More about Composition Pedagogies
Memories of Five Paragraph Essays and Essay Prompts came flooding into my mind when reading the notes and the chapter. “Describe your first pet,” or “Compare and contrast two characters from .”
When I started classes at Edison College in Florida, the English class was very different from what I had in high school. When I started over and took an English class at OSU-OKC, it was even more different. I’ve always enjoyed English classes, wishing I could take more of them instead of the difficult math classes we all had to take. However, my first degree was in Business because I didn’t realize I loved English until too far into my business program.
When I showed up at UCO, and started taking higher level English classes, bingo, I knew it was something I had a passion for (and I like ending sentences with prepositions). Now that I have started the Composition and Rhetoric graduate program, people are constantly asking me what Rhetoric is. “The field of written rhetoric, which came to be called ‘composition’” (2) makes my head swim. Rhetoric is very difficult to define to non-English majors, and I’ve been saying, “composition is more like the structure, and rhetoric is the style,” but this is untrue.
The three paragraphs above show my writing process very well. I went way off topic, but am now trying to reel it back in by referring to the above digression as an example of the topic at hand. Ok, here we go.
I was exposed to the Modes of Discourse throughout middle school and high school. In the later years of high school we were taught the Five Paragraph Essay. When I started taking English classes in college, I noticed a shift to the Process Approach, and I really liked it. I am, without a doubt, a much better writer because of the Process Approach. Flaws exist, obviously, unfortunately, but an improvement is an improvement, and let’s not kid ourselves by trying to be old school and saying the error-focus was better because kids today just don’t get it.
“It is clear that the process movement has not solved every problem” (22). The biggest flaw I see with the Process Approach is the lack of focus on the audience. “Writing is an act of communication between writer and audience” (7). I am guilty of writing without purpose, i.e. writing in a journal or writing a short story that is not to be read by anyone other than me, myself, and maybe my wife if she asks nicely. However, there is no need to teach students how to write in their diaries.
“The importance of students being able to ‘express’ their thoughts and feelings through writing” (13) is important. However, what good does it do to teach these students to express things to themselves? If said students would like to take the elective “Composition for Emos,” great, but college should be more about cultivating young people into productive and employable people. Please don’t misunderstand me, “essays concerned with personal experience and self-reflection” (13) do have value. However, we need to make sure the student is writing it for an audience.
I agree with Social Constructionism in that “writers are not autonomous individuals, distinct and removed from culture… writing is socially constructed because it both reflects and shapes thinking” (14,15). Writing should also be shared socially. This chapter, these notes, make me think students are increasingly becoming introverted writers – not wanting to share their work with the class because of embarrassment or shyness. This is a shame, because, as I quoted earlier, “writing is an act of communication between writer and audience” (7). Without the audience, students are only learning to be their own psychiatrist.
