Language Power and Consciousness

by Guy Allen, from the Bedford anthology Teaching Writing, 3rd edition

[His basic idea is the power of personal writing]

Basic training exercises include collecting and revising examples of wordiness and cliches, replacing passives and forms of "to be" with active, specific verbs, replacing vagueness with detail, building parallel phrases, sentences, and paragraphs, and transforming weak writing into strong writing. -77

In other words, the expression of the self and its experience through language somehow develops the whole person, so that the evidence of development appears in the various things people do with their lives. -89

Grammar is not a dress code. Grammar, as Chomsky and other linguists have pointed out, is the internal system that allows us to generate and understand infinite new meanings from finite vocabulary. "The normal use of language is . . . free and undetermined but yet appropriate to situations, and it is recognized as appropriate by other participants in the discourse situation" (Chomsky 56-59). The academic addiction to rigid, formal discourse situations is like putting on a tuxedo every time we step out of the house. -93

The work with language leads inevitably to work with the self and its life among other selves. The self uses sharpened language skills in a free and undetermined way to speak to itself and to speak to others. -95

The "writing problem" in our universities is really a humanism problem. We teach humanism and dodge its practice. We ask our students to study and understand meaning at the same time that we offer little opportunity for them to make original meaning. -95

Language is the tool of the human mind, whatever the mind's enterprise. Language can help us to live unconsciously, or it can help us to live consciously. -96

From "Clueless in Academe"

This is from the anthology, Teaching Composition, by Bedford St Martin...

[Discussing what unites different fields]
Whatever the differences between their specialized jargons, they have all learned to play the following game: listen closely to others, summarize them in a recognizable way, and make your own relevant argument. This argument literacy, the ability to listen, summarize, and respond, is rightly viewed as central to being educated. - 33-34

In giving priority to ideas and arguments, however, I don't minimize the importance of qualities that can't be reduced to pure rationality--emotional intelligence, moral character, visual and aesthetic sensitivity, and creativity in storytelling and personal narrative. What I do claim is that training in these qualities will be incomplete if students are unable to translate them into persuasive public discourse. -34

Nor does privileging argumentation in the curriculum necessarily represent the ethnocentric or racist bias that some make it out to be. On the contrary, since effective argument starts with attentive listening, training in argument is central to multicultural understanding and respect for otherness. -34

Given the genius-worship that runs through our culture, academics are often admired for speaking above other people's heads, but knowing this fact somehow doesn't save me from embarrassment when I fumble painfully to explain what I do to nonacademic relatives and friends. -35

Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. -39

In my educational writing, I am best known for the argument that the wisest response we can make to the philosophical and social conflicts that have disrupted education is to "teach the conflicts' themselves, to bring controversy to the center of the academic curriculum. -41

. . . the ultimate motivation of my argument for teaching the conflicts is the need to clarify academic culture, not just to resolve spats among academics or cultural factions. -41

We take for granted, for example, that reflecting in a self-conscious way about experience--"intellectualizing"-- is something our students naturally see the point of and way to learn to do better. -43

The idea that, below their apparent surface, texts harbor deep meanings that cry out for interpretation, analysis, and debate is one of those assumptions that seems so normal once we are socialized into academia that we forget how counterintuitive it can be. -45

If what authors intend does not seem a genuine problem, then making a problem of unintended psychological or social meanings in texts seems all the more patently a waste of time. -47

Why would any sane person go out of his or her way to say things that are "arguable"? Just as common sense suggests that it is foolish to invent problems that did not previously exist, it also suggests that the point of writing and speaking is to make statements that nobody is likely to dispute. -50

The Making of Meaning, Ann Berthoff

This is a selection from a longer work.

From Teaching Composition: Background Readings, 3rd Ed, Bedford/St Martins

Thus writing is not like cooking a particular dish; writing may resemble, at one stage or another, some phase of say, making a cream sauce, but it is not sequential or "linear"; it is not measurement, followed by amalgamation and transformation. An analogy for writing that is based on culinary experience would have to include ways of calculating the guests' preferences, as well as ways of determining what's on the shelf--the cook's and the grocer's--and what's in the purse. -293

Our job is to design sequences of assignments that let our students discover what language can do, what they can do with language. Kenneth Koch got poetry out of his youngsters because he gave them syntactic structures to play with; Sylvia Aston-Warner's "key vocabulary" became what she called "the captions of the dynamic life itself"; Paulo Freire's "generative words" provided the means by which the peasants in his literacy classes--"culture circles"--could name the world. -295

Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times. -295

We know reality not directly but by means of the meanings we make. (The role of critical thinking is, of course, to review and revise those meanings.) What we know, we know in some form--perceptual or conceptual. --295

The ability to speak is innate, but language can only be realized in a social context. Dialogue, that is to say, is essential to the making of meaning and thus learning to write. -297

