I wrote a post about how forcing SEAE on students is racist, and someone asked the reasonable question: “It has been very challenging, especially in FYC classes, to reconcile my obligation to prepare students for academic writing across disciplines with my wish to preserve their own agency and choice. How do you strike that balance?”
And my answer to that is long, complicated, and privileged.
University professors are experts in everything. I had a friend who was a financial advisor who said that financial advisors routinely charge doctors and professors more, because both of those groups of people think they’re experts in everything and so are complete pains in the ass. He thought I’d be mad about that, but I just said, “Yeah.” And, unhappily, at a place where people have to write a lot to succeed, far too many people think they’re experts in writing..
I’ve had far too many faculty and even graduate students (all over the U) who’ve never taken a course in linguistics or read anything about rhetoric or dialect rhetsplain me. They think they’re experts in writing because they write a lot. I walk a lot, but that doesn’t mean I’m a physical therapist. It was irritating, but as a faculty member (especially once I got tenure), I could just shrug and move on.
In other words, I’m starting with the issue that how I handled this in my classes was influenced by my privilege. Even as an Assistant Professor, I was (too often) the Director of Composition, and so I knew that any complaints about my teaching would go to me. When I found myself in situations in which I had to defend my practices, I knew enough linguistics to grammar-shame the racists. (Grammar Nazis are never actually very good at grammar, even prescriptive grammar. Again, the analogy is accurate.) I think I have to start by acknowledging the issue since not everyone has the freedom I did.
So, what did I do?
I was trained in a program that had people write the same kind of paper every two weeks. This was genius. It was at a time when most writing programs had students writing a different kind of paper every two (or three weeks). That was also a time when research showed that no commenting practice was better than any other, since none seemed to correlate any more than any other with improvement in student writing (Hillocks, Research in Written Composition). But, even as a consultant at the Writing Center, I could see that the writing in Rhetoric classes did get better (that wasn’t true of all first-year writing courses).
Much later, I would read studies about cognitive development and realize that that classic form of a writing class (in which each paper is a new genre) makes no sense cognitively—even the Rhetoric model that I liked was problematic. The worst version is that a student writes an evaluative paper about bunnies, and the teacher makes comments on it. Then the student is supposed to write an argumentative paper about squirrels. A sensible person would infer that the comments about the evaluative paper are useless for their argumentative paper about squirrels (unless they’re points about grammar, and we’ll come back to that). That’s why students read comments simply as justifications of the grade. The cognitive process involved in generalizing from specific comments about a paper on one genre and topic to principles that can be applied to the specific case of a paper about another topic and in another genre is really complicated.
The Rhetoric model was a little better, insofar as it was the same genre, but even that was vexed. A student writes an argument about bunnies, and gets comments about that paper, and then has to abstract the principles of argument to apply to a different argument about squirrels. With any model in which the student is writing new papers every time, the student has to take the specific comments, abstract them to principles, and then reapply them to a specific case. That task requires metacognition.
I’m a member of the church of metacognition. I think (notice what I did there) that all of the train wrecks I’ve studied could have been prevented had people been willing to think about whether they might be wrong—that is, to think about whether their way of thinking was a good way to think.[2] But, I don’t think it makes sense to require (aka, grade on the basis of) something in a class that you don’t teach. So, how do you teach metacognition?
You don’t teach it by requiring that students already can do it. You teach it by asking students to reconsider how they thought about an issue. You teach it by having students submit multiple versions of an argument, and you make comments (on paper and in person) that make them think about their argument.
Once again, we’re back on the issue of my privilege. I have only once had a thoroughly unethical workload, and that ended disastrously (I was denied tenure). Otherwise, it’s been in the realm of the neoliberal model of the University, and I’ve done okay. But, were I in the situation of most Assistant Professors (let alone various fragile faculty positions) I would say use this model for one class at most.
I haven’t gotten around to the question of dialect because the way I strike the balance between being reasonable about how language works and the expectation that first-year composition prepares students for writing in a racist system is to throw some things off the scale. We can’t teach students the conventions of every academic disciplines; those disciplines need to do that work.
There was a moment in time (I infer that it’s passed) when people in composition accepted that FYC was supposed to be some kind of “basic” class in which people would learn things they would use in every other class with any writing. The fantasy was (and is, for many people) that you could have a class that would prepare students for all forms of writing they will encounter in college. Another was that you could teach students to read for genre, so that you should have students either write in the genre of their major or write in every genre. Both of those methods have students needing to infer principles in a pretty complicated way.
A friend once compared this kind of class to how PE used to be—two weeks on volleyball, two weeks on tennis, two weeks on swimming. You don’t end up a well-rounded athlete, but someone who sucks at a lot of stuff.
