interpretation.

Let me draw on an example hom my own teaching. I don't expect my stu- dents to be literary critics when they write about Bleak House. If a literary critic is a person who wins publication in a professional journal (or if he or she is one whocould), thestudents aren't critics. I do, however, expect my students to be, themselves, invented as literary critics by approximating the language of a literary critic writing about Bleak House. My students, then, don't invent the language of literary criticism (they don't, that is, act on their own) but they are, themselves, invented by it. Their papers don't begin with a moment of insight, a "by G o d moment that is outside of language. They begin with a moment of appropriation, a moment when they can offer up a sentence that is not theirs as though it were their own. (I can remember when, as a graduate student, I would begin papers by sitting down to write literally in the voice - with the syntax and the key words - of the strongest teacher 1 had met.)

What I am saying about my students' essays is that they are approximate, not that they are wrong or invalid. They are evidence of a discourse that lies between what I might call the students' primary discourse (what the students might write about Bleak House were they not in my class or in any class, and were they not imagining that they were in my class or in any class - if you can imagine any student doing any such thing) and standard, official literary criticism (which is imaginable but impossible to find). The students' essays are evidence of a discourse that lies between these two hypothetical poles. The writing is limited as much by a student's ability to imagine "what might be said" as it is by cognitive control strategies6 The act of writing takes the student away from where he is and what he knows and allows him to imag- ine something else. The approximate discourse, therefore, is evidence of a change, a change that, because we are teachers, we call "development." What our beginning students need to learn is to extend themselves, by successive approximations, into the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine the "what might be said" and constitute knowl- edge within the various branches of our academic community.?

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Pat Bizzell is, 1 think, one of the most important scholars writing now on "basic writers" (and this is the common name we use for students who are refused unrestrained access to the academic cormnunity) and on the special characteristics of academic discourse. In a recent essay, "Cognition, Conven- tion, and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing" (1982a), she looks at two schools of composition research and the way they represent the problems that writing poses for writers.Vor one group, the "inner-directed theorists," the problems are internal, cobetive, rooted in the way the mind represents knowledge to itself. These researchers are concemed with discovering the "universal, fundamental structures of thought and language" and with devel- oping pedagogies to teach o r facilitate both basic, general cognitive skills and specific cognitive strategies, or heuristics, directed to serve more specialized needs. Of the second group, the "outer-directed theorists," she says that they are "more interested in the social processes whereby lanbwage-learning and thinking capacities are shaped and used in particular communities."

The staple activity of outer-directed writing instruction will be analysis of the conventions of particular discourse communities. For example, a main focus of writing-across-thecurriculun~ programs is to demystify the conventions of the academic discourse community. (1982a, pp. 218)

The essay offers a detailed analysis of the wdy the two theoretical camps can best serve the general enterprise of con~position research and composition teaching. Its agenda, however, seems to be to counter the influence of the cog- nitivists and to provide bibliography and encouragement to those interested in the social dimension of language learning.

As far as basic writers are concemed, Bizzell argues that the cognitivists' failure to acki~owledge the primary, shaping role of convention in the act of composing makes them "particularly insensitive to the problen~s of poor writ- ers." She argues that some of those problems, like the problem of establishing and monitoring overall goals for a piece of writing can be

better understood in terms of their unfamiliarity with the academic dis- course community, combined, perhaps, with such limited experience outside their native discourse communities that they are unaware that there is such a thing as a discoursc community with conventions to be mastered. What is underdeveloped is their knowledge both of the ways experience is constituted and interpreted in the acadenuc discourse com- munity and of the fact that all discourse communities constitute and interpret experience. (1982a, p. 230)

One response to the problems of basic writers, then, would be to determine just what the cormnunity's conventions are, so that those conventions could be written out, "demystified" and taught in our classrooms. Teachers, a s a result, could be more precise and helpful when they ask students to "think," "argue," "describe," or "define." Another response would be to exmune the essays writ- ten by basic writers - their approxin~ations of acadenuc discourse - to deter- mine more clearly where the problems lie. Lf we look at their writing, and if we

Inrrmting the Uniuerslty 71 -- - - - _ -

look at it in the context of other student writing, we can better see the points of discord that arise when students try to write their way into the university.

The purpose of the remainder of this chapter will be to examine some of the most striking and characteristic of these problems as they are presented in the expository essays of first-year college students. I will be concerned, then, with university discourse in its most generalized form - as it is represented by introductory courses - and not with the special conventions required by advanced work in the various disciplines. And 1 will be concerned with the difficult, and often violent accommodations that occur when students locate themselves in a discourse that is not "naturally" o r immediately theirs.

1 have reviewed 500 essays written, as the "Clay Model" essay was, in response to a question used during one of our placement exams at the University of Pittsburgh: "Describe a time when you did something you felt to be creative. Then, o n the basis of the incident you have described, go o n to draw some gen- eral conclusions about 'creativity.' " Some of the essays were written by basic writers (or, more properly, those essays led readers to identify the writers as basic writers); some were written by students who " passed" (who were granted immediate access to the community of writers at the university). As I read these essays, 1 was looking to determine the stylistic resources that enabled writers to locate themselves within a n "academic" discourse. My bias as a reader should be clear by now. 1 was not looking to see how a writer might represent the skills demanded by a neutral language (a language whose key features were paragraphs, topic sentences, transitions, and the like - features of a clear and orderly mind). 1 was looking to see what happened when a writer entered into a language to locate himself (a textual self) and his subject; and I was looking to see how, once entered, that lanbwage made or unmade the writer.

