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Elbow, PeterA Method for Teaching Writing.National Council of Teachers of English, Champaign,Ill.Nov 6811p.College English; v30 n2 p115-125 Nov 1968

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ABSTRACTThis article proposes to teach writing from the

hypothesis that true writing and good prose are only end productsrather than the primary objectives. The author suggests thatprcducing an effect in a reader and revealing the self in words areprior achievements in the process of learning to write well. Criteriafor judging writing are based largely on an attempt to achieveempirical class judgment. The method is intended principally forcollege freshmen. (Author/R1)

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COLLEGE ENGLISH

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November 1968 Number 2

A Method for Teaching WritingPETER ELBOW

The Problem"Is English really your native

tongue?" So wrote a Dartmouth Fresh-man English teacher on his student's es-say. English teachers try not to thinkabout how often this comment fits theessays they grade. My hypothesis is thatstudents seldom learn to write in thesecourses as well as one could expect themto do as natives. They write essays whichlack the skills and competences that theyseem naturally to possess in their normalcommand of language. Of course thereare important differences between whatstudents are naturally good at with lan-guage and what is required for collegeessays. But these differences are not socomplete as some maintain. There couldbe more transfer of learning than thereusually is.

Writing as Producing a Specific Effect inthe Reader

Two common criteria for judgingwriting:1) Is the writing true? does it embodygood reasoning (valid inferences and ad-equate documentation) and good ideas?

Peter Elbow teaches Humanities at tbe Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology; be is complet-ing his Ph.D. at Brandeis. He is the author ofthe 1966 English lnnitute prize essay onChaucer.

2) Is the writing good, effective, pleasingin the sense of being "good style?" Thisjudgment emphasizes form more thancontent, but not trivially: "He can saywhatever he wants, but only if it comesin clear, strong sentences; unified, co-herent paragraphs; and total essays thathang together around a clear progres-sion of ideas with a beginning, middle,and end."

But there is a third model or criterionfor judging the quality of writing:whether it produces the desired effect inthe reader. Teachers tend to use the firsttwo criteria, but this third is the onethat people exercise, whether conscious-ly or not, from the day they begin touse language at all. Everyone learned touse language almost automatically in hisfirst years and has learnedunless thereis brain damageto be very skilled atusing words to make certain things hap-pen, i.e., to make people respond to himin certain ways. He may not consciouslyattend to the effects he is trying to pro-duce nor the techniques he uses for pro-ducing them; and if he is neurotic theeffects may even be opposite to those heconsciously desires. But the skill withlanguage is invariably there. Writingcourses need to use it and transform it fornew endsnot work against it.

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116 COLLEGE ENGLISH

What is called for then is a writingcourse which ignores, at least initially, thefirst two criteriawhether the writing istrue or good style. (This would not be acourse for students who are already ex-cellent writers.) The point is to try tobuild from strength and only graduallyto proceed toward areas of weakness. Wecan try as much as possible, thereby, toavoid the common school situation inwhich the student is trying to satisfycriteria that he doesn't know, feel, orunderstand, and thus cannot really ac-cet, even if he wants to.

Judging the effect of a piece of writ-ing, however, is a subtle business. Theeffect tends to be intangible and difficultto specify. But we can simplify the mat-ter. The student writing will be designedto produce a specific piece of overt be-havior in a reader. Whether it succeedsor not is therefore readily observable.

In the first meeting of the course theteacher presents the problem of writingto the class in exactly these terms. Heasks the class to reflect on situationspastor presentof putting words on paper toproduce a desired behavior. It is impor-tant at this point that this conception befleshed out from the class's own experi-ence and speculationnot the teacher's.The class must think of assignments: itmust come up with instances it cantake seriously. For when I produce ex-amplese.g., how to get a refund on afaulty product, how to get a letter witha certain thesis into a certain newspaper,how to get a certain service from a gov-ernment official, how to get a raise froma specific employermany people findthem crude, artificial, and corny. I findthem clean, solid, and extremely interest-ing because I feel the need for solid, em-pirical bedrock in this mysterious matterof words on papereven at the cost ofsome gentility or sophistication.