What I did notice was that a lot of disciplines have the same kind of paper assignment: take a concept the professor (and/or readings) have discussed in regard to this case (or these cases), and apply it to a new case (call this the theory application paper). We can teach that, so I did. That kind of paper has several sub-genres:
1) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to demonstrate understanding of the theory/concept/definition;
2) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to critique the theory/concept/definition;
3) Apply the theory/concept/definition to a new case in order to solve some puzzle about the case (this is what a tremendous number of scholarly articles do).
So, I might assign a reading in which an author describes three kinds of democracy, and ask that students write a paper in which they apply the definitions to the US. I might have an answer for which I’m looking (it’s the third kind), or I might not. I might be looking for a paper that:
1) Shows that the US fits one of those definition;
2) Shows that the US doesn’t quite fit any of them, and so there is something wrong with the author’s definitions/taxonomy;
3) Shows that applying this taxonomy of democracies explains something puzzling about the US government (why we have plebiscites at the state level, but not federal, or why we haven’t abandoned the Electoral College) or politics (why so few people vote).
Of course, I might be allowing students to do all three (if students think it fits, then they’d write the first or third, but if they don’t they would write the second).
Students typically did three papers, and turned the first one in three times (the third revision was late in the semester). They turned in their first version of their first paper within the first three weeks of class; I’d comment on it (I’d rarely give a grade for that first version) and return it within a week. They’d revise it and turn it in again a week after getting it back (we’d have individual conferences in the interim). I’d get that version back in a week. They’d turn in their first version of their second paper a week or two after that, and so on. Since the paper would be so thoroughly rewritten, I barely commented on sentence-level issues (correctness, clarity, effectiveness) on that first submission of the first paper (or second, for that matter). For many students, the most serious issues would disappear when they knew what they wanted to say.
I’ve given this long explanation of how the papers worked because it means that students had the opportunity to focus on their argument before thinking about sentence-level questions.
Obviously, in forty years my teaching evolved a lot, and so all I can say is where I ended up. And here’s the practice on which I landed. In class, we’d go over the topic of “grammar,” with the analogy of etiquette. And then I’d do what pretty much everyone else does. I’d emphasize sentence-level characteristics that interfered with the ability of the reader to understand the paper (e.g., reference errors, predication), only remarking on them once or twice in a paper. If it was a recurrent thing, I might highlight several instances (and I mean literally highlight) of a specific problem. I might ask them to go to the Writing Center or come to office hours, so we could go over it.
But, and this is important, I gave them a specific task on which they should focus. Please don’t send a student to the Writing Center telling them to work on “grammar.” It’s fine to tell them to go to the Writing Center to revise the sentences you’ve marked, or to reduce passive voice (but please make sure it’s passive voice that you mean, and not progressive or passive agency). Telling a student to work on “grammar” is like saying a paper is “good”—what does that mean?
I didn’t insist that students write in SEAE—that is, I didn’t grade them on it. I graded on clarity, and let students know about things that other people might consider errors (e.g., sentence fragments). And that seems to me a reasonable way to handle those things. If a student wants to get better at SEAE (and some students do), then I’d make an effort to comment more about sentence-level characteristics. My department happened to have a really good class in which the prescriptive/descriptive grammar issue was discussed at length, so students who really wanted to geek out on grammar could do it.
I think the important point is that students should retain agency. The criticism that a lot of people make about not teaching SEAE is that we’re in a racist society, and students who speak or write in a stigmatized dialect will be materially hurt. Well, okay, but I don’t see how materially hurting them now (in the form of bad grades) is helping the situation. It’s possible to remark on variations from SEAE without grading a student down for them. It’s also possible to do what the student wants in that regard, such as not remark on them.
Too many people have the fantasy of a class that gets rid of all the things we don’t want to deal with in students. Students should come to our class clean behind the ears, so that…what? So we don’t have to teach?
[1] I love that people share my blog posts, and I know that means people read them who don’t know who I am. Someone criticized my “casual” use of the term Nazi, and that’s a completely legit criticism—people do throw the term around–but it isn’t casual at all for me. Given the work I do, I would obviously never use that term without a lot of thought. People who rant about pronouncing “ask” as “aks,” make a big deal about double negatives, or, in other words, focus on aspects of Black English, aren’t just prescriptivists (we’re all prescriptivists, but that’s a different post)—they’re just people who want to believe that racist hierarchies are ontologically grounded, citing pseudo-intellectual and racist bullshit. Kind of like the Nazis. I call them Nazis because I take Nazis very seriously, and I take very seriously the damage done by the pseudo-intellectual framing of SEAE as a better dialect.
[2] My crank theory is that metacognition is ethical. I don’t see how one could think about thinking without perspective-shifting—would I think this was a good way of thinking if someone else thought this way? And, once you’re there, you’re in the realm of ethics.