So I just read a batch of “exploratory essays” that came in in my “Writing from Research” course. I’m popping quotation marks around some phrases here because I am interested in the exchange these students and I are having. I think that the exchange tells me something about school and something about the complexity of the ethics of rhetoric. I asked for “essays” within a genre that we defined in class at some length. The process is straightforward: develop a complex question, one for which you don’t have an answer. Then go and find sources and explore them in an attempt to see if you can find an answer. Here’s the way the “exploratory essay” we all talked about develops: you summarize (in a generous way that respects the context of the source) what is new in a new source of information; you do some analysis of what you summarized to try to understand what the source offers; you reflect on how the source has expanded your thinking and brought forward your exploration of that initial question.
My students are smart; they read well and write with clarity. All in all, this was a pretty successful batch of drafts. What interested me in this batch of papers (notice the shift in terms here) was a kind of resistance to a new genre. I don’t want to rant here but I might a little. Just trying to figure this college composition thing out.
About half of the papers did what came naturally to the writer: they argued a thesis with now apparent intent to open the writer up the information from sources. Others offered a report, sort of repeating what Wikipedia or some other (sometimes more focused) sources offered. A few tried out the exploratory form but made pretty uneven use of paragraphs. Rather than using blocks of text to make the moves of summary, analysis, and reflection cohere, they sort of just wrote (I read several two-page paragraphs). It was as though the tool on offer (the “exploratory essay”) was either too foreign or too much labor or not adequately understood or something. Maybe it is that in an academic world dominated by the five-paragraph essays, it’s hard for a school writer to imagine paragraphs serving other purposes, hard for them to see the paragraph as a tool for thinking rather than a teacher’s metric.
This resistance showed in two other ways as well. First, writers struggled to link the sources they were working with. I kept scribbling the same idea in the margins: “maybe in a revision use a content-based transition.” As I read, I could see, “oh, this source got you thinking about this and the logic you are not naming is that knowing this, you next need to know that.” What I wondered is why that was visible to me and not to the writer. Hmmm, the answer to that is kind of obvious to me now. I had the opportunity of reading a complete draft; many of the writers may not have taken up that opportunity.
The second resistance is more interesting to me. As a writing teacher, I have begun to use over and over the phrase “frame this source reference.” My meaning is not especially novel at one level. I mean use what Diana Hacker calls a signal phrase that announces the source; I mean integrate some thoughtful paraphrase or summary and quote selectively; I mean “connect” (a verb Nancy Sommers plays with) the ideas you draw from a source to the purpose you are achieving within your paragraph and bring your judgment and interpretation to bear on what you’ve borrowed. Nothing new here. Writers’ resistance to “framing” is, I think, also not especially novel. To “frame” naturally, I have to be comfortable in open conversations, conversations where my assumption is that others have as much (or more likely more) to say than I do. I have to be ready to be generous as a listener/reader and also as a speaker/writer. U.S. citizens, on my observation, are not comfortable in such conversations. So many of us are puzzled by the humility that “framing” requires. It’s not natural; we don’t do it.
One final resistance that leaps to mind. Wikipedia. I’m inclined to include the acronym WTF here. I know about Wikipedia; I use it when I don’t have enough time to find a better treatment of a topic or when I just need some dates. It’s a beautiful tool, but it’s an ENCYCLOPEDIA. Actually, it’s likely closer to either a dictionary or a blog. It’s not, finally, a researchers conversation partner. The papers I read had some intense conversations with Wikipedia entries. Cool. Not enough. I want conversations with the sources that Wikipedia authors read. This resistance is driven, I think, by time. If a writer hasn’t given herself enough time to read, reflect on, make notes on, and then work with a 15-page essay or article, she goes to Wikipedia. It makes sense. Sadly, it probably also terminates serious exploration, at the least it leads her to write in generalities that make exploration less likely.
So I had a fun read, wrote lots of comments. But I’m talking with my friends about why U.S. citizens are so resistant to intellectual exploration. Is it in the water? I suppose Mark Edmundson’s grouchy 1997 critique of consumer students offers some limited insight. Makes me sad, makes me think many of my students will miss out on the joy of a college education, makes me really really worried about my fellow voters.
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2 comments:
I love the part where you talk about paragraphs serving other purposes than what school writers have learned. I have personally never thought of it as anything more than just a paragraph to get out some topic of information. If you think about it in a more poetic sense it seems that they can be so much more than that.
Yeah, the zen of the paragraph might be the single most important thing that any first-year college writer has ever learned.
Hmmmm, that seems a bit much. But you get my drift;)
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