The Fear of Writing

Some friends on WPA-l are engaged in a mild conversation about the pleasure of writing. I want to elaborate here and then let one of my students, Jake, describe his problem with writing & how it has been taught.

I know my position is not popular; it might even be called dangerous. For a host of reasons, I would not recommend it for untenured or non-tenure track WPAs. Essentially, promoting the pleasure of writing is uncool–it’s not rigorous.

I have, when trying to make my position sound more scholarly :-), called it the transfer of affect. I think one of the best ways of helping students negotiate difficult rhetorical situations (the kind I usually call school writing–I think in A Theory of Literate Action, Chuck Bazerman calls them school genres) is to encourage a positive attitude toward writing.  As others in the WPA-l discussion have noted, making a positive attitude primary does not stop us from teaching many other writing and research skills. I work with my students on grammar, style, rhetorical theory, and research strategies.

I think we can make all of these interesting and pleasurable, although several of my students are clearly enduring my grammar lessons. But above all, I want my students to come out of our class having enjoyed their writing and reading (mostly reading each other) experiences. Achieving this objective is really not very hard. In fact, it’s fun. If you look at Rachel’s essay at the end of this post, you’ll see why.

I do know that encouraging pleasure in writing has invigorated the writing program I have been directing at Drexel. Almost all of the teachers have embraced it. The students as well have responded positively to it. My colleague, Karen Nulton, and I have significant research to support these claims. I think, however, focusing on the pleasure of writing is not the best way to make friends with administrators and other teachers who very likely do not enjoy writing. These are the people who believe in minimum word counts and a required number of scholarly sources.

I need to let Jake speak. But I do want to ground my theory as essentially a progressive, liberatory pedagogy. More lately, educators like Will Richardson, John Tagg, and L. Dee Fink refer to it as engaged learning–Tagg pushing for The Learning Paradigm College. None of this is new.

Here’s Jake’s description of why he had come to loath writing:
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