Haswell through Du Gay

I was delighted to see Richard Haswell on our reading list this week because we discussed the "minimal marking" technique he pioneered in my last class, "Teaching Technical Writing." I was then further delighted to see him frame writing instruction in Du Gay's "circuit of culture," which we discussed extensively in Dr. Rice's "Intercultural Communication" class.

As a recovering grammar geek, I'm interested in the ways Haswell discusses criteria as a part of "regulation." We've covered pretty thoroughly the ways in which these criteria (standard grammar, syntax, spelling, and the like) function as shibboleths for the elite. With very few exceptions, these criteria mark us by our class.

Particularly interesting to me was Haswell's treatment of genre and mode rules. He disagreed with Donald M. Murray, who argued that six qualities bridge all discourse modes: meaning, authority, voice, development, design [organization], and clarity. "What a marvelous concept," I thought, "A universal rubric for good writing." Haswell argues that Murray's argument is easy to counter. After all, technical communication is voiceless. (But isn't that a kind of voice?) And surrealist poetry is deliberately non-sensical. (But isn't that a kind of meaning-making?) I do agree with Haswell that Murray's "qualities are mediated quite differently by different genres and modes." (p. 1266) In other words, Murray's "qualities of good writing" are only universal because they are so flexible. While professors have no trouble understanding how these qualities bridge genres, students have a lot of trouble with the concepts. (I suppose because they're not already good writers.)

So I began to think about these qualities of good writing — all these adjectives Haswell uses to describe good writing throughout the piece:

• productive
• appropriate (to some criterion)
• efficient
• accurate
• clear

To these we could add the classic (having already covered "clear"):

• brief
• and sincere.

And it seems to me that we have come to the fundamental difficulty of teaching writing. It's not that teaching writing is impossible. Teaching writing is very both very difficult and quite variable, so if one masters teaching one type of student in one discipline, that knowledge does not always transfer. It's a rhetorical act, so everything depends on the audience. (To ameliorate this difficulty, the theme or essay comes into the void, a piece of writing that appeals to no audience in particular.)

This difficulty is complicated by the fact that most of us learned to write in a way completely different than the way we teach. Unlike math, which very few students grasp without explicit instruction, most writers learn to write by reading a lot. They absorb the patterns and reproduce them much in the same way they absorb spoken language.

English teachers thought for a long time (and many of us still do) that we can reconstruct that knowledge explicitly in the form of grammar and style handbooks. If students will absorb this structured meta-knowledge, then surely they can produce the writing. Hartwell (pdf) put that to rest for us, didn't he?

So what does Haswell propose? I found this to be particularly insightful, "Teacher feedback can largely be a waste of time, for both the teacher and student, unless the critical language is grounded in the specific rhetoric of the field under study." (p. 1279) This is probably impractical in a large class, but I wondered what might happen if we ask our students, on the first day of class, to write about their career and/or personal aspirations. If a student is interested in accounting, he or she might get different feedback then a student who is interested in English or education. Could we offer a variety?

Wandering a bit further afield from Haswell here — Aside from feedback, could we offer students a variety of assignments taken from the essays Haswell offers in his bibliography of writing within disciplines? A business student might need to learn correspondence (email, primarily!), report writing, with a particular emphasis on concision. A history student would likely want to write a classical academic research paper. An English student could write an essay.

I loved this essay, but I wonder if Haswell's thesis about attending to problems with "as little effort as possible" considering the enormous task really boils down to less effort: "eschewing the traditional cover-all bases appraoch to writing response and adopting a smaller task-specific, problem-specific, and learner-specific method" (p. 1282) is really the way to less effort, or if it's the way to more effort, but better feedback. I suppose that efficiency only comes with experience.