So let the class invent its own assign-ments. If it wants more sophistication,fine. So long as it keeps to this empiri-cal model of writing. Perhaps it will

want to pick some member of the classor some member of the college adminis-tration with a given opinion and see whatwords on paper have any effect in chang-ing it. Perhaps an essay or story for a cer-tain magazine. Perhaps words on paper tohelp in a specific situation of grief oranxietywords written either by the per-son himself (diary or journal) or bysomeone else to the troubled person.Most classes will come up with far betterideas than these. But "better" is mislead-ing: the right assignments are simplythose that the members of the class cantake seriously. The leacher must be firmin throwing this mater into the lap of theclass. If the class takes time to handleit, that time will not have been wasted.If the class cannot come up with anycases of words on paper it can take seri-ously then it has specified its situationrather well. If it did not deal explicitlywith this situation it would be neglectingits main business.

The teacher gets a new role by thisshift of criteria from truth and good styleto effect. He is no longer the authorityon standards of excellence. For thoughhe may know more than most of his stu-dents about truth in writing and goodstyle, he is not the authority on whetherwriting produces specified behavior.

Indeed, the class must try to be com-pletely empirical in its judgments. Itwill not only send off letters to the news-paper and see which ones get published,but also invite businessmen, officials, etc.to reveal their responses. Many will cometo class when invited. The person whosemind was to be changed must be per-suaded to come to class and tell the dif-ferent effects of the papers. The role ofthe teacher will be to help studentsachieve the goal they specified and tohelp students discover why some thingsworked and others did not. (Empiricaldoes not mean simpleminded; though theempirical class is not free to concludethat certain businessmen, teachers, or edi-tors behave differently from the way

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A METHOD FOR TEACHING WRITING 117

they in fact do behave, it is of coursefree to conclude that their behavior iscontradictory, that they should behavedifferently, or that they are insensitive tocertain properties of words on paper.)

But the whole point of empirical feed-back is to learn to judge for oneself.Therefore every member of the class willjudge all the papers. First the class mustagree on an assignment: a problem, apiece of desired behavior, and perhaps anagreed-on set of facts that all writers muststick to. Then all papers are photo-copiedso that all students get copies and judgetheir effectiveness. (The plan requires ac-cess to inexpensive photocopying.) Theclass hour is used to discuss differences ofjudgment. The teacher's role is primarilyto see that the class performs this func-tion: fighting out disagreements and mu-tually explaining why some think onepaper is beta x at producing the giveneffect and some anotherand what thingsin the writing had what effect. (Peoplewithout conventional "English teacher"training might do an excellent job teach-ing this sort of class.)

I see four reasons why it is crucial forthe students all to be readers and judges.1) It means starting with skills that stu-dents do possess. Ts: forces the student torealize that he does in fact have standardsand criteria for judging writing. And itrequires that he develop them. The pro-cedure should prevent a common dilem-ma in which the student becomes com-pletely disoriented; he feels he's lost allidea of what is good and what is bad; heloses all confidence in his powers of re-sponding validly to the quality of writ-ing. Perhaps students do not possess ex-actly the criteria for evaluating writingthat college teachers feel are the rightones: "they prefer bad writing"; "theyhave bad taste!" "Good" and "bad" writ-ing, however, are not absolutes. Thequestion is "good for what" and "bad forwhat." The student's best hope of learn-ing the teacher's criteria will come fromenhancing and building up his own tal-

ents for distinguishing certain kinds ofgoodness in writing from certain kinds ofbadness. His criteria can be naturally de-veloped and expanded. (And there maynot be such a large gapin terms of de-velopmentbetween the student's "bad"taste and the teacher's "good" taste.) Butif the student's ability to judge accord-ing to his own criteria is stamped out andhe is asked to start from scratch in learn-ing the teacher's criteria, he is apt to bestymied and even permanently damagedin his ability to write well.2) I don't mean to imply all students asfine, intuitive sensibilities and all writingteachers as rigid ogres. A student willoften enough be baffled by the judgmentof his classmates on his paper as much ashe might have been baffled by the judg-ment of his teacher. Yet it is better thisway. For students seldom really believewhat the teacher says about their writing.They may say "Oh, I see now" to theteacher's explanation. More often theymake do with a glum sigh of ostensibleassent. Of course they have to put upwith the teacher's judgment; but reallyit is often resistedespecially because theteacher is a repository of authority andthis gets mixed up with his also being therepository of standards for excellence.Where the adverse judgment of a class ona paper may occasionally seem high-handed and dictatorial, yet the beleag-ured student's plight is better in twoways. First, he can resist it better. Hecan say "What do they know! I know asmuch about writing as they domore infact!" But second, he is coerced to assentto their judgment more powerfully yetmore validly than he is apt to assent to theteacher's judgment. For there is no rightand wrong in this business. It's just amatter of whether something works. Ifhe cannot get his classmaes to think itworksand especially if outside valida-tion confirms the classthen he has notin fact succeeded at that assignment. Butthe process of outside validation will