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp Theory, ed by Victor Villanueva ISBN: 0-8141-0976-4 by Patrick Hartwell For me the grammar issue was settled at least twenty years ago with the conclusion offered by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer in 1963: In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teacher of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing. -205 [He wants to ask 4 questions: 1. Why is the grammar issue so important? 2. How can we intelligibly define the word grammar? 3. What do findings in cognate disciplines suggest about formal grammar instruction? 4. What is our theory of language and what does it predict about the value of grammar teaching?] [He distinguishes 5 versions of grammar. #1. Native speech patterns. #2 Scientific description of native patterns #3 Linguistic etiquette #4 Grammar as taught in school #5 Stylistic advice] ... or James Briton's analogy, offered informally after a conference presentation, that grammar study would be like forcing starving people to master the use of a knife and fork before allowing them to eat. -216 

 I consider a hypothetical argument, that if Grammar 2 knowledge affected Grammar 1 performance, then linguists would be our best writers. (I can certify that they are, on the whole, not.) Such a position, after all, is only in accord with other domains of science. . . -216 

 Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other strings. -218 

 Most students, reading their writing aloud, will correct in essences all errors of spelling, grammar, and, by intonation, punctuation, but usually without noticing that what they read departs from what they wrote(22). And Richard H. Haswell ("Minimal Marking," CE, 45 [1983], 600-604) notes that his students correct 61.1% of their errors when they are identified with a simple mark in the margin rather than by error type. -223 22---- See Bartholomae, "The Study of Error"; Patrick Hartwell, "The Writing Center and the Paradoxes of Written Down Speech," in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, ed Gary Olson (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE 1984) pp 48-61; and Sondra Perl, "A Look At Basic Writers in the Process of Composing," in Basic Writing: A Collection of Essays for Teachers, Researchers, and Administrators (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1980), pp13-32 

 Developing writers show the same patterning of errors, regardless of dialect. (29) Studies of reading and of writing suggest that surface features of spoken dialect are simply irrelevant to mastering pring literacy. Print is a complex cultural code--or better yet, a system of codes-- and my bet is that, regardless of instruction, one masters those codfes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization. -224 

 Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form. -225

Inventing the University

INVENTING THE UNIVERSITY

by David Bartholomae, anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp, Victor Villanueva Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion---invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the particular ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. -623 

... he has to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language while finding some compromise between idiosyncrasy, a personal history, on the one hand, and the requirements of convention, the history of the discipline, on the other hand. -624 This is, however, one of the most important characteristic slips of basic writers. (I use the term "basic writers" to refer to university students traditionally placed in remedial composition courses.) It is very have for them to take on the role--the voice, the persona-- of an authority whose authority is rooted in scholarship, analysis, or research. -625 

 Linda Flower has argued that the difficulty inexperienced writers have with writing can be understood as a difficulty in negotiating the transition between "writer based" and "reader-based" prose. -627 [Bartholamae thinks this advice is unhelpful, considering how little they really know about the reader and his/her discourse conventions]. Our students, I've said, have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were easily or comfortably one with their audience. -628 

 What these assignments fail to address is the central problem of academic writing, where a student must assume the right of speaking to someone who knows more about baseball or "To His Coy Mistriss" than the student does, a reader for whom the general commonplaces and the readily available utterances about a subject are inadequate. -629 

 [B argues for the importance of "academic writing" as writing for a discourse community, not an expressivist interpretation.] [Here he is reacting to a Cognitive Process theory , an expressivist type that places meaning in the writer, expressed by language.] The act of writing, here, has a personal, cognitive history but not a history as a text, as a text that is made possible by prior texts. When located in the perspective afforded by prior texts, writing is seen to exist separate from the writer and his intentions, it is seen i nth e context of other articles in Seventeen, of all articles written for or about women, of all articles written about English teaching, and so on. Reading research has made it possible to say that these prior texts, or a reader's experience with these prior texts, have bearing on how the text is read. -630 And since students assume privilege by locating themselves within the discourse of

The Elements of Teaching Writing

The Elements of Teaching Writing Quotes

Gottschalk, Katherine, and Keith Hjortshoj. The Elements of Teaching Writing A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines (Bedford/St. Martin's Professional Resources). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003. Print. Educational research indicates that many factors, all related to language use, limit amounts and types of learning: =Even if they are alert, students are not able to sustain attention to continuous lectures beyond ten or fifteen minutes at a time. They are most attentive at the beginning and end of alecture period and most likely to miss information in the middle. =Partly because they have to write and listen at once, attentive students typically record less than half of the most important information and ideas in a lecture. =If they have not recorded this material in a form that will restore understanding, students will quickly forget most of what they learned in class. =This weakness of short term memory applies also to reading. UNless students write notes or papers about reading assignments or talk about them in discussions, they will quickly forget most of what they read. =If they are trying to record and recall large amounts of material, students are most likely to miss the connections among facts, concepts, and viewpoints. Analysis, synthesis, critical thinking, the application of concepts to new cases, and other complex forms of learning all conflict to some extent with the goals of extensive coverage. -18-19 

 Asking a student who has read only one text in a field to critique its strengths and weaknesses may be asking for the impossible. -41 

 According to the study [A Harvard University one on student writers], some of the most useful types of [teacher] comments were =Questions that stimulated further thought. =Brief summaries of what the reader got out of the paper =Descriptions of difficulties the reader encountered. -Even highly critical feedback that was constructive and respectful. -53 

 Give reading essays priority over grading them. -58 

 According to Connors and Lunsford's extensive 1988 study, the twenty errors occurring most commonly in student essays are as follows, in descending order of frequency. 