Here is one essay. Its writer was classified as a basic writer and, since the essay is relatively free of sentence level errors, that decision must have been rooted in some perceived failure of the discourse itself.

1 am very interested in music, and 1 try to be creative in my inter- pretation of music. While in highschool, 1 was a nlember of a jazz ensemble. The members of the ensemble were given chances to impro- vise and be creative in various songs. 1 feel that this was a great experi- ence for me, as well as the other members. I was proud to know that I could use my imagination and feelings to crcate music other than what was written.

Creativity to me, means k i n g free to express yourself in a way that is unique to you, not having to conform to certain rules and guidelines. Music is only one of the many areas in which people are given opportu- nities to show their creativity. Sculpting, carving, building, art, and act- ing are just a few more areas where people can show their creativity.

Through my music 1 conveyed feelings and thoughts whjch were important to me. Music was my means of showing creativity. In whatever

form creativity takes, whether it be music, art, or science, it is an important aspect of our lives because it enables us to be individuals.

Notice the key gesture in this essay, one that appears in all but a few of the essays 1 read. The student defines as his own that which is a commonplace. "Creativity, to me, means being free to express yourself in a way that is unique to you, not having to conform to certain rules and guidelines:" This act of appropriation constitutes his authority; it constitutes his authority as a writer and not just as a musician (that is, as someone with a story to tell). There were many essays in the set that told only a story - where the writer established his presence as a musician or a skier or someone who painted designs on a van, but not as a person at a remove from that experience interpreting it, treat- ing it as a metaphor for something else (creativity). Unless those stories were long, detailed, and very well told - unless the writer was doing more than saying, "1 am a skier" or a musician or a van-painter - those writers were all given low ratiiigs.

Notice also that the writer of the "Jazz" paper locates himself and his experience in relation to the con~monplace (creativity is unique expression; it is not having to conform to rules or guidelines) regardless of whether the comnionplace is true or not. Anyone who improvises "knows" that iniprovi- sation follows rules and guidelines. It is the power of the commonplace - its truth as a recognizable and, the writer believes, as a final statement - that justifies the example and completes the essay. The example, in other words, has value because it stands within the field of the commonplace.9 It is not the wcasion for what one might call an "objective" analysis or a "close" reading. It could also be said that the essay stops with the articulation of the com- monplace. The following sections speak only to the power of that statement. The reference to "sculpting, carving, building. art, and acting" attest to the universality of the commonplace (and it attests the writer's nervousness with the status he has appropriated for himself - he is saying, "Now, I'm not the only one here who has done something unique"). The commonplace stands by itself. For this writer, it does not need to be elaborated. By virtue of having written it, he has completed the essay and established the contract by which we may be spoken to as equals: "In whatever form creativity takes, whether it be music, art, or science, it is an important aspect of our lives because it enables us to be individuals." (For me to break that contract, to argue that my life is not represented in that essay, is one way for me to begin as a teacher with that student in that essay.)

All of the papers 1 read were built around one of three commonplaces: (1) creativity is self-expression, (2) creativity is doing something new or unique, and (3) creativity is using old things in new ways. These are clearly, then, key phrases from the storehouse of things to say about creativity. I've listed them in the order of the students' ratings: A student with the highest rating was more likely to use number three than number one, although each comn~onplace ran across the range of possible ratings. One could argue that some standard assertions are more powerful than others, but 1 think the

inventing the University 73 - -- -

ranking simply represents the power of assertions within our community of readers. Every student was able to offer up an experience that was meant as an example of "creativity"; the lowest range of writers, then, was not represented by students who could not imagine themselves as creative people.1°

1 said that the writer of the "Jazz" paper offered up a commonplace regard- less of whether it was true or not; and-this, 1 said, was an instance of the power of a commonplace to determine the meaning of an example. A commonplace determines a system of interpretation that can be used to "place" an example within a standard system of belief. You can see a similar process at work in this essay.

During the football season, the team was supposed to wear the same type of cleats and the same type socks, 1 figured that 1 would change this a little by wearing my white shoes instead of black and to cover up the team socks with a pair of my own white ones. I thought that this looked better than what we were wearing, and 1 told a few of the other people on the team to change too. They agreed that it did look better and they changed there combination to go along with mine. After the game people came up to us and said that it looked very good the way we wore our socks, and they wanted to know why we changed from the rest of the team.

I feel that creativity comes from when a person lets his imagination come up with ideas and he is not afraid to express them. Once you cre- ate something to do it will be original and unique because it came about from your own imagination and if any one else tries to copy it, it won't be the same because you thought of it first from your own ideas.

This is not an elegant paper, but it seems seamless, tidy. If the paper on the clay model of the earth showed an ill fit between the writer and his project, here the discourse seems natural, smooth. You could reproduce this paper and hand it out to a class, and it would take a lot of prompting before the stu- dents sensed something fishy and one of the more aggressive ones said some- thing like, "Sure he came up with the idea of wearing white shoes and white socks. Him and Billy 'White-Shoes' Johnson. Come on. He copied the very thing he said was his own idea, 'original and unique. ' "

The "I" of this text - the "I" who "figured," "thought," and "felt" - is located in a conventional rhetoric of the self that t u r n imagination into origi- nation (1 made it), that argues an ethic of production (I made it and it is mine), and that argues a tight scheme of intention (I made it because I decided to make it). The rhetoric seems invisible because it is so common. This "I" (the maker) is also located in a version of history that dominates classrooms, the "great man" theory: History is rolling along (the English novel is dominated by a central, inhustive narrative presence; America is in the throes of a Great Depression; during football season the team was supposed to wear the same kind of cleats and socks) until a figure appears, one who can shape history (Henry James, FDR, the writer of the "White Shws" paper), and everything is changed. In the argument of the "White Shoes" paper, the history goes

THE STUDY OF ERROR 74 - - --- - - -

"1 figured . . . I thought . . . I told . . . They agreed . . ." and, as a consequence, "I feel that creativity cottlesfron~ u)lu.n a person lets his imagination come up with ideas and he is not afraid to express them." The act of appropriation becomes a narrative of courage and conquest. The writer was able to write that story when he was able to imagine himself in that discourse. Getting him out of it will be a difficult matter indeed.

