The Importance of Articles in Teaching Writing

I can’t stop thinking about content and form.  Hardly the thoughts I would choose to have burrowed into the Unforgettable realm of my mind.  But that is exactly where the age-old pair has ensconced themselves.  They will not leave me.  So, I shall escort them out in this posting.  I hope.

In the last two postings, I’ve been trying to make sense of how both Gerald Graff and Laurel Richardson’s views of writing—in terms of content and form—relate to each other.  At first, they seem to be unrelated to me.  Richardson calls for us to consider writing as thinking; to write is to think.  She seems to be responding especially to the notion that in order to write one must know beforehand what one wishes to say.  In addition, Richardson thinks that the forms in which we write help to create knowledge themselves.  There are some things that one might only think of when trying to write a monologue, or in a strict poetic form.  Richardson’s position resists the trend in academia to write in a particular style, an opaque form that makes its content that much harder to understand.  Gerald Graff has a similar view, which he calls Arguespeak—the cryptic language in which scholars speak and write, and a way of communicating in which students are often denied explicit instruction.

Initially, it seems that Graff and Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say method of academic writing is in line with Richardson: they propose a form in which students can write, a form that ensures students’ ideas will remain focused and cogent.  But, there is a difference between the Graff-Birkenstein method and Richardson’s call for writing as thinking.  The difference is this: Richardson suggests formal conventions like genre, poetic rhythm, or characterization; the Graff-Birkenstein method gives students the language to think, isolating the core of a student’s idea.  This distinction is important because it sheds light on the inadequacy of my terms, content and form.  And especially form.  What is the difference between the conventional form of a genre—lyric poetry, for example—and the providing of (some) exact language with which students should think?  What effect does thinking in someone else’s sentences have on students’ own thoughts?  While it might ensure that they preserve cogency, how will it effect aspects of writing like voice, for example?

To be clear, Graff and Birkenstein suggest that after students master the basic idea—how to weave others’ ideas into their own—they are free to alter templates to be more original.  In this sense, the Graff-Birkenstein method is one way to train students to think a certain kind of way—a way that does not come easily to some (or many) students.  This is said with great clarity by two graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who, addressing a colleague’s concern that the They Say/I Say method is too formulaic, write: “It seemed to us that our colleague had conflated Graff and Birkenstein’s transparency with a sort of rote, mechanistic method of learning that reduced the complexity of writing to a set of skills that could be grasped and implemented easily.” I agree.  (I wonder if I myself, in my first previous few postings, have fallen into this trap of rash opinion-making: mistaking clarity for glibness; treating content and form so separately; suggesting that Graff was either an education or and English professor.) As with most tools and methods, this one could be of great value to the writing teacher.  That is, as long as it is one tool among others.  A course in which this is the only way of writing—or, a teacher who teaches it as the “right” way, the only way—would be limiting students to only one way of thinking and expressing ideas.  And, unfortunately, as often happens when administrators wish to implement standardized pedagogy, it is quite possible that what would be a valuable tool might be misused as a magic wand.  This is precisely what happened with 6-Traits of Writing, Reading/Writing Workshops, and even Do Nows.  They Say/I Say is a valuable way to help students organize their ideas.  But, administrators must remember the most important word of that sentence: a.

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