Kathleen Blake Yancey passionately believes that the new century requires new methods of writing instruction. In 2009, Yancey, a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, issued a “call to action, a call to research…a call to help our students compose often, compose well, and through these composings, become the citizen writers of our country, the citizen writers of our world, and the writers of our future” (1).
In 2020, reading her words is inspiring, but it also prompts me to ask some difficult, possibly existential, questions about the teaching of composition. In this response, I will pose these questions and then grapple with them. Ultimately, I argue that there is still a role for teaching composition, but that it may be changing faster than most curricula can readily accommodate.
First, then, the question. Yancey regularly reminds her readers that, for millennia, people have been inexorably compelled to write—even in the face of daunting opposition. She states, “We composers pursued [the] impulse to write in spite of—in spite of cultures that devalued writing; in spite of prohibitions against it…in spite of the fact thatwe…were told we should read but that we weren’t ready to compose. In spite of” (Yancey 1). Yancey returns to this theme—the theme of writing in spite of—throughout her article by noting the sheer number and variety of texts that have proliferated as technology has facilitated new means of composition. Therefore, my questions are these: If, as Yancy agues so eloquently, much of the history of letters exists in spite of great difficulties, then is it possible that those who write well will always write well? Is it possible that writers do not write because they have been given classroom instruction, but because they are innately driven to put pen to paper? Can composition—that is, a true love of writing and not merely the rote creation of expository texts—even be taught?
Now, the grappling. I would like to begin by telling a story from about a recent session that I had as a college-level writing tutor. A student who is taking a composition class met with me looking for advice. They were struggling to begin writing an essay even though they had been making an honest go of it. The first problem, I found out, was that they had been assigned to read a text that held little interest for them. The second, related problem was that their prompt was a full page of detailed instructions spelling out the structure of the essay they were expected to produce. It’s little wonder this student felt no real inspiration when faced with such a task. And part of me wonders if we should require such assignments at all. For many students, graduating college means leaving essay writing behind forever, so what’s the point? If this student isn’t particularly inclined to write essays, why make them?
Finally, my argument. I agree with Yancy that certain people will always write, even in spite of the most strident opposition. It also seems likely that some people, unless absolutely forced, will never write. However, I would argue (and I think Yancy would agree here as well) for the existence of a great middle mass of people who exist somewhere between these two extremes. And for these people—and I count myself among them—receiving the right sort of instruction and encouragement is essential if they are ever to write well.
What then, does this sort of writing instruction look like, now that we are nearly a quarter of the way finished with our (not so) new century? Yancey issues a call to action, but she does not offer much by way of specifics. I speculate that effective instruction will make writing a less onerous task by uncoupling it from the strictures of the expository essay. It’s not that students shouldn’t be taught to critically evaluate a text; rather, they should be granted a greater measure of autonomy to write in their own voices, and to select texts that are of genuine interest to them. My favorite writing prompt in college was one that I received in graduate school. The professor asked us simply to “tell him something interesting about something interesting.” I know that undergraduates will likely need a bit more guidance than that. But even so, I wish I had received a prompt of that sort years earlier. If I had, I might have decided to become a writer years ago, rather than waiting until my thirties to go back to school.
Joe Harris RWS Journal 