There are ways, I think, that a writer can shape history in the very act of writing it. Some students are able to enter into a discourse but, by stylistic maneuvers, to take possession of it at the same time. They don't originate a discourse, but they locate themselves within it aggressively, selfconsciously. Here is another essay on jazz, which for sake of convenience I've shortened. It received a higher rating than the first essay on jazz.

Jazz has always been thought of as a very original creative field in music. Improvisation, the spontaneous creation of original melodies in a piece of music, makes up a large part of jazz as a musical style. I had the opportunity to be a member of my high school's jazz ensemble for three years, and became an improvisation soloist this year. Throughout the years, I have seen and heard many jazz players, both proffessional and arna- teur. The solos performed by these artists were each flavored with that particular individual's style and ideas, along with some of the conven- tional premises behind improvisation. This particular type of solo work is creative because it is, done on the spur of the moment and blends the performer's ideas with basic guidelines.

1 realized my own creative potential when 1 began soloing. . . . My solos, just as all the solos generated by others, were original

because 1 combined and shaped other's ideas with mine to create some- thing completely new. Creativity is combining the practical knowledge and guidelines of a discipline with one's original ideas to bring about a new, original end result, one that is different from everyone else's. Creativity is based on the individual. Two artists can interpret the same scene differently. Each person who creates something does so by bring- ing out something individual in himself.

The essay is different in some important ways from the first essay on jazz. The writer of the second is more easily able to place himself in the context of an "academic" discussion. The second essay contains an "I" who realized his "creative potential" by soloing; the first contained an "I" who had "a great experience." In the second essay, before the phrase, "I had the opportunity to be a member of my h g h school's jazz ensemble," there is an introduction that offers a general definition of improvisation and an acknowledgment that other people have thought about jazz and creativity. In fact, throughout the essay the writer offers definitions and counterdefinitions. He is placing him- self in the context of what has been said and what might be said. In the first paper, before a similar statement about being a member of a jazz ensembIe, there was an introduction that locates jazz solely in the context of this indi- vidual's experience: "1 am very interested in music." The writer of this first paper was authorized by who he is, a musician, rather than by what he can

Inventing the University 75

say about music in the context of what is generally said. The writer of the sec- ond essay uses a more specialized vocabulary; he talks about "conventional premises," "creative potential," "musical style," and "practical knowledge." And this is not just a matter of using bigger words, since these terms locate the experience in the context of a recognizable interpretive scheme - on the one hand there is tradition and, on the other, individual talent.

It could be said, then, that this essay is also framed and completed by a commonplace: "Creativity is combining the practical knowledge and guide- lines of a discipline with one's original ideas to bring about a new, original end result, one that is different from everyone else's." Here, however, the argument is a more powerful one; and 1 mean "powerful" in the political sense, since it is an argument that complicates a "naive" assumption (it makes $holarly work possible, in other words), and it does so in terms that come close to those used in current academic debates (over the relation between convention and idiosyncracy or between rules and creativity). The assertion is almost consumed by the pleas for originality at the end of the sentence; but the point remains that the terms "original" and "different," as they are used at the end of the essay, are problematic, since they must be thought of in the context of "practical knowledge and guidelines of a discipline."

The key distinguishing gesture of this essay, that which makes it "better" than the other, is the way the writer works against a conventional point of view, one that is represented within the essay by conventional phrases that the writer must then work against. In his practice he demonstrates that a writer, and not just a musician, works within "conventional premises." The "I" who comments in this paper (not the "I" of the narrative about a time when he soloed) places himself self-consciously within the context of a con- ventional discourse about the subject, even as he struggles against the lan- guage of that conventional dicourse. The opening definition of improvisation, where improvisation is defined as spontaneous creation, is rejected when the writer begins talking about "the conventional premises behind improvisa- tion." The earlier definition is part of the conventional language of those who "have always thought" of jazz as a "very original creative field in music." The paper begins with what "has been said" and then works itself out against the force and logic of what has been said, of what is not only an argument but also a collection of phrases, examples, and definitions.

I had a teacher who once told us that whenever we were stuck for some- thing to say, we should use the following as a "machine" for producing a paper: "While most readers of - have said -, a close and careful read- ing shows that . " The writer of the second paper on jazz is using a standard opening gambit, even if it is not announced with flourish. The essay becomes possible when he sets himself against what must become a "naive" assumption - what "most people think." He has d e f i e d a closed circle for himself. In fact, you could say that he has laid the groundwork for a discipline with its own key terms ("practical knowledge," "disciplinary guidelines," and "original ideas"), with its own agenda and with its own investigative proce- dures (looking for common features in the work of individual soloists).

76 THE STUDY OF ERROR -- -- -

The history represented by this student's essay, then, is not the history of a musician and it is not the history of a thought being worked out within an individual mind; it is the history of work being done within and against con- ventional systems.