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muddy the water and force the class totry to be flexible: it will discover thatdifferent readerse.g., different business-menare affected by different qualitiesof writing.3) It is terrifically helpful for one's writ-ing to read a stack of papers of verymixed quality all on exactly the samesubject. This is an experience that allteachers have. Most realize how muchthey learn from it, even if they wish ithappened less frequently. But it is anexperience that students never have. Ifyou read only competent writing it ishard to know or feel what makes it so.4) It is simply fun and interesting for theclass to read and discuss its own papers.

This strategy consists, in short, of start-ing from strengthstarting from the cri-teria which the student already instinc-tively usesand only moving toward newor different criteria as the students dis-cover them and accept them. I am notmeaning to imply, condescendingly,that many students are complete novicesin satisfying the criteria of truth andgood style; but I sense that the strengthand of most students' real skill withlanguage is tied in with the use of lan-guage that has received their commit-ment for the last sixteen yearslanguagedesigned to produce an effect on an audi-ence. Correspondingly, the disturbingcharacteristic of much strident essaywriting is precisely its lack of force orguts.

But the important thing is that the cri-teria of truth and good style are notwholly different: from the third criterionbeing exercised in this course. The pro-posed strategy will mobilize natural skillsin language and then develop them sothat they come to include the firet twocriteria. Before long, students will them-selves invent truth and good style astwobut not the only two special sub-sets in the problem of producing a de-sired effect. The class will end up talkingabout all the aspects of good reasoningand good style that any teacher could

desire, and techniques for achieving themand in the process will probably acceptmore learning from the teacher than be-fore. They will also attain a realisticappraisal and understanding of the roleof "correctness"spelling, grammar, etc.They will learn that for certain kinds ofwriting it is not so important, and thiswill better free them to see how it isnecessary in most other situations to pro-duce certain effects and behaviors. Thestrategy would prevent a situation thatis not uncommon: students sometimesfeel that criteria for good writing areimposed from above by the teacher, andtherefore they naively blame and resenthim for what are simply conventions ofcorrectness. Students will be forced toderive trustworthy criteria for them-selves. The strategy here, in short, is that"producing an effect" is not really a cri-terion in itself but rather a neutral rubricwhich contains all criteria.

Students will not take long to specifywriting problems closer to the classroom,e.g., how to produce the behavior in ahistory teacher of giving an A on a fresh-man history essay. All will write an as-signed essay for the history course andask a history teacher to grade them andcome to class to explain. When the classdoes this a number of times, students willbegin to attain a sound understanding ofthe problem of writing satisfactory col-lege essays. For example, they might welldevelop real misgivings about the criteriaused by a teacherand conclude they hadattained much sounder ones in theircourse's explorations. They will never-theleEs see that the teacher is a teacherand that they will probably have to writeessays for him. But they will understandwhat his criteria are and see them as oneset among a wide range of possibilitiesand be able to decide freely and realis-tically how to respond to the teacher'sdemands.

Inviting teachers in will be very inter-esting for the teachers as well. It willsharpen their perception of their own

A METHOD FOR TEACHING WRITING 119

criteria. I can well imagine a teacher say-ing his criteria are x, y, and z, and theclass replying that really .he uses v, w, x.However the argument ends up, every-one will learn a lot.

It may be objected that this programspends too much time exploring criteriaand too little time learning how to satisfythe new and difficult criteria that a col-lege student must meet; that the programneglects the brute necessity of learningskillscorrect syntax, clear paragraphing,good style, coherent reasoning. I do notwish to imply that these skills are easyfar from it. Yet I am sure that learningthem is far easier than it often seems. Butthese criteria must be clearly seen, andabove all, realistically accepted. I am surethat when a student seems unable to learnsome of these skillswhen he goes on formonths or years without really masteringthemoften he is covertly refusing toaccept them. He may say "I guess I justdon't have good study habits," or "I amjust too lazy," or "I just can't seem toget writing," or "I guess I'm just not ver-bal." But covertly he may be saying "I'mdamned if I'm going to give in and playword games according to the rules ofthose goddam teachers." Notice that hishumble or contrite assessment of why hedoesn't seem to write well blandly lacksthe natural force he possesses as a person;his real juice is bound up with the resent-ful refusal that he does not expressprobably not even to himself.

