Writing for Learning: The Student/Content Connection[*]

The benefits of using the writing to enhance students’ active learning in all disciplines—those as diverse as Business Administration and Physics—have only recently begun to be appreciated. Writing is, at the least, under-utilized on most college campuses. At present, those professors who do require students to write view writing as a product, as a means of evaluation without realizing its rich potential for contributing to the process of learning. Most professors emphasize the subject in writing assignments, almost excluding the writer, and narrowing the role of audience to the professor as grader of tests and term papers. Using the full possibilities of the communication triangle—subject, writer, and audience—will result in improved learning in any discipline, and will provide students with experiences necessary to encourage their intellectual development.

The Restricted Role of Writing in the Schools

In a study of the writing of more than five hundred British students, ages eleven to eighteen, James Britton and his colleagues analyzed approximately two thousand samples of student writing. From these samples, they identified audience categories for student writing, including writing for the self, writing for the teacher, and writing for broader audiences (Britton et al., 1975). In no age group was the writing less than 95 percent teacher-directed, and of this writing, in ever-increasing proportions with older students, it ranged up to 70 percent for teacher-as-examiner. This writing is characterized by assignments formulated as a testing function where the writing is a culminating or end point.

In a similar study, the Writing Across the Curriculum Project, Peter Medway and his associates observed that “writing tasks set by teachers of school subjects rarely carried the child forward, nor were they seen to have any other ‘purpose’ than reciting what was already known” (Applebee, 1977). A more recent study conducted in this country confirmed findings from the British setting; students actually spend only 3 percent of their time writing papers of a paragraph or more in length. The rest of their “writing” time is occupied with filling in blanks and writing phrases or isolated sentences (Applebee, 1981).

The uses of writing are equally restricted at the college level. For example, at the University of Washington, students in twenty-four disciplines were surveyed about the writing requirements in their courses (Gere, 1977). The study revealed that writing for any course seldom involved more than fifteen pages, including essay examinations, with upper division courses in all fields requiring longer and fewer papers. Research papers and essay questions on exams were identified as the tasks most often assigned to students. The University of Washington is doubtless typical of most college campuses:

Gere maintains that most college writing is, and will remain, primarily a means of testing knowledge after-the-fact, until faculty members discover the potential of writing as a means of reinforcing content as students are learning.

Students who have not been encouraged to write for various purposes will be less able to demonstrate intellectual mastery of the abstract concepts required for both reading and writing formal academic prose. Students whose writing has been restricted to creation of products used by teachers to evaluate the students’ learning will be unable, as Medway puts it, “to communicate what they have to say when they most want to say it” (Applebee, 1977, p. 83). Teachers who have not considered the role of writing in the learning process will miss opportunities to help their students internalize the subject matter of their disciplines and extend the range of the students’ thinking processes.

Writing as a Means of Thinking

In his studies of the development of children’s intellectual abilities, Jerome Bruner theorizes a spiral of mental growth in which “around adolescence—language becomes increasingly important as a medium of thought” (Bruner, 1966, p. 27). Bruner notes that increasing sophistication in children’s ability to deal with abstract concepts is based upon the “translation of experience into language.” But, he continues, “it is obviously not language per se that makes the difference; rather, it seems to be the use of language as an instrument of thinking that matters, its internalization, to use an apt but puzzling word” (Bruner, 1966, p. 14, italics mine). Donald Murray insists that “the writer’s job is not to say what he already knows but to explore his own experience for his own meaning . . . . As he sees his language he keeps changing the words—he thinks” (Murray, 1970, p. 23; italics mine). One conclusion of the 1975 Rutgers Conference on Teaching and Writing was that “writing has, or should have, a special role in learning in all disciplines” (Zemelman, 1977, p. 52).

Unfortunately, this realization has been accompanied by a good deal of proselytizing of non-English faculty by their colleagues in composition. The repeated message is that students should write more in all their classes so that they will “write better.” Contrast this view with the position taken by participants in the Rutgers Conference. They urged that the role of college writing must be changed. It must be made an activity of asking and discovering rather than one used almost exclusively for demonstrating what students already know. In Zemelman’s words, “teachers need assignments and ways of ‘correcting’ papers that do not discourage students from risking exploration. And they need to make certain that in testing and evaluating, they do not mistake risk-taking and difficulty for failure” (Zemelman, 1977 pp. 53-54).

