Annotated Bibliography Final Draft
Start Assignment
- Due Feb 12 by 11:59pm
- Points 50
- Submitting a text entry box or a file upload
1500 words in total
Look at an example provided below
Description:
You’ve had the opportunity to test your initial ideas and cultivate source literacy techniques for your final Hybrid Argument pa.per. You’ve cultivated strong research skills and practiced identifying reliable and credible source materials. You practiced MLA citation style and this week we will combine rhetorical analysis techniques, summary writing, and MLA citation style into annotated bibliographies.
An Annotated bibliography is a tool that many scholars use as they write hybrid and extended argument pa.pers; particularly, when you have multiple sources, it’s important that you keep information and research highly organized so to attribute accurately. To strengthen our writerly ethos, this week has been carved out so you can do the majority of the research required for the final pa.per. While integrating 10 different sources may be overwhelming or exist as the longest pa.per you’ve ever drafted, the exercises, source map, and source annotation assignments this week will pars the research and planning process into digestible bits.
Module Objectives:
- Select 10 high quality sources for the hybrid argument portfolio
- Model high quality academic research practice
- Create an annotated bibliography adhering to MLA citation standards
- Provide peers’ suggestions on strengthening MLA formatting and Annotations
Readings:
Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing 2e, Issue 7 “Rethinking Revision” p. 259 – 288
Instructions:
Follow the prompts in the following documents:
- Annotated Bibliography Assignment Sheet and Rubric
- Annotated Bibliography Student Example
Grading:
Upload your document in (x) format
Cohen 1
Sarah Cohen
Instructor Qui Gon Jinn
ENGL 1164
6 November 2018
Annotated Bibliography
Ichniowski, Tom. “New Spending Measure Provides Construction Boost.” ENR: Engineering
News-Record, February 2018. EBSCOhost,
search.ebscohost.com.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=128005
898&site=ehost-live&scope=site. This article highlights the budget that is being
increased to help the Army Corps of Engineers build a better infrastructure. It provides
quotes from the Army Chief and the Lieutenant General of the Army Corps of Engineers.
The article points out the flaws that come with the new increase in the budget. I will use
this source as it provides credible quotes from people who know first-hand how the
infrastructure in the United States needs to be improved. With the quotes, I will try to
persuade my audience that the budget “increase” needs to be raised as it is not enough to
make improvements across the nation. This source will help present logic that is needed
to persuade the reader, without knowing the numbers, the reader would not know the
little impact the budget has on infrastructure. By presenting this, it allows the reader to
see how inefficient the new budget is.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.
Routledge, 1996. Kress and van Leeuwen provide means to examine visual and linguistic
compositional argument as it relates to the features of an image, including color choices,
subject representation, viewer positioning, framing, size and location of image, and other
Cohen 2
structural elements that speak to the designers’ intended visual effect. Analyzing the
relationship between producer and viewer by means of the visual interaction can begin to
address and “regulate what may be ‘said’ with images, how it should be said, and how it
should be interpreted” (114). Specifically, Kress and van Leeuwen’s text will be critical
as I need to establish the digital and rhetorical arguments pertaining to the design choices
featured on WeddingWire as it relates to the position of the viewer and the compositional
visual culture of the website.
Los Angeles Public Library. “Hartley Burr Alexander: Not Your Typical 20th Century
Philosopher.” https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/hartley-burr-alexander-
not-your-typical-20th-century Accesses 13 July 2018. This online publication illuminates
historical and biographic information about Hartley Burr Alexander. This text is useful in
corroborating primary source documents about Alexander’s conviction to Native American
cultural preservation against evidence other scholars and colleagues have provided,
speaking to the legacy and Alexander’s vita. This multigenre project is in part
bibliographic, so this source will be useful in establishing the character and personal
history of Alexander and the inspirations that contributed to his thematic consultation to
the NE capitol. This source also provides work that Alexander did after the Nebraska State
Capitol project including thematic curation to the Los Angeles Central Library
Commission, Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Oregon State Capitol, Fidelity Mutual
Life Building in Philadelphia, Metropolitan Life Instance Building in NYC, Rockefeller
Center in New York, and the Department of Justice Building in Washington D.C., among
many others; while these other curations are not the focus of this inquiry, these examples
Cohen 3
will be useful in establishing Alexander’s commitment to mediated memory and art
practices regarding Native American life in North America
Moore, Tami J. and Barbara Clark. “The Impact of ‘Message Senders’ on What Is True: Native
Americans in Nebraska History Books” Multicultural Perspectives, vol. 6 no. 2, 2009, pp.
17-23, DOI: 10.1207/s15327892mcp0602_4. This journal article was authored by two
University of Nebraska-Kearney professors and through a comparative Nebraska social
studies textbook study, they found five emerging themes as it relates to how contemporary
textbooks portray Native Americans. These characteristic Native American themes and
“images included thievery, brutality, lazy men, alcoholism, and magic” (Moore & Clark
19). Moore and Clark’s study details the damaging effects this kind of portrayal has upon
students in shaping their conceptions of Native lived experiences and presence in both
historic and contemporary contexts. This source offers a contemporary example of how
current educational traditions relating to Native American cultural education falters
tremendously from a space of commemoration and honoring the First Peoples of the Great
Plains. This source will be another supporting artifact which attempts to combine fragments
of both the current ways Nebraska treats Native American history and education against the
commemorative intentions of Alexander’s Nebraska State Capitol Building.
Week 6: Creating Bibliographies and Practicing MLA Citation
Annotated Bibliography Assignment Sheet and Rubric
Assignment: You will create an annotated bibliography of 8-10 high-quality sources you plan on using in
your Final Hybrid Argument paper for this course. An annotated bibliography is a wonderful research tool
that allows you to keep track of and represent your research in one condensed location. You will correctly
cite and format each source according as you would on your Works Cited page, followed by a brief
summary and personal evaluation of the source.
Further Annotated Bibliography Explanation Found on Owl Perdue Online Writing Lab: Annotated
Bibliographies
What Is an Annotated Bibliography? An annotation is a brief summary of a book, article, or
other publication. An abstract is also a summary, but there is a difference between the two.
An abstract is simply a summary of a work, whereas the purpose of an annotation is to
describe the work in such a way that the reader can decide whether or not to read the work
itself. An annotated bibliography helps the reader understand the particular usefulness of
each item. The ideal annotated bibliography shows the relationships among individual items
and may compare their strengths or shortcomings.
Technical Requirements for Each of Your 8-10 Sources:
• Bibliography must be formatted according to MLA 8 style and formatting guidelines (i.e. format your
citations as they will appear on your final Works Cited page)
• Each Annotation should be approximately 250-500 words in length and should include:
o A 3-4 sentence objective summary immediately following the citation. You are required to use the
objective summary and attributive tag skills from Chapter 8 (Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with
Readings 11e)
o A 2-3 sentence evaluation indicating how this source might (or might not) contribute to your
research (not your opinion of the source itself, but your opinion about how effectively it would serve
as evidence for your argument; be specific and think rhetorically).
• A bibliography is an opportunity to demonstrate high quality research so as you select your 8-10
sources to annotate, make sure you are selecting the very best and most exemplar sources
Helpful Note: Consider the chart from pages 109-111 of your textbook, Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with
Readings 11e, to help you rhetorically evaluate each source. Attributive Tags can be reviewed on pages
369-371.
Additional Requirements and Reminders:
• Sources should appear in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. If an author is not provided,
alphabetize based on the first major word of the article title.
• Times New Roman 12-point font, Double-spaced, One-inch margins
• Minimal errors in punctuation or accuracy/completeness of information
• You are highly encouraged to not use any service or program that will “do it for you” – these are
frequently inaccurate and cause unnecessary problems for students, particularly when you are doing an
annotated bibliography (which requires extra, “human” attention to formatting).
Potential bibliography sources include but are not limited to: Books, journals, magazines, newspapers,
pamphlets, personal interviews, lectures, speeches, videos, tweets, YouTube videos, TED talks, textbooks,
scholarly articles, etc.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/annotated_bibliographies/index.html
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/annotated_bibliographies/index.html
Criteria
Below Expectation
(0-30)
Meeting
Expectations
(31-43)
Outstanding
(44-50)
Total
Points
Nuts
and
Bolts
Did student annotate a minimum of 8 sources? Did students submit in an acceptable word
or x format? While this assignment is based on completion, points will be awarded
based on the breadth, quality, and completeness of your reflection.
__/ 10
Style Conventional and accepted rules of good writing are followed including the following: 1)
Summaries remain impartial, brief, abbreviations and direct quotes are avoided 2) Student
does not rely on “fluff” to meet annotation length i.e. do not report information in the title 3)
Remain objective and avoid introducing personal prejudices.
__/ 10
Length and
Breadth
Did student draft an objective and evaluate the rhetorical usefulness of the source meeting
a minimum 250-word count for each entry? Did student stay focused on the key ideas but
provided enough information to be useful for outside evaluators or researchers?
__/ 5
Perspective
Summaries are composed in third person perspective and the student remains objective
during evaluation.
__/5
Language
and
Vocabulary
Student makes reasonable attempts to use the vocabulary of the author, as far as possible,
to convey the ideas and conclusions of the author. Student avoids excessive paraphrasing
and introducing annotations with superfluous and/or redundant phrases like “The author
states,” “This article concerns,” “This new contribution to,” etc.
Student avoids the monotonous starting of sentences with “It was suggested that,” “It was
found that,” “It was reported that,” etc. Annotations in which most sentences end with “are
discussed” and “are given” are similarly ineffective.
__/ 10
MLA
Formatting
Are all source entries cited without erroneous mistakes according to MLA 8 standard
guidelines? Did student meticulously follow document formatting requirements of an
Annotated Bibliography?
__/ 10
Annotation Example:
Micciche, Laura R. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” College Composition and Communication. 55.4 (2004):
716-37. JSTOR. Web. 18 Nov. 2010. Micciche focuses on the rhetoric of grammar—what we say and how we
say it. She acknowledges that grammar instruction out of context may not produce better writing and she
admits that the “drill-and-kill” exercises may not be beneficial at all. She offers a more succinct definition of
rhetorical grammar, which she defines as “teaching the effective communication through language use.”
