Writing as Process

Abstract

A committee meeting was in progress. We sat on our badly varnished, scarred chairs, scratching at pub licity copy. The composition teachers of the country were to meet in the spring, and our job was to lure as many as possible to the conference; for the university at which we taught was the sponsoring institution. In the midst of our pencil nibbling, one fellow coughed softly and said: I'm trying to get across, very subtly, of course, the thought that teaching comp is pretty dreary stuff. It's not what I want to be doing, you know. I hope they get the message. I sat back, chagrined. I had been guilty of enthusiasm; it was too late to pretend otherwise. Slowly, however, my embarrassment has turned to anger?at myself, for having allowed that disdainful sniff to unsettle me, and at my profession, for having allowed the poisonous mist of dis dain to settle over the teaching of writing at the college level. To have written is never disdained. Indeed, to be a good writer is to possess a highly regarded skill; but to teach the craft, especially to young and unskilled students, ah?that is a different matter. My committee companion doesn't disdain writing; he scorns the fumbling and inarticulate awkwardness of the students he has agreed to teach. He has plenty of company. We disdain them because they can't write;inevitably, ironically, and in large measure because of our disdain, they do not learn. Certainly there is justification for despair. The stack of papers on any freshman composition teacher's desk will provide abundant proof of that: the students are too inex perienced to make mature judgments; they haven't read enough good writing to have a feel for the structure of the complex sentence; they suffer from fuzzy thinking, poor logic, and consequently, from faulty transitions. Their spelling is unreliable, and although most of them begin a sentence with a capital letter and sprinkle end marks with fair accuracy, internal punctuation is a mystery. Since the