In general, as I reviewed the essays for this study, I found that the more successful writers set themselves in their essays against what they defined as some more naive way of talking about their subject - against "those who think that . . ." - or against earlier, more naive versions of themselves - "once I thought that. . . ." By trading in one set of commonplaces at the expense of another, they could win themselves status as members of what is taken to be some more privileged group. The ability to imagine privilege enabled writing. Here is one particularly successful essay. Notice the special- ized vocabulary, but notice also the way in which the text continually refers to its own language and to the language of others.

Throughout my life, 1 have been interested and intrigued by music. My mother has often told me of the times, before I went to school, when I would "conduct" the orchestra on her records. I continued to listen to music and eventually started to play the guitar and the cIarinet. Finally, at about the age of twelve, I started to sit down and to try to write songs. Even though my instrumental skills were far from my own high stan- dards, I would spend much of my spare time during the day with a gui- tar around my neck, trying to produce a piece of music.

Each of these sessions, as I remember them, had a rather set format. I would sit in my bedroom, strumming different combinations of the five or six chords 1 could play, until I heard a series of which sounded par- ticularly good to me. After this, I set the music to a suitable rhythm, (usu- ally dependent on my mood at the time), and ran through the tune until I could play it fairly easily. Only after this section was complete did I go on to writing lyrics, which generally followed along the lines of the cur- rent popular songs on the radio.

At the time of the writing, I felt that my songs were, in themselves. an original creation of my own; that is, I, alone, made them. However, I now see that, in this sense of the word, I was not creative. The songs themselves seem to be an oversimplified form of the music I listened to at the time.

In a more fitting sense, however, I was being creative. Since I did not purposely copy my favorite songs, I was, effectively, originating my songs frommy own "process of creativity." To achieve my goal, I needed what a composer would call "inspiration" for my piece. In this case the inspiration was the current hit on the radio. Perhaps, with my present point of view, 1 feel that I used too much "inspiration" in my songs, but, at that time, I did not.

Creativity, therefore, is a process which, in my case, involved a cer- tain series of "small creations" if you like. As well, it is something, the appreciation of which varies with one's point of view, that point of view being set by the person's experience, tastes, and his own personal view of creativity. The less experienced tend to allow for less originality, whle

Jnvmtmng the University n _ .__.__-____ _ _ _ _ the more experienced demand real originality to classify something a "creation." Either way, a term as abstract as this is perfectly correct, and open to interpretation.

This writer is consistently and dramatically conscious of herself forming s o m e h n g to say out of what has been said and out of what she has been say- ing in the act of writing this paper. "Creativity" begins in this paper as "orig- inal creation." What she thought was "creativity," however, she now says was imitation; and, as she says, "in this sense of the word" she was not "cre- ative." In another sense, however, she says that she w a s creative, since she didn't purposefully copy the songs but used them as "inspiration."

While the elaborate stylistic display - the pauses, qualifications, and the us6 of quotation marks - is in part a performance for our benefit, at a more obvious level we as readers are directly addressed in the first sentence of the last paragraph: "Creativity, therefore, is a process which, in my case, involved a certain series of 'small creations' if you like." We are addressed here as adults who can share her perspective on what she has said and who can be expected to understand her terms. If she gets into trouble after this sentence, and 1 think she does, it is because she doesn't have the courage to generalize from her assertion. Since she has rhetorically separated herself from her younger "self," and since she argues that she has gotten smarter, she assumes that there is some developmental sequence at work here and that, in the world of adults (which must be more complete than the world of chldren) there must be something like "real creativity." If her world is imperfect (if she can only talk about creation by putting the word in quotation marks), it must be because she is young. When she looks beyond herself to us, she cannot see our work as an extension of her project. She cannot assume that we too will be concerned with the problem of creativity and originality. At least she is not willing to challenge us on those grounds, to generalize her argument, and to argue that even for adults creations are really only "small creations." The sense of privilege that has allowed her to expose her own language cannot be extended to expose ours.

The writing in this piece - that is, the work of the writer within the essay - goes on in spite of, or against, the language that keeps pressing to give another name to her experience as a songwriter and to bring the discus- sion to closure. (In comparison, think of the quick closure of the "White

: Shoes" paper.) Its style is difficult, highly qualified. It relies on quotation marks and parody to set off the language and attitudes that belong to the dis- course (or the discourses) that it would reject, that it would not take as its own

' proper location. David Olson (1981) has argued that the key difference between oral lan-

1 guage and written language is that written language separates both the pro- ; ducer and the receive; from the text. For my student writers, this means that

they had to learn that what they said (the code) was more important than what they meant (the intention). A writer, in other words, loses his primacy

78 THE STUDY OF ERROR - _- . . _~

at the moment of writing and must begin to attend to his and his words' con- ventional, even physical presence on the page. And, Olson says, the writer must learn that his authority is not established through his presence but through his absence - through his ability, that is, to speak as a god-like source beyond the limitations of any particular social or historical moment; to speak by means of the wisdom of convention, through the oversounds of offi- cial or authoritative utterance, as the voice of logic or the voice of the com- munity. He concludes:

The child's growing competence with this distinctive register of lan- guage in which both the meaning and the authority are displaced from the intentions of the speaker and lodged "in the text" may contribute to the similarly specialized and distinctive mode of thought we have come to associate with literacy and formal education. (1981, p. 110)

