Rescuing the Baby from the Bathwater

            Something precious has been lost amid the zeal with which composition professors since the 70s have privileged the students’ own writing as the sole text in composition classes.  In his article “A Relationship Between Reading and Writing:  A Conversational Model,” Charles Bazerman calls for teachers to reexamine the “interplay between reading and writing,” and he reminds us that all written communication is part of a broader “ongoing” conversation (157-8).

            My English 109 students have been working on a persuasive essay and have been given several professionally-written essays as models, yet these models were never discussed in class.  Inspired by Bazerman’s discussion of “reacting to reading,” I decided to have the class analyze the author’s argument in one of these models.  We weighed her evidence for accuracy, fairness, relevance, and sufficiency, and we looked for logical fallacies, which we had discussed in a previous workshop.  Finally, I had the class free write about how persuasive the author was, which of her claims were most persuasive, and whether or not their opinion had changed.  Most importantly, they had to state why they responded as they did:  What was their reasoning?  One student asked if he could write that he was offended by the essay; I told him yes, so long as he explained why he was offended.

            What I had asked the class to do was to “explore their assumptions and framework of thought,” as Bazerman suggests (159).  Only one student had read and annotated the text before class, yet the results of this exercise were encouraging.  Their free writes were some of the most logical, organized, and grammatically-correct papers they had produced in the two semesters we have worked together.  I feel that reading a challenging text, then asking and answering challenging questions about that text led my students to be successful on this assignment.

            The texts we ask composition students to read need not be Shakespeare or Chaucer (although that would make this Lit major very happy), but they should be challenging enough to elicit the kind of discussion and analysis that my students experienced in last Friday’s workshop.  There is room for all types of texts in the composition classroom.