Reading Response, 9/9 (despite the date posted)

I began this post as a comment on Liz’s, but as it ballooned more and more out of control, I decided to post it on its own merits. Any direct address of Liz or her article should be considered vestigial elements of its first conception, just like a child with a tail or six fingers.

That being said, I wanted to piggyback off some of the things that Liz said. First, yes, I agree with you Liz insofar as Zebroski makes a solid point in indicating the wide applicability and even necessity of theoretical practice* in an instructive setting. My understanding of this, flawed though it may be, is that composition instruction ultimately fails when it views the writing process merely as a means to an end; that is to say, when the classroom motto is "Write better so you get better grades." Zebroski's suggestion, and one that I imagine we all have to at least tip our hats to, is that the writing process is an ends unto itself. "Write better because it expands you as a human being" says the Zebroskian classroom.

I find this supremely enriching, in that it deviates from the perception of English instruction as a self-sustaining system of do's and do-not's. While the embittered practicalist in me must admit that, at some level, all writing instruction inevitably rests in some way on "Write this essay so you don't fail the next essay you're assigned," by hitching our wagon to the theory of communicative literary instruction our field becomes less of an abstraction and more of a critical device for personal exploration and expression.

Now, this is not to say that the selection from Zebroski is without its faults. Perhaps ironically, I find that his theoretical entreaties seem solid, but his suggestions for practical applications of these notions leave me somewhat cold. I disagree with Liz about the ethnographic writing suggestion, in that I think understanding the "otherness" of a foreign culture is entirely the point of an exercise like that. Like you said, of course, a great deal of the impact of the activity would depend on the approach of the instructor. David Crystal said that when "we learn a new lexeme, we always make at least two gains in precision" (198), and I think that that sentiment expands easily to the field of expressive writing as well. I think that an assignment that forces a student to expand their understanding of a new group will by rights refine the role co (eat your heart out, David Crystal's Chapter 48) plays in hir own groups. Naturally, it would be counter-productive to have this devolve into a "report on the inferior ______ people, by Garth, the far superior white male," but a reflective examination of one individual’s perhaps foreign way of life could be immensely formative as an experience for a young writer.

I find myself differing perhaps most substantially from Zebroski on the issue of his metawriting exercises. At the risk of whiplash as I pull a rather hasty about-face, this exercise seems too heavily steeped in theory without any practical applicability to provide immediate relevance to the students participating in it. While I certainly agree that composition needs to free itself from this requirement for immediate applicability, extended theoretical self-reflection, especially among students whose relationship with the writing process may be less than sterling, seems at risk of being overly contemplative at length. An easy fix to this would be to have a thematic link that draws more abstract assignments like this clearly and traceably towards more measurable goals and tasks, in such a way that the process of self-reflection can be seen more clearly as an essential element, but not entirety, of the writing process. Also, the use of themes will be a helpful defense if Zebroski happens to visit your classroom and takes issue with your interpretation of his work.

To touch briefly on the Williamson reading, I find it certainly to be an appropriate supplement to Zebroski’s writing, though it suffers some similar shortcomings. Where is the line drawn between theoretical integrity and practical necessity? To tie more directly to the course material, what does Williamson propose we as teachers do about “ain’t”? If it is only being excluded from academic work because it’s been identified as a stigmatized form for that context, what will be the effect when that error ceases to be corrected? Now, this is not to say that I am necessarily against relaxing our grip on this notion of “correct” English, but there are certainly a fair number of conventions expected of academic speech that, like panda bears, will disappear if we stop forcibly reproducing them. I ‘m not sure if Williamson’s work is prepared to stand up to the professional repercussions it seems to be presenting here. Its wholesale adoption by the community at large would be nothing short of revolutionary. How artificial do we want professional language to sound? More directly, if we were to relax our grip on the reins of the language, how sure are we that that ain’t a good thing?

* Of course, if theory, like Zebroski tells us, "is practice," perhaps I'm repeating myself by saying "practice practice.**

** Then again, maybe the real time waster is these worthless footnotes. Sorry guys.