Micciche argues that rhetorical grammar instruction is central to composition’s commitment to teaching critical
thinking and cultural criticism. She suggests that the ability to develop sentences to serve a purpose require a
conceptual ability to envision relationships between ideas. In order to link grammar and conceptual thinking,
she encourages writers to stray away from the error-correction goals of formal grammar and assess the
meaning provided by the manipulation of syntactic structure. She maintains that even rhetorical grammar
should be reserved for the end stages of drafting as she concedes that it may reduce time spent on higher-
order concerns if not appropriately applied during the correct stage. Rhetorical grammar instruction will then
move the students toward conscious decision making in order to shape meaning effectively. By creating an
awareness of the power of grammar, instructors encourage students to identify the functions of grammar in
culture as, for instance, a form of resistance. Micciche presents an assignment which she titles “commonplace
books,” which are simply journals kept by all students in which they write daily. Micciche then asks the students
to write a paragraph on the effectiveness of the writing itself or to imitate a writer’s style (not content) in an
attempt to assess the power in the syntax. These assignments open the students’ eyes to more than just the
traditional grammar error-correction and turn them into cultural critics capable of analyzing the manipulation of
grammar. Micciche offers many different examples of student responses to grammatical choices and how
those choices may or may not have been effective in order to illustrate the effectiveness of her commonplace
book assignments. Micciche suggests that rather than abandon grammar instruction, teachers should seek
avenues from which to revitalize the practice in order to promote composition’s goals “to equip students to be
active citizens of the world they inhabit.” This resource will be useful for my overview of grammar instruction
and some of the critiques waged by rhetoric and composition scholars.
1
Shitty First Drafts
Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird
Born in San Francisco in 1954, Anne Lamott is a graduate of Goucher College
in Baltimore and is the author of six novels, including Rosie (1983), Crooked Little
Heart (1997), All New People (2000), and Blue Shoes (2002). She has also been the
food reviewer for California magazine, a book reviewer for Mademoiselle, and a
regular contributor to Salon’s “Mothers Who Think.” Her nonfiction books include
Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), in which she
describes her adventures as a single parent, and Tender Mercies: Some Thoughts on
Faith (1999), in which she charts her journey toward faith in God.
In the following selection, taken from Lamott’s popular book about writing,
Bird by Bird (1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those “shitty first
drafts” that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts.
1 Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of
shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good
second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who
are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think
that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling
great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they
have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their
necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages
as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some
very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal
of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and
confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but
we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that
God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest
friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
2 Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do
they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff
warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the
snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to
himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can
either type, or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those
writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and
sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now,
Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every
morning — sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away,
humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad
things to rain down on a person like this.
3 For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the
only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
4 The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp
all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it
later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions
come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so
what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to
get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all
down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that
you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be
something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just
love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be
writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no
way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.
5 I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing
food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single
review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at
my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents’ brains.) These
reviews always took two days to write. First I’d go to a restaurant several times with
a few opinionated, articulate friends in tow. I’d sit there writing down everything
anyone said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday I’d
sit down at my desk with my notes and try to write the review. Even after I’d been
doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a
couple of dreadful sentences, XX them out, try again, XX everything out, and then
feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think
calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m
through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But
probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop,
remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down.
Eventually I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes.
Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer,
and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really shitty
first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.
6 So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just
making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible. I’d write a lead
paragraph that was a whole page, even though the entire review could only be three
pages long, and then I’d start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time,
bird by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting like
cartoon characters. They’d be pretending to snore, or rolling their eyes at my
overwrought descriptions, no matter how hard I tried to tone those descriptions
down, no matter how conscious I was of what a friend said to me gently in my early
days of restaurant reviewing. “Annie,” she said, “it is just a piece of chicken. It is just
a bit of cake.”
7 But because by then I had been writing for so long, I would eventually let myself
trust the process — sort of, more or less. I’d write a first draft that was maybe twice
as long as it should be, with a self-indulgent and boring beginning, stupefying
descriptions of the meal, lots of quotes from my black-humored friends that made
them sound more like the Manson girls than food lovers, and no ending to speak of.
2
The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the
day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second
draft. I’d worry that people would read what I’d written and believe that the accident
had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my
mind was shot.
8 The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out
everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second page, figure
out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second draft. It always turned out fine,
sometimes even funny and weird and helpful. I’d go over it one more time and mail
it in.
9 Then, a month later, when it was time for another review, the whole process
would start again, complete with the fears that people would find my first draft
before I could rewrite it.
10 Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start
somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of
mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second
draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more
accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to
see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
1. Lamott says that the perceptions most people have of how writers work is
different from the reality of the work itself. She refers to this in paragraph 1 as
“the fantasy of the uninitiated.” What does she mean?
2. In paragraph 7 Lamott refers to a time when, through experience, she
“eventually let [herself] trust the process – sort of, more or less.” She is
referring to the writing process, of course, but why “more or less”? Do you
think that her wariness is personal, or is she speaking for all writers in this
regard? Explain.
3. From what Lamott has to say, is writing a first draft more about the product or
the process? Do you agree in regard to your own first drafts? Explain.
Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College
Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed.
Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.
How to Read Like a Writer
by
Mike Bunn
This essay is a chapter in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, a
peer-reviewed open textbook series for the writing classroom.
Download the full volume and individual chapters from:
• Writing Spaces: http://writingspaces.org/essays
• Parlor Press: http://parlorpress.com/writingspaces
• WAC Clearinghouse: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/
Print versions of the volume are available for purchase directly from Parlor
Press and through other booksellers.
This essay is available under a Creative Commons License subject to the Writing Spaces’
Terms of Use. More information, such as the specific license being used, is available at the
bottom of the first page of the chapter.
© 2011 by the respective author(s). For reprint rights and other permissions, contact the
original author(s).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Writing spaces : readings on writing. Volume 1 / edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel
Zemliansky.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-184-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60235-185-1 (adobe ebook)
1. College readers. 2. English language–Rhetoric. I. Lowe, Charles, 1965- II. Zemliansky,
Pavel.
PE1417.W735 2010
808’.0427–dc22
2010019487
http://writingspaces.org/essays
http://wac.colostate.edu/books/
http://parlorpress.com/writingspaces
71
How to Read Like a Writer
Mike Bunn
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six months
and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.*
The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-story theatre in the heart of
London’s famous West End, and eight times a week it housed a three-
hour performance of the musical Les Miserables. Because of antiquated
fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city was required to have a certain
number of staff members inside watching the performance in case of
an emergency.
My job (in addition to wearing a red tuxedo jacket) was to sit inside
the dark theater with the patrons and make sure nothing went wrong.
It didn’t seem to matter to my supervisor that I had no training in se-
curity and no idea where we kept the fire extinguishers. I was pretty
sure that if there was any trouble I’d be running down the back stairs,
leaving the patrons to fend for themselves. I had no intention of dying
in a bright red tuxedo.
There was a Red Coat stationed on each of the theater’s four floors,
and we all passed the time by sitting quietly in the back, reading books
with tiny flashlights. It’s not easy trying to read in the dim light of
a theatre—flashlight or no flashlight—and it’s even tougher with
shrieks and shouts and gunshots coming from the stage. I had to focus
intently on each and every word, often rereading a single sentence sev-
eral times. Sometimes I got distracted and had to re-read entire para-
* This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the
Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,
USA. To view the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.
org/terms-of-use.
Mike Bunn72
graphs. As I struggled to read in this environment, I began to realize
that the way I was reading—one word at a time—was exactly the
same way that the author had written the text. I realized writing is a
word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process. The intense concentra-
tion required to read in the theater helped me recognize some of the
interesting ways that authors string words into phrases into paragraphs
into entire books.
I came to realize that all writing consists of a series of choices.
I was an English major in college, but I don’t think I ever thought
much about reading. I read all the time. I read for my classes and
on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought
about the important connections between reading and writing, and
how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer.
What Does It Mean to Read Like a Writer?
When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of
the choices the author made so that you can better understand how
such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully
examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the
text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same)
techniques in your writing.
You are reading to learn about writing.
Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in
the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway),
you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together
by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a par-
ticular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices
the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing
your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is
written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?
The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are
the most important writerly choices represented in the text—choices
as large as the overall structure or as small as a single word used only
once—to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers (in-
cluding yourself ). Then you can go one step further and imagine what
different choices the author might have made instead, and what effect
those different choices would have on readers.
How to Read Like a Writer 73
Say you’re reading an essay in class that begins with a short quote
from President Barack Obama about the war in Iraq. As a writer, what
do you think of this technique? Do you think it is effective to begin the
essay with a quote? What if the essay began with a quote from someone
else? What if it was a much longer quote from President Obama, or a
quote from the President about something other than the war?
And here is where we get to the most important part: Would you
want to try this technique in your own
writing?
Would you want to start your own essay with a quote? Do you
think it would be effective to begin your essay with a quote from Presi-
dent Obama? What about a quote from someone else?
You could make yourself a list. What are the advantages and dis-
advantages of starting with a quote? What about the advantages and
disadvantages of starting with a quote from the President? How would
other readers respond to this technique? Would certain readers (say
Democrats or liberals) appreciate an essay that started with a quote
from President Obama better than other readers (say Republicans or
conservatives)? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of
starting with a quote from a less divisive person? What about starting
with a quote from someone more divisive?
The goal is to carefully consider the choices the author made and
the techniques that he or she used, and then decide whether you want
to make those same choices or use those same techniques in your own
writing. Author and professor Wendy Bishop explains how her reading
process changed when she began to read like a writer:
It wasn’t until I claimed the sentence as my area of desire,
interest, and expertise—until I wanted to be a writer writing
better—that I had to look underneath my initial readings .