William Irmscher’s two definitions of writing may offer a valuable fulcrum for balancing the pressures to assign more writing so that “students will write better” against a needed appreciation for writing as an integral process of learning in all disciplines. He says:

Similarly, Janet Emig points out that:

But, granting the truth of Emig’s observations, faculty may well propose another valid question: “If students write, when will I have time to correct all those papers? Again, faculty reflect the traditions that have produced them. Only within the past fifteen years have composition theorists proposed assigning quantities of student writing, whether or not the writing was “corrected” by anyone (see for example, Moffet, 1968). The remainder of this paper is devoted to practical aspects of using writing in the classroom, suggesting only a few of the many strategies currently in use by faculty concerned for the full intellectual development of their students.

Writing as an Active Form of Learning

In many classes, professors ask open-ended questions intended to provoke thoughtful discussions. In almost every case, the race is to the swiftest in these situations: a hand shoots up, followed by another hand, and, customarily, no more than thirty percent of the students in a class of twenty-five or thirty will participate in the discussion. What are the rest of the students doing? Thinking? Professors always hope so, and are occasionally rewarded by perceptive comments in the written work of a student who rarely speaks in class. But what about the fifty percent or more of the students who neither discuss often or write telling responses in papers or on essay exams? Many of those students doubtless believe that they are intellectually engaged in the discussion, that they are formulating relevant thoughts in response to the questions posed. However, many of those same students will frequently say about an essay exam: “I knew the answer, but I just couldn’t say (write) it.” Often the professor responds (or thinks): “If you knew it, you could write it.” This response fails to take into account most students’ lack of experience in expressing their ideas in writing (Applebee, 1981).

Studies of student writing at Eastern Oregon State College and elsewhere demonstrate clearly that students benefit from opportunities to collect their thoughts in writing, at various points during the term and under a variety of “practice” conditions. Representative student comments, reproduced in Table 1, suggest both the kinds of writing students find helpful and the ways in which students find they learn from these assignments.

Table 1

Using Ungraded Writing to Improve Students’ Learning

Students clearly recognize that writing—even ungraded writing—is a valuable aid to their learning processes. In-class writing can be used to (a) improve class discussions, (b) show students where their thinking lacks clarity, (c) prepare students to listen and observe critically, and (d) alert professors to content that should be reviewed or explained further. A variety of strategies are useful in achieving these ends. Some examples follow; for further suggestions see Ful­wiler and Young, 1982.

Broadening the Audience

Journal writing illustrates an important message of writing-across-the-curriculum programs: Vary the audience for student writing. In journals, the audience is the self, but numerous other audiences can be constructed. Use of realistic audiences increases student involvement in the writing process, resulting in better written products (Larsen, 1983).

Varying the audience for students’ writing can be as simple as creating a hypothetical audience for an assignment, or making the other students in the class the first audience for students’ papers. The second alternative has an immediate result. Students who have no qualms about boring the professor will work very hard not to embarrass themselves before their peers. They almost uniformly identify an audience of students as “tougher” to write for than the professor alone, especially since they are aware of their classmates’ low tolerance for boredom. In fact, a widely accepted composition theory identifies students’ classmates as their most effective audience. Ken Bruffee (1973, 1978) has demonstrated dramatic effects on student writing as a consequence of using peers as critics and collaborators in the writing process.

A hypothetical audience helps to focus an assignment for students. For example, Harriette Stover created an assignment for freshman pre-nursing students at Dallas County Community College. After spending some time observing in the wards of a hospital, students are asked to write three papers and a journal entry about an unusual occurrence with a patient, one they remember vividly. Although the subject matter is the same for each paper, the audiences vary:

Often a rather broad hypothetical audience is also effective: “When writing your paper, present the information clearly and concisely so the someone unfamiliar with x could easily understand your explanation”. This person could be a family member or a student about to take your course. This uninformed audience effectively substitutes for the omniscient professor who needs nothing explained, and also provides a point of discussion for omissions or confusing passages: ‘How would someone who is unfamiliar with x know that y is significant? Would you need to clarify this cause-and-effect relationship for someone who is not a specialist in the field?”

More “realistic” hypothetical audiences can also be contrived for student writing. Business courses have relied for years upon the case study method, which directs students to write up analyses for presentation to clients. Virtually every other discipline has an appropriate audience, as well. For example:

1. music students writing short music history papers as though they are preparing program notes for a performance or for a record album,

2. political science majors writing position papers for their congressmen or government advisory groups,

3. education majors preparing position papers for school boards,

4. sociology students writing informative reports for public service agencies.

5. art history students providing a detailed rationale to a museum board for the purchase of a given art work,

6. computer science students writing a comparative report on small office computers for an office manager who knows little about computers,

7. history students researching and writing historical vignettes for publication in the local historical society’s centennial booklet (for further examples see Field & Weiss, 1979).