     We have supplied short examples for some errors and discuss others in the paragraphs that follow. 1. No comma after introductory element. [Well it wasn't really true.] 2. Vague pronoun reference [See discussion below.] 3. No comma in compound sentence [I like to eat but I hate to gain weight.] 4. Wrong word [His F in math enhanced his alarm about his D in chem.] 5. No comma with nonrestrictive element. [See discussion below.] 6. Wrong or missing inflected verb endings [I use to go often to town.] 7. Wrong or missing preposition (Moosewood Restaurant is located at Ithaca.] 8. Comma splice [See discussion below.] 9. Possessive apostrophe [Student's backpacks weigh far too much.] 10. Tense shift [I was happily watching TV when suddenly my sister attacks me.] 11. Unnecessary shift in person (pronoun) [When one is tired, you should sleep.] 12. Sentence fragment [See discussion below.] 13. Wrong tense or verb form [I would not have said that if I thought it would shocked her.] 14. Subject-verb agreement [Having many close friends, especially if you've known them for a long time, are a great help in times of trouble.] 15. Lack of a comma in a series [Students eat, sleep, and do homework.] 16. Pronoun agreement [See discussion below.] 17. Unnecessary comma(s) with restrictive element [The novel, that my teacher assigned, was very boring.] 18. Run-on or fused sentence [He loved the seminar he even loved the readings.] 19. Dangling or misplaced modifier [After being put to sleep, a small incision is made below the navel.] 20. Its/it's error [Its a splendid day for everyone.] -98

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print. ... the very term "pedagogy," as my good friend and colleague Panagiota Gounari explains it, has Greek roots, meaning "to lead a child" from pais: child and ago: to lead). Thus, as the therm "pedagogy" illustrates, education is inherently directive and must always be transformative. -25 

 In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. -45 

 True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. -45 

 Conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression. Formerly, they could eat dress, wear shoes, be educated, travel, and hear Beethoven: while millions did not eat, had no clothes or shoes, neither studied nor traveled, much less listened to Beethoven. Any restriction on this way of life, in the name of the rights of the community, appears to the former oppressors as a profound violation of their individual rights--although they had no respect for the millions who suffered and died of hunger, pain, sorrow, and despair. -57 

 [attitudes of the banking concept of education] (a) the teacher techers and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen--meekly; (e) the disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. -73 

 Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. Their life is not one of risk-taking, for they are not aware of taking risks. Risks are not challenges perceived upon reflection, but merely "noted" by the signs which indicate them; they accordingly do not require decision-making responses. -98 

As each person, in his decoding essay, relates how he perceived or felt a certain occurrence or situation, his exposition challenges all the other decoders by re-presenting to them the same reality upon which they have themselves been intent. -112 The first requirement is that these codifications must necessarily represent situations familiar to the individuals whose thematics are being examined, so that they can easily recognize the situations (and this their own relation to them). -114 The theme of development, for example, is especially appropriate to the field of economics, but not exclusively so. This theme would also be focalized by sociology, anthropology, and social psychology (fields concerned with cultural change and with the modification of attitudes and values--questions which are equally relevant to a philosophy of development). It would be focalized by political science (a field concerned with the decisions which involve development), by education, and so forth. In this way, the themes which characterize a totality will never be approached rigidly. -120 

 It is accomplished by the oppressors' depositing myths indispensible to the preservation of the status quo: for example, the myth that the oppressive order is a "free society": the myth that all persons are free to work where they wish, that if they don't like their boss they can leave him and look for another job; the myth that this order respects human rights and is therefore worthy of esteem; the myth that anyone who is industrious can become an entrepreneur--worse yet, the myth that the street vendor is as much an entrepreneur as the owner of a large factory; the myth of the universal right of education, when of all the Brazilian children who enter primary schools only a tiny fraction ever reach the university; the myth of the equality of all individuals, when the question: "Do you know who you're talking to?" is still current among us; the myth of the heroism of the oppressor classes as defenders of "Western Christian civilization" against "materialist barbarism"; the myth of the charity and generosity of the elites, when what they really do as a class is to foster selective "good deeds" (subsequently elaborated into the myth of "disinterested aid," which on the international level was severely criticized by Pope John XXII); -140 In the theory of antidialogical action, conquest (as its primary characteristic) invovles a Subject who conquers another person and transforms her or him into a "thing." In the dialogical theory of action. Subjects meet in cooperation in order to transform the world. -167 In cultural invasion, the actors draw the thematic content of their action from their own values and ideology: their starting point is their own world, from which they enter the world of those they invade. In cultural synthesis, the actors who come from "another world" to the world of the people do so not as invaders. They do not come to teach or to transmit or to give anythign, but rather to learn with the people, about the people's world. -180