. . I started asking, how—how did the writer get me to feel,
how did the writer say something so that it remains in my
memory when many other things too easily fall out, how did
the writer communicate his/her intentions about genre, about
irony? (119–20)
Bishop moved from simply reporting her personal reactions to the
things she read to attempting to uncover how the author led her (and
other readers) to have those reactions. This effort to uncover how au-
thors build texts is what makes Reading Like a Writer so useful for
student writers.
Mike Bunn74
How Is RLW Different from “Normal” Reading?
Most of the time we read for information. We read a recipe to learn
how to bake lasagna. We read the sports page to see if our school won
the game, Facebook to see who has commented on our status update,
a history book to learn about the Vietnam War, and the syllabus to see
when the next writing assignment is due. Reading Like a Writer asks
for something very different.
In 1940, a famous poet and critic named Allen Tate discussed two
different ways of reading:
There are many ways to read, but generally speaking there are
two ways. They correspond to the two ways in which we may
be interested in a piece of architecture. If the building has Co-
rinthian columns, we can trace the origin and development of
Corinthian columns; we are interested as historians. But if we
are interested as architects, we may or may not know about
the history of the Corinthian style; we must, however, know
all about the construction of the building, down to the last
nail or peg in the beams. We have got to know this if we are
going to put up buildings ourselves. (506)
While I don’t know anything about Corinthian columns (and doubt
that I will ever want to know anything about Corinthian columns),
Allen Tate’s metaphor of reading as if you were an architect is a great
way to think about RLW. When you read like a writer, you are trying
to figure out how the text you are reading was constructed so that you
learn how to “build” one for yourself. Author David Jauss makes a
similar comparison when he writes that “reading won’t help you much
unless you learn to read like a writer. You must look at a book the way
a carpenter looks at a house someone else built, examining the details
in order to see how it was made” (64).
Perhaps I should change the name and call this Reading Like an
Architect, or Reading Like a Carpenter. In a way those names make
perfect sense. You are reading to see how something was constructed
so that you can construct something similar yourself.
How to Read Like a Writer 75
Why Learn to Read Like a Writer?
For most college students RLW is a new way to read, and it can be dif-
ficult to learn at first. Making things even more difficult is that your
college writing instructor may expect you to read this way for class but
never actually teach you how to do it. He or she may not even tell you
that you’re supposed to read this way. This is because most writing
instructors are so focused on teaching writing that they forget to show
students how they want them to read.
That’s what this essay is for.
In addition to the fact that your college writing instructor may
expect you to read like a writer, this kind of reading is also one of the
very best ways to learn how to write well. Reading like a writer can
help you understand how the process of writing is a series of making
choices, and in doing so, can help you recognize important decisions
you might face and techniques you might want to use when working
on your own writing. Reading this way becomes an opportunity to
think and learn about writing.
Charles Moran, a professor of English at the University of Massa-
chusetts, urges us to read like writers because:
When we read like writers we understand and participate in
the writing. We see the choices the writer has made, and we
see how the writer has coped with the consequences of those
choices . . . We “see” what the writer is doing because we read
as writers; we see because we have written ourselves and know
the territory, know the feel of it, know some of the moves our-
selves. (61)
You are already an author, and that means you have a built-in advan-
tage when reading like a writer. All of your previous writing experi-
ences—inside the classroom and out—can contribute to your success
with RLW. Because you “have written” things yourself, just as Moran
suggests, you are better able to “see” the choices that the author is
making in the texts that you read. This in turn helps you to think
about whether you want to make some of those same choices in your
own writing, and what the consequences might be for your readers if
you do.
Mike Bunn76
What Are Some Questions to Ask
Before You Start Reading?
As I sat down to work on this essay, I contacted a few of my former stu-
dents to ask what advice they would give to college students regarding
how to read effectively in the writing classroom and also to get their
thoughts on RLW. Throughout the rest of the essay I’d like to share
some of their insights and suggestions; after all, who is better qualified
to help you learn what you need to know about reading in college writ-
ing courses than students who recently took those courses themselves?
One of the things that several students mentioned to do first, be-
fore you even start reading, is to consider the context surrounding both
the assignment and the text you’re reading. As one former student,
Alison, states: “The reading I did in college asked me to go above and
beyond, not only in breadth of subject matter, but in depth, with re-
gards to informed analysis and background information on context.”
Alison was asked to think about some of the factors that went into the
creation of the text, as well as some of the factors influencing her own
experience of reading—taken together these constitute the context of
reading. Another former student, Jamie, suggests that students “learn
about the historical context of the writings” they will read for class.
Writing professor Richard Straub puts it this way: “You’re not going to
just read a text. You’re going to read a text within a certain context, a
set of circumstances . . . It’s one kind of writing or another, designed
for one audience and purpose or another” (138).
Among the contextual factors you’ll want to consider before you
even start reading are:
• Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing?
• Do you know who the intended audience is for this piece of
writing?
It may be that you need to start reading before you can answer these
first two questions, but it’s worth trying to answer them before you
start. For example, if you know at the outset that the author is try-
ing to reach a very specific group of readers, then his or her writerly
techniques may seem more or less effective than if he/she was trying
to reach a more general audience. Similarly—returning to our earlier
example of beginning an essay with a quote from President Obama
How to Read Like a Writer 77
about the war in Iraq—if you know that the author’s purpose is to
address some of the dangers and drawbacks of warfare, this may be
a very effective opening. If the purpose is to encourage Americans to
wear sunscreen while at the beach this opening makes no sense at all.
One former student, Lola, explained that most of her reading assign-
ments in college writing classes were designed “to provoke analysis and
criticisms into the style, structure, and purpose of the writing itself.”
In What Genre Is This Written?
Another important thing to consider before reading is the genre of the
text. Genre means a few different things in college English classes, but
it’s most often used to indicate the type of writing: a poem, a newspa-
per article, an essay, a short story, a novel, a legal brief, an instruction
manual, etc. Because the conventions for each genre can be very differ-
ent (who ever heard of a 900-page newspaper article?), techniques that
are effective for one genre may not work well in another. Many readers
expect poems and pop songs to rhyme, for example, but might react
negatively to a legal brief or instruction manual that did so.
Another former student, Mike, comments on how important the
genre of the text can be for reading:
I think a lot of the way I read, of course, depends on the type
of text I’m reading. If I’m reading philosophy, I always look
for signaling words (however, therefore, furthermore, despite)
indicating the direction of the argument . . . when I read fic-
tion or creative nonfiction, I look for how the author inserts
dialogue or character sketches within narration or environ-
mental observation. After reading To the Lighthouse [sic] last
semester, I have noticed how much more attentive I’ve become
to the types of narration (omniscient, impersonal, psychologi-
cal, realistic, etc.), and how these different approaches are uti-
lized to achieve an author’s overall effect.
Although Mike specifically mentions what he looked for while reading
a published novel, one of the great things about RLW is that it can be
used equally well with either published or student-produced writing.
Is This a Published or a Student-Produced Piece of Writing?
As you read both kinds of texts you can locate the choices the author
made and imagine the different decisions that he/she might have made.
Mike Bunn78
While it might seem a little weird at first to imagine how published
texts could be written differently—after all, they were good enough
to be published—remember that all writing can be improved. Scholar
Nancy Walker believes that it’s important for students to read pub-
lished work using RLW because “the work ceases to be a mere artifact,
a stone tablet, and becomes instead a living utterance with immediacy
and texture. It could have been better or worse than it is had the author
made different choices” (36). As Walker suggests, it’s worth thinking
about how the published text would be different—maybe even bet-
ter—if the author had made different choices in the writing because
you may be faced with similar choices in your own work.
Is This the Kind of Writing You Will Be
Assigned to Write Yourself?
Knowing ahead of time what kind of writing assignments you will be
asked to complete can really help you to read like a writer. It’s prob-
ably impossible (and definitely too time consuming) to identify all of
the choices the author made and all techniques an author used, so it’s
important to prioritize while reading. Knowing what you’ll be writing
yourself can help you prioritize. It may be the case that your instruc-
tor has assigned the text you’re reading to serve as model for the kind
of writing you’ll be doing later. Jessie, a former student, writes, “In
college writing classes, we knew we were reading for a purpose—to
influence or inspire our own work. The reading that I have done in
college writing courses has always been really specific to a certain type
of writing, and it allows me to focus and experiment on that specific
style in depth and without distraction.”
If the text you’re reading is a model of a particular style of writ-
ing—for example, highly-emotional or humorous—RLW is particu-
larly helpful because you can look at a piece you’re reading and think
about whether you want to adopt a similar style in your own writing.
You might realize that the author is trying to arouse sympathy in read-
ers and examine what techniques he/she uses to do this; then you can
decide whether these techniques might work well in your own writing.
You might notice that the author keeps including jokes or funny sto-
ries and think about whether you want to include them in your writ-
ing—what would the impact be on your potential readers?
How to Read Like a Writer 79
What Are Questions to Ask As You Are Reading?
It is helpful to continue to ask yourself questions as you read like a
writer. As you’re first learning to read in this new way, you may want
to have a set of questions written or typed out in front of you that you
can refer to while reading. Eventually—after plenty of practice—you
will start to ask certain questions and locate certain things in the text
almost automatically. Remember, for most students this is a new way
of reading, and you’ll have to train yourself to do it well. Also keep in
mind that you’re reading to understand how the text was written—
how the house was built—more than you’re trying to determine the
meaning of the things you read or assess whether the texts are good
or bad.
First, return to two of the same questions I suggested that you
consider before reading:
• What is the author’s purpose for this piece of writing?
• Who is the intended audience?
Think about these two questions again as you read. It may be that
you couldn’t really answer them before, or that your ideas will change
while reading. Knowing why the piece was written and who it’s for can
help explain why the author might have made certain choices or used
particular techniques in the writing, and you can assess those choices
and techniques based in part on how effective they are in fulfilling
that purpose and/or reaching the intended audience.
Beyond these initial two questions, there is an almost endless list
of questions you might ask regarding writing choices and techniques.
Here are some of the questions that one former student, Clare, asks
herself:
When reading I tend to be asking myself a million questions.
