The Inauthenticity of School Writing: or, Teaching Writing is Weird

Inauthenticity in School Writing
Something very weird happens when you try to find models of good writing that your college composition students can use to emulate: you can’t find them. There are no “research papers” out there; there are no five-paragraph essays; very few real pieces of writing do those things we want our college students to do. So most often, we are left with using examples of good student writing as models. But this is weird. If student writing reflects nothing that naturally occurs in the world, what is it doing? What after all is student writing supposed to be emulating? This is not a small question, but I think one that really strikes at the heart of literacy education. When we teach writing, at any level, what are we doing and why are we doing it? My experience is mostly in college writing, and I have never found acceptable answers to these questions. I find that we in composition have pretty similar ideas about what we’re doing and why, but that when it comes time to show the greater academy, the accreditors, the public at large—there are just no decent answers.

Is writing used in school to assess what students have learned about a topic? If so, then composition courses might want to help students practice ways to use writing as a demonstration of content mastery. That puts composition in the role of “service course,” which most comp people hate.

Is writing used not just for after-the-fact assessment (“summative assessment”) but used rather for students to learn about a topic AS they write? Is it therefore a means of learning, not just a demonstration that learning has taken place? If this is the case, then composition courses would be failures if all they did was help student practice discrete writing skills that serve to demonstrate content mastery. In this scenario, comp courses set into motion much deeper learning strategies (though I’m not liking that word).

What if we go even further: Is writing—school writing—used in part for students to craft and develop stances that serve to concretize certain student/scholarly identities, without which “learning” is just the internalization of random facts, but with and through which learning is about the transformation of the world and identities within it? If writing, argumentative writing in our society, is a social practice through which people take stances upon the world, create and develop identities in relation to situations of import, and through which they both enter into and simultaneously transform the social roles and institutions they inherit—then literacy education, college composition, any teaching of writing would seem to be indispensible to a real education.

These three options, fairly loosely, might be said to represent the three major schools of thought in English composition: the first school, the “current-traditional” school, was prominent from the 50s till about 1970; the second school, “process” pedagogy took over then; and in the mid-to-late 80s, the “post-process” school started to gain prominence. It’s a lot messier than this, and all schools still operate here and there. But for anyone outside the field of composition, it might be good to know that these waves of different ideas of writing education are noted by most compositionists.

So teaching writing in college is weird, for several reasons. First, not many of us believe that the current-traditional school has much validity; yet it seems that most people outside our field think this is the role we do and should be playing. So there is a fight between paradigms here. We want to help our students learn to utilize their writing practices so that they can learn more deeply in their education and so that they can create identities that take stances on issues and seek to transform them, rather than calling internalization of agreed-upon content an education. Most of our colleagues yell at us because their students “can’t write,” which always means different things, but nearly always within the range of “can’t use commas” (which most teachers can’t either) to “have bad subject verb agreement” (which most linguists might agree is undergoing a shift in Standard English anyway). The point is that “can’t write” generally means “have poor mechanics,” which just isn’t what we tend to focus on, and for several reasons: first, no two people even agree on what good mechanics are after a certain level, so what one teacher sees as good writing, another might see as a misplaced modifier; also, our decades of research tell us that if we approach the more global issues of writing/literacy as social practices, the surface level errors will decrease with time; further, said research shows us that trying to rush the path toward error-free prose by overt instruction doesn’t work anyway…. So error-free prose itself is a myth, and trying to teach it directly robs time from the curriculum where students’ literacy practices could be developed and places this time in instruction that might help them pass a test this semester, but will have no long term effect on their writing. (This is nearly indisputable, and I will gladly refer any reader to tons of supporting research upon request.)

Writing instruction is weird. I started this post with the more specific issue of not being able to find “real writing” that students can use as models for their “school writing.” It’s true. I love using MLK’s beautiful “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but when you really try to use it as a model, you see that this—one of the most powerful pieces of 20th Century exposition—uses very few of the conventions our colleagues wish we would teach, and breaks even more. Academic journal essays are generally more clear in their argumentation, but they are so specialized that they’re entirely boring to most people, college freshmen included; op-ed pieces are good, but there too we see only analogies to the “rules of writing” that people think matter in school. So professional writing is very difficult to use as models for college writing, and that in itself speaks to issues of inauthenticity in what we do and in what is expected of us outside the composition classroom.

People learn most effectively through apprenticeships, through watching masterful craftspeople perform tasks, sprinkled with bits of explanation/instruction, then by a “scaffolding” process by which the learner gradually takes over and eventually masters the given practice. This goes for many types of learning (though perhaps not all [though, I personally think all]), and for the learning of social practices it most certainly applies. With no masters out there who find value in the rules of school writing, how are we supposed to—-with a straight face-—tell our students that these rules matter? We can call them training wheels, but after 12 years of training wheels, wouldn’t you get bored and just want to be free to ride and fall or soar?

In assessment theory we call something 'authentic' to the extent that the test itself matches the real life thing it seeks to measure. In this case, when we assess student writing, where is our authenticity? Is it any wonder that so many students just see writing as whatever this or that teacher wants, as just another test to pass?

But on the flip side, if we take this argument and say, Okay, let’s target our writing to model office memos, notes to parents, professional emails, etc., does this seem like a worthy use of an education? I think the major lesson compositionists have learn in the transitions away from the current-traditional model is that writing must be seen as a practice with value in and of itself, not just as a means to another end, whether that end is demonstrating content knowledge or writing error free office memos. Whether we see writing as a cognitive process or an interlocking system of social practices (always situated, never having any purpose outside of a given context), most in composition would argue that we are only educating our students when we value the actual writing and the writers. But again, this seems to be a fight between us inside the composition classroom and nearly everyone else outside. I blame us for not communicating our reasons more persuasively.

As long as we view composition (as long as we let the outside world view it) as training for something else, not for writing and the means it serves, then we are bound to be inauthentic in our assignments and assessments. What should we do?