Until students have discovered, felt,and accepted the criteria, a teachersimply wastes his time trying to teachstudents to satisfy them. And once a stu-dent has accepted them he gets on ratherquickly and forcefully with the businessof learning how to satisfy them. In theprocedure I am advocating it would bequite natural for a class of poorly trainedstudents to decide at some point in themiddle of the course to devote the nextthree weeks to grammar drill. They fi-nally can see it is worth their time. Inthose three weeks they will learn more

grammar than if the whole term had beendevoted to it.

In recent years teachers of writinghave begun to learn how immensely ithelps a student's writing if he imagines aspecific audience. Better yet if he has one.This can be seen as support for my hy-pothesis: the student's best language skillsare brought out and developed whenwriting is considered as words on paperdesigned to produce a specific effect ina specific reader. Other excellences inwriting are best produced as develop-ments from this model.

Writing as Revealing the Author's Selfin His Words

Two experiences have recently givenme concrete meaning for what was pre-viously a vague conceptthe self revealedin words. The first experience was liter-ary: trying to understand what madeMoll Flanders a better book than my ex-isting literary criteria seemed to suggestit was ( "Moll Flanders and the Problemof the Novel as Literary Art," unpub-lished essay, Honorable Mention, En-glish Institute, 1967). One of the impor-tant things about that novel is the wayyou can actually hear Moll speaking inthe words on the page. Robert Frostmade the specific connection betweenthis phenomenon and a good prose style:

Everything written is as good as it isdramatic. . . . A dramatic necessity goesdeep into the nature of the sentence.Sentences are not different enough to holdthe attention unless they are dramatic.No ingenuity of varying structure willdo. All that can save them is the speak-ing tone of voice somehow entangled inthe words and fastened to the page forthe ear of the imagination. That is all thatcan save poetry from sing-song, all thatcan save prose from itself. (From the in-troduction to "A Way Out;" quoted in"The Speaking Voice," Reuben Brower,reprinted in The Study of Literature,Sylvan Barnet, Morton Berman, WilliamBurto, eds. [Boston, 1960], p. 160.)

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When words carry the sound of a personwhether in fiction, poetry or an essaythey are alive. Without it they are dead.

Now this capacity to write wordswhich contain a voice may not be every-thing. We all know students who have itand yet still write poor essays. But it isa lot. I think it is a root quality of goodwriting and that we should try to teachit. A student who has it may make spell-ing and syntactical errors, he may orga-nize his papers badly and reason badly;and his sentences may contradict all thestructural canons of what is currentlycalled good prose. But there is a realsense in which he already has the maincharacteristic of good prose: his wordshang together into felt syntactical unitswhose meanings jump immediately andautomatically into the reader's head. Andfrom what he has, the other excellencescan grow more naturally, organically,and usually more quicklythan in thecase of the student whose words on paperare totally lacking in life.

A student who has a voice in the wordshe puts on paper can be said to "havewords" or be able to "find words" in away that the other student cannot. Thiscan be quite literally the case: manystudents without a voice simply have anagonizing time finding words. Theystruggle over each sentence, break downin the middle, and sometimes cannot evenproduce at all. It can be a kind of mute-ness or radical incoherence. Others wholack a voice can find words but thosewords are not strong and centered. Suchpersons are often those who cannot, infact, stop the words from rushing t. thepage, but the words are flaccid and with-out force or point. Of course the studentwho has a voice must often struggle too.He struggles to decide on the best word;he struggles especially in revising; buthe hasn't the terrible Struggle simply toemerge from silenceor from the func-tional silence of empty wordiness. Thestudent who has a voice can "unlock hisword-hoard." The connotations of the

ENGLISH

poet's kenning are appropriate. Every-one does have a "word-hoard": a collec-tion of words that are connected to hisstrong and primary experiences in theworldas opposed to words which (put-ting it inexactly) are only connected toother words. (Cf. L. S. Vygotsky on"spontaneous" and "scientific" conceptsin Thought and Language [Cambridge,Mass., 1962 ].)

