#teaching When students take the training wheels off, they produce better [[writing]]. By "training wheels" I mean over-simplified, false [[genre|genres]] (the [[5-paragraph essay]]!) that actively encourages students to ignore the fact that writing involves a [[rhetorical situation]] and a real [[audience]]. The danger is in teaching students to write "a paper" that meets the arbitrary guidelines of an assignment, but gets them writing arguments that the students _themselves_ don't even believe! Students are capable of responding to actual, real [[rhetorical situation|rhetorical situations]]. Let them. What this means is getting them to understand that they don't need to just "fake it." Instead, they have something valuable to add to an [[research conversation|ongoing conversation]]—however small that contribution might be.[^reference] [^reference]: [[Sommers et al. 2004 - The Novice as Expert|Sommers et al 2004]] covers this idea a bit. From the abstract: "We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and ==(2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment.==" See also [[Writing Across Contexts (2014)]], pp. 18-19. ## Two Examples ### Preaching to the choir In an introduction to academic writing course, I had a student working on an argument essay. She was writing about vaccinations and the anti-vaxxer movement, but her [[audience]] wasn't drilled down. She was trying to produce a "good" argument about why vaccinations are safe and the links to autism are based on rubbish research. But after looking at an early draft, I asked her to forget for a moment about the fact that this was being written for school: did she honestly believe that anyone who was an anti-vaxxer would be convinced by her argument? Because that was the implied audience or reader. Oh, no, not at all, she said. Okay, then who's it for? Hmmm... The student knew she wouldn't convince anyone with this paper. She was writing it because, well... it was the kind of paper she'd been taught she was "supposed" to produce. It was "good" but, from a practical standpoint, it was a dead-end. She was preaching to the choir. So, she modified her topic a bit. Her paper became an exploration of the anti-vaxxer movement and why certain beliefs persist despite empirical evidence proving them false. It was a much more valuable because she had something to add to the [[research conversation]]. ### "For the amount you spend on a single cup of coffee..." I teach an upper level course on communications in statistics and actuarial science in which I ask students to produce an article for a non-specialist audience. They have to take a technical concept and break it down in a way that's interesting and down-to-earth. A common topic is the [Time Value of Money](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp). Students talk about things like interest, investing, inflation and so on. The "trap" here — and this is often what spearates the B+/A- papers from the A/A+ ones — is underestimating the audience or over-simplifying things. In the most egregious form of this, the paper will end up implying that the only reason the reader hasn't invested before is that they've literally never heard of investing or compound interest. Yet, obviously, that's absurd. And if the student thinks about it for a second, they know that too—but it's become a blindspot because they're not actually trying to write something that would be valuable for another human being; they're focused on producing a "good" paper for a communications class. This particular example shows that this is a problem that goes beyond the doors of the classroom. We've all read the same finance 101 article that uses the same [[cliché|clichés]]: "if you stopped buying your daily coffee and instead you _invested_ that money into..." And again, the worst offenders of this problem seem to pretend that the only reason people don't invest is that they've literally never heard of the concept.[^sethi] [^sethi]: As far as I can tell, [Ramit Sethi's](https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/) entire brand or ethos was originally based on calling that out. In both cases — student writing or trite, vapid blog posts — the problem is stemming from a failure to fully account for who your [[audience]] is and what they already know and/or believe. My only contention here is that, if teachers are not careful, they can exacerbate this problem or danger by assigning papers that actually *encourage* students to ignore real audiences. ## Relevant Sources [[Wayne C. Booth]] tells a relevant story at the beginning of his article, "[[Booth 1963 - The Rhetorical Stance|The Rhetorical Stance]]." Booth has a student whose graduate papers are "pretentious, dull, and disorganized." When the student sends Booth a four-page note, all of a sudden the writing is totally different: "unpretentious, stimulating, organized, convincing." > LAST FALL I had an advanced graduate student, bright, energetic, well-informed, whose papers were almost unreadable. He managed to be pretentious, dull, and disorganized in his paper on *Emma*, and pretentious, dull, and disorganized on *Madame Bovary*. On *The Golden Bowl* he was all these and obscure as well. Then one day, toward the end of term, he cornered me after class and said, "You know, I think you were all wrong about Robbe-Grillet's *Jealousy* today." We didn't have time to discuss it, so I suggested that he write me a note about it. Five hours later I found in my faculty box a four-page polemic, unpretentious, stimulating, organized, convincing. Here was a man who had taught freshman composition for several years and who was incapable of committing any of the more obvious errors that we think of as characteristic of bad writing. Yet he could not write a decent sentence, paragraph, or paper until his rhetorical problem was solved—until, that is, he had found a definition of his audience, his argument, and his own proper tone of voice. (139) I had a similar problem when trying to complete my doctoral thesis. I handed in two version of my opening chapter that were... terrible. "Pretentious, dull, and disorganized" was probably apt. My supervisor was very kind, but the feedback boiled down to, "Try again." I don't know what changed, exactly, for the third attempt, but I recall it being very different. After two chapters that basically had to go in the trash, I was a bit frustrated, so a part of me just said, "ah, to heck with it." This time, I just... tried to explain things. I ignored the fact that this was supposed to be a "dissertation chapter." I used more down-to-earth language. The entire time, I wasn't sure whether it would be okay. Indeed, I thought it *wouldn't be*, but I figured at least my supervisor would have a better sense of what I was _trying_ to say and we could work from there. After I submitted the draft and my supervisor called me in to chat about it, she literally asked me, "What happened? Did the heavens open up and reveal themselves to you? Do more like this!"[^demonstration] [^demonstration]: In his [[Rhetoric (Aristotle)|Rhetoric]], [[Aristotle]] makes the point that [[the best proofs are a sort of demonstration]]. You're not "arguing" a thing. You're just... laying it all out. You're demonstrating it.