Another traditional audience for student writing is the professional journal. Although that audience may be appropriate for papers in some upper division courses, it is a disastrous expectation for entering freshmen—especially those enrolled in general education courses. Even on the upper division level, using academic journals as an audience for students’ writing has one potential drawback. Depending upon the journals being studied, students’ writing may become, in the words of one dismayed scientist: “verbose, pompous, full of fashionable circumlocutions as well as dangling constructions, and painfully polysyllabic” (Woodford, 1967).

At the very least, professors can relinquish their “audience” role of teacher-as-examiner, exchanging it for the role of “interested adult reader” (Britton, 1975). In so doing, they enter into a professional relationship with the student writer, based upon snared interest and expertise; in Perry’s terms, they invite the student to participate in the community of scholars so essential to their development (Perry, 1970).

In Teaching the Universe of Discourse, James Moffett observes that the student is “on a two-way street”: sometimes he needs to trace his over-generalizations down to their inadequate sources, and sometimes he needs to build new ideas from the ground up” (Moffett, 1968, pp. 29-30). He insists that students “need to know when they are adults how experience is abstracted, communicated and utilized, whether the data are the recurring phenomena of nature and society or the private truths of the hearts”(Moffett, p. 212). How will students develop these skills in their classes? How will they learn? By writing.

Implications for Instruction

In the past, college faculties may have taken credit for teaching students who were, in reality, largely self-taught—students with an innate sensitivity to language who internalized skills of analysis and clear expression through extensive reading. The dramatic change in college student populations over the past two decades mandates a reappraisal of instructional techniques for students who must, literally, be taught. In order to progress beyond rote learning, these students require expanded opportunities for clarifying concepts, examining conclusions, and perceiving relationships. Continuing opportunities to engage their course materials through a variety of writing experiences, both graded and ungraded, may show these students how to build productive bridges between course content and themselves as learners.

References

• Applebee, Arthur N., Auten, Anne, and Lehr, Fran. Writing in Secondary School: English and the Content Areas. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1981.
• Applebee, Arthur. Writing across the curriculum: The London projects. English Journal, 1977, 66, 81-85.
• Berthoff, Ann E. From Problem-solving to a theory of the imagination. In Richard L. Graves, ed. Rhetoric and Composition. New Jersey: Hayden Book, 1976, p. 288.
• Britton, James, et al. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). London: Macmillan, 1975.
• Bruffee, Kenneth. The Brooklyn plan: Attaining intellectual growth through peer tutoring. Liberal Education, 1978, 64, 447-469.
• __________. Collaborative learning: Some practical models. College English, 1973, 35, 634-643.
• Bruner, Jerome S. Toward a Theory of Instruction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.
• Drenk, D. Teaching finance through writing. In C.W. Griffin, ed. Teaching Writing in All Disciplines. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1982.
• Field, John P. and Weiss, Robert H. Cases for Composition. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1979.
• Fulwiler, Toby and Young, Art, eds. Language connections: Writing and reading across the curriculum. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1982.
• Gere, Anne Ruggles. Writing and WRITING. English Journal, 1977, 66, 60-64.
• Irmscher, William F. The teaching of writing in terms of growth. English Journal, 1977, 66, 34.
• Krupa, Gene H. and Tremmel, Robert. Underground writing. Freshman English News, 1983, 12, 13.
• Larsen, Reed. Student involvement in writing assignments and the quality of writing: A research report. Paper presented at the Writing, Meaning and Higher Order Reasoning, 3rd National Institute, Chicago, Illinois, 1983.
• Moffett, James. Teaching the Universe of Discourse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
• Murray, Donald M. The interior view: One writer’s philosophy of composition. CCC, 1970, 21, 23.
• Perry, William G. Forms of intellectual and ethical development in the college years: A scheme. New York: Holt, Reinhardt & Winston, 1970.
• Stover, Harryette. Presentation at Conference of College Composition and Communication, San Francisco, March, 1982.
• Woodford, F. Peter. Sounder thinking through clear writing. Science, 1967, 156 743.
• Young, Richard. Invention: A topographical survey. In Gary Tate, ed., Teaching composition: Ten biolographical essays. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976, pp. 1-43.
• Zemelman, Steven. The Rutgers assessment on teaching writing—a summary and assessment. CCC, 1977, 28, 52.

Notes

• *

  This paper is a continuation of work begun at the Institute of Writing, University of Iowa, Iowa, 1979.

  Parts of this paper are excerpted from The Busy Professor’s Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum, available from Lois Barry, Eastern Oregon State College ($2.75 plus postage).