Teaching English Composition in the Present and Future Tense

In 2013, Verlyn Klinkenborg, author and lecturer in Yale’s English Department, wrote an editorial for The New York Times. The provocative title of the article was “The Decline and Fall of the English Major.” He cites statistics of plummeting enrollment numbers, notes the lack of funding, the increased pressure from parents, and the fear of finding employment with a humanities degree. But while his title notes a loss—the English major, we take it, has fallen—in actuality his article offers a solution. What the humanities should offer, Klinkenborg posits, is not a study of literature or history or philosophy, but the study of writing and critical thinking:

[Students] can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

It’s the lack of emphasis on composition that has led to a dearth of students under the umbrella of “English major” who can write well, that is, who can write so that their ideas are heard. To resuscitate the discipline of English, we need to remember the importance of teaching writing. The greatest strength of the English major is not the ability to regurgitate Freud or define Modernism.

It is our mission as English teachers to teach writing as a method of thinking, to re-mediate their writing for current and future circumstances and technologies, and to help our students find a sense of agency and empowerment in the act of writing. This approach is the most — perhaps only — way to teach literacy in the twenty-first century. If we continue to focus solely on literary analysis, to bracket changing technologies, new media, and contemporary writing out of classrooms, the discipline of English will become outmoded — according to Klinkenborg, it already has.

In the words of the late James Slevin, “Every tertiary school has an obligation to allow students to explore the critical study of cultural objects and to learn and control for their own purposes the discourses that enable and reflect on such a study” (204). The English classroom should be about writing in order to interpret the ever-changing world in which our students exist. It should train students in the act of generating ideas that can better this world. It should be a space for honing an approach to making knowledge that can evolve as the world evolves. It should be a space of meaning-making through frequent and varied instances of writing, and the meanings students make here should matter beyond the walls of the classroom.

I’ve come to these conclusions thanks to the teachers, readers, and writers that have surrounded me throughout my career. The University of Georgia’s emphasis on service learning showed me see how the skills that I was developing as an undergraduate in the English Department transferred beyond the campus. Teaching at a low-income classroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where my students didn’t have computers at home, highlighted how crucial digital literacy is to twenty-first century education. And Matthew Pavesich, Phil Sandick, and Norma Tilden of Georgetown University—whose approaches to teaching writing are both radical and obvious—deeply influenced my understanding of pedagogical theory.

Pavesich’s focus on rhetorical ecologies is particularly appropriate for teaching writing in the networked age. His work has convinced me that we should expand our understanding of what matters in writing and in teaching writing. Margaret Syverson began the ecological turn in 1999 with her seminal book, The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition, where she asserted that more factors and influences come to bear on our writing than we assume. Writing is distributed, emergent, enacted, embodied; it is networked and hyperlinked in the way that our lives are in the digital age. Jenny Edbauer follows Syverson in her 2005 article, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” No rhetorical situation exists outside of an open network of past or present cultures and events. There is no such thing as writing in isolation. “The elements of the rhetorical situation,” Edbauer writes, “simply bleed” (8–9). This theory of writing has an enormous pedagogical impact. If we buy into it, which I do, then in order to teach writing we must recognize the many circumstances in and around which writing occurs.

That writing is distributed amongst multiple agents is never more true than in the classroom, and yet our academic policies in regards to plagiarism deny this reality: “Plagiarism is the act of passing off as one’s own the ideas or writings of another” (Georgetown Standards of Conduct). I believe in the benefit of peer review, of student-led discussions, of writing center tutors, of office hours. Both in and out of the classroom, students should be interacting, developing ideas with one another. As they look through a wealth of primary and secondary sources, they are hearing the writing voices of others. As they write their paper on GoogleDrive, social media notifications inundate their screen. A word or idea falls into the paper here, drops out there. There is no such thing as writing in isolation in 2017.

