From Self-Analysis to Academic Analysis: An Approach to Expository Writing

Abstract

THE TEACHING OF WRITING has long been divided into creative writing and expository writing courses, the one often stereotyped by students as imaginative and expressive, and the other as prescriptive and rigid. Of course, those of us who teach expository writing insist that we are not teaching mechanical rules but are teaching our students to think creatively. However, too often we discover that the energetic involvement we see when they express their personal experiences in the story and poem of a creative writing course is absent when they are asked to write an extended academic essay or paper. In fact, in order to follow the organizational rules we have taught them, students may deliberately select a simple topic with an obvious thesis, which can then be divided easily into three or four sub-topics and supported with details. More disturbing, they never learn the painstaking, but exciting, process of analysis of specific material which must occur before a thesis or an understanding of central meaning can emerge. Yet if we are to teach them skills that will enable them to write good expository papers in history, psychology, or political science, they must understand the actual process of analysis. Some of us, seeing the unenthusiastic and mechanical response to an essay assignment, rush to assign journal entries, descriptive sketches and poems, and watch as our students' interest grows intense and their writing becomes more fluent and more perceptive. Although these creative writing experiences do generate interest and give students confidence, the resultant fluency and perception are rarely transferable to more structured academic papers. In fact, the student who is able to write a detailed, evocative descriptive paragraph based on personal experience is often reduced to rudimentary prose when writing an academic paper. Troubled by this contradiction, I designed an expository writing course that uses the student's personal experience not only to stimulate intense interest in selfexpression as these creative writing assignments do, but also to stimulate disciplined analytical thinking that the expository writing assignments demand. In this course, students move from close analysis of aspects of their personal experience to analysis of academic material. They discover for themselves those thought processes which underlie the rules of paper organization we teach in expository writing courses.