Olson is writing about children. His generalizations, 1 think I've shown, can be extended to students writing their way into the academic community. These are educated and literate individuals, to be sure, but they are individ- uals still outside the peculiar boundaries of the academic community. In the papers I've examined in this chapter, the writers have shown an increasing awareness of the codes (or the competing codes) that operate within a dis- course. TO speak with authority they have to speak not only in another's voice but through another's code; and they not only have to d o this, they have to speak in the voice and through the codes of those of us with power and wis- dom; and they not only have to d o this, they have to d o it before they know what they are doing before they have a project to participate in, and before, at least in terms of our disciplines, they have anything to say. Our students may be able to enter into a conventional discourse and speak, not as them- selves, but through the voice of the community; the university, however, is the place where "common" wisdom is only of negative values - it is some- thing to work against. The movement toward a more specialized discourse begins (or, perhaps, best begins) both when a student can define a position of privilege, a position that sets him against a "common" discourse, and when he or she can work self-consciously, critically, against not only the "common" code but his or her own.

Pat Bizzell, you will recall, argues that the problems of poor writers can be attributed both to their unfamiliarity with the conventions of academic dis- course and to their ignorance that there are such things as discourse conunu- nities with conventions to be mastered. If the latter is true, 1 think it is true only in rare cases. All the student writers I've discussed (and, in fact, most of the student writers whose work I've seen) have shown an awareness that some- thing special or something different is required when one writes for an aca- demic classroon~. The essays that 1 have presented in this chapter all, 1 think, give evidence of writers hying to write their way into a new community.

lnucnting the Uniuersig 79 ~

. - . - - ..~ ~ -

To some degree, however, all of them can be said to be unfamiliar with the conventionsbf academic discourse.

Problems of convention are both problems of finish and problems of sub- stance. The most substantial academic tasks for students, learning history or sociology or literary criticism, are matters of many courses, much reading and writing, and several years of education. Our students, however, must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks and, as a consequence, write as sociologists or write literary criticism. There must be steps along the way. Some of these steps will be marked by drafts and revi- sions. Some will be marked by courses, and in an ideal curriculum the prc- liminary courses would be writing courses, whether housed in an English dep2rtment or not. For some students, students we call "basic writers," these courses will be in a sense the most basic introduction to the language and methods of academic writing.

Our students, as I've said, must have a place to begin. If the problem of a beginning is the problem of establishing authority, of defining rhetorically or stylistically a position from which one may speak, then the papers I have examined show characteristic student responses to that probleni and show levels of approximation or stages in the development of writers who are writ- ing their way into a position of privilege.

As 1 look over the papers I've discussed, I would arrange them in the following order: the "White Shoes" paper; the first "Jazz" essay; the "Clay Model" paper; the second "Jazz" essay; and, as the most successful paper, the essay on "Composing Songs." The more advanced essay for me, then, are those that are set against the "naive" codes of "everyday" life. (1 put the terms "naive" and "everyday" in quotation marks because they are, of course, arbi- trary terms.) In the advanced essays one can see a writer claiming an "inside" position of privilege by rejmting the language and comn~onplaces of a "naive" discourse, the language of "outsiders." The "1" of those essays locates itself against one discourse (what it claims to be a naive discourse) and approxi- mates the specialized language of what is presumed to be a more powerful and more privileged community. There are two gestures present, then - one imitative and one critical. The writer continually audits and pushes against a language that would render him "like everyone else" and mimics the language and interpretive systems of the privileged community.

At a first level, then, a student might establish his authority by simply stating his own presence within the field of a subject. A student, for example, writes about creativity by telling a story about a time he went skiing. Nothing more. The "I" on the page is a skier, and skiing stands as a representation of a creative act. Neither the skier nor skiing are available for interpretation; they cannot be located in an essay that is not a narrative essay (where skiing might serve metaphorically as an example of, say, a sport where set move- ments also allow for a personal style). Or a student, as did the one who wrote the "White Shoes" paper, locates a narrative in an unconnected rehearsal of commonplaces about creativity. In both cases, the writers have finessed the requirement to set themselves against the available utterances of the world

80 THE STUDY O F ERROR -. .-

outside the closed world of the academy. And, again, in the first "Jazz" paper, we have the example of a writer who locates himself within an available com- monplace and carries out only rudimentary procedures for elaboration, prc- cedures driven by the commonplace itself and not set against it. Elaboration, in this latter case, is not the opening up of a system but a justification of it.

At a next level I would place student writers who establish their author- ity by mimicking the rhythm and texture, the "sound," of academic prose, without there being any recognizable interpretive or academic project under way. I'm thinking, here, of the "Clay Model" essay. At an advanced stage, I would place students who establish their authority as writers; they claim their authority, not by simply claiming that they are skiers or that they have done something creative, but by placing themselves both within and against a discourse, or within and against competing discourses, and working self- consciously to claim an interpretive project of their own, one that grants them their privilege to speak. This is true, 1 think, in the case of the second "Jazz" paper and, to a greater degree, in the case of the "Composing Songs" paper.

The levels of development that I've suggested are not marked by corre- sponding levels in the type or frequency of error, at least not by the type or frequency of sentence-level error. 1 am arguing, then, that a basic writer is not necessarily a writer who makes a lot of mistakes. In fact, one of the problems with curricula designed to aid basic writers is that they too often begin with the assumption that the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence-level error. Students are placed in courses because their placement essays show a high frequency of such errors, and those courses are designed with the goal of making those errors go away. This approach to the problems of the basic writer ignores the degree to which error is less often a constant feature than a marker in the development of a writer. A student who can write a reasonably correct narrative may fall to pieces when faced with a more unfamiliar assignment. More in~yortant, however, such courses fail to serve the rest of the curriculum. On every campus there is a significant num- ber of college freshmen who require a course to introduce them to the kinds of writing that are required for a university education. Some of these students can write correct sentences and some cannot; but, as a group, they lack the facility other freshmen possess when they are faced with an academic writing task.

