How to Hunt Down a Writer

Yes. Let's learn how to argue better and more. Yes. Let's teach our composition students arguing for its own sake as the basis for their writing skills.

Keep in mind these students approach the English 1101 and 1102 classroom with the trepidation of those who have been sentenced to the gallows. As I write this, I can see their sallow faces on the first day of English 1101. I imagine the word "prey" taped over their eyes, as their eyes tell me they feel hunted in writing class, and we, the teachers, are the hunters.

During this first class, I ask the students if they are afraid of writing, if they have ever had a negative experience occur in a writing class. Hands rocket up, and at least the dreadful noise of the room's technology buzz is challenged momentarily by the sounds of human beings--of students--of students terrified of English Composition. Maybe these students aren't terrified of English Composition, itself, but of the hunters who they fear teach it.

Into this class environment of hunter and hunted, I quote Donald Murray and Peter Elbow. Murray says, “You don’t have to think you have talent to write. There is no secret society of writers you have to join,” and also, “All writers are self-taught. Your instructor can help, your classmates can help, this book can help, but you still have to learn how to write in your own way” (7).

I tell them that Peter Elbow, a pioneer of voice in writing, suggested to me once when I was stuck with my writing that I write as much bad writing as possible. Then I, too, add my comments to the students that writing can be an exhilarating act of discovery, writing can be their ally; this community of 1101 writers can be a support tool for them. I tell them how writing has saved my life. They stare at me like I am Bozo the Clown.

Yet at the end of a few classes, the students surround my desk with their stories of being hunted. I remember one young lady who was a freshman sat alongside me with her head hanging close to the fake wood desktop. She whispered how she'd failed 1101 last semester and how her professor had said in conference, "Your writing is terrible. You should not be in this class." Those remarks would certainly encourage me to write that next polished essay.

Another student who failed 1101 and felt berated by his professor, found upon taking the class again that he could write. In fact, the op-ed article he sent to the Atlanta Journal Constitution was selected for publication. Ironically, the subject of his op-ed piece was hunting. This student wasn't a failure as a writer when he took 1101 the first time. We failed in giving him the confidence to know he could write.

Stories like these are numerous and frightening. I've never found a student who has failed 1101 to be a student who cannot write. I've found students who have had the writer in them erased, but not one who wasn't a writer.

Now add to this a writing discipline focused on argument--let's argue. Let's teach the students how to defend their stance--let's be able to defend our policy on Iraq, our position on the Patriot Act. A world that argues more is assuredly a better world.

I can hear others say as they read this that argument is a skill of scholars and all threads of knowledge can be traced back to argument, which may well be true. But is the place for this English Composition 1101 and 1102 where English class is a huge monster of essay and word that students would rather drop again and again than endure?

I say everything is not an argument. Donald Murray reveals in Write to Learn about persuasion, rather than argument, as he prefers to call it:

In fact, I believe academic argument is a term and a process left over from the days when the academic world was exclusively male . . . . Truth was found by two men taking completely opposite sides and each trying to destroy the other. . . . Persuasion is the basic form of intellectual discourse; it is the way that new ideas are introduced, that old ideas are discarded, and old ideas are adpated to new trains of thoughts. (313-314)

I believe it is okay, as does Murray, to teach these skills; however, to make this the basis of our discipline disturbs me. One might say I am simply an emotional rant of an instructor on this subject--that I'm too emotional to be objective. I would have to say that is true. I'm one of the students who had my essay-writing hand slapped by a college professor that wanted to make sure his students knew they couldn't write. I didn't fail the class. I made a B. The grade wasn't an issue. I made several Bs in college. The issue was I didn't write with a voice of my own for twenty years. And writing is my first love.

We have to be emotional when the writing lives of our students are at stake. Do we want students to feel like I did and many do when they leave 1101 and 1102 and they are afraid to put any word to paper, or do we want them to say as they leave 1101 and 1102, "I will never look at writing the same way. I am not afraid of it anymore. I know I can write"? Each semester we don’t want to say we have hunted down and crushed the potential of 100 writers, but want to say we've given 100 students the opportunity at writing brilliance.

I suggest let’s take off the camouflage outfit of the hunter seeking failed writers as their spoils. Let’s put down our guns, our rights and wrongs, our arguments. Yes. Let’s become who we truly are--teachers of writers instead.


Work Cited

Murray, Donald. Write to Learn. 8th Ed. Boston: Thomson, 2005.


Copyright 2005 Shelnutt