Ken Macrorie Research Articles

On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page

On Walking and Thinking: Two Walks across the Page

The Hidden Ethos Inside Process Pedagogy

The outsider ethos established by Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and Donald Murray in their early books is a driving force behind process pedagogy. Close textual analysis of these theorists can help writing instructors better understand the role of ethos in process pedagogy and in their own teaching.

Instructional Note: Resurrecting the I-Search: Engaging Students in Meaningful Scholarship

The intersection of the call for civic engagement and the call for student scholars at the center of writing pedagogy, along with the daunting challenge of introducing beginning students to the demands and rewards of academic writing, is an ideal location for a revival of Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper.

English Composition as a Happening (review)

More than ten years ago, the late James Berlin—a leading advocate of a cultural studies approach to composition and an outspoken opponent of expressivism—remarked to me that what we have come to know as expressivist theories in composition are only a small part of a much wider experimentation, some of which was overtly political, in the late 60s and early 70s. When I began reading Geoffrey Sirc's English Composition as a Happening, I was hoping to learn more about that range of experiment. However, while there is much discussion of the avant garde traditions in the visual arts that produced "happenings" in the 1960s, and about work in composition that Sirc connects to these traditions, there is almost nothing about overtly political experiments in composition or about the social forces of the 1960s that informed the context in which teachers such as Ken Macrorie and William Coles developed an alternative to academic discourse. Sirc's book is offbeat, eccentric, and not all that reader-friendly to scholars who are not particularly interested in aesthetic debates in the visual arts. Nevertheless, for all its quirkiness, Sirc's book is too interesting to ignore.

Reviews: Books That Have Stood the Test of Time

Reviews five books: Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, by Mina Shaughnessy; Telling Writing, by Ken Macrorie; Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Structured Reading, by Lynn Quitman Troyka and Joseph W. Thweatt; Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, by Stephen D. Krashen.

From Mickey Mouse to Marilyn Manson: A Search Experience

Describes the Multiple Intelligence search (used by the author with 6th and 9th graders) based on Ken Macrorie’s “I-Search” and Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Describes the process as students conducted a search using library resources and technology; became experts on topics they are passionate about; created a professional presentation; and explored topics through multiple intelligences.

Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal

The recognition of the study of writing as an important area of research within English in North America has also led to a questioning of its theoretical underpinnings. While the teaching of writing has achieved programmatic or departmental status at many colleges and universities, voices from outside and from within the ranks question whether a discipline devoted to the study of writing exists or if those who teach writing simply assume it exists because they share common problems and interests. The convenient landmark for disciplinary historians is the Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer review of the field in 1963, a survey that found a legion of pedagogical studies of writing, most lacking any broad theoretical notion of writing abilities or even awareness of similar existing studies. Contemporary reviewers of writing research point out how much happened in the years that followed, but no development has been more influential than the emphasis on writing as a process. For the last few years, Richard Young's and Maxine Hairston's accounts of the process movement as a Kuhnian paradigm shift have served as justifications for disciplinary status. Even though the claim of a paradigm shift is now viewed by some as an overstatement, it is evident that many writing teachers in grade schools, high schools, and colleges have internalized process assumptions. In the most optimistic visions, writing teachers K-13 march happily under the process banner. Slogans such as revising is good for you are repeated in nearly every college writing textbook as well as in many secondary and elementary classrooms. Paradigm, pre-paradigm, or no paradigm, nearly everyone seems to agree that writing as a process is good and current-traditional rhetoric is bad. It would seem, therefore, that any disciplinary claims must be based on some shared definition of process. The problem, of course, is that conceptions of writing as a process vary from theorist to theorist. Commentators on the process movement (e.g., Berlin, Writing Instruction) now assume at least two major perspectives on composing, an expressive view including the work of authentic voice proponents such as William Coles, Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Donald Stewart, and a cognitive view including the research of those who analyze composing processes such as