If I were writing this, where would I go with the story? If the
author goes in a different direction (as they so often do) from
what I am thinking, I will ask myself, why did they do this?
What are they telling me?
Clare tries to figure out why the author might have made a move in
the writing that she hadn’t anticipated, but even more importantly,
she asks herself what she would do if she were the author. Reading the
Mike Bunn80
text becomes an opportunity for Clare to think about her own role as
an author.
Here are some additional examples of the kinds of questions you
might ask yourself as you read:
• How effective is the language the author uses? Is it too formal?
Too informal? Perfectly appropriate?
Depending on the subject matter and the intended audience, it may
make sense to be more or less formal in terms of language. As you
begin reading, you can ask yourself whether the word choice and tone/
language of the writing seem appropriate.
• What kinds of evidence does the author use to support his/her
claims? Does he/she use statistics? Quotes from famous people?
Personal anecdotes or personal stories? Does he/she cite books
or articles?
• How appropriate or effective is this evidence? Would a dif-
ferent type of evidence, or some combination of evidence, be
more effective?
To some extent the kinds of questions you ask should be deter-
mined by the genre of writing you are reading. For example, it’s prob-
ably worth examining the evidence that the author uses to support his/
her claims if you’re reading an opinion column, but less important if
you’re reading a short story. An opinion column is often intended to
convince readers of something, so the kinds of evidence used are often
very important. A short story may be intended to convince readers of
something, sometimes, but probably not in the same way. A short story
rarely includes claims or evidence in the way that we usually think
about them.
• Are there places in the writing that you find confusing? What
about the writing in those places makes it unclear or confusing?
It’s pretty normal to get confused in places while reading, especially
while reading for class, so it can be helpful to look closely at the writ-
ing to try and get a sense of exactly what tripped you up. This way you
can learn to avoid those same problems in your own writing.
How to Read Like a Writer 81
• How does the author move from one idea to another in the
writing? Are the transitions between the ideas effective? How
else might he/she have transitioned between ideas instead?
Notice that in these questions I am encouraging you to question
whether aspects of the writing are appropriate and effective in addition
to deciding whether you liked or disliked them. You want to imagine
how other readers might respond to the writing and the techniques
you’ve identified. Deciding whether you liked or disliked something
is only about you; considering whether a technique is appropriate or
effective lets you contemplate what the author might have been trying
to do and to decide whether a majority of readers would find the move
successful. This is important because it’s the same thing you should
be thinking about while you are writing: how will readers respond to
this technique I am using, to this sentence, to this word? As you read,
ask yourself what the author is doing at each step of the way, and then
consider whether the same choice or technique might work in your
own writing.
What Should You Be Writing As You Are Reading?
The most common suggestion made by former students—mentioned
by every single one of them—was to mark up the text, make com-
ments in the margins, and write yourself notes and summaries both
during and after reading. Often the notes students took while reading
became ideas or material for the students to use in their own papers.
It’s important to read with a pen or highlighter in your hand so that
you can mark—right on the text—all those spots where you identify
an interesting choice the author has made or a writerly technique you
might want to use. One thing that I like to do is to highlight and
underline the passage in the text itself, and then try to answer the fol-
lowing three questions on my notepad:
• What is the technique the author is using here?
• Is this technique effective?
• What would be the advantages and disadvantages if I tried this
same technique in my writing?
Mike Bunn82
By utilizing this same process of highlighting and note taking, you’ll
end up with a useful list of specific techniques to have at your disposal
when it comes time to begin your own writing.
What Does RLW Look Like in Action?
Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this essay and spend some
time reading like writers as a way to get more comfortable with the
process:
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six
months and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew
Lloyd Webber. The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-story
theatre in the heart of London’s famous West End, and eight times
a week it housed a three-hour performance of the musical Les
Miserables. Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every theatre
in the city was required to have a certain number of staff members
inside watching the performance in case of an emergency.
Let’s begin with those questions I encouraged you to try to answer
before you start reading. (I realize we’re cheating a little bit in this case
since you’ve already read most of this essay, but this is just practice.
When doing this on your own, you should attempt to answer these
questions before reading, and then return to them as you read to fur-
ther develop your answers.)
• Do you know the author’s purpose for this piece of writing? I
hope the purpose is clear by now; if it isn’t, I’m doing a pretty
lousy job of explaining how and why you might read like a
writer.
• Do you know who the intended audience is? Again, I hope that
you know this one by now.
• What about the genre? Is this an essay? An article? What would
you call it?
• You know that it’s published and not student writing. How
does this influence your expectations for what you will read?
• Are you going to be asked to write something like this yourself?
Probably not in your college writing class, but you can still use
RLW to learn about writerly techniques that you might want
to use in whatever you do end up writing.
How to Read Like a Writer 83
Now ask yourself questions as you read.
In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six
months and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew
Lloyd Webber. The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-sto-
ry theatre in the heart of London’s famous West End, and eight
times a week it housed a three-hour performance of the musi-
cal Les Miserables. Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every
theatre in the city was required to have a certain number of staff
members inside watching the performance in case of an emer-
gency.
Since this paragraph is the very first one, it makes sense to think about
how it introduces readers to the essay. What technique(s) does the au-
thor use to begin the text? This is a personal story about his time work-
ing in London. What else do you notice as you read over this passage?
Is the passage vague or specific about where he worked? You know that
the author worked in a famous part of London in a beautiful theater
owned by a well-known composer. Are these details important? How
different would this opening be if instead I had written:
In 1997, I was living in London and working at a theatre that
showed Les Miserables.
This is certainly shorter, and some of you may prefer this version. It’s
quick. To the point. But what (if anything) is lost by eliminating so
much of the detail? I chose to include each of the details that the re-
vised sentence omits, so it’s worth considering why. Why did I men-
tion where the theater was located? Why did I explain that I was living
in London right after finishing college? Does it matter that it was after
college? What effect might I have hoped the inclusion of these details
would have on readers? Is this reference to college an attempt to con-
nect with my audience of college students? Am I trying to establish my
credibility as an author by announcing that I went to college? Why
might I want the readers to know that this was a theater owned by
Andrew Lloyd Weber? Do you think I am just trying to mention a
famous name that readers will recognize? Will Andrew Lloyd Weber
figure prominently in the rest of the essay?
These are all reasonable questions to ask. They are not necessarily
the right questions to ask because there are no right questions. They
Mike Bunn84
certainly aren’t the only questions you could ask, either. The goal is to
train yourself to formulate questions as you read based on whatever
you notice in the text. Your own reactions to what you’re reading will
help determine the kinds of questions to ask.
Now take a broader perspective. I begin this essay—an essay about
reading—by talking about my job in a theater in London. Why?
Doesn’t this seem like an odd way to begin an essay about reading?
If you read on a little further (feel free to scan back up at the top of
this essay) you learn in the third full paragraph what the connection
is between working in the theater and reading like a writer, but why
include this information at all? What does this story add to the essay?
Is it worth the space it takes up?
Think about what effect presenting this personal information
might have on readers. Does it make it feel like a real person, some
“ordinary guy,” is talking to you? Does it draw you into the essay and
make you want to keep reading?
What about the language I use? Is it formal or more informal? This
is a time when you can really narrow your focus and look at particular
words:
Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city
was required to have a certain number of staff members inside
watching the performance in case of an emergency.
What is the effect of using the word “antiquated” to describe the fire-
safety laws? It certainly projects a negative impression; if the laws are
described as antiquated it means I view them as old-fashioned or obso-
lete. This is a fairly uncommon word, so it stands out, drawing atten-
tion to my choice in using it. The word also sounds quite formal. Am
I formal in the rest of this sentence?
I use the word “performance” when I just as easily could have writ-
ten “show.” For that matter, I could have written “old” instead of “an-
tiquated.” You can proceed like this throughout the sentence, thinking
about alternative choices I could have made and what the effect would
be. Instead of “staff members” I could have written “employees” or just
“workers.” Notice the difference if the sentence had been written:
Because of old fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city was re-
quired to have a certain number of workers inside watching the
show in case of an emergency.
How to Read Like a Writer 85
Which version is more likely to appeal to readers? You can try to an-
swer this question by thinking about the advantages and disadvan-
tages of using formal language. When would you want to use formal
language in your writing and when would it make more sense to be
more conversational?
As you can see from discussing just this one paragraph, you could
ask questions about the text forever. Luckily, you don’t have to. As
you continue reading like a writer, you’ll learn to notice techniques
that seem new and pay less attention to the ones you’ve thought about
before. The more you practice the quicker the process becomes until
you’re reading like a writer almost automatically.
I want to end this essay by sharing one more set of comments by
my former student, Lola, this time about what it means to her to read
like a writer:
Reading as a writer would compel me to question what might
have brought the author to make these decisions, and then de-
cide what worked and what didn’t. What could have made that
chapter better or easier to understand? How can I make sure
I include some of the good attributes of this writing style into
my own? How can I take aspects that I feel the writer failed at
and make sure not to make the same mistakes in my writing?
Questioning why the author made certain decisions. Considering what
techniques could have made the text better. Deciding how to include
the best attributes of what you read in your own writing. This is what
Reading Like a Writer is all about.
Are you ready to start reading?
Discussion
1. How is “Reading Like a Writer” similar to and/or different
from the way(s) you read for other classes?
2. What kinds of choices do you make as a writer that readers
might identify in your written work?
3. Is there anything you notice in this essay that you might like
to try in your own writing? What is that technique or strategy?
When do you plan to try using it?
4. What are some of the different ways that you can learn about
the context of a text before you begin reading it?
Mike Bunn86
Works Cited
Bishop, Wendy. “Reading, Stealing, and Writing Like a Writer.” Elements of
Alternate Style: Essays on Writing and Revision. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Ports-
mouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.
Jauss, David. “Articles of Faith.” Creative Writing in America: Theory and
Pedagogy. Ed. Joseph Moxley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1989. Print.
Moran, Charles. “Reading Like a Writer.” Vital Signs 1. Ed. James L. Collins.
Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. Print.
Straub, Richard. “Responding—Really Responding—to Other Students’
Writing.” The Subject is Reading. Ed. Wendy Bishop. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cook, 2000. Print.
