Review of Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition. By Kristin Dombek and Scott Herndon. New York: Teachers College Press, 2004, 130 pp. $22.95
Through their work in the Expository Writing Program of NYU, whose pedagogy has been shaped by an eclectic line of thinkers—from Newman and Pater to Bartholomae and Friere—Dombek and Herndon urge an approach to writing instruction that moves students beyond thesis-driven essays towards more complex and exploratory writing. Despite shrewd warnings on assignments about popular culture, race, and gender, their best chapters address the dialectics between thought and sentence structure and the multiplicity of “thinking moves” that students must master to become good analytic writers.
Most students arrive in college, the authors lament, inexperienced in any modes of writing but the report and the five-paragraph essay. To move them towards more complex writing, they urge us to stop blaming those convenient culprits—mass media and consumer culture—and admit our own failure to teach what traits typify good thinking and to model them in our choice of assigned texts. Without such a shift in pedagogy, they warn, students will continue to resort to predictable “defaults,” patterns of evaded thinking, that the authors astutely identify.
To genuinely engage students in the process of writing, we need, the authors claim, to “problematize” their writing assignments—design them to frame a significant problem. It is, they claim, students’ fear of uncertainty—the need to appear authoritative—that prompts them to shun those exploratory paths, those tentative forays of thought, that yield thoughtful academic writing. Convinced that thesis-driven writing exacerbates that fear, the authors, in designing their own assignments, “search for problems to solve, not theses to defend.”
That English 101 is committed to “text-based writing,” the authors rightly suggest, is insufficient to provide what students really need: lessons in how to exercise their voices upon a text, without which they tend to efface their voices before the authority of the text or respond to that text with ungrounded opinion. Recent trends in public education—the valorization of self-esteem and an enduring cult of textual authority—the authors suggest, have forged in students a paradoxical assumption: if their untutored opinions are sacral, as students, they are, ipso facto, unqualified to analyze a text. The authors urge us to wean students away from such defaults by modeling “thinking moves” that can be recognized, named, and practiced. They further endorse assignments that bridge the gap between “personal experience” and “academic writing”—an insight that resonates with Jane Tompkins’ belated epiphany, in A Life in School: that assignments in the humanities should help students to find some intersection between the personal and the academic, without which their discourse smacks of trivial prattle or sterile disengagement.
An intriguing chapter, “The Grammar of Ideas,” urges us to teach sentence structure less as a means of avoiding error than as a mode of building complex thought. Such an approach, it argues, enables students to see how different sentence patterns (declarative, cumulative, periodic, and chiasmic) can model the movement of entire paragraphs or entire essays. A common assumption—that as students begin to think more complexly, they will produce more complex syntax—the authors challenge with the exhortation to teach more dialectically—sometimes, that is, starting from the grammatical end. The seismic shift of public education away from grammatical instruction in recent decades now prompts even Stanley Fish, they note, to inveigh against content-heavy composition courses:
Every dean should forthwith insist that all composition courses teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. No composition course should have a theme, especially one the instructor is interested in. (Fish, 2002)
Such attention to sentence-structure, the authors argue, must find an equivalent place in reading instruction. They urge us to find the right moment to illustrate the movement of a sentence in an assigned text. They dare to invoke the unfashionable word “beauty” as a quality that, in beautifully wrought sentences, students should appreciate. Such observations ring true. In teaching Black Boy a few weeks ago, I asked students to appraise a moment when Wright, after a hiatus of many years, comes face to face with his estranged father:
A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when I saw my father sitting with the strange woman and the time when I was to see him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands—a quarter of a century during which my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered that when I tried to talk to him I realized that, though ties of blood made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers, speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality. (Wright, 1998, 34)
Having recently studied clauses, we read the sentence aloud several times, calling attention to its elaborate syntax, its parallel internal rhythms, noting how the repetition of “although” underscores the gap between Wright’s genetic, and emotional, connections to his father; how the very length of the sentence underscores the length of time—and the scope of the psychological journey—between his last, and current, glimpse of the man. I asked students to simulate the impact of the sentence by dividing it into several sentences. So crucified, it had lost its power. The wedding of form and content seemed persuasive. A few faces brightened with recognition.
How useful is this text, on the whole, for instructors in our own writing program?
The authors assume that students enter college with practice in the five-paragraph essay that my own 101 students rarely reveal. If I, too, am sometimes weary of thesis-driven writing, getting students to master even this form of writing by mid semester can be no small feat. Although students of the humanities must learn to think complexly—and all prospective freethinking citizens need to recognize a questionable premise when they encounter one—the insistence on helping students “to complicate their analyses” sometimes seems, fetishistically, to endorse complication for its own sake. Prior to complication, it can be argued, students need to be able to write simply and clearly. To produce good memos in their field of employment—to become promotable—they need to be able to write simply and clearly. Most need far more practice than we assume in subordinating—and ordering—three subtopics to support a main idea. More than one department head has complained that the forms of writing students must master in their own programs demand, above all, clarity and condensation and that English 101’s exclusive focus on the academic essay encourages complication “that gets in the way of these tasks.”
If we share, on the other hand, the premise that college composition should cultivate, above all, a capacity for complex thinking, we should agree that it is important to assign texts that model it. Dombek and Herndon provide, disappointingly, little advice on text selection.
Despite these caveats, their book is worth reading for its rationale for “problematizing” writing assignments, its rich approach to teaching sentence structure as a mode of thought, its reminder of the mimetic element that resides in all deep learning, and its insistence that students not merely recognize certain “thinking moves,” but be able to name them—a capacity for which I have argued in previous articles in Viewpoints and without which, I agree, students are academically impaired.
References
Tompkins, Jane P. A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
Wright, Richard (1998) Black Boy. New York: HarperPerrennial.
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Maintained by Jay Howard, Apr 2004