Modern use of theprogymnasmatain teaching rhetorical invention

ly to students, but create an impression for some that the techniques are purely activities for fun, trivial interludes that don't contribute substantially to a finished paper. In addition, some teachers fear the freedom these techniques allow students and believe more controlled instruction is needed. On the other hand, structured heuristics such as Burke's Pentad and Young, Becker, and Pike's Tagmemic Grid provide systems to guide inquiry, but often are so abstract, acontextual and complex that they are difficult for students to apply and sometimes seem to intrude on rather than to aid the composing process. I Aware of problems with both approaches and having little time to present them fully, a majority of us, I would guess, take the middle road and briefly introduce students to invention techniques before quickly moving on to other concerns.2 Problems in reconciling free and structured heuristics have appeared in several articles.3 In the end, a number of theorists say that structure and freedom, reason and intuition, consciousness and unconsciousness aren't mutually exclusive: Each school of heuristics contains elements of the other. For example, free writing theorists Ken Macrorie and Peter Elbow advocate that after students use automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing, they should consciously seek patterns in their free writing-or in Elbow's words, an emerging center of gravity (20), which can then be used to generate and organize more discourse. And structuralist Richard Young points out the guiding, not dictating nature of heuristics. Young emphasizes that systematic heuristics do not always work consciously: Although more or less systematic, a heuristic search is not wholly conscious or mechanical; intuition, relevant knowledge, and skill are also necessary. A heuristic is an explicit strategy for effective guessing ( 135). Since the two approaches contain aspects of each other, there should be pedagogies that integrate both heuristics. But how? I believe a way of addressing the problem of how teachers can integrate free and structured inquiry effectively can be found in the classical progymnasmata, exercises designed to train the classical student in the art of inventio. While the classical tradition may suggest a rhetoric that is unduly prescriptive to some

On the possibility of a unified theory of composition and literature

Composition studies began to take its contemporary form only in the early 1960s. There is no unbroken theoretical tradition from classical rhetoric to the present, although scholars in composition studies have attempted to reinvent the work of earlier theorists as foundations for their own work.' Perhaps because of this discontinuity in the tradition and because composition studies has been constituted as a field so recently, there is also no dominant theory governing composition studies today. Some theorists seek the universal laws of composition, or at least a universally applicable method for investigating such laws, while others seek to understand discourse in its historical context. Not coincidentally, the period in which composition studies has developed has also been a period of theoretical upheaval in English studies, the parent discipline. Composition theorists have drawn on the contending literary theories of this period as much as on the rhetorical tradition in shaping their own debates. One reason for this influence of literary theory on composition theory is that almost every active scholar in composition studies today holds a degree in English literature, not in composition and rhetoric. This situation is changing as degree programs in composition proliferate, but the majority of faculty who design and teach in these degree programs were themselves trained as literary critics. Much important work in composition studies shows the influence of the scholars' literary training. For example, Mina Shaughnessy has subjected the essays of unsuccessful student writers to a sort of new-critical close-reading. She is thus able to show that the students' tortured sentence structures are actually attempts to make meaning, albeit meaning in an unfamiliar world, the academic. Elaine Maimon has analyzed as literary genres the various kinds of academic discourse, thus uncovering their knowledge-generating conventions. Ann Berthoff has generalized a theory of the poetic imagination, derived primarily from the work of I. A. Richards, to explain all attempts at making meaning in language. Composition specialists have not only used literary training in their own work but also urged on their students a kind of literary close-reading ability as a means to develop the students' own writing. Pedagogy such as that of Peter Elbow and Ken Macrorie assumes that the same critical eye that allows the

The Peaceable Classroom

Is it possible to teach English so that people stop killing each other? When a professor dropped this question into a colloquium for young college teachers in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, most people shuffled their feet. For Mary Rose O'Reilley it was a question that would not go away; Peaceable Classroom records one attempt to answer it. Out of her own experience, primarily as a college English teacher, she writes about certain moral connections between school and the outside world, making clear that the kind of environment created in the classroom determines a whole series of choices students make in the future, especially about issues of peace and justice. Animated throughout by the spirit of the personal essayist, Peaceable Classroom first defines a pedagogy of nonviolence and then analyzes certain contemporary approaches to rhetoric and literary studies in light of nonviolent theory. The pedagogy of Ken Macrorie, Peter Elbow, and the National Writing Project is examined. The author emphasizes that many techniques taken for granted in contemporary writing pedagogy -- such as freewriting and journaling -- are not just educational fads, but rather ways of shaping a different human being. Finding then, is not only an aspect of writing process, but a spiritual event as well. To find voice, and to mediate personal voice in a community of others, is one of the central dialectics of the peaceable classroom. The author urges teachers to foster critical encounters with the intellectual and spiritual traditions of humankind and to reclaim the revolutionary power of literature to change things.