Tate, Allen. “We Read as Writers.” Princeton Alumni Weekly 40 (March 8,
1940): 505- 506. Print.
Walker, Nancy. “The Student Reader as Writer.” ADE Bulletin 106 (1993)
35–37. Print.
Universityof Massachusetts Amherst
English Department Faculty Publication Series English
1994
Ranking , Evaluating , Liking: Sorting Out Three
Forms of Judgment.
Peter Elbow
University of Massachusetts – Amherst, elbow@english.umass.edu
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1
Peter Elbow
Ranking, Evaluating and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment
From: College English 55.2 (1993): 187-206. Reprinted in Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of
Writing and Teaching Writing. NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. This version lacks some formatting and copy editing
in the published versions.
This essay is my attempt to sort out the different acts we call assessment–the different
ways in which we express or frame our judgments of value. I have been working on this tangle
not just because it is interesting and important in itself but because assessment tends so much
to drive and control teaching. Much of what we do in the classroom is determined by the
assessment structures we work under.
Assessment is a large and technical area and I’m not a professional. But my main premise
or subtext in this essay is that we nonprofessionals can and should work on it because
professionals have not reached definitive conclusions about the problem of how to assess
writing (or anything else, I’d say). Also, decisions about assessment are often made by people
even less professional than we, namely legislators. Pat Belanoff and I realized that the field of
assessment is open when we saw the harmful effects of a writing proficiency exam at Stony
Brook and worked out a collaborative portfolio assessment system in its place (Belanoff and
Elbow; Elbow and Belanoff). Professionals keep changing their minds about large scale testing
and assessment. And as for classroom grading, psychometricians provide little support or
defense of it.
The Problems with Ranking and the Benefits of Evaluating
By ranking I mean the act of summing up one’s judgment of a performance or person into
a single, holistic number or score. We rank every time we give a grade or holistic score.
Ranking implies a single scale or continuum or dimension along which all performances are
hung.
By evaluating I mean the act of expressing one’s judgment of a performance or person by
pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of different features or dimensions. We evaluate
every time we write a comment on a paper or have an conversation about its value. Evaluation
implies the recognition of different criteria or dimensions–and by implication different contexts
and audiences for the same performance. Evaluation requires going beyond a first response
that may be nothing but a kind of ranking (“I like it” or “This is better than that”), and instead
looking carefully enough at the performance or person to make distinctions between parts or
features or criteria.
It’s obvious, thus, that I am troubled by ranking. But I will resist any temptation to argue
that we can get rid of all ranking–or even should. Instead I will try to show how we can have
less ranking and more evaluation in its place.
2
I see three distinct problems with ranking: it is inaccurate or unreliable; it gives no
substantive feedback; and it is harmful to the atmosphere for teaching and learning.
(1) First the unreliability. To rank reliably means to give a fair number, to find the single
quantitative score that readers will agree on. But readers don’t agree.
This is not news–this unavailability of agreement. We have long seen it on many fronts.
For example, research in evaluation has shown many times that if we give a paper to a set of
readers, those readers tend to give it the full range of grades (Diederich). I’ve recently come
across new research to this effect–new to me because it was published in 1912. The
investigators carefully showed how high school English teachers gave different grades to the
same paper. In response to criticism that this was a local problem in English, they went on the
next year to discover an even greater variation among grades given by high school geometry
teachers and history teachers to papers in their subjects. (See the summary of Daniel Starch
and Edward Elliott’s 1913 School Review articles in Kirschenbaum, Simon and Napier 258-59.)
We know the same thing from literary criticism and theory. If the best critics can’t agree
about what a text means, how can we be surprised that they disagree even more about the
quality or value of texts. And we know that nothing in literary or philosophical theory gives us
any agreed-upon rules for settling such disputes.
Students have shown us the same inconsistency with their own controlled experiments of
handing the same paper to different teachers and getting different grades. This helps explain
why we hate it so when students ask us their favorite question, “What do you want for an A?”:
it rubs our noses in the unreliability of our grades.
Of course champions of holistic scoring argue that they get can get agreement among
readers–and they often do (White). But they get that agreement by “training” the readers
before and during the scoring sessions. What “training” means is getting those scorers to stop
reading the way they normally read–getting them to stop using the conflicting criteria and
standards they normally use outside the scoring sessions. (In an impressive and powerful book,
Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues that whenever we have widespread inter-reader reliability, we
have reason to suspect that difference has been suppressed and homogeneity imposed–almost
always at the expense of certain groups.) In short, the reliability in holistic scoring is not a
measure of how texts are valued by real readers in natural settings, but only of how they are
valued in artificial settings with imposed agreements.
Defenders of holistic scoring might reply (as one anonymous reviewer did), that holistic
scores are not perfect or absolutely objective readings but just “judgments that most readers
will agree are the appropriate ones given the purpose of the assessment and the system of
communication.” But I have been in and even conducted enough holistic scoring sessions to
know that even that degree of agreement doesn’t occur unless “purpose” and
“appropriateness” are defined to mean acceptance of the single set of standards imposed on
that session. We know too much about the differences among readers and the highly variable
nature of the reading process. Supposing we get readings only from academics, or only from
people in English, or only from respected critics, or only from respected writing programs, or
only from feminists, or only from sound readers of my tribe (white, male, middle class, full
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professors between the ages of fifty and sixty). We still don’t get agreement. We can
sometimes get agreement among readers from some subset, a particular community that has
developed a strong set of common values, perhaps one English department or one writing
program. But what is the value of such a rare agreement? It tells us nothing about how
readers from other English departments or writing programs will judge–much less how readers
from other domains will judge.
(From the opposite ideological direction, some skeptics might object to my skeptical train
of thought: “So what else is new?” they might reply. “Of course my grades are biased,
‘interested’ or ‘situated’–always partial to my interests or the values of my community or
culture. There’s no other possibility.” But how can people consent to give grades if they feel
that way? A single teacher’s grade for a student is liable to have substantial consequences–for
example on eligibility for a scholarship or a job or entrance into professional school. In grading,
surely we must not take anything less than genuine fairness as our goal.)
It won’t be long before we see these issues argued in a court of law, when a student who
has been disqualified from playing on a team or rejected from a professional school sues,
charging that the basis for his plight–teacher grades–is not reliable. I wonder if lawyers will be
able to make our grades stick.
(2) Ranking or grading is woefully uncommunicative. Grades and holistic scores are
nothing but points on a continuum from “yea” to “boo”–with no information or clues about the
criteria behind these noises. They are 100 percent evaluation and 0 percent description or
information. They quantify the degree of approval or disapproval in readers but tell nothing at
all about what the readers actually approve or disapprove of. They say nothing that couldn’t be
said with gold stars or black marks or smiley-faces. Of course our first reactions are often
nothing but global holistic feelings of approval or disapproval, but we need a system for
communicating our judgments that nudges us to move beyond these holistic feelings and to
articulate the basis of our feeling–a process that often leads us to change our feeling. (Holistic
scoring sessions sometimes use rubrics that explain the criteria–though these are rarely passed
along to students–and even in these situations, the rubrics fail to fit many papers.) As C. S.
Lewis says, “People are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of
things than to describe them” (7).
(3) Ranking leads students to get so hung up on these oversimple quantitative verdicts
that they care more about scores than about learning–more about the grade we put on the
paper than about the comment we have written on it. Have you noticed how grading often
forces us to write comments to justify our grades?–and how these are often not the comment
we would make if we were just trying to help the student write better? (“Just try writing
several favorable comments on a paper and then giving it a grade of D” [Diederich 21].)
Grades and holistic scores give too much encouragement to those students who score
high–making them too apt to think they are already fine–and too little encouragement to those
students who do badly. Unsuccessful students often come to doubt their intelligence. But
oddly enough, many “A” students also end up doubting their true ability and feeling like frauds-
-because they have sold out on their own judgment and simply given teachers whatever yields
an A. They have too often been rewarded for what they don’t really believe in. (Notice that
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there’s more cheating by students who get high grades than by those who get low ones. There
would be less incentive to cheat if there were no ranking.)
We might be tempted to put up with the inaccuracy or unfairness of grades if they gave
good diagnostic feedback or helped the learning climate; or we might put up with the damage
they do to the learning climate if they gave a fair or reliable measure of how skilled or
knowledgeable students are. But since they fail dismally on both counts, we are faced with the
striking question of why grading has persisted so long.
There must be many reasons. It is obviously easier and quicker to express a global feeling
with a single number than to figure out what the strengths and weaknesses are and what one’s
criteria are. (Though I’m heartened to discover, as I pursue this issue, how troubled teachers
are by grading and how difficult they find it.) But perhaps more important, we see around us a
deep hunger to rank–to create pecking orders: to see who we can look down on and who we
must look up to, or in the military metaphor, who we can kick and who we must salute.
Psychologists tell us that this taste for pecking orders or ranking is associated with the
authoritarian personality. We see this hunger graphically in the case of IQ scores. It is plain
that IQ scoring does not represent a commitment to looking carefully at peoples’ intelligence;
when we do that, we see different and frequently uncorrelated kinds or dimensions of
intelligence (Gardner). The persistent use of IQ scores represents the hunger to have a number
so that everyone can have a rank. (“Ten!” mutter the guys when they see a pretty woman.)
Because ranking or grading has caused so much discomfort to so many students and
teachers, I think we see a lot of confusion about the process. It is hard to think clearly about
something that has given so many of us such anxiety and distress. The most notable confusion I
notice is the tendency to think that if we renounce ranking or grading, we are renouncing the
very possibility of judgment and discrimination–that we are embracing the idea that there is no
way to distinguish or talk about the difference between what works well and what works badly.
So the most important point, then, is that I am not arguing against judgment or
evaluation. I’m just arguing against that crude, oversimple way of representing judgment–
distorting it, really–into a single number, which means ranking people and performances along
a single continuum.
In fact I am arguing for evaluation. Evaluation means looking hard and thoughtfully at a piece
of writing in order to make distinctions as to the quality of different features or dimensions.
