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

The things we carry . . .

One of the journal exercises I do with my composition students involves taking prompts from Tim O'Brien's powerful short story "The Things They Carried" and having the class fill in the prompts according to what their lives have required them to carry.

Sometimes I will do the exercise with them, sometimes not. I did write along with them this past week. I am posting my entry which I read to the class when we shared.

Truthful, honest writing, I believe, is accomplished most readily by opening the words our souls have given us and sharing them with a community of fellow writers. This exercise always generates some amazing words from the students.

With a thanks to Tim O'Brien for the use of a few lines from his work.


The things we carry are largely determined by necessities. Among the necessities are a house that carries the spirit of the previous owners, Gary and Ronna Jordan, who hid the permanently foggy windows in the bedroom when they were trying to sell the place by pulling their green brocade curtains taut, who failed to tell us the house was falling apart because of the hate they carried for each other.

So now we carry a roof that leaks that the they said was new. We carry brown water spots creating a random design on our family room ceiling, the girls’ bathroom, and bedrooms. We carry the Jordans’ mold that continues to grow in our house because of their lies. We carry our own mold inside us because the weight of their dishonesty is too much to carry.

We had carried a hope people were honest when we first moved into this house. Now, even though Gary Jordan was a construction project supervisor, we carry the discovery of duct tape on anything that has ever been broken in this house that he tried to fix. They even duct taped their marriage together, but it didn’t last.

We carry the fear that the house remembers their duct-taped marriage. We carry the fear the duct tape of our own marriage won’t hold either. We have a fear what the Jordans carried at 2117 Breconridge Drive is catching. We carry no illusion about honesty anymore.

At night I carry peculiar little odds and ends. I carry ghosts. I carry sleeping in any other bed than with you because the beagle snores louder than a human. She gets to sleep next to you. I don't.

I carry the sounds of the day in my head, a pre-programmed litany that occurs whenever I close my eyes. The question“Is Christmas day still on the 25?” I asked my manager at the bookstore. The open dialogue my brain waves have with each other about how stupid I’ve been. During the dark, I carry the wide awakeness of a premenopausal woman—something I thought I’d never carry, not the premenopausal stuff, but the wide awakeness part. I slept for twelve hours a night as soon as I came home from the hospital after I was born. Now, being a hormonal ghost, walking my own halls is a haunting thing to carry.

Some things we carry are determined by superstition: For instance we believe if we carry the honor of treating others right, then they will treat us right in return.

Some things we carry in common—among those we carry a hope that will sustain us. We carry the fact that we were both preachers’ kids. We carry the junk that being preacher’s kids carries with it.

While we were dating, we carried Captain D’s as our favorite restaurant. We carried the knowledge that we were good people, that neither of us had much money growing up. You wore those corduroy tan pants for twenty years. I had to be told the clodhoppers I wore to the office weren’t appropriate. We bought our first Christmas tree for $9, and most of the needles fell off by the time we got it in the apartment. We carried no furniture into our first apartment. We sat on the orange shag carpet and ate meals in front of a black and white TV. We carried love then so we didn’t think it mattered all the things we didn’t carry.

We carry the land, the mold, the rotten roof, the brown spots on the ceiling, the duct-taped everything since we bought the Jordans’ house. Now, six years later, if we get along we carry the hope that we still love each other, the hope that if we hold onto the rope long enough, we can carry the possibility of someone seeing what a good job we’ve done of holding on and everything. We carry the hope that the other person will make sure we never completely fall.

We carry all we can bear, and then some, including the silent awe for the terrible power of the things we carry.
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Shelnutt 2005 Copyright