Ken Macrorie: A Review Essay

Engfish. Freewriting. Fabulous realities. I-Search. The Third Way. These are Ken Macrorie's legacy to students and teachers of composition. Like all words, they have a history. They generate debate, testing and revising our assumptions about teaching. Sometimes people also misuse them, quoting them out of context and changing their meanings. Yet, the publication of Searching Writing: A Contextbook (Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1980), his sixth and most recent book, invites us to examine his meanings, his definitions, and to reflect on the kind of teaching Macrorie encourages. Ken Macrorie has spent some forty years trying to understand the power of the language. Although his first book, The Perceptive Writer, Reader, and Speaker (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), appeared just as the 1960s began changing people's views of American education, Macrorie's love for language and respect for those who use it well predate the 1960s by more than twenty years. To regard Macrorie's 60s English as an anachronism, too intense and too personal for today's practically minded, job-oriented students, is to misunderstand his work and its importance. We can learn much from a man whose writings reveal forty years' experience as a perceptive student, a vulnerable teacher, and a truthteller. Macrorie, born in 1918 in Moline, Illinois, tells us in his books that his mother was a librarian and his father, who loved to recite Shakespeare, worked for a farm-implement company. Macrorie grew up with parents who, although they had not attended college, liked books. For editing his high-school yearbook and earning the second-highest grades of any boy in his class, he received a two-year scholarship to attend Oberlin College. There he almost lost the scholarship when his grades slipped to a C+ average. He endured awesome one-hour voices lecturing from platforms two feet high, and he moved through the streets and buildings of Oberlin largely unperceiving, stunned by foreignness (A Vulnerable Teacher [Rochelle Park, N.J.: Hayden, 1974], p. 2). Although he tried to be a

Toward Irrational Heuristics: Freeing the Tacit Mode

JAMES KINNEY'S RECENT ARTICLE Classifying Heuristics (1979) provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of nonrational heuristics as strategies for prewriting and problem solving. Kinney argues that because intuitive and propositional thinking are both conscious, other classes of heuristics exist besides the systematic type.' Kinney's assertion parallels D. Gordon Rohmann's belief that we need nonrational answers to nonrational questions.2 In the predominately rationalist and objective climate of present academic thought, Kinney's and Rohmann's arguments will doubtless receive indignant response. This may occur even in the field of composition, where the work of intuitive theorists such as Ken Macrorie (1968), Donald Murray (1968), and Peter Elbow (1973) has added much to our knowledge of the processes of thinking, invention, and composing. We have found, however, that even when students apply the prewriting strategies suggested by these authors, their writing may become blocked. For instance, we watched an engineering student attempt to develop a paper on natural-seeming light in a dark, energy-efficient house. Our subject sat in front of her desk, a sheaf of empty paper before her. She muttered and fidgeted and tried several free writes without success. She looked at the ceiling and at the floor, and then haphazardly doodled on her paper. She became angry. Every time I begin writing I waste time, she lamented while pacing aimlessly about the silent room. The paper she wrote was without distinction-a pastiche of quotes from library sources, bland, without synthesis or imagination. Unwittingly, our student had failed to use the tacit irrational heuristics her mind and environment offered her.

Theory, Research, and Pedagogy

THE WRITING PROGRAM I WILL BE DISCUSSING here began in early seventies at a university which admits only those whose grades and test scores are in upper twelve percent of graduating high school seniors in state.1 The basic course was a two-quarter requirement for all incoming freshman. These students were quite likely to have produced writing which fit in well with expectations of their high-school English teachers. They were students who would have readily adopted a version of what Richard Lanham has called the style. The founder of our program, Lowry Pei, now at Harvard University, saw that problems that these students had with their writing were derived from their college prepatory training. They could write in style, but they had no style of their own. They could also repeat official ideas, but they had difficulty expressing their own thoughts, communicating their own perceptions of world in a written language which corresponded with their personal voice. Consequently, Pei designed a program that stressed writing of personal narratives. The program's instructors were given Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers and Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing as guides to transforming styles into personal styles. Consistency of standards and content in program was achieved not through use of a syllabus or a uniform final examination, but through weekly meetings of instructors and other members of program's staff. The instructors usually met with their students three times a week for regular classes and once every week or so individually. Writing assignments went from What I Did Last Summer to My First Drug/Sexual/Political Experience. (These were often same paper.) Many of teaching assistants practiced charismatic teaching. One had a woodblock print of Buddha with attendant Bodhisattvas. He said that yellow