How to teach students to write with avoice is difficult to know. Frost empha-sizes what we already guessthat we missthe whole point if we concentrate ontricks of structure. But the followingprocedure would help. The students reada writer with a particularly strong andobvious-- "loud" voice and then try towrite something that produces the samevoice. The object is for the student to"get inside" the self of the imitated writerby getting the sound of his tone of voice.It is an exercise in producing words thatsountl like a person and not merely likemeanings. The class tries this assignmentwith various writers. Here again the classwould serve as the official judge: thejudgment of all the readers in the classis in fact the best judge of which papersget the imitated writer's voice into thewords on the page. The teacheror anysingle personis in danger of prejudgingthe question because of conventionalparameters for defining style. For the as-signment is to get the sound not the style.I think I can imagine two papers ofwhich one seemed closer to the style ofthe model, and yet the other attainedmore unmistakably the sound of themodel. That is to say I don't know wherethe sound comes from. In the class judg-ment there is not likely to be tidy agree-ment about the matter. But that's as itshould be with something not fully un-derstood.

The second experience to give me asense of what is really meant by a selfrevealed through the words on the pageis not literary but pragmaticthe experi-ence of being a draft counselor trying to

A METHOD FOR TEACHING WRITING 121

help conscientious objectors in theirpreparation of #150 forms for their draftboards. The CO who wants to be classi-fied as such by his draft board mustanswer questions about his beliefs. Osten-sibly his answers tell the draft boardwhether or not he has the right belief.In order to be recognized as a CO, theman must have a belief that is religiousand it must compel him to refrain fromfighting in all war. But draft boards donot give the classification to everyonewho describes such beliefs. There are toomany. The Supreme Court's Seeger de-cision in 1965 defined as religious anybelief which occupies a central place inthe life of the man (like the belief in Godof the traditional CO). And nuclearweapons have increased the number ofpeople who cannot support any war. (Cf.my article, "Who Is a Conscientious Ob-jector?" Christian Century, August 7,1968.)

Therefore draft boards now rule moreand more frequently on the question ofsinceritywhether the person really doesbelieve the things he says he believes.And so questions which look as thoughthey are meant to reveal whether the manhas the right belief are in fact cruciallyused to reveal whether he has the beliefhe says he has.

Students I have counseled seem to bestrikingly bad at this test. In the firstplace they tend to start by describingsomething which is not really their be-lief at all. (I can speak freely because Idid the same dance.) It seems we comeout of our educational process thinkingthat when we give an account of whatmakes senseof what we feel we can askothers to assent towe have stated ourbelief. The absurdity of this notion isclear when it is stated so baklly, but it isamazing how many persons give this kindof answer when asked to tell their beliefs.We are slow to realize that belief is whatyou call on when action is required andknowledge and evidence do not providecertainty. (And they never do: philos-

ophers demonstrate how "is's" cannotgive birth to "ought's.")

Perhaps the difficulty is that the regis-trant wants to show that his belief makessensethat it holds. But whether the be-lief holds is irrelevant. Draft boards arenot asking to be proven stupid or evilwhich is what follows from a demon-stration that the CO's belief holds.

The only issue is whether the applicantholds his belief. And so even after hesucceeds in really determining what hisbelief is, there is the mysterious matterof how to state it in such a way that thereader believes that he believes it.

Literary critics have tended to assentto the exorcism of "sincerity."' But thedraft counselor has his nose rubbed in it.He's faced every day with the differencebetween an answer that makes him re-spond "I'm not at all convinced this guybelieves this stuff," and one which makeshim respond "Yes. It is clear he believesthese things." And it has nothing to dowith the content of the belief: some-

1 It is a corrective simply to spell out whatfollows from the premise that there is an un-conscious. (A) Intention becomes messy: in ouruse of words, as in other behavior, we mustsometimes distinguish between what we thoughtwe intended and another intention we 'were notaware of. (B) What this means for the inter-pretation of literature is that we are cowardsto decide there is no intention just because wecannot be certain what it is. Besides, with cer-tain kinds of evidence, tact, and practice, wecan sometimes have a pretty good idea. Ofcourse anyone who wishes may decide that theintention is not part of the work. But mostreaderseven if they see the sense in which awork of literature is a detached, timeless pieceof significant formnevertheless cannot refrainfrom also responding to literature as they re-spond to words uttered by whole men livingin real time and space: "Am I sure he meanswhat he seems to say he means?" (The concreteadvice of Wimsatt and Beardsleyin effect notto trust the teller but the talewas more rightthan wrong since it made us see intention asmore complex than what the writer said he hadin mind.) (C) What this means for rhetoric isthat we are not always right when we thinkwe are sincere. We can make good use of theears of others in trying to determine what wereally mean.