For example, the process of evaluation permits us to make the following kinds of statements
about a piece of writing:
-The thinking and ideas seemed interesting and creative.
-The overall structure or sequence seemed confusing.
-The writing was perfectly clear at the level of individual sentences and even paragraphs.
-There is an odd, angry tone of voice that seems unrelated or inappropriate to what the writer
was saying.
-Yet this same voice is strong and memorable and makes one listen if irritated.
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-There are a fair number of mistakes in grammar or spelling: more than “a sprinkling” but less
than “riddled with.”
To rank, on the other hand, is to be forced to translate those discriminations into a single
number. What grade or holistic score do these judgments add up to? It’s likely, by the way,
that more readers would agree with those separate, “analytic” statements than would agree on
a holistic score.
I’ve conducted many assessment sessions where we were not trying to impose a set of
standards but rather to find out how experienced teachers read and evaluate, and I’ve had
many opportunities to see that good readers give grades or scores right down through the
range of possibilities. Of course good readers sometimes agree–especially on papers that are
strikingly good or bad or conventional, but I think I see difference more frequently than
agreement when readers really speak up.
The process of evaluation, because it invites us to articulate our criteria and to make
distinctions among parts or features or dimensions of a performance, thereby invites us further
to acknowledge the main fact about evaluation: that different readers have different priorities,
values, and standards.
The conclusion I am drawing, then, in this first train of thought is that we should do less
ranking and more evaluation. Instead of using grades or holistic scores–single number verdicts
that try to sum up complex performances along only one scale–we should give some kind of
written or spoken evaluation that discriminates among criteria and dimensions of the writing–
and if possible that takes account of the complex context for writing: who the writer is, what
the writer’s audience and goals are, who we are as reader and how we read, and how we might
differ in our reading from other readers the writer might be addressing.
But how can we put this principle into practice? The pressure for ranking seems
implacable. Evaluation takes more time, effort, and money. It seems as though we couldn’t get
along without scores on writing exams. Most teachers are obliged to give grades at the end of
each course. And many students–given that they have become conditioned or even addicted
to ranking over the years and must continue to inhabit a ranking in most of their courses–will
object if we don’t put grades on papers. Some students, in the absence of that crude gold star
or black mark, may not try hard enough (though how hard is “enough”–and is it really our job
to stimulate motivation artificially with grades–and is grading the best source of motivation?).
It is important to note that there are certain schools and colleges that do not use single-
number grades or scores, and they function successfully. I taught for nine years at Evergreen
State College, which uses only written evaluations. This system works fine, even down to
getting students accepted into high quality graduate and professional schools.
Nevertheless we have an intractable dilemma: that grading is unfair and
counterproductive but that students and institutions tend to want grades. In the face of this
dilemma there is a need for creativity and pragmatism. Here are some ways in which I and
others use less ranking and more evaluation in teaching–and they suggest some adjustments in
how we score larger scale assessments. What follows is an assortment of experimental
compromises–sometimes crude, seldom ideal or utopian–but they help.
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(a) Portfolios. Just because conventional institutions oblige us to turn in a single
quantitative course grade at the end of every marking period, it doesn’t follow that we need to
grade individual papers. Course grades are more trustworthy and less damaging because they
are based on so many performances over so many weeks. By avoiding frequent ranking or
grading, we make it somewhat less likely for students to become addicted to oversimple
numerical rankings–to think that evaluation always translates into a simple number–in short,
to mistake ranking for evaluation. (I’m not trying to defend conventional course grades since
they are still uncommunicative and they still feed the hunger for ranking.) Portfolios permit me
to refrain from grading individual papers and limit myself to writerly evaluative comments–and
help students see this as a positive rather than a negative thing, a chance to be graded on a
body of their best work that can be judged more fairly. Portfolios have many other advantages
as well. They are particularly valuable as occasions for asking students to write extensive and
thoughtful explorations of their own strengths and weaknesses.
A midsemester portfolio is usually an informal affair, but it is a good occasion for giving
anxious students a ballpark estimate of how well they are doing in the course so far. I find it
helpful to tell students that I’m perfectly willing to tell them my best estimate of their course
grade–but only if they come to me in conference and only during the second half of the
semester. This serves somewhat to quiet their anxiety while they go through seven weeks of
drying out from grades. By midsemester, most of them have come to enjoy not getting those
numbers and thus being able to think better about more writerly comments from me and their
classmates.
Portfolios are now used extensively and productively in larger assessments, and there is
constant experimentation with new applications (Belanoff and Dickson; Portfolio Assessment
Newsletter; Portfolio News).
(b) Another useful option is to make a strategic retreat from a wholly negative position.
That is, I sometimes do a bit of ranking even on individual papers, using two “bottom-line”
grades: H and U for “Honors” and “Unsatisfactory.” I tell students that these translate to about
A or A- and D or F. This practice may seem theoretically inconsistent with all the arguments I’ve
just made, but (at the moment, anyway) I justify it for the following reasons.
First, I sympathize with a part of the students’ anxiety about not getting grades: their fear
that they might be failing and not know about it–or doing an excellent job and not get any
recognition. Second, I’m not giving many grades; only a small proportion of papers get these
‘H’s or ‘U’s. The system creates a “non-bottom-line” or “non-quantified” atmosphere. Third,
these holistic judgments about best and worst do not seem as arbitrary and questionable as
most grades. There is usually a bit more agreement among readers about the best and worst
papers. What seems most dubious is the process of trying to rank that whole middle-range of
papers–papers that have a mixture of better and worse qualities so that the numerical grade
depends enormously on a reader’s priorities or mood or temperament. My willingness to give
these few grades goes a long way toward helping my students forgo most bottom-line grading.
I’m not trying to pretend that these minimal “grades” are truly reliable. But they
represent a very small amount of ranking. Yes, someone could insist that I’m really ranking
every single paper (and indeed if it seemed politically necessary, I could put an OK or S [for
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satisfactory] on all those middle range papers and brag, “Yes, I grade everything.”) But the fact
is that I am doing much less sorting since I don’t have to sort them into five or even twelve
piles. Thus there is a huge reduction in the total amount of unreliability I produce.
(It might seem that if I use only these few minimal grades I have no good way for figuring
out a final grade for the course–since that requires a more fine-grained set of ranks. But I don’t
find that to be the case. For I also give these same minimal grades to the many other important
parts of my course such as attendance, meeting deadlines, peer responding, and journal
writing. If I want a mathematically computed grade on a scale of six or A through E, I can easily
compute it when I have such a large number of grades to work from–even though they are only
along an odd three point scale.)
This same practice of crude or minimal ranking is big help on larger assessments outside
classrooms, and needs to be applied to the process of assessment in general. There are two
important principles to emphasize. On the one hand we must be prudent or accommodating
enough to admit that despite all the arguments against ranking, there are situations when we
need that bottom-line verdict along one scale: which student has not done satisfactory work
and should be denied credit for the course? which student gets the scholarship? which
candidate to hire or fire? We often operate with scarce resources. But on the other hand we
must be bold enough to insist that we do far more ranking than is really needed. We can get
along not only with fewer occasions for assessment but also with fewer gradations in scoring. If
we decide what the real bottom-line is on a given occasion–perhaps just “failing” or perhaps
“honors” too–then the reading of papers or portfolios is enormously quick and cheap. It leaves
time and money for evaluation–perhaps for analytic scoring or some comment.
At Stony Brook we worked out a portfolio system where multiple readers had only to
make a binary decision: acceptable or not. Then individual teachers could decide the actual
course grade and give comments for their own students–so long as those students passed in
the eyes of an independent rater (Elbow and Belanoff; Belanoff and Elbow). The best way to
begin to wean our society from its addiction to ranking may be to permit a tiny bit of it (which
also means less unreliability)–rather than trying to go “cold turkey.”
(c) Sometimes I use an analytic grid for evaluating and commenting on student papers. Here’s
an example:
Strong OK Weak
CONTENT, INSIGHTS, THINKING, GRAPPLING WITH TOPIC
GENUINE REVISION, SUBSTANTIVE CHANGES, NOT JUST EDITING
ORGANIZATION, STRUCTURE, GUIDING THE READER
LANGUAGE: SYNTAX, SENTENCES, WORDING, VOICE
MECHANICS: SPELLING, GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, ROOFREADING
OVERALL [Note: this is not a sum of the other scores.]
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I often vary the criteria in my grid (e.g. “connecting with readers” or “investment”) depending
on the assignment or the point in the semester.
Grids are a way I can satisfy the students’ hunger for ranking but still not give in to
conventional grades on individual papers. Sometimes I provide nothing but a grid (especially on
final drafts), and this is a very quick way to provide a response. Or on midprocess drafts I
sometimes use a grid in addition to a comment: a more readerly comment that often doesn’t
so much tell them what’s wrong or right or how to improve things but rather tries to give them
an account of what is happening to me as I read their words. I think this kind of comment is
really the most useful thing of all for students, but it frustrates some students for a while. The
grid can help these students feel less anxious and thus pay better attention to my comment.
I find grids extremely helpful at the end of the semester for telling students their
strengths and weaknesses in the course–or what they’ve done well and not so well. Besides
categories like the ones above, I use categories like these: “skill in giving feedback to others,”
“ability to meet deadlines,” “effort,” and “improvement.” This practice makes my final grade
much more communicative.
(d) I also help make up for the absence of ranking–gold stars and black marks–by having
students share their writing with each other a great deal both orally and through frequent
publication in class magazines. Also, where possible, I try to get students to give or send writing
to audiences outside the class. At the University of Massachusetts, freshmen pay a ten dollar
lab fee for the writing course, and every teacher publishes four or five class magazines of final
drafts a semester. The effects are striking. Sharing, peer feedback, and publication give the
best reward and motivation for writing, namely, getting your words out to many readers.