An Invention Heuristic for Expressive Writing

As teachers of composition and rhetoric, most of us have come to realize the necessity and benefits of involving students in the initial process of invention-that process which actively engages students both in examining their experience for that which they find interesting and valuable, and in determining or discovering the most effective way to write about these experiences for the composing task at hand. And yet many of us have also come to recognize the reluctance and sometimes the inability of students to undertake autonomously this dual task. Students seem to have problems with both stages of invention. First, they often fail to carefully consider, weigh, and focus their experiences; and second, they fall short of working through these experiences in writing so that their writing becomes imaginative and pleasant to read. An indication that we as composition teachers realize these problems is our recent interest in invention heuristics. We have come to realize that giving students assistance at the pre-writing stages will frequently yield more insightful and imaginative compositions. Richard Larson's Discovery Through Questioning: A Plan for Teaching Rhetorical Invention;' Pike, Becker, and Young's particle, wave, and field approach;2 and Aristotle's classical topoi3 are examples of heuristic teaching aids that many of us use to provide students with such help. Although several of these heuristics can be adapted to a variety of writing aims, no one heuristic we know of is specifically designed for expressive composition. By expressive composition, we refer to the definition or discovery of personal identity and the expression of self through writing. While some dissimilarities in terminology and philosophy exist, the type of writing we are talking about here is basically the same variety of expressive composition discussed by Ken Macrorie, Lou Kelly, and Peter Elbow. It is writing frequently found in student journal entries and in polished papers that result from reworking journal material.

Practice into Theory

The term connotes, in the minds of much of the general public and some English teachers, instruction in prescribed usage. Complaints about students' grammar are often displeasure with dialectal variations, and English teachers are frequently held responsible for students' aberrations from proper language use. While questions of and attitudes toward usage remain compelling, they can obscure other important dimensions of language instruction. One of these is the issue of owning language. Publication of Students' Right to Their Own Language (1974) evoked a storm of controversy which continues to the present. I risk recollections of emotional controversies and rancorous usage disputes because this CCCC document underlines the significance of owner in language instruction. CCCC's 1972 resolution, which occasioned the 1974 publication, reads in part: We affirm the students' right to their OWN patterns and varieties of language-the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their OWN identity and style . . teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their OWN language. (emphasis mine) The prominence of in this resolution and in the accompanying explanatory document emphasizes the personal, individual nature of language. All students own an idiolect, an individual language, when they begin school, and Students' Right to Their Own Language reminds us that students needs to continue owning their language if they are to use it effectively. When students relinquish ownership of language, they lose their capacity for self expression, fall into formulaic utterances which lack authenticity and power. Many contemporary teachers of writing including William Coles, Donald Hall, and Ken Macrorie demonstrate the weaknesses of depersonalized prose, and others such as Richard Lanham and

Turning the Corner: Story to Meaning in Freshman Composition Classes

THOSE OF US WHO FOLLOW a write-from-your-own-experience philosophy in teaching Freshman Composition consistently run into one problem: a batch of trivial narrative papers to read each week. Following the lead of Ken Macrorie, Donald M. Murray, and, more recently, Joseph Comprone, we take this approach to keep our students out of the depths of the library, where they would spend hours researching a boring subject to an artificial and boring paper, and at their desks engaged in the process of writing, where they belong. Freshman writers, we believe, are apprentices in a skilled trade-writing-and like carpenters' apprentices need material to practice their trade on. But novice carpenters are not sent to the lumber mill to pick up their own materials each day. They keep hammering and sawing and all the material they need is kept at their fingertips. Freshmen have all the material they need for writing at their fingertips, too: their own experiences. Too often, however, they fashion those experiences into a dull, firstperson narrative of What I Did. The genuine significance of what they did lies undiscovered and undeveloped. The challenge for writing teachers is to help the beginners examine their experiences critically and turn the corner from simple narration to wider meanings and truth in their writing. In my freshman English courses I shy away from relevant or significant assigned paper topics. In fact I make no assignments at all other than that writing teacher's cliche, write about what you know. When I do get a paper entitled Pollution or Inflation I ask the writer how much substantial information he has to pass along to his readers. Does he really know the ins and outs of economic theory, for example? The answer is invariably no. A budding John Maynard Keynes is rare these days. Then I have two options. I can send him to the library to research inflation, in short to pick up a quick course in economics. Then he can a research paper, that exercise in footnotes and boredom. Or I can tell him, Write about something you know more about, something you've had some experience with. the next week it's My First Day in College. After three weeks of revision it's a well-honed My First Day in College. Full of hard-hitting specific detail and crisp dialogue, it still makes me yawn. I find myself repeatedly asking, So what? Simple narration, I reasoned, is the mode for best presenting unique experiences

Writing as Action in Living

matically on paper in return for the dullness of vague ideas, shadows of feelings, and well-organized trivia. Instead of living in writing and instead of seeing linguistic acts as forms of life, student writers look upon writing as mere expression. When students express themselves on paper and when they read what they wrote, along with the writing teacher's comment, Your ideas are fine, but you express them poorly, student writers wonder whether writing is worth the paper it is written on. Coached in the gimmicks of organized expression and bribed by the letter grade, even better student writers live in a frozen style comparable to a Nixon charm-a charm that ends very close to its beginning. The kind of writing Ken Macrorie called Engfish and the English teacher's belief that to write some-