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times the sincerity of the most outlandishbelief is beyond question, while the state-ment of a "tame," almost universal, beliefcarries no conviction; sometimes viceversa.

The situation forces out into the openan important criterion for writing: onemust refrain from considering thesepieces of discursive prose in terms ofwhether the assertions make sense or areconsistent, and judge them instead interms of whether they reveal a personwho holds the assertionswhatever theassertions may be. I realized I was facedwith a pragmatic but pure instance of theproblem that critics of literature andteachers of writing have talked of for solongwhether writing is "alive." If theteacher of Freshman English does notteach his student to write "lively" prose,the student is likely to get lower gradesfor the rest of his college career. If thedraft counselor does not succeed in help-ing the registrant write prose which is"alive" in this primary senseprosewhich contains not just propositions buta personthe man is likely to have to goto jail.

Teaching Freshman English may betrying, but this situation is downrightfrightening. After more than a year of itI still haven't a clue as to the objectiveingredients of this "aliveness." The onlything I have learned is to say to the manwho lacks it, "Look, I don't believe you!I can't feel any person in these words!You've made all these interesting state-ments but really I haven't the slightestidea who you are. I can't hear you." Butthis helpless response turns out powerful.It forces the man to look at what he haswritten from a point of view he is un-accustomed to. He struggles and floun-ders and is baffled. But he is finally forcedto realize that he has left out the mainthingeven if he doesn't know what thatmain thing is. The situation is graveenough that he knows he has to go homeand try to put himself into his words.The new productto the extent that it

is an improvementmay not be objec-tively more graceful, correct, or logicalthan before. But it does have what writ-ing teachers are most eager to producewriting that is alive and reveals a person.

Thus even though I don't understandthe observable ingredients of this aspectof good writing, and therefore haven'tany theoretically justifiable rules forteaching it, I nevertheless end up teach-ing it (or rather helping others to pro-duce it) more consistently than anythingI ever taught as a Freshman Englishteacher. The moral seems to be that ask-ing for the right thing may be better thanknowing how to explain what you askfor: i.e., even if x, y, and z are all validways to conceive the capacity that youare trying to teach, and even if youunderstand x and y much better than z,nevertheless you may teach it better byasking for z.

Therefore I propose reproducing thissituation for our writing course. Studentswill be asked to write pieces for whichthe test is not whether the assertionsmake sense or are consistent but whetherthe reader feels the writer in the wordswhether the reader believes that thewriter believes it. (For irony, a morecomplex formulation is required.) Againthe best yardstick in this imprecise matterwill be the judgment of all the membersof the class. This is really a subset of thecategory of writing designed to producea certain effect in the reader. But itwould be aimed at a particular root ca-pacity in writingthe ability to have avoice, to find words; not to be inco-herent, tongue-tied, or emptily verbose.In short, to write from within the self.

What would these writing exercisesbe? Wouldn't they be invasions of pri-vacy inappropriate to school? Some ex-ercises might seem personal. For example,the questions relating to conscientiousobjection seem very rich and useful writ-ing problems. But if some students feltlack of privacy as a problem, papers neednot be signed. As long as the student gets

A METHOD FOR TEACHING WRITING 123

feedback on his paperwhich he woulddo from class assessment and discussionthere is no need for the teacher or theclass member to know the author.

But I am not talking about intimate,autobiographical "self-exposure" when Italk of "revealing a self in words." Writ-ing in words which "reveal the self" hasnothing necessarily to do with exposingintimaciesundressing. For I am talkingabout the sound or feel of a believableperson simply in the fabric of the words.The most intimate revelations can be putin words that are not alive and have noself; and conversely, the most impersonalreasoningin lean, laconic, "unrevealing"prosecan nevertheless be alive and in-fused with the presence of a person or aself. It would be important, therefore, tohave some exercises about matters whichare relatively impersonal but to judgethem solely in terms of whether convic-tion is displayedwhether the writer isin the words. This would teach the stu-dents that this quality is not to be con-fused with undressing. (Actually theperson in the words need not be the"real" self of the author; it is the gift oftruly creative writers to reveal different"selves" in written words.)

