Please read Instructor Comments before reading this essay.

Model #5

Learning to Say Something

The manner in which I learned writing was as unproductive and dated as that described by Lad Tobin in Clark's Writing in the Center. Tobin writes this about how writing has been taught in the past: "Once upon a time, in an age of disciplinary darkness and desolation, say about 1965 or so, writing students were subjected to cruel and inhuman punishments" (qtd. in Clark 5). Teachers gave students deadly topics that forced writers down defined paths that allowed for no exploration and questioning.
Looking back at my own writing history, which was supposed to have taken place in more enlightened times, I see that the methods of my writing instruction had much in common with Medieval brain surgery. In the heyday of my education as a writer, I glimpsed even then the inefficiency of the public education machine and rebelled religiously against it.

Even in the early days of my academic career, I knew that teachers were trying to make a conformist out of me. I hated it. I will grant that in the anthropological sense of the term, at least, "conformity" is not a bad thing as far as language is concerned. Every English speaker must, for example, agree that the symbols "c," "a," and "t" must be combined it exactly that order to refer to "cat." However, even in elementary school, the notion that any variations in writing were heretical was poured into my head as well as those of countless unsuspecting victims. Our first paragraphs had to look exactly like those in our workbooks. Our first paragraphs had to be at least four sentences long. Our first essays had to have mass-produced introductions, bodies, and conclusions. They were manufacturing our skills as writers from day one. Writing was not about being creative, expressing thought, or even sounding intelligent—it was about telling teachers what they wanted to hear.

Of course, I didn’t stand for it. I pointed out every time that authors wrote one-word sentences or ended thoughts with prepositions. By the time I was in fourth or fifth grade, I realized that there were a lot of good writers out there who had lived through school. Somehow people like e.e. cummings had gotten published in spite of grammatical sins that would make any English teacher blush. If they could do it, I figured, writing must be about something besides turning out factory-made thoughts.

Throughout every later writing class, which was usually called "English," the assembly line was as well oiled as ever. I was never really taught how to write, but only how not to. Most writing instruction in middle and high school consisted of learning grammar rules, diagramming sentences, and getting back papers that appeared to have been graded with bloody chainsaws. Then came the handbooks. They were brimming with do’s and don’ts, but never really contained suggestions on how to start writing and not get stuck. They were useless for writing, serving merely as a kind of fine print disclaimer through which students could not say they were warned.

Occasionally an English teacher would teach us how to brainstorm, cluster, or list, but such activities were always mandatory. Since I usually started writing anyway and let the muses direct me where they would, I frequently found myself scribbling bogus (but convincing) prewriting in the moments before the bell rang to signal the beginning of class and the end of procrastinators’ pipe dreams. My papers had been done since the night before. Throughout high school, prewriting, outlines, rough drafts, and final drafts were all required, regardless of whether or not one could, with one fell swoop, answer all five questions about Ethan Frome’s misery as prescribed in the "instruction sheet" given out before every essay.

As if to further my writing skills, my high school teachers picked topics for our compositions that would sedated even the most energetic expresso connoisseur. Topics as mundane as "What is the best gift you have ever received and why?" were scrawled maliciously across the top of every composition assignment. I often tried to be as creative as I could, not out of any desire to create art, but just to fend off the characteristic drowsiness of high school writing. Inventing fantastic responses with just enough credibility to prevent my detainment after class for interrogation was my specialty. I took delight in writing appalling fictional accounts of my "ideal future career" or "how I would spend a million dollars" with just enough finesses to make my teachers afraid to ask if everything was ok at home. For example, I once wrote that my "dream job" would be an assembly line worker in a cardboard box factory, supporting my position with transcendental imagery of the unlimited variation inherent in the boxes’ possible contents, and the impact of my job’s profundity.

The explicitness of the instructions did little for teaching me how to write for myself. When I got to college, and had to draw correlations and conclusions of my own, I felt bewildered and unprepared. I didn’t know what to do in Anthropology 356, for example, when an assignment stating "analyze some aspect of a speech community of your own choosing and apply these theories from readings to support your position" was handed out. It was a scary feeling, especially since I deemed myself a good writer, but there were no prefabricated questions to answer or guidelines about what to discuss. I could no longer lean on the crutches of "instructions" for literary support.

For years I had attempted to avoid the stabbing of red felt-tipped pens by following the process and methods of my teachers. I figured that as long as the mechanics of my papers made them feel influential, my writing would be considered "good." All the while I swore that my ideas were better than the topics assigned me, and that my thoughts would not stand to be confined by their requirements, but as I entered college, I realized that I had succumbed to their wishes, and that their words spoke through me. I outlined because I "had to" to get an "A," and revised because I was forbidden to turn in a final draft as my first attempt. I was forced to confront the idea that I was not as rebellious a writer as I had thought, but a product of their "instruction."

"How did it come to that?" I wondered. A process had taken place, but not all the "process" approach to which Clark refers (6-7). Looking back, I realized that I have been taught to produce writing, to manufacture it as a factory manufactures cars, to standardized specifications and accepted norms. Even the parts of this essay are interchangeable to others I have written.

That Anthropology paper I wrote, however, makes me consider other possibilities. No one told me what to do, or how I was supposed to tell about it. I chose to observe people’s speech in the computer lab, and there was no professor to tell me this wasn’t as important as their pointless, concrete parameters. I discovered all kinds of bizarre and esoteric knowledge about how people communicate in an environment that’s supposed to limit conversation. I learned that waves, head nods, and smiles are absolutely required in the computer lab as people must acknowledge acquaintances, or else face their wrath. I learned that rustling papers signals others that one is about to leave, inviting goodbyes. I learned that friends cannot stay silent if they sit next to each other. I learned.

When I finished typing the last sentence of the paper, I felt like it was the first real one I had ever written, the first complete thought that was truly my own. I had said something that had value, however small, where my every previous writing contained mostly 81/2 by 11 thoughts, chosen by someone else. What could I have written had the assembly line "writing teachers" not bludgeoned my brain into submission with cookie-cutter themes no one cares about? When I think back on all the compositions I’ve had to write, it disturbs me to think that I could have been thinking all along. I was just never asked.

Finally, those rebellious literary nonconformists who would have never made it through third grade Grammar come to mind. I realized now how they got published. They said something. My education as a writer has at last become concerned with that very act. Writing has no value unless it means something. I can stand bewildered in front of scripts foreign to my native tongue and although I am sure that their strange letters contain truth for those who can discern them, their contents matter to me. So it is with composition, style, and voice. If my words are meaningless, then my writing is not writing at all, but a waste of paper.

According to the definition of "writing," I have just begun to learn the subject. I am eager for my "education as a writer" to continue.