8/29/16
Kira Marshall-McKelvey
I have this annoying tendency to bring everything back to the writing center. I hadn't even stopped to consider how much I loved the writing center, how much I learned from it, until I left that position upon graduating. Because writing (usually) comes so easily to me (until it's mid-April and the weather starts to get nice, and I'm all "academic essay? What's that?"), I never recognized the importance of keeping a conscious and consistent awareness of the writing process throughout my own secondary and early undergraduate work. I just kinda hoped inspiration would appear somewhere, maybe on a mountain or a nearby lake (alternatively, five shots of espresso), would write some shit, and call it a day.
HOWEVER. Kudos to Jon Olson of the Pennsylvania State University writing center, I quickly gained an understanding that writing is all about the process. I had students come in to the writing center at every stage of the process--from brainstorming to final edits. This understanding of other students' writing processes led to the recognition that my own work did actually have a process, I was just too ignorant (naive? Dumb?) to pay attention to it.
Now, after reading Janet Emig's The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders, I have an even richer understanding of writing as a process, and I dearly wish I had read it before I applied to become a writing tutor. After seeing the way Emig breaks down certain categories of writing, I knew that I had an unconscious understanding of said categories, but I never understood the importance of articulating and really spending time on them.
The most important categories that stood out to me were reflexive versus extensive writing. While the shift between the two can sometimes be subtle, it was enlightening to me how different students view the processes between the two categories. More astonishing still was the fact that high school students actually spend more time on their pre-planning and writing process when their work is self-sponsored rather than school-sponsored. Reflexive writing, even when not for a grade, actually lends itself to more thorough revision processes among high school seniors.
This information is actually comforting to me, as it demonstrates a sort of self-motivation to both write and write well. When I think back to my own high school experiences, I was very much driven by external approval, most often via high marks on a paper. Yet in Emig's case, students found more of a reason to care about their writing when the subject was meaningful to them. When facing school sponsored assignments, students were more likely to say things like "sooo, there it is. Done." It seemed that the students viewed their writing process for extensive writing as a means to an end, as a goal to exert the least amount of effort possible.
So what does that mean for my own work as a composition instructor? This dilemma is something I've struggled with for the week that I've been teaching (though it feels like I've been teaching for an eternity--only 14 more eternities to go). A couple of students have implied that they are not interested in reading or writing about food (our course theme), and as such, I feel like I'm going to have a difficult time getting them excited about the steps that are necessary to create a thoughtful and well-organized paper.
On a similar note, a number of my students also noted that they want to learn how to improve their grammar. This is a concept that I struggle with, as I don't want students to get caught up in the minor mechanics of their writing before they can craft a nuanced, thoughtful argument. Emig also notes that teaching grammar formally to college students does not actually help, and teachers end up wasting their time. Spelling and mechanics are important, so how can I as an educator help students through that process without feeling hopeless?