The notion of judging an essay solelyon whether it contains conviction and aself will set some teachers' teeth on edge:"This kid has plenty of conviction andself in his wordstoo much! What heneeds is to reason carefully and write adecent sentence." This response is dif-ficult to avoid. But maybe it's necessaryto go through conviction and self ratherthan away from them or around them.Maybe the quickest path to good reason-ing and decent sentence writingand wemust admit that we haven't yet foundquick onesis through learning betterhow to write words that reveal convic-tion and a person. And it is important toremember that the class's judgment heremay be more accurate than the teacher's:it might not agree, for example, that "thiskid has plenty of conviction and self in

his words." It might see the paper aspretty fakeas in fact lacking convictionand selfand be right. When it got thestudent to burn through the dose he hadbeen using in his words, I suspect hewould reason better and make decentsentences.

Summing up

It will be objected that I am abandon-ing the teaching of what is observableand explainabletruth and good stylefor what is mysterious and unexplainablewhether it affects the reader in the de-sired way and whether a self is revealedin the words. Though the terms of theobjection may be true, I don't think theobjection holds up. Perhaps we havebetter rules for manipulating propositionsto achieve the truth than for manipulat-ing words to produce specific effects inthe reader; perhaps we have better rulesfor building words into a clear and ef-fective prose style than for putting downlive words to reveal a self. But these in-determinate and unexplainable qualitiesmay still be more worth concentratingon. It may be that the most characteristicuse of languagethe use of language thatwill permit people to liberate and developthe greatest skillis language for the pro-duction of certain effects in readers andthe presentation of the self. It may bethat teachers put students into a trap bytelling them to do x and y and not z,when the best way to do x and y is to doz. It is a common idea that freshmen havetoo much sincerity and too little sophis-tication and tough-mindedness. But Iwonder. Ostensible sincerity may maska fearful avoidance of the real thing.

Some readers will notice that I am dis-guising as iconoclasm the wisdom of tra-dition and common sense. But the essaywould never sell under the title "GettingAristotle Back into Freshman English."Yet it will be recalled that Aristotle de-votes far more space in his Rhetoric tothe speaker and the audienceand beginswith these topicsthan he does to the

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speech. He understands rhetoric as atransaction between the self and theaudiencethe two prior realities in thehuman acti,yity of verbal composition andcommunication. He recognizes that thisactivity is not the same as that of de-termining the truth. C. S. Baldwin de-scribes Aristotle's approach:

Aristotle's division and its order are thedivision and the order not merely of anal-ysis, but of much the same synthesisas underlies the actual processes of com-position. I begin with myself; for the sub-ject-matter else is dead, remaining ab-stract. It begins to live, to become per-suasive, when it becomes my message.Then only have I really a subject forpresentation. A subject, for purposes ofaddress as distinct from purposes of in-vestigation, must include the speaker. Itis mine if it arouses me. I consider nextthe audience, not for concession or com-promise, but for adaptation. What is minemust become theirs. Therefore I mustknow them, their n B os and their r a 9 os.My address becomes concrete throughmy effort to bring it home. The truthmust prevailthrough what? Againstwhat? Not only through or againstreasoning, but through or against com-plexes of general moral habit and theemotions of the occasion. I must establishsympathy, win openness of mind, instructin such wise as to please and awaken,rouse to action. My speech is for thesepeople now. Only thus am I ready to con-sider composition; for only thus can Iknow what arguments are available, orwhat order will be effective, or what stylewill tell. (Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic[New York, 1924], pp. 12, 13.)

Cicero and Quintilian carry on this tra-dition.

If we leave tradition and look to com-mon sense we notice how students whodon't write well can miraculously achievea high degree of truth and a strong, clearprose on certain occasions when theysomehow involve their selves and getturned on: sometimes on an exam, some-times very late at night on a paper due

next morning, and sometimes in personalcommunications like important personalletters. Sufficient pressure has built up toforce the student finally to put himselfinto his words, and there is usually astrong sense of desired audience responsewhich focuses the words and thoughts.Is he not, on such occasions, finally doingprecisely what we are talking abouthere? Working for a specific effect andrevealing himself in his words?

