November 16, 2004

Can people learn to swim by doing exercises and drills without ever entering the water?

The answer to this question is not as clear cut as one might think to members of the National Council of Teachers of English who meet for their annual convention in Indianapolis Thursday through Nov. 23. Or perhaps they simply fear that the answer may threaten their very existence.

That's because a college English class takes place poolside rather than in the water. Each semester millions of undergraduates read, brainstorm, write and revise in pretend writing situations for a pretend audience (their instructor). Then they graduate with writing skills insufficient for the real world. A survey by the College Board's National Commission on Writing confirmed as much, when they found that, "A majority of U.S. employers say about one-third of workers do not meet the writing requirements of their positions," according to an Associated Press article Sept. 15.

For decades, rhetoricians have been conducting studies and research to find out why. And the only thing we've learned for certain is that nothing works! Truly, except for some measurable success with sentence-combining drills, no other single method or technique in the composition classroom -- from sentence diagramming to outlining, from conferencing to portfolios -- has ever been scientifically proven to effect improvement in student writing skills!

But council members also know that the operative phrase here is in the composition classroom. For while we've been scratching our heads and marking up papers each night way past David Letterman, we've always secretly known about our prized older students, the 30-to-40-year-old men and women starting college following a divorce or corporate downsizing, who have been out of school but suddenly arrive as the best writers in class, in spite of their recollections of poor performance in high school English.

The fact is, these are the "swimmers" who had to do it for real, who have been exposed to 10 years of everyday "texts" (news, tax forms, films, family crises) and real writing situations (job and loan applications, sales reports, letters to the boss, to Johnny's teacher). They plunged into the seas of conflict, commerce and life with necessity as the motive to open their minds and compel writing effectiveness for the community of readers and writers on whom they depended for survival.

In an attempt to duplicate that situation in higher education, the council, to its credit, has been presenting papers on "authentic" writing practice, which they've been recommending for incorporation into the classroom. Letters to newspapers, essays on topics derived from courses in other disciplines, and group or departmental publications in which student essays are printed, are among their prescriptions for a cure.

Yet as long as the teaching experience is still concentrated in the English classroom, this effort to simulate real writing is like pouring buckets of water on the swimming class as they flail their arms in unison up on the deck.

For the purest, most hopeful implementation of authentic writing theory is to toss them into the water. Get them out of the composition classroom and make them swim for their lives. Skills do improve when a student, for example, writes and rewrites legal opinions in the pre-law class that he considers the key to his future, when she labors over the stem cell research report in her biology major or when they compile a summation from the interviews conducted of 25 couples for their sociology report on the status of marriage in the 21st century.

A number of universities have taken the lead in the sink or swim movement, the University of Illinois-Champaign and the University of Missouri-Columbia among them, having eliminated traditional composition (poolside) classes in favor of an intensive writing requirement for undergraduates in the course of choice. Unfortunately, at those institutions, too often the instructors of, say, Intensive Writing-Biology II, or Intensive Writing-World History, simply turn papers over to English teaching assistants for grading the mechanics, effectively stunting student growth in the rhetorical arts and skills which would have been cultivated by the missing comp teacher.

So the more effective solution would seem to be to keep the composition classes and team them up with key courses in the students' majors, as College of DuPage of Glen Ellyn has done successfully with dual seminars in its honors program. There are only a handful of these seminars which genuinely implement writing across the curriculum, since they require exhaustive preparation, coordination and teacher in-service. But in view of the alternative that tosses out the rhetoric professors, along with the art and science of rhetoric itself, perhaps the council should lobby more for this idea.

Granted, there may be other professions, like investment advisers, the benefits of whose services have also proven to be statistically illusive over the years, which nonetheless survive and even proliferate, because people continue to hire and pay them. But unlike the stock advisers, teachers are paid with tax dollars -- a fact that ought to make a difference in what the councils' major focus will be in Indianapolis.

David McGrath, professor of English at College of DuPage, writes frequently about education.