Scribbling on the Paper

“Students who were asked to write a complete draft in order in grammatical sentences produced many fewer ideas than students who were free to write as they liked” (94-95). Charney’s reference to a study by Shawn Glynn and colleagues, depicts my own writing experience. When I recall writing in high school, it was often constrained by this, and my college papers as an undergrad seem abysmal to me now. I was writing to get an assignment done, and dreading too many drafts on my typewriter. I wanted that perfect first draft, and it looked so good on my new typewriter, that surely presentation counted for something. Between use of a typewriter and product focus of my writing, I am amazed that I succeeded (though I had my share of bad papers). My process now is so much different, mostly because I am aware of writing as a process and that the early writing and invention strategies are crucial to finding the ideas for my writing.

I know that middle-high school text books have taken the steps of writing process and done what Mike Rose called the “rigid rules” instead of using them as “helpful hints” as Charney calls them. Don’t we often want to make our teaching (and grading) easier, and if it’s a formula, a recipe to follow, then the students are happy and we can more easily check off the blanks as students fill in what is needed. Binkley addressed this as well: “The process model of composing in practice frequently becomes a model of writing taught as a compartmentalized phenomenon. Each stage is strictly adhered to and followed in sequence” (239). Around 1984-5, I was working on a senior paper on the teaching of grammar. My advisor/mentor teacher, must have struggled with my inability to invent and let the ideas grow as I was writing, and to move revision beyond editing. One day we discussed the writing process and he took a piece of paper, and said, “Amy, the process of writing is not a straight line, it’s a mess.” And he scribbled all over the paper. That day my view of writing changed as I saw and kept his scribble. I realized that I was trying to make it neat, and in so doing I was making very little progress in my own writing and thinking. That day writing may have become more difficult as I had to let go of habits, but my thinking went deeper and I started to discover what I could learn from writing.

Campo’s article reminded me of the overlap of the invention and revision strategies. Dr. Roy Fox, our English Education advisor, uses what he calls “radical reformulation” that reminds me of what Campos and others describe. After much writing is done, the writer takes one paragraph and reforms it with either a different voice (a scientist, Huck Finn, or Oprah, for instance) or just a different version without changing the voice. After four new paragraphs have been written, the writer shares these, and looks at them, not to see which is better (avoiding the vague notion of what “better” means), but looks to see how the paragraphs differ and which may be more effective for the writing. What has happened for me is that I discover at least one whole new draft as well as ways to reformulate a current draft.

I’m curious what your stories have been – have you had good support in school-based writing, such as to try various invention strategies? Have the steps of writing been prescribed?