The Results are in . . .

The results are in for the BST writing test for our sophomores. And it goes to show you how much I know. I really struggled with my Comp I classes this year. I had a few exceptional writers, but more than ever I felt like there were a large number of unmotivated, careless writers. You know the kind - get it done and turn it in and then hope for the best. No, change that. They don’t hope for the best. They expect the best simply because they did it. It’s that entitlement issue again (and I think of the portly sophomore I saw at the start of the year whose shirt read “Genius by Birth; Slacker by Choice.”

But only ten students failed the test. The vast majority passed. Shows you how much I really know. Moreover, upon looking at which students passed, I was amazed at many who barely made it through my Comp I class, scored way above what I expected. Two students in particular, both in different sections of the class, struggled all year. Now that I think about it, one, in fact, failed Comp I (this was mostly due to the fact that he was sent to Juvenile detention part way through the quarter and also due to his love of the internet so he rarely got anything actually written). But the one who barely made it scored a 5.0 and the one who failed was right behind with a 4.5. I contrasted those scores with the other students who passed Comp I with flying colors and who I felt were superb writings. Some did score in the 4.5 - 5.0 range (I even had one pull off a 5.5), but many scored in the 3.0 range - just average. Again, it shows you what I know.

Now what I’m hoping to do with this information, which will actually be useful - unlike the RU Ready info, is obtain copies of the essays (I’d like to get copies of them all - but I won’t hold my breath) - or at least obtain copies of a variety of essays ranging from 2.0 all the way up to one that scored a 6.0 (though I think it was taken by a senior). Then I’d like to get those essays onto a disk and use them in my Comp classes next year. I’d like to examine what makes a 2.0 essay and what makes a 5.5 essay. With a computer and projector, we could take a 2.0 and try to revise it into a 5.5 essay.

I am also interested in seeing how much value the test scorers gave to form and grammatical correctness. Then I’d like to see how much value they gave to voice and style and personality. I know from past essays a normal topic sentence, several supporting sentences, and a concluding sentence type essay will get at least a 3.0. But I’m wondering if students add voice and style to that, how much will their score improve. And I’d like to see what a very personal and stylized piece that is lacking a clear form would score.

I’m getting fired up about this now.

I was talking with a colleague and she told me about how one of my teaching idols (who retired after my first year here) was a strict proponent of the formulaic theme. That doesn’t surprise me. And the students who took his classes and went off to college all did very well and often remarked how they were surprised by how many of their college peers really didn’t know how to write.

This interests me because I had the opposite experience.

For several quarters in college, I was indoctrinated into the thesis support/formulaic approach. This totally changed my writing. I remember a paper for Jerry Schnable in which I just blathered my way around my topic and I scored a B- for a final grade (I think he gave it to me because I put so much effort into it). A year later, after having discovered the thesis support system, I took another one of his classes and again submitted my paper. I was dreading the results, but it came back with a glowing “100/100 A” on it (I still have that paper too). But the key this time was that I had done a thesis support outline first and followed that throughout (and in fact the paper unraveled about five pages in - but I suspect he just read the intro, thesis, and my topic sentences and checked for correct citation and never caught on that it kind of fell apart toward the end). So I soon mastered that form. Later in Dr. Michael’s class, one of the best comments I received - and I’m looking at the paper right now (I have it stored in a folder in my desk reserved for my favorite old essays) that reads “Excellent introductory paragraph.” I remember being particularly proud of the thesis - for it showed off all that I had learned about grammar and structure -
While each group, Tam and Chinh, and Baroka and Lakunle, and their methods, old traditions verse new practices, differ, they each, however, do have on commonality: to ‘colonize’ Hang and Sidi.” I remember being very happy that I could embed all those phrases (and I even pulled of a colon!) in that thesis.

Now I look at it and thing “God, that’s wordy!” But the professor loved it. I was swept up in the world of academic jargon. The more clauses and phrases I could pack into a sentence, the better it was going to be. I guess somebody thought I knew what I was talking about.

But while I was falling in love with this complex, formulaic writing style, I also had some professors who pushed me away from that and forced me into a more natural form of writing. And I was lucky they did. For in their classes my voice emerged somehow from all those compound complex sentences I loved to create. Here is a comment from an essay from a methods class where I was encouraged to move away from the thesis-support format: “--This isn’t a unified essay with a clear conclusion. It’s better than that. This is full of smart things and is a great pleasure to read. I wouldn’t trade that for a conventional essay.” (Now that I read that again, I find it ironic just how often I end up writing something similar to that in many of the essays I now read!)

And here’s another from a poetry class - there was no unity whatsoever in this paper. It was me trying to make sense of the poems I was assigned. So in a real way what the paper became was my “thinking out” the poems and making meaning from them. Here is one comment: “You have a fine analytical mind and, I might add, an ease with the ‘logic’ of metaphor. Consequently, you thing/imagine/and articulate -- even lyrically -- as you ‘read’ the poems.” Now the paper was anything but analytical. But I had a great time writing it. I wasn’t out to prove anything. I was just out to show my thinking. That is I didn’t start with a thesis (which would have been impossible because I hadn’t done the thinking - or writing (since I always think best through writing - just see that jumbled blog entry for an example of that) so I couldn’t possibly have conceived a thesis. Yet, the professor thought it was analytical.

