by Kim De Vries
Most writing teachers claim that they want to empower students; I say it myself and I believe it to be true. But you'd never guess that if you were a student in a college writing class. No matter how much we claim to be "de-centering authority" or encouraging students to "own their writing" or "find their true voices," at the end of term we all give grades based on how well students measure up to a fairly standard definition of good academic writing. In college good writing is usually defined as:
1.concise, without ornament
2.empirical
3.deductive
4.individualistic
5.egalitarian
6.public (institutionally sanctioned)
Many people might ask, "well, what's wrong with that? That is good writing, isn't it?" Sometimes it is. In certain places. For certain audiences. But in college writing classes, and in fact throughout the American educational system (possibly the entire Western educational system), this kind of writing is treated as naturally better. And that is not only factually untrue, but also politically, historically, dangerously naive.
The "plain" style of writing we all are encouraged to use is the product of the European Enlightenement and is rooted in the same beliefs that brought us the Capitalist systems we know and love today. It's efficient, linear, no-nonsense. Logic rules; emotion, aesthetic effects, and anything but the hardest evidence are out. College faculty agree, at least implicitly, on this definition of good writing that is freighted with the beliefs of Western capitalist culture. Some evidence of this agreement is easily visible in the documented rules of discourse we teach to students, and the way we encourage them to think about their subjects.
For example, we push students to step away from their experiences and to write from a critical distance and to analyze ideas logically. We encourage them to speak only for themselves as individuals unless they offer evidence in the institutionally sanctioned manner. Finally, while we all promote free speech and individual expression, most of the writing produced in our classes is considered public discourse, and as such must actually follow many guidelines. We don't tend to look kindly on students who ignore the assignment, or who adopt a tone not considered proper for academic work, such as overly sentimental, didactic, or impassioned. And we certainly don't want them to write the way they talk. Through these constraints, students are made to think that the kind of writing we require is naturally better than anything they already know how to do. That the kind of thinking we ask for is superior to the way they or their peers, or their families think.
For some students, learning these new rules is fairly easy because the plain style pretty well matches upper-middle class Anglo-American English; they learn it at home. However, most of my students learn Written Academic English as a second language, even if they were born and raised in America. For them, the writing class becomes a hegemonic space in which they have no choice but to be assimilated. In fact, most students cooperate because they already believe that a college degree is their pass to a better life than that of their parents. But unconsciously they resist. Their revisions go nowhere or they write around the topics I think they should explore, instead focussing on superficial details or wandering off on tangents. They just want me to spell out exactly what to write in order to get a decent grade, so they can get out of the class and move on.
Now I am faced with a choice: I can lay out the rules and make them practice, knowing that they will get through their other classes ok, churning out adequate acdemic essays, but that they won't learn all much about writing and won't get much out of writing—that's what most of them want and and that's what I am pushed toward by the ever-growing number of standardized tests. Or I can push my students to question, hoping that by the end of term they will really have thought about what they really want from college and from writing, and that they will question why they are being required to think and write in certain ways. Spending time on these big questions may leave them uncertain of grammar or of academic discourse conventions. I used to worry about whether I had the right to make that choice, but in fact no one can learn grammar in one term anyway. Now I think the best way for them to learn about how they are expected to write and think in college is to talk explicitly about why those are the rules in place; to dismantle the idea that this style is naturally superior. And I now realize that I have to make this choice not only for the students, but for us, for my school.
Because I have to wonder how much we might be missing in our writing classes and in our schools , when we insist on certain forms of writing or thinking. If we truly value individuality, should we not value the individual ways each person thinks and shares those thoughts? For all of our sakes, we must reconsider what we may lose, what richness and complexity, and insight, by shutting out of our classes anything different from our accustomed and comfortable ways.