Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester – which in this case would be Spring 2009 – and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com – anything – as long as what they write contains the following:
- An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
- A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
- A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.
The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before – and good letters of application are damned hard to write – but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19– or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.
The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained – and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation – was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second – and even a third and fourth – language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.
I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised – though perhaps I shouldn’t be – that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that – at least at first – this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is – that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that – because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.
So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it – to do, in other words, his own work – he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”
What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all.
Not that people who cannot write well, or who never learn to write well, cannot, or have not, grown up. Of course they can; and of course those who have, have. Nonetheless, to write well is, ineluctably, to pursue, to continually rediscover, to embody a connection between one’s facility with language and the content, intellectual and otherwise, of one’s character. I do not mean this in an absolute moral sense. I do not mean that people who cannot write well have no character or that writing is the only way in which people can show their character. I mean, simply, that you cannot write well if you do not make this connection, and it does not matter whether you are writing a poem, a newspaper article, a business plan, a blog post, a novel or a research paper. If you are unwilling or unable to connect the process of who you are – or at least the process of who you are that pertains specifically to whatever you are writing – to the process of expressing yourself clearly and persuasively in written form, your writing will always be less successful than it might otherwise have been.
More to the point, even if every student in every classroom in this country were to work assiduously to become an A writer, even if every one of those students were to get precisely the right kind of attention from her or his ideal teacher, only a portion of those students would get the A they were striving so hard to achieve; and if I were to allow my role as a teacher to be defined solely as gatekeeper – and whether he meant it or not, my student’s request for my personal “Road Map to an A” means that he defined my role as such – I would be doing a grave disservice to all the B, C and even some D students in my classes, whose hard work might not have earned them an A, but the lessons of which they will carry with them into the rest of their lives; and as anyone who has ever worked for a living knows, perhaps especially if you have employed others, being successful in one’s career – and, in a technical writing class, my students’ focus is inevitably on the connection between writing and career – is often more about one’s ability to work in a disciplined and principled way than it is about whether or not that work would have received an A in a college classroom.
Not that grades are not important, not that there are not meaningful differences between an A paper and a C paper, or between the writing abilities – and perhaps, perhaps, the thinking abilities as well – of the students who wrote those papers, but to focus on the grade solely for the sake of the grade, ultimately, is to focus on the surface of learning, on what it means to be able to display an A as opposed to a C. It is to avoid – or, worse, to dismiss as irrelevant – the work of holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking. In terms of writing, after all, that is what revision is: the process of holding yourself accountable for the quality of your own thinking; and here, again, we come up against the connection between writing and character, because your willingness truly to hold yourself accountable for anything is as strong a measure of maturity and character as I can imagine.
I am thinking as I write this about a woman who was a student some years ago in an honors section of the advanced essay-writing class that my department offers and who received C’s on every paper that she wrote during the first two-thirds or so of the semester. I don’t remember precisely when she started to come to my office to talk about her grades, but almost every time she did, she cried. “I don’t get C’s,” she would sob into the tissues I handed her. “I can’t get C’s; I am an honors student. I’ve always gotten straight A’s.”
We talked a lot at these meetings about writing, about what she wanted to write and why she wanted to write, and I kept explaining that she was getting C’s because her essays were very safe, each one a traditionally structured, five paragraph argument that was designed to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear. Indeed, her voice in these essays resembled that of a classroom parrot expecting to earn the crackers she craved by repeating the things she’d heard her teacher say more than it resembled the voice of an intelligent and articulate young woman exploring through language the subject she’d chosen to write about. She was not, I told her, saying on her own terms what she had to say, and learning how to do that was the point of the class. Intellectually, she understood what I was telling her. Emotionally, however, and psychologically, she was so attached to the tried-and-true formula of repackaging-for-an-A what her teacher had already said in class – a strategy quite common among the honors students I have taught – that she couldn’t believe I would find her own voice, her own way of saying things, anything but inappropriate for a college classroom. She was too frightened to risk the possibility of getting an even lower grade than she already had because of that inappropriateness.
Finally – I don’t remember why – I asked her if she kept a journal. She said yes, and I asked her if she would let me read some of it. Again, she said yes, and so at our next meeting, she brought her journal in. The passages I read were so brilliantly and beautifully written that I told her if she could write just one essay like that for me, I would forgive all the C’s she’d received till that point and give her an A for the semester. At first, she didn’t believe me – which is a topic for a whole other post – and on her next assignment handed me again one of her “safe” pieces of writing. When she got it back with another C on it, she decided she had nothing left to lose and wrote her next essay as if it were an entry in her journal. It was a gorgeous piece of prose, more than deserving of the A I gave her; and this A so excited her that she went back to her other papers and, on her own, rewrote them. Every single one of her rewrites also deserved an A, and that was the grade she got for the semester, though it would have been her grade even if she hadn’t done the rewrites. First, I’d given her my word that one paper in the style of her journal would be enough, and I like to keep my word. Second, though, and at least as importantly, the way in which she’d learned to hold herself accountable, the chance she’d taken on herself as a writer and a thinker, was, in my opinion, worth the A I gave her.