We should teach our students that writing in a highly networked culture means that sole authorship has become complicated — perhaps a fantasy, for some ecological purists. In acknowledging the shared creation and cultivation of ideas, we help them better understand thought processes. How did the idea develop? Was it your peer reviewer who inspired this sentence here? How do you credit this person? How did that person impact your thinking? Unless we grapple with these questions as teachers of writing, we cannot expect our students to grapple with them. Unless we are transparent about the formulation of ideas, students will remain mystified by their development.

The formulation of ideas emerges from the writing process. By having our students read literature without understanding that what they are reading is the product of the writing process, how can we expect them to apply the knowledge they gain from the literature to their own writing process? When I say process what I mean is processes; the processes of prewriting, writing, and revising that come in and out of order, that are repeated in a nonlinear form as the ideas emerge. When I think of ideas emerging out of writing, I channel Syverson and also Anne Berthoff. In The Making of Meaning, Berthoff describes these writing processes as modes of “discovery and interpretation, of naming and stating, of seeing relationships and making meaning” (2). It’s this emphasis on critical inquiry and “writing as a technology that restructures thought” (à la Walter Ong) that aligns me to Berthoff. I once worked with a student who, looking around at the work of her classmates, said, “I’m just not good at this. I don’t know where to start.” Our students should not feel crippled by the lack of ideas they have when they first sit down at the computer; they should see the blank screen as the beginning of critical thinking.

In order to understand the ways in which writing is a process of meaning making, I circle back to the idea that we must read literature as writing in the composition classroom. And we should read a variety of contemporary literature—from Roxane Gay’s 2011 Tumblr posts, to her 2017 nonfiction book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, to her ever evolving twitter feed. We might begin by asking, “Why did the author write in this media? Why did the author use this word and not that one? How would it change the meaning if she had said ‘this’ instead of ‘that’? How did her language and ideas evolve?” This act of critical inquiry via interpretive paraphrase, to borrow from Berthoff, “teaches students to see relationships and to discover that that is what they do with their minds” (72). Only in seeing relationships between writing and reading, between writing and idea formation, between writing and just-short-of-everything can we expect students to take the meaning-making skills they learn inside our classroom outside of our classroom.

This is the kind of approach that Phil Sandick takes with his first-year students at Georgetown University. Here are his course goals:

Read critically, paying attention to the ways that texts reflect their contexts, purposes, and audiences

Adapt writing for multiple genres, styles, technologies in ways that reflect different rhetorical situations

Based on analysis of genre, context, purpose, and audience, deploy language’s many resources, including its figurative power as well as conventions of grammar, punctuation, syntax, and semantics, to shape and communicate meaning with clarity and fluency (emphasis mine)

Students don’t merely pay attention to the plot of The Namesake but to the way that Jumpha Lahiri has written the novel. Over the course of the semester, his students author a literature review, an op-ed, an audio ethnography, and a position paper, and they write weekly in an online discussion board. In a variety of mediums and spaces, students make meanings out of writing with their writing. The writing differs depending on the medium and space of the writing; they learn that writing is something that can be adapted, that is, remediated. It isn’t only the printed word that involves composing. Pavesich similarly has his students engage with their audience wherever that audience lives — whether that be on Twitter, YouTube, or in a local newspaper.

Doug Eyman’s pedagogical approach in Digital Rhetoric emphasizes the importance of “multiliteracies” in the digital age. The English classroom should practice writing alphabetic text pieces, yes, but also practice remediating those texts into a new media. The work of the English classroom, I reiterate, is the work of composing. It is not the bound book but the ideas within that book that are valuable. By viewing writing in this way, we are future-proofing our students’ education and enabling them to transfer the critical thinking skills not only beyond the physical space of our classroom but also beyond the temporal space. A writing classroom should equip students to read an ecology of (alphabetic, visual, print, digital) writing — from a podcast to a comic to an eighteenth-century novel — understand what the writing is doing, and enter a dialogue with that writing.

Entering a dialogue with writing and reading literature as writing are interconnected. Students must learn how to unpack the rhetorical decisions being made by other writers in the conversation. In doing so, the students will begin to see the creative labor required to produce literature, that writing is something an author makes. To re-quote Berthoff, writing teaches students what they do with their minds. In the composition classroom, students should begin to see themselves as agents of their own minds — that is, as writers. By teaching students to be writers, we ask them to move out of their traditionally passive role in the classroom into an active one (Elbow 1993).