The "White Shoes" essay, for example, shows fewer sentence-level errors than the "Clay Model" paper. This may well be due to the fact that the writer of the "White Shoes" paper stayed well within safe, familiar territory. He kept himself out of trouble by doing what he could easily do. The tortuous syntax of the more advanced papers on my list is a syntax that represents a writer's struggle with a difficult and unfamiliar language, and it is a syntax that can quickly lead an inexperienced writer into trouble. The syntax and punctua- tion of the "Composing Songs" essay, for example, shows the effort that is required when a writer works against the pressure of conventional discourse. Lf the prose is inelegant (although 1 confess 1 admire those dense sentences) it is still correct. This writer has a command of the linguistic and stylistic

inventing the University 81 -

resources - the highly embedded sentences, the use of parentheses and quo- tation marks - required to complete the act of writing. lt is easy to imagine the possible pitfalls for a writer working without this facility.

There was no camera trained on the "Clay Model" writer while he was writing, and I have no protocol of what was going through his mind, but it is possible to speculate on the syntactic difficulties of sentences like these: "In the past time I thought that an incident was creative was when 1 had to make a clay model of the earth, but not of the classical or your everyday model of the earth which consists of the two cores, the mantle and the crust. 1 thought of these things in a dimension of which it would be unique, but easy to com- prehend," The syntactic difficulties appear to be the result of the writer's attempt to use an unusual vocabulary and to extend his sentences beyond the boundaries of what would have been "normal" in his speech or writing. There is reason to believe, that is, that the problem was with this kind of sen- tence, in this context. If the problem of the last sentence is that of holding together the units "I thought," "dimension," "unique" and "easy to compre- hend," then the linquistic problem was not a simple matter of sentence con- struction. I am arguing, then, that such sentences fall apart not because the writer lacked the necessary syntax to glue the pieces together but because he lacked the full statement within which these key words were already operat- ing. While writing, and in the thrust of his need to complete the sentence, he had the key words but not the utterance. (And to recover the utterance, I sus- pect, he would need to do more than revise the sentence.) The invisible con- ventions, the prepared phrases remained too distant for the statement to be completed. The writer would have needed to get inside of a discourse that he could in fact only partially imagine. The act of constructing a sentence, then. became something like an act of transcription in which the voice on the tape unexpectedly faded away and became inaudible.

Shaughnessy (1977) speaks of the advanced writer as one who often has a more facile but still incomplete possession of t h s prior discourse. In the case of the advanced writer, the evidence of a problem is the presence of disso- nant, redundant, or imprecise language, as in a sentence such as this: "No education can be total, it must be continuous." Such a student, Shaughnessy says, could be said to hear the "melody of formal English" while still unable to make precise or exact distinctions. And, she says,

the pre-packaging feature of language, the possibility of taking over phrases and whole sentences without much thought about them, threat- ens the writer now as before. The writer, a s we have said, inherits the language out of which he must fabricate his own messages. He is there- fore in a constant tangle with the language, obliged to recognize its pub- lic, communal nature and yet driven to invent out of this lanbwage his own statements. (1977, pp. 207-08)

For the unskilled writer, the problem is different in degree and not in kind. The inexperienced writer is left with a more fragmentary record of the corn- ings and goings of academic discourse. Or, as 1 said above, he or she often has

82 THE STUDY O F E R R O R - -- - - -- -

the key words without the complete statements within which they are already operating.

Let me provide one final example of this kind of syntactic difficulty in another piece of student writing. The writer of this paper seems to be able to sustain a discussion only by continually repeating his first step, producing a litany of strong, general, authoritative assertions that trail quickly into con- fusion. Notice how the writer seems to stabilize his movement through the paper by returning again and again to recognizable and available comrnon- place utterances. When he has to move away from them, however, away from the familiar to statements that would extend those utterances, where he, too, must speak, the writing - that is, both the syntax and the structure of the discourse - falls to pieces.

Many times the times drives a person's life depends on how he uses it. 1 would like to think about if time is twenty-five hours a day rather than twenty-four hours. Some people think it's the boaring or some peo- ple might say it's the pleasure to take one more hour for their life. But 1 think the time is passing and conung, still we are standing on same posi- tion. We should use time as best as we can use about the good way in our life. Everything we do, such as sleep, eat, study, play and doing something for ourselves. These take the time to do and we could find the individual ability and may process own. It is the important for us and our society. As time going on the world changes therefor we are changing, too. When these situation changes we should follow the suit- able case of own. But many times we should decide what's the better way to do so by using time. Sometimes like this kind of situation can cause the success of our lives or ruin. I think every individual of his own thought drive how to use time. These affect are done from environrnen- tal causes. So we should work on the better way of our life recognizing the importance of time.

There is a general pattern of disintegration when the writer moves off from standard phrases. This sentence, for example, starts out coherently and then falls apart: "We sl~ould use time &is best as we can use about the good way in our life." The difficulty seems to be one of extending those standard phrases or of connecting them to the main subject reference, "time" (or "the time," a con- struction that causes many of the problems in the paper). Here is an example of a sentence that shows, in miniature, this problem of connection: "I think every individual of his own thought drive how to use time."