From here, in fact, we may even won-der about those rules for truth and goodstyle. Are they really so trustworthy?Those rules only approximate the out-ward characteristics of the prose ofwriters who excel at using language toproduce desired effects and reveal theself. For such writers can depart wildlyfrom these approximations and still pro-duce good writing. These rules ignorethe generative principles which producedthe truth and the good prose.

In short, this is a proposal to teachwriting from the hypothesis that truewriting and good prose are only endproducts and arefrom the standpointof developmentalmost epiphenomenal.Producing an effect in a reader and re-vealing the self in words are priorachievements in the process of learningto write well. The use of all the membersof the class as judges is not merely astrategic nod towards participatory de-mocracy but rather the most valid way toexercise these essential prior criteria.

Final ConsiderationsIn thinking about this approach I have

had college freshmen in mind simply be-cause my experience in teaching writinghas been with college students. But Idon't see why it wouldn't be at least asappropriate to high school.

It would be easiest to point this pro-posal at very poorly prepared, "disad-vantaged" students. With them, the in-ability to transfer obvious linguistic skillto the production of good written essaysis most glaring. But I suspect that the loss

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is just as great in competent, well trainedstudents.

I don't wish to diminish the validity ofother models for the use of words. Forexample, words can usefully be thoughtof in a way that has little to do with aself, an audience, or an effect. That is,we can think of words as approachingthe blessed condition of numberas atruthseeking machine, a prosthesis for thebrain: writing thus can usefully be con-ceived as the manipulation o.. proposi-tions according to the rules of grammarand logicand according to the (half)rules of association and metaphorto seewhat new propositions can be made toemerge. This is a model which empha-sizes the use of words as thinking.

But thinking is not the same as writing.It is true that they vastly overlap. Wordsin the human head tend to be accom-panied by concurrent thought; butthought tends to come in the medium ofwords. Or more concretely, nothinghelps in writing an essay like having anidea; but students think amazingly betterwhen they finally mobilize their naturalskill with language and learn to writefrom inside a self. But in spite of thisoverlap, being able to think well is notthe same as being able to write wellandcertainly not the same as being able tohave a voice, find words, and produce adesired response in a reader.

Of course thinking ought to be taughtto freshmen. Perhaps there should be oneterm which stresses writing and anotherwhich stresses thinking. Since the formeris too important to be left to Englishteachers and the latter too important tobe left to philosophers, why not have alldepartments staff these courses and keepclass sizes down to ten or fifteen?

But it may be a mistake to reduce toone term the amount of time devoted towriting. For if there is any validity inthis essay it points to the conclusion thatwe are hasty in our teaching of writing.Freshman English courses have tended to

try prematurely to induce the outwardmanifestations of good writingcontroland self-conscious clarity. But real writ-ers have constantly stressed how long ittakes to learn to write; and most haverecognized that good writers may haveto write very badly for a long timeusually purple. If a whole term does notfill most essays with excellent reasoningand a good prose style, it will be too soonto call it the wrong path. It may still bethe shortest one. After all, under presenttechniques, few are satisfied with thewriting even of seniors and graduate stu-dents.

if a college didn't want to commitmore than a term's worth of money andeffort, it could adopt the following plan:The course would run all year but meetonly once a week for one and a half ortwo hours. Students would turn in papersto an office three days before the meetingand pick up the complete stack of photo-copied essays two days before the meet-ing. The classes wouldn't require a greatdeal of teacher preparation beyond read-ing the stack of papers and trying tothink about responses. Indeed this wouldbe a good place to begin experimentswith teacherless classes.

What about grading? What I proposein this article suggests experimentation:since the class's job is to figure out dif-ferent ways in which writing succeedsin being good, the class might play animportant part in grading. But even if itis not possible or desirable to depart fromorthodox grading, it would make sense totreat the weekly assignment not as grade-determining tests but rather as exercisesin getting fr...edback and therefore learn-ing how to write betteri.e., as prepara-tion for grade-determining tests. Whynot grade the student on, say, five essayshe chooses to revise on the basis of classfeedback and hands in at the end of thecourse? This would make the grade morenearly a measure of what the student hasattained over the period of the course.