I can imagine people wondering what grade I would have given this student if the essay she’d produced while trying to write as she’d written in her journal had earned only a B, and it’s a fair question. The easy answer is that I’m not sure. Part of me thinks that perhaps she would still have deserved the A because the nature of the learning that would have taken place, independently of the specific essay she produced, would still merit it; part of me thinks that, to be fair and consistent, I’d have to give her a B, since that is the level she was able to reach in her writing; and part of me is very aware that what actually happened – no matter how much good it might have done her as an individual – was unfair to the rest of the class, since not everyone was given the same opportunity to have her or his lowest grades dropped.
This line, between treating students as the individuals they are – who learn at their own pace, in their own way; who bring, inevitably, the entirety of their lives into the classroom and the work they produce, and who deserve to have those lives if not accommodated, then at least respected; and for each of whom the grade they receive will mean a different thing – the line between this and establishing the classroom as a level playing field, where everyone gets the same fair shake in terms of access to teaching and how the work they produce is evaluated, is a thin and difficult one to walk, perhaps especially for teachers of writing – or, more accurately, teachers of subjects in which student writing necessarily touches on the fundamental questions they are facing in their lives.
Concerned as it is with efficient and effective workplace communication – with, in other words, writing that is explicitly not about self-exploration and mere self-expression – you wouldn’t think that technical writing is such a subject. If you think only about the kinds of documents the students in my technical writing class need to produce – memos, letters, reports, proposals – it clearly is not. On the other hand, though, being an effective technical writer requires knowing yourself, or at least certain aspects of who you are, quite well. Almost every technical writing text I have read, for example, encourages students to know their own communication styles, confronts them with exercises designed to foster ethical self-awareness, and insists on the importance of understanding and accommodating cultural difference, which means you need to understand your own culture pretty well. Similarly, responding to an assignment that asks you to talk about your career goals in a way that persuades an instructor to allow you into his technical writing class demands that you to reflect in a non-shallow way on what you are thinking about doing with your life, even if you don’t yet have a clear idea of what that might be.
Not knowing what she wanted to do with her life, however, was not the problem that the third student who came to see me brought with her to my office. She knows precisely what she wants to be, a social worker, and she wants specifically to work with juvenile delinquents. Half a moment’s thought will reveal the relevance of a course in technical writing to a career in which the ability to produce effective reports and grants, among other things, is crucial. So when I read this student’s letter, I found it odd that she mentioned her career goals only once, in a single sentence. Instead, she spent about a third of the letter telling me about the professional experience she’d acquired working at a law firm and asserting, without ever fully explaining why, that her experience there had left her with the desire to do whatever she could to improve her writing skills. Moreover, the letter was peppered with expressions and syntactical structures suggesting that she was trying very hard to sound – and to impress me with the fact that she sounded – more like a law student than an undergraduate with an interest in social work.
The B– she received – a respectable grade that was, nonetheless, lower than what she was used to receiving on written work – was due largely to the vague and awkward writing that resulted from this strategy, but when I pointed this out to her, suggesting that her letter would have been stronger if she’d written more as and about herself and what she wanted to do with her life, she looked down at her essay, shook her head and said, “This is really strange.” It wasn’t, she explained, that she didn’t understand what I was telling her; now that I’d pointed it out, she could see how much of her letter sounded false and stilted. Rather, my suggestion that she write as herself was precisely the opposite of the advice she’d received from her high school English teacher, a man whom she had adored because he took her writing seriously. He’d advised her, once she’d started showing him the admissions letters she was writing to the colleges she wanted to attend, that she should write so she sounded precisely not like herself. She didn’t want her readers to know she was “a little Black girl from the suburbs.” She told me that even when she was in this teacher’s class, she’d heard rumors that he might be, “You know, racist,” and she whispered that word as if she were afraid someone who knew him might be listening, the way white people when I was younger used to whisper the word Black when referring to Black people, even when no Black people were around, as if Black people didn’t know they were Black or as if there were other, non-Black people who didn’t know that Black people were Black; and she told me also that this teacher had tried to discourage her from going to Howard University because, “Why would you want to go to an historically Black college when you have so many other choices?” (I should be clear: I don’t teach at Howard; she is taking courses at the school where I teach so she can transfer them back to Howard.)
For a brief moment, I thought I had misheard her, but when it was clear that I had not, I pointed out the obvious: that she was a (not little) “Black girl from the suburbs” and that not only was there nothing wrong with writing as who she was, but if her experience as an African American woman from Long Island was relevant to the letter I’d asked her to write, it would only have made the letter stronger if she’d included it. Unfortunately, we did not have time to continue the conversation because my office hours were over and I had another class to teach, though I don’t know what else I would have said. I do wonder, though, what else she might have had to say and perhaps we will have a chance to talk about that after I read her rewrite. What interests me now, though, as I sit here in my office writing these words, what fascinates me, what has fascinated me ever since I became a teacher – is, in fact, part of the reason why I became a teacher – is how you can follow almost any branch in a person’s education and it will eventually root itself somewhere in who that person is; and I am also thinking about how, if I had not given this student a B-, we might never have had the conversation we did; and this is not about me, about how wonderful and progressive a teacher I am, because there are any number of teachers out there with whom this student could have had that conversation. Rather, it is about my responsibility as a teacher to be ready to have whatever version of that conversation is necessary when one of my students is ready to have it; it is about the fact that, if what I cared most about as a teacher was whether or not my students could follow some “Road Map to the A,” there is no way I would or could ever be ready.