(e) I sometimes use a kind of modified contract grading. That is, at the start of the course
I pass out a long list of all the things that I most want students to do–the concrete activities
that I think most lead to learning–and I promise students that if they do them all they are
guaranteed a certain final grade. Currently, I say it’s a B–it could be lower or higher. My list
includes these items: not missing more than a week’s worth of classes; not having more than
one late major assignment; substantive revising on all major revisions; good copy editing on all
major revisions; good effort on peer feedback work; keeping up the journal; and substantial
effort and investment on each draft.
I like the way this system changes the “bottom-line” for a course: the intersection where
my authority crosses their self-interest. I can tell them, “You have to work very hard in this
course, but you can stop worrying about grades.” The crux is no longer that commodity I’ve
always hated and never trusted: a numerical ranking of the quality of their writing along a
single continuum. Instead the crux becomes what I care about most: the concrete behaviors
that I most want students to engage in because they produce the more learning and help me
teach better. Admittedly, effort and investment are not concrete observable behaviors, but
they are no harder to judge than overall quality of writing. And since I care about effort and
investment, I don’t mind the few arguments I get into about them; they seem fruitful. (“Let’s
try and figure out why it looked to me as though you didn’t put any effort in here.”) In contrast,
I hate discussions about grades on a paper and find such arguments fruitless. Besides, I’m not
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making fine distinctions about effort and investment–just letting a bell go off when they fall
palpably low.
It’s crucial to note that I am not fighting evaluation with this system. I am just fighting
ranking or grading. I still write evaluative comments and often use an evaluative grid to tell my
students what I see as strengths and weaknesses in their papers. My goal is not to get rid of
evaluation but in fact to emphasize it, enhance it. I’m trying to get students to listen better to
my evaluations–by uncoupling them from a grade. In effect, I’m doing this because I’m so fed
up with students following or obeying my evaluations too blindly–making whatever changes my
comments suggest but doing it for the sake of a grade; not really taking the time to make up
their own minds about whether they think my judgments or suggestions really make sense to
them. The worst part of grades is that they make students obey us without carefully thinking
about the merits of what we say. I love the situation this system so often puts students in: I
make a criticism or suggestion about their paper, but it doesn’t matter to their grade whether
they go along with me or not (so long as they genuinely revise in some fashion). They have to
think; to decide.
Admittedly this system is crude and impure. Some of the really skilled students who are
used to getting A’s and desperate to get one in this course remain unhelpfully hung up about
getting those ‘H’s on their papers. But a good number of these students discover that they
can’t get them, and they soon settle down to accepting a B and having less anxiety and more of
a learning voyage.
The Limitations of Evaluation and the Benefits of Evaluation-free Zones
Everything I’ve said so far has been in praise of evaluation as a substitute for ranking. But
I need to turn a corner here and speak about the limits or problems of evaluation. Evaluating
may be better than ranking, but it still carries some of the same problems. That is, even though
I’ve praised evaluation for inviting us to acknowledge that readers and contexts are different,
nevertheless the very word evaluation tends to imply fairness or reliability or getting beyond
personal or subjective preferences. Also, of course, evaluation takes a lot more time and work.
To rank you just have to put down a number; holistic scoring of exams is cheaper than analytic
scoring.
Most important of all, evaluation harms the climate for learning and teaching–or rather
too much evaluation has this effect. That is, if we evaluate everything students write, they tend
to remain tangled up in the assumption that their whole job in school is to give teachers “what
they want.” Constant evaluation makes students worry more about psyching out the teacher
than about what they are really learning. Students fall into to a kind of defensive or on-guard
stance toward the teacher: a desire to hide what they don’t understand and try to impress.
This stance gets in the way of learning. (Think of the patient trying to hide symptoms from the
doctor.) Most of all, constant evaluation by someone in authority makes students reluctant to
take the risks that are needed for good learning–to try out hunches and trust their own
judgment. Face it: if our goal is to get students to exercise their own judgment, that means
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exercising an immature and undeveloped judgment and making choices that are obviously
wrong to us.
We see around us a widespread hunger to be evaluated that is often just as strong as the
hunger to rank. Countless conditions make many of us walk around in the world wanting to ask
others (especially those in authority), “How am I doing, did I do OK?” I don’t think the hunger
to be evaluated is as harmful as the hunger to rank, but it can get in the way of learning. For I
find that the greatest and most powerful breakthroughs in learning occur when I can get myself
and others to put aside this nagging, self-doubting question (“How am I doing? How am I
doing?”)–and instead to take some chances, trust our instincts or hungers. When everything is
evaluated, everything counts. Often the most powerful arena for deep learning is a kind of
“time out” zone from the pressures of normal evaluated reality: make-believe, play, dreams–in
effect, the Shakespearian forest.
In my attempts to get away from too much evaluation (not from all evaluation, just from
too much of it), I have drifted into a set of teaching practices which now feel to me like the best
part of my teaching. I realize now what I’ve been unconsciously doing for a number of years:
creating “evaluation-free zones.”
(a) The paradigm evaluation-free zone is the ten minute, nonstop freewrite. When I get
students to freewrite, I am using my authority to create unusual conditions in order to
contradict or interrupt our pervasive habit of always evaluating our writing. What is essential
here are the two central features of freewriting: that it be private (thus I don’t collect it or have
students share it with anyone else); and that it be nonstop (thus there isn’t time for planning,
and control is usually diminished). Students quickly catch on and enter into the spirit. At the
end of the course, they often tell me that freewriting is the most useful thing I’ve taught them
(see Belanoff, Elbow, and Fontaine).
(b) A larger evaluation-free zone is the single unevaluated assignment–what people
sometimes call the “quickwrite” or sketch. This is a piece of writing that I ask students to do–
either in class or for homework–without any or much revising. It is meant to be low stakes
writing. There is a bit of pressure, nevertheless, since I usually ask them to share it with others
and I usually collect it and read it. But I don’t write any comments at all–except perhaps to put
straight lines along some passages I like or to write a phrase of appreciation at the end. And I
ask students to refrain from giving evaluative feedback to each other–and instead just to say
“thank you” or mention a couple of phrases or ideas that stick in mind. (However, this writing-
without-feedback can be a good occasion for students to discuss the topic they have written
about–and thus serve as an excellent kick-off for discussions of what I am teaching.)
(c) These experiments have led me to my next and largest evaluation-free zone–what I
sometimes call a “jump start” for my whole course. For the last few semesters I’ve been
devoting the first three weeks entirely to the two evaluation-free activities I’ve just described:
freewriting (and also more leisurely private writing in a journal) and quickwrites or sketches.
Since the stakes are low and I’m not asking for much revising, I ask for much more writing
homework per week than usual. And every day we write in class: various exercises or games.
The emphasis is on getting rolling, getting fluent, taking risks. And every day all students read
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out loud something they’ve written–sometimes a short passage even to the whole class. So
despite the absence of feedback, it is a very audience-filled and sociable three weeks.
At first I only dared do this for two weeks, but when I discovered how fast the writing
improves, how good it is for building community, and what a pleasure this period is for me, I
went to three weeks. I’m curious to try an experiment with teaching a whole course this way. I
wonder, that is, whether all that evaluation we work so hard to give really does any more good
than the constant writing and sharing (Zak).
I need to pause here to address an obvious rejoinder: “But withholding evaluation is not
normal!” Indeed, it is not normal–certainly not normal in school. We normally tend to
emphasize evaluations–even bottom-line ranking kinds of evaluations. But I resist the
argument that if it’s not normal we shouldn’t do it.
The best argument for evaluation-free zones is from experience. If you try them, I
suspect you’ll discover that they are satisfying and bring out good writing. Students have a
better time writing these unevaluated pieces; they enjoy hearing and appreciating these pieces
when they don’t have to evaluate. And I have a much better time when I engage in this
astonishing activity: reading student work when I don’t have to evaluate and respond. And yet
the writing improves. I see students investing and risking more, writing more fluently, and
using livelier, more interesting voices. This writing gives me and them a higher standard of
clarity and voice for when we move on to more careful and revised writing tasks–tasks that
involve more intellectual pushing and that sometimes make their writing go tangled or sodden.
The Benefits and Feasibility of Liking
Liking and disliking seem like unpromising topics in an exploration of assessment. They
seem to represent the worst kind of subjectivity, the merest accident of personal taste. But I’ve
recently come to think that the phenomenon of liking is perhaps the most important evaluative
response for writers and teachers to think about. In effect, I’m turning another corner in my
argument. In the first section I argued against ranking–with evaluating being the solution.
Next I argued not against evaluating–but for no-evaluation zones in addition to evaluating.
Now I will argue neither against evaluating nor against non-evaluation zones, but for something
very different in addition, or perhaps underneath, as a foundation: liking.
Let me start with the germ story. I was in a workshop and we were going around the
circle with everyone telling a piece of good news about their writing in the last six months. It
got to Wendy Bishop, a good poet (who has also written two good books about the teaching of
writing), and she said, “In the last six months, I’ve learned to like everything I write.” Our jaws
dropped; we were startled–in a way scandalized. But I’ve been chewing on her words ever
since, and they have led me into a retelling of the story of how people learn to write better.
The old story goes like this: We write something. We read it over and we say, “This is
terrible. I hate it. I’ve got to work on it and improve it.” And we do, and it gets better, and this
happens again and again, and before long we have become a wonderful writer. But that’s not
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really what happens. Yes, we vow to work on it–but we don’t. And next time we have the
impulse to write, we’re just a bit less likely to start.
What really happens when people learn to write better is more like this: We write
something. We read it over and we say, “This terrible . . . . But I like it. Damn it, I’m going to get
it good enough so that others will like it too.” And this time we don’t just put it in a drawer, we
actually work hard on it. And we try it out on other people too–not just to get feedback and
advice but, perhaps more important, to find someone else who will like it.
Notice the two stories here–two hypotheses. (a) “First you improve the faults and then
you like it.” (b) “First you like it and then you improve faults.” The second story may sound odd
when stated so baldly, but really it’s common sense. Only if we like something will we get
involved enough to work and struggle with it. Only if we like what we write will we write again
and again by choice–which is the only way we get better.
This hypothesis sheds light on the process of how people get to be published writers.
