Balancing Expression with Structure

One of my students interviewed me a few weeks ago for another class. She asked me what one thing I’d tell freshmen. I told her that freshman needed to know that they have good ideas. My students might not always have brilliant ideas, but they always have something worth saying. They can’t write like scholars until they think like scholars. And scholars don’t think “I wonder what my professor wants my to say.” They consider their audience, but they write with the mantle of authority.

This week two of my students handed in papers with entire plagiarized paragraphs, and a third with plagiarized sentences. I had hoped that if I showed I believed in them they would take responsibility. I don’t know to what extent the plagiarism was intentional. But either way, it shows that my teaching philosophy isn’t fool-proof.

How do I know that they plagiarized if I showed trust in them? You’d better believe it was painful to get up and walk over to the computer to plug a student’s sentence into Google when my suspicion was based on the quality of the writing.

Either my students didn’t care that I trusted them or they didn’t believe that I cared about their ideas.

I sound like an expressivist. I want my students to use their unique subjectivity to tell the truth as they understand it. Although I like expressivism, I don’t know that it adequately describes my feelings about writing.

I believe that expressivism doesn’t work for all writers. I happen to find Peter Elbow’s methods helpful, but Muriel Harris cinched it for me--some people write just fine when they start with outlines and write every sentence carefully. Others don’t. So I can’t just teach them how to get in touch with themselves through writing. And I’m teaching academic writing. My course is designed to help students in future courses. So I owe it to my students to help them learn to write for teachers, not just for themselves.

I have tools to offer my students. I help them learn how magically topic sentences work to help your reader follow your argument. I can show them how important it is to keep lifeless words out of sentences. I can even give them outlines for how to structure their papers. I don’t think an expressivist would do that. But I don’t force my students to follow strict guidelines for how to write a paper. If they can come up with another way that works, I accept that. I rejoice at that. I write comments on their papers about how well they’ve expressed their subjectivity.

I don’t think that models suppress creativity. If I use models as tools while encouraging students to make their own way, I give them a starting place. Creative genius can be found when writers twist models to serve their own purposes or when they use readerly expectations to trick an audience. Even if there is mystery behind good writing, there are still tricks of the trade worth teaching. On the other hand, even if good writing is based in following conventions, playing by the rules too strictly without an attempt at creativity won’t result in something worth reading.