One of the remarkable things about this paper is that, in spite of all the syntactic confusion, there is the hint of an academic project here. The writer sets out to discuss how to creatively use one's time. The text seems to allude to examples and to stages in an argument, even if in the end it is all pretty inco- herent. The gestures of academic authority, however, are clearly present, and present in a form that echoes thc procedures in other, more successful papers. The writer sets himself against what "some people t h i n k ; he speaks with the air of authority: "But 1 think. . . . Everything we do. . . . When these situation changes. . . ." And he speaks as though there were a project underway, one

Inventing the U n ~ v e r s i t y 83 -- -.

where he proposes what he thinks, turns to evidence, and offers a conclusion: "These affect are done from environmental causes. So we should work. - . ." This is the case of a student with the ability to imagine the general outline and rhythm of academic prose but without the ability to cany it out, to complete the sentences. And when he gets lost in the new, in the unknown, in the responsibility of his own commitment to speak, he returns again to the famil- iar ground of the commonplace.

The challenge to researchers, it seems to me, is to turn their attention again to products, to student writing, since the drama in a student's essay, as he or she struggles with and against the languages of our contemporary life, is as intense and telling as the drama of an essay's mental preparation or physical production. A written text, too, can be a compelling model of the "composing process" once we conceive of a writer as at work within a text and simultane- ously, then within a society, a history, and a culture.

It may very well be that some students will need to learn to crudely mimic the "distinctive register" of academic discourse before they are pre- pared to actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse, and before they are sophisticated enough with the refinements of tone and gesture to do it with grace or elegance. To say this, however, is to say that our students must be our students. Their initial progress will be marked by their abilities to take on the role of privilege, by their abilities to establish authority. From this point of view, the student who wrote about constructing the clay model of the earth is better prepared for his education than the student who wrote about playing football in white shoes, even though the "White Shoes" paper is relatively error-free and the "Clay Model" paper is not. It will be hard to pry loose the writer of the "White Shoes" paper from the tidy, pat discourse that allows him to dispose of the question of creativity in such a quick and efficient manner. He will have to be convinced that it is better to write sen- tences he might not so easily control, and he will have to be convinced that it is better to write muddier and more confusing prose (in order that it may sound like ours), and t h s will be harder than convincing the "Clay Model" writer to continue what he has already begun.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Prepcirahon of h s chapter was supported by the Learning Research and Develqnnent Center of the Univerjity of Pittsburgh, which is supported in part by the National Institute of Education.

NOTES

1 David Olson (1981) has made a similar observation about school-related problems of lan- guage learning in younger children. Here is his conclusion: "Hence, depending u p n whether children assumed language was primarily suitable for making assertions and conlectures or pri- marily for making direct or indiwctcommands, they will either find school texts easy or difficult" (p. 107).

2. For Aristotle, there were both general and specific commonplaces. A speaker, says Aristotle, has a "stock of arguments to which he may turn for a particular need."

, THE STUDY O f ERROR Inventing the University 85 --

If he knows the topoi (regions. places, lines or argument) - and a skilled speaker will know 8. My debt to Bizzell's work should be evident everywhere in this essay. See also Bizzell them - he will know where to find what he wants for a special caw. The general topics, or (1978,1982b) and BizzeU and Herzberg (1980). commonplaces, are regions containing arguments that are common to all branches of knowl- 9. Fish says the following about the relationship berween student and an object under study: edge. . . . But there are also special topics (regions, places, loci) in which one looks for argu- we are not to imagine a moment when my students "simply see" a physical configuration of ments appertaining to particular branches of knowledge, special sciences, such as ethics or atoms and t h ~ n assign that configuration a significance, according to the situation they hnp politics. (1932, pp. 154-55) pen to be in. To be in the situation (this or any other) is to "see" with the eyes of its interests,

And. he says. "the topics or places, then, may be indifferently thought of as in the xience that LS con- its goals, its understood practices, values, and norms, and so to be conferring significance by cerned, or in the n k d of the speaker." But the question of location is "indifferent" nttly if the n i n d of seeing, not after it. The categories of my students' vision are the categories by which they the speaker is in line with set opinion general assumption. For the speaker (or writer) who is not sit- understand themselves to be functioning as students . . . and objects will appear to them in uated so comfortably in the privileged public realm, this is indeed not an indifferent matter at all. If f o m related to that way of functioning rather than in some objertive or preinterpretive he does not have the commonplace at hand, he will not, m Aristotle's terms, know where to go at all. form. (1980, p. 334)

3. Pat Bixzell has argued that the Snlenteen writer's process of goal-setting 10. 1 am aware that the papers given the highest rankings offer arguments about creativity can be better understood U we see it in terms of writing for a discourse community. His ini- and originality similar to my own. If there is a conspiracy here, that is one of the points of my chap- ha1 problem . . . is to find a way to include these readers in a discourse community for which ter. I should add that my reading of the "content" of basic writers' essays is quite different from he is conlfortable writing. He places them in the academic discourse community by imagin- Lunsford's (1980). ing the girls as students. . . . Once he has included then1 in a familiar discourse community, he can find a way to address them that is common in the community: he will argue with REFERENCES them, puttting a new interpretation on information they possess in order to correct miscon- ceptions. (1982a, p. 228) Aristotle. (1932). The Rhetoric of Aristotle (L. Cooper, Trans.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentiue-Hall. 4. See Bartholomae (1979,1983) and Rose (1983) for articles on curricula designed to move Barthes, R. (1974). S[. (R. Howard, Trans.). New York: Hill & Wang.

