Working with Advanced Writers

Abstract

and passive style that virtually excludes people from their writing. In their prose, decisions are made and opportunities exist for development of business. Paula Johnson, director of writing program at Yale for several years, found that freshmen writers at Yale excelled at this impersonal style, 1 and research of Andrea Lunsford, director of writing at University of British Columbia, confirms Johnson's observations. In analyzing writing samples of entering freshmen, Lunsford found that writers whom essay evaluators classified as skilled used many more abstract words and nominalizations than did unskilled writers; they also used far fewer personal pronouns. 2 Fourth, advanced students' writing is often unrealistically ambitious. They are apt to tackle topics that are much too broad, giving their papers titles like American Sense of Humor, and Problem of Cheating in College, and beginning their papers with statements of commitment that they could not fulfill in less than 25 or 30 pages. They seem unaware of responsibilities such topics impose on them. Graduate students are a little more realistic, but they too are likely to overestimate greatly how much they can handle responsibly in a short paper. Fifth, papers of advanced writers tend to be long on generalizations and short on specifics. So, of course, do those of beginning writers, but advanced writers seem even more prone to expect to pass smoothly phrased and correctly written generalizations off as genuine discourse. Lunsford's study supports this observation. She noted that a major difference between content of essays of basic writers and those of skilled writers was that basic writers tended to draw on concrete personal experience when writing about topics such as advertising, but skilled writers expressed their ideas mostly in generalities and high level abstractions. Paula Johnson noted same pattern. Sixth, even advanced college writers seem to have almost no sense of audience when they write. Most of their papers are written solely for teacher in role of judge and examiner, or they are what I call blue sky papers, written to some unidentified and faceless person. Even these advanced writers never seem to have considered what preconceptions their readers might bring to a text or what readers might expect of them as a writer. But this is not surprising since most of these advanced students tell me that they have never before had a composition teacher who even mentioned audience, much less stressed it as an important component of writing situation. Even my graduate students have had almost no experience in analysis of audience. The final product of these advanced writers, then, is apt to be wordy, dull, sometimes superficial, but mechanically correct writing. They display what Paula Johnson calls a flat competence; what they do not have is what Wayne Booth calls the rhetorical stance.'3 That is, they reveal no sense of audience for their writing, they show no sense of purpose except to fill a requirement, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.181 on Thu, 29 Sep 2016 05:18:20 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Working with Advanced Writers 199 and they have no persona or voice. Their writing reveals nothing of themselves. To me, this lack of what Donald Stewart and others have called the authentic voice emerges as chief problem of most advanced writers. Almost all of their other problems-wordiness, impersonal style, excessive generalities, fuzzy diction, bland verbs and ponderous nominalizations, and a fondness for conventional wisdom-stem from this central problem. Because these students have no sense of audience other than their teachers, and because they are often wary and distrustful of that audience, they are reluctant to let their real personalities show through their writing. As a result, when they write they often use language not as a means for communicating about something that genuinely interests them, but as a barrier. They create masks to keep from exposing vulnerable real self. Sometimes mask is that of stodgy bureaucrat, spouting jargon and convoluted sentences; sometimes it is that of cheerleader, dazzling reader with flashy trivia and words like fantastic and incredible; sometimes students take on role of pedantic scholar, using big words to impress and intimidate; and sometimes they assume guise of good and earnest citizen expressing virtuous senti-