From then on, I began to see that writing jumbo sized sentences wasn’t where it was at for me as a writer. Yeah, I could pepper a paper with words like ‘myriad,’ ‘juxtaposition,’ ‘puerile,’ and my old favorites ‘propitiation’ and ‘vouchsafe,’ but what did that matter?

It was at this point that it hit me: I was kind of writing out of order. For Dr. Michael’s and Jerry Schnable's classes I did a lot of ‘exploratory’ writing - which William Zeigler notes as being the first part of the scientific model of thesis and support. This is the messy stuff that scientists go through. It’s all the work that leads up to the point where they can formulate their ideas into a thesis. But in most of my college classes, the professors neglected this side of the model. They focused instead just on the second half of the model - exposition - or proving the thesis.

It’s laughable now how much I struggled to catch on to this system. I’d sit in class and read examples of papers with these great theses and think, “God are they smart! How could they come up with that?” But it’s laughable because I was never shown the exploratory side of writing in college. Sure I was told to brainstorm or outline, but it seemed to be a given that if you thought hard enough or read closely enough - POOF - a damned thesis would pop right into your brain. Well, that never happened to me.

So I was stuck writing these exploratory type essays in which I thought my way around a problem. For example, (to refer to the thesis for the paper done in Dr. Michael’s class) I wrote a whole essay about how the characters interacted with other characters and how, ultimately, they were both manipulated by the older antagonists in the novel and play. Then I took that essay and chopped it up and wrenched it into a thesis support form - got rid of all the personal pronouns and humor I had injected into it - and handed it in.

I was finally able to break free from the thesis support system in my final methods class. There I was encouraged to explore in my essays. The professor was more interested in what I had to think than what I had to prove. And my writing took off. In one paper I even experimented with the braided essay format - though I had no idea what that was at the time. I just knew that I had written an earlier essay that I wanted to include in my methods essay. Now this type of thinking is utterly taboo in most traditional English courses that I had taken. But in this class that kind of experimentation was encouraged. So I took that former essay and embedded it right into my paper. Here is the final comment - “this is a marvelous set of essays integrated into one essay of great polish. It rewards rereading. I’ve singled out one of the essays that might well be a piece to consider submitting to a magazine.” Sure enough, the piece that was encouraged to be published was the essay I embedded (and would have been left out in a more traditional class).

So I left college with a love for writing and I began teaching. And my love for writing was completely drubbed out of me. For whatever reason, whether it was out of fear, stupidity, department policy, lack of preparation, or some evil influence, whatever it was, I began teaching writing in the thesis-support mode. I made up great diagrams for the essays. I hung up posters celebrating the five paragraph theme. I told my students if you could mast writing a paragraph (clear topic sentence, three lucid supporting sentences, and one strong concluding sentence) then they could simply expand that later in their writing careers into a five paragraph theme. And I actually taught that way! Even though I knew better.

Things came to a head during my third year. I was teaching a Comm 10 class. They were writing personal essays about rites of passage. One student wrote about killing his first deer. And it would have been a great essay (he ended up shooting a cow), but I had him so screwed up that he included a thesis (in a personal essay of all things! What the hell was I doing to these poor kids) that went something like this - “Killing my first ‘deer’ was a rite of passage for me because it made me look foolish, my father was disappointed in me, and I learned an important lesson.” I remember reading the essay - well, grading it really - checking that his second paragraph had a clear topic sentence tying in to the first issue stated in his thesis (making himself look foolish), checking that he had enough sentences to support it and a neat concluding paragraph -- but as I was grading it, the story caught me by surprise and I ended up ‘reading’ the essay. I was laughing out loud by the time I finished it. The story was great. But yet it got in the way of the form. So I decided then to chuck the whole damn system. I still use that essay as an example of what I loath the five paragraph theme. Now I find myself stomping out the five paragraph theme in my all of my students’ essays like a man trying to stomp out brush fires to prevent an inferno. Whenever I get a thesis statement in a narrative, instead of encouraging as I did with the poor ‘deer’ hunting rite of passage essay, now I crush it. What I wouldn’t give to be able to go back to that essay and tell the writer, “If you do a good enough job showing us HOW you looked foolish, HOW you let your Dad down, and WHAT you learned, you don’t have to tell us about it in a generic thesis.”

Yeah, it teaches structure. But it kills narrative. And our world is built on narratives. I mean dear reader you won’t go home tonight and say to your wife or husband, “now the three reasons we should go out to eat tonight are . . .” or “we should spend the day at the lake because it will be warm, we need to get away, and we need to clean out the cabin.” The sad truth is stated over and over again in comp theory - and the research shows this again and again - the five paragraph theme exists nowhere except in the world of research papers and theses. And almost no one reads those.

Fortunately, I went back to grad school. I walked in still advocating the five paragraph thesis support form. And I was damn near thrown out! What a wake up call. Here were professors and experts who studied how people write best and how people learn best. And they were telling me that the five paragraph thesis was not what they wanted to see in a class. I was amazed. And I’ve never been the same.