students into university discourse. The movement to extend wrlting "across the curriculum" is Bartholomae, D. (1979). Teaching basic wrihng: An alternative to basic skills. /ounzal of Bosic evidence of a general concern for locating students within the work of the university; see Blzzell Writing, 2, 85-109. (1982a) and Maimon et ul. (1981). For longer works directed specifically at basic writing, see Ponsot -. (1983). Writing assignments: Where writing begins. In P. Stock (Ed.), Forum (pp. 3W-12). and Deen (1982) and Shaughnessy (1977). For a book describing a course for more advanced stu- Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook. dents, see Coles (1978). Bereiter, C., & Scardamah, M . (1985). Cognitive coping strategies and the problem of "inert

5. In spite of my misgivings about Bereiter and Scardamalia's interpretation of thecogn~tive knowledge." In S. S. Chipman, J. W. Segal, & R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: nature of the problenl of "inert knowledge," this is anessay 1 regularly recommend to teachers. It Research and operl questions (Vol. 2). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. has much to say abuut the dangers of what seem to be "neutral" forms of classroom discourse and B-U, P. (1978). The ethos of academic discourse. College Coinpit~on and Cr~n~munication. 29,351-55. provides. in its final section, a set of recommendations on how a teacher might undo discourse . (1982a). Cognition, convention, and certainty: What we need to know about writing. conventions that have become part of the institution of teaching. Prdterb 3,21344.

6. Stanley Fish (1980) argues that the basis for distinguishing novice from expert readings is -. (1982b). College composition: lnitiation into the academic discourse community. Curri- the persuasiveness of the dixourse used to present and defend d given reading. In particular, see culum Inquiry, 12,191,207. the chapter, "Demonstration vs. Persuasion: Two Models of Critical Activity" (pp. 356-73). Bizzell, P., & Herzberg, B. (1980). "Inherent" ideology, "universal" history, "emplr~cal" evidence,

7. Some students, when they come to the university, can do this better than others. When and "context-free" writing: Some problems with E. D. Hirxh's The Philosuphy of Compositloil. Jonathan Culler says, "the possibility of bringing someone to see that a particular interpretation is Muden1 Lnnguage Noles, 95,1181-1202. a good one assumes shared points of departure and common notions of how to read," he is Coles, W. E., Jr. (1978). 77lcplurol I. New York Holt, Rinehart & Winston. acknowledging that teaching, at least in English classes, has had to assume that students, to be stu- Fish S. (1980). Is there a text ill this class? The authority of interpretive comn~uiiities. Cambridge, MA: dents, were already to some degree participating in the structures of reading and writing that con- Harvard University Press. stitute English studies (quoted in Fish, 1980, p. 366). Flower, L. S. (1981). Revising writer-based prose. journal of Basic Writing, 3, 62-74.

Stanley Fish tells us "not to worry" that students will violate our enterprise by offering i d i o Flower, L., & Hayes, J. (1981). A cognitive process theory of writing. College Con~posltion atld syncratic readings of standard texts: Communication, 12, 365-87.

Hairston, M. (1978). A contemporary rhetoric. Boston: Houghton Mifflii. The fear of solipsism, of the imposition by the unconstrained self of its own prejudices, is Lunsford, A. A . (190). The content of basic writers' essays. College Compos~lion and Con~municalion. unfounded because the self does not exist apart from the communal or conventional cate- gories of thought that enable its operations (of thinking, seeing, reading). Once w e realize Maimon, E. P., Belcher, G. L., Hearn,G. W., Nodine, B. F., & O'Connor, F. X. (1981). Writing in the that the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are arts and sciences. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop. culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness wholly and Olson, D. R. (1981). Writing: The divorce of the author from the text. In B. M. Kroll& R. J. Vann dangerously free, becomes incomprehensible. (1980, p. 335) (Eds.), Exploring speaking -writing relationsltips: Connections and contrasfs. Urbana, IL:

He, too, is assumlng that students, to be students (and not "dangerously free"), must be members National Council of Teachers of English. in good standing of the community whose immediate head is the English teacher. It is interesting Perkins, D. N. (1985). General cognitive skills: Why not? In S. S. Chipman, J. W. Segal. & that his parenthetical catalogue of the "operations" of thought, "thinking, seeing, reading," R. Glaser (Eds.), Thinking and learning skills: Research and open questions (Vol. 2). Hillsdale. NJ: excludes writing, since it is only through written records that we have any real indication of how a student thinks, sees, and reads. (Perhaps "real" is an inappropriate word to use here, since there is Ponsot, M., & Deen, R. (1982). Beat not thepoor desk. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cmk. certainly a "real" intellectual life that goeson, independent of writing. Let me say that thinking, see- Rodriquez, R. (1983) Hunger of Memory. New York: Bantam. ing, and reading are valued in the academic community only as they are represented by extended. Rose, M. (1983). Remedial writing courses: A critique and a proposal. College English, 45, 109-28. elaborated written records.) Writing, 1 presume, is a given for Fish. It is the card of entry into this Said, E. W. (1975) Beprrntngs: Intention and method. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. closed community that constrains and exclude5 dangerous characters. Students who are excluded Shaughnessy, M. (1977). Errors and expectations. New York Oxford University Press. from this community are students who do poorly on written placement exams or in freshmancom- position They d o not, that is. move easily into the privileged discourse of the community, repre- sented by the English literature class.