It wasn’t until graduate school that I felt some sense of agency in the classroom; and even then it’s challenging at times to feel empowered at the seminar table. In undergrad, competition, grading, and standardized tests were partially to blame — I was writing as part of a game in which winners got As and losers got Bs. The structuring of courses, though, also limited my ability to see myself as the active agent in the classroom. Syllabi read like funnels: We’ll read x and then you’ll write about x.

In the classroom, there was no emphasis on the writing process or on reading literature as writing, but rather on close reading for themes, imagery, overarching concerns laid bare by the text—and on theory, which I question belonging in the undergraduate classroom. I too often found myself listening more to Judith Butler than to myself. I infrequently (if ever) was led toward interpretive paraphrase as critical inquiry. Apart from my fourth-year thesis project, I didn’t create a final project that stood apart from the syllabus. New media was housed in my undergraduate university’s journalism school; if there were professors in the English department doing this kind of work, I missed their courses. I didn’t question any of these components of my coursework until Norma Tilden’s graduate-level seminar, “Approaches to Teaching Writing.”

Students should be active within the classroom, in control of their own senses and mind. In order to nudge this along, I believe that much of the writing that occurs in the undergraduate composition classroom should be personal— for example, creative nonfiction. Writing that matters to the writer personally, Richard Miller writes in “The Nervous System,” seldom matters to the academy; the writing that establishes your powerfulness in the classroom is not typically the same personal writing that you find yourself crying through. But it’s personal writing that can expose your strengths as a writer and that can make you realize the ways in which writing matters. Personal writing is a way to engage and connect students in the practice of writing, and it’s also a way to hear our students and for them to hear one another. Whether through workshopping or online discussion forums, the writing classroom should be a space where students learn to listen to others speaking and to speak so that others can hear them.

Apart from personal writing, I believe that remaining transparent about how the skills learned in the English classroom can transfer beyond it increases a student’s agency. This could be through direct or indirect service-learning or it could be in open conversations with students about the intent behind assignments. We should pull back the curtain so that students are empowered with an understanding of how the course is shaping their education. We should also structure classroom activities such that students can choose where they’re heading and experience problem-based learning. As far as choice is concerned, though, it needs to be more authentic than “pick one of the texts we’ve read in class and write a 10- to 12-page paper.” Peer review is another impactful way to engage the students in their own learning process. Some condemn this as the blind-leading-the-blind, but I believe that this sells short our students’ ability to think critically. If we’re reading literature as writing in your course, my students are learning how to discern when writing works and when it doesn’t.

At least a portion of the reading list should be determined by the students. If we become too wedded to our own scholarly interests or the canon, we’ll lose sight of the mission to train students to write on a variety of cultural texts. What do students feel they need to write on? Is it a television show? Is it the election? We’ve all, as writers, encountered something we have to write about. It’s a personal, visceral reaction to something. For me, that something is the HBO series True Blood. It’s Andrea Arnold’s American Honey; anxiety disorder; my parents’ divorce; the 2016 presidential election. And that writing has been both critical and personal; in Microsoft Word and on social media; anonymous and public. The writing, in all instances, has been networked — has been emergent and distributed. Even though the medium and intent behind each project has been different, the skills are the same.

If the English major has fallen, then with a re-emphasis on writing it is prepared to rise. Each day on the news there are new tragedies, conflicts, and complications. We encounter this world as humans, not as English majors or writing teachers. We connect with one another online and off to discuss what we see and hear happening around us. These discussions happen every millisecond on Facebook, on Tumblr, in the hallway, in The New York Times. In likes, reposts, and comments. And in all of these spaces combined, our students are producing more writing than any other generation.

They’re ready to write. We’ve got to be ready to help them make that writing mean something.

In the composition classroom, the students are learning nothing short of how to make meaning of that world and everything in it.