Conventional wisdom assumes a Darwinian model: poor writers are unread; then they get
better; as a result, they get a wider audience; finally they turn into Norman Mailer. But now I’d
say the process is more complicated. People who get better and get published really tend to be
driven by how much they care about their writing. Yes, they have a small audience at first–
after all, they’re not very good. But they try reader after reader until finally they can find
people who like and appreciate their writing. I certainly did this. If someone doesn’t like her
writing enough to be pushy and hungry about finding a few people who also like it, she
probably won’t get better.
It may sound so far as though all the effort and drive comes from the lonely driven writer-
-and sometimes it does (Norman Mailer is no joke). But, often enough, readers play the
crucially active role in this story of how writers get better. That is, the way writers learn to like
their writing is by the grace of having a reader or two who likes it–even though it’s not good.
Having at least a few appreciative readers is probably indispensable to getting better.
When I apply this story to our situation as teachers I come up with this interesting
hypothesis: good writing teachers like student writing (and like students). I think I see this
born out–and it is really nothing but common sense. Teachers who hate student writing and
hate students are grouchy all the time. How could we stand our work and do a decent job if we
hated their writing. Good teachers see what is only potentially good, they get a kick out of
mere possibility–and they encourage it. When I manage to do this, I teach well.
Thus, I’ve begun to notice a turning point in my courses–two or three weeks into the
semester: “Am I going to like these folks or is this going to be a battle, a struggle?” When I like
them everything seems to go better–and it seems to me they learn more by the end. When I
don’t and we stay tangled up in struggle, we all suffer–and they seem to learn less.
So what am I saying? That we should like bad writing? How can we see all the
weaknesses and criticize student writing if we just like it? But here’s the interesting point: if I
like someone’s writing it’s easier to criticize it.
13
I first noticed this when I was trying to gather essays for the book on freewriting that Pat
Belanoff and Sheryl Fontaine and I edited. I would read an essay someone had written, I would
want it for the book, but I had some serious criticism. I’d get excited and write, “I really like
this, and I hope we can use it in our book, but you’ve got to get rid of this and change that, and I
got really mad at this other thing.” I usually find it hard to criticize, but I began to notice that I
was a much more critical and pushy reader when I liked something. It’s even fun to criticize in
those conditions.
It’s the same with student writing. If I like a piece, I don’t have to pussyfoot around with
my criticism. It’s when I don’t like their writing that I find myself tiptoeing: trying to soften my
criticism, trying to find something nice to say–and usually sounding fake, often unclear. I see
the same thing with my own writing. If I like it, I can criticize it better. I have faith that there’ll
still be something good left, even if I train my full critical guns on it.
In short–and to highlight how this section relates to the other two sections of this essay–
liking is not same as ranking or evaluating. Naturally, people get them mixed up: when they
like something, they assume it’s good; when they hate it, they assume it’s bad. But it’s helpful
to uncouple the two domains and realize that it makes perfectly good sense to say, “This is
terrible, but I like it.” Or, “This is good, but I hate it.” In short, I am not arguing here against
criticizing or evaluating. I’m merely arguing for liking.
Let me sum up my clump of hypotheses so far:
-It’s not improvement that leads to liking, but rather liking that leads to improvement.
-It’s the mark of good writers to like their writing.
-Liking is not same as evaluating. We can often criticize something better when we like it.
-We learn to like our writing when we have a respected reader who likes it.
-Therefore, it’s the mark of good teachers to like students and their writing.
If this set of hypotheses is true, what practical consequences follow from it? How can we
be better at liking? It feels as though we have no choice–as though liking and not-liking just
happen to us. I don’t really understand this business. I’d love to hear discussion about the
mystery of liking–the phenomenology of liking. I sense it’s some kind of putting oneself out–or
holding oneself open–but I can’t see it clearly. I have a hunch, however, that we’re not so
helpless about liking as we tend to feel.
For in fact I can suggest some practical concrete activities that I have found fairly reliable
at increasing the chances of liking student writing:
(a) I ask for lots of private writing and merely shared writing, that is, writing that I don’t
read at all, and writing that I read but don’t comment on. This makes me more cheerful
because it’s so much easier. Students get better without me. Having to evaluate writing–
especially bad writing–makes me more likely to hate it. This throws light on grading: it’s hard
to like something if we know we have to give it a D.
(b) I have students share lots of writing with each other–and after a while respond to
each other. It’s easier to like their writing when I don’t feel myself as the only reader and judge.
14
And so it helps to build community in general: it takes pressure off me. Thus I try to use peer
groups not only for feedback, but for other activities too, such as collaborative writing,
brainstorming, putting class magazines together, and working out other decisions.
(c) I increase the chances of my liking their writing when I get better at finding what is
good–or potentially good–and learn to praise it. This is a skill. It requires a good eye, a good
nose. We tend–especially in the academic world–to assume that a good eye or fine
discrimination means criticizing. Academics are sometimes proud of their tendency to be
bothered by what is bad. Thus I find I am sometimes looked down on as dumb and
undiscriminating: “He likes bad writing. He must have no taste, no discrimination.” But I’ve
finally become angry rather than defensive. It’s an act of discrimination to see what’s good in
bad writing. Maybe, in fact, this is the secret of the mystery of liking: to be able to see
potential goodness underneath badness.
Put it this way. We tend to stereotype liking as a “soft” and sentimental activity. Mr.
Rogers is our model. Fine. There’s nothing wrong with softness and sentiment–and I love Mr.
Rogers. But liking can also be hard-assed. Let me suggest an alternative to Mr. Rogers: B. F.
Skinner. Skinner taught pigeons to play ping-pong. How did he do it? Not by moaning, “Pigeon
standards are falling. The pigeons they send us these days are no good. When I was a pigeon . .
. .” He did it by a careful, disciplined method that involved close analytic observation. He put
pigeons on a ping-pong table with a ball, and every time a pigeon turned his head 30 degrees
toward the ball, he gave a reward (see my “Danger of Softness”).
_What would this approach require in the teaching of writing? It’s very simple . . . but not
easy. Imagine that we want to teach students an ability they badly lack, for example how to
organize their writing or how to make their sentences clearer. Skinner’s insight is that we get
nowhere in this task by just telling them how much they lack this skill: “It’s disorganized.
Organize it!” “It’s unclear. Make it clear!” Notice how much more practical and helpful it is to
move from this kind of advice: “Do something different from what you’re doing here” to this
kind: “Do more of what you’re doing there.”
No, what we must learn to do is to read closely and carefully enough to show the student
little bits of proto-organization or sort of clarity in what they’ve already written. We don’t have
to pretend the writing is wonderful. We could even say, “This is a terrible paper and the worst
part about it is the lack of organization. But I will teach you how to organize. Look here at this
little organizational move you made in this sentence. Read it outloud and try to feel how it
pulls together this stuff here and distinguishes it from that stuff there. Try to remember what it
felt like writing that sentence–creating that piece of organization. Do it some more.”
When academics criticize behaviorism as crude it often means that they aren’t willing to
do the close careful reading of student writing that is required. They’d rather give a cursory
reading and turn up their nose and give a low grade and complain about falling standards. No
one has undermined behaviorism’s main principle of learning: that reward produces learning
more effectively than punishment.
(d) I improve my chances of liking student writing when I take steps to get to know them
a bit as people. I do this partly through the assignments I give. That is, I always ask them to
15
write a letter or two to me and to each other (for example about their history with writing). I
base at least a couple of assignments on their own experiences, memories, or histories. And I
make sure some of the assignments are free choice pieces–which also helps me know them.
In addition, I make sure to have at least three conferences with each _student each
semester–the first one very early. I often call off some class es in order to keep conferences
from being too onerous (insisting nevertheless that students meet with their partner or small
group when class is called off). Some teachers have mini-conferences with students during
class–while students are engaged in writing or peer group meetings. I’ve found that when I
deal only with my classes as a whole–as a large group–I sometimes experience them as a herd
or lump–as stereotyped “adolescents”; I fail to experience them as individuals. For me,
personally, this is disastrous since it often leads me to experience them as that scary tribe that I
felt rejected by when I was an eighteen-year-old–and thus, at times, as “the enemy.” But when
I sit down with them face to face, they are not so stereotyped or alien or threatening–they are
just eighteen-year-olds.
Getting a glimpse of them as individual people is particularly helpful in cases where their
writing is not just bad, but somehow offensive–perhaps violent or cruelly racist or homophobic
or sexist–or frighteningly vacuous. When I know them just a bit I can often see behind their
awful attitude to the person and the life situation that spawned it, and not hate their writing so
much. When I know students I can see that they are smart behind that dumb behavior; they
are doing the best they can behind that bad behavior. Conditions are keeping them from acting
decently; something is holding them back.
(e) It’s odd, but the more I let myself show the easier it is to like them and their writing. I
need to share some of my own writing–show some of my own feelings. I need to write the
letter to them that they write to me–about my past experiences and what I want and don’t
want to happen.
(f) It helps to work on my own writing–and work on learning to like it. Teachers who are
most critical and sour about student writing are often having trouble with their own writing.
They are bitter or unforgiving or hurting toward their own work. (I think I’ve noticed that failed
PhDs are often the most severe and difficult with students.) When we are stuck or sour in our
own writing, what helps us most is to find spaces free from evaluation such as those provided
by freewriting and journal writing. Also, activities like reading out loud and finding a supportive
reader or two. I would insist, then, that if only for the sake of our teaching, we need to learn to
be charitable and to like our own writing.
A final word. I fear that this sermon about liking might seem an invitation to guilt. There
is enough pressure on us as teachers that we don’t need someone coming along and calling us
inadequate if we don’t like our students and their writing. That is, even though I think I am
right to make this foray into the realm of feeling, I also acknowledge that it is dangerous–and
paradoxical. It strikes me that we also need to have permission to hate the dirty bastards and
their stupid writing.
After all, the conditions under which they go to school bring out some awful behavior on
their part, and the conditions under which we teach sometimes make it difficult for us to like
16
them and their writing. Writing wasn’t meant to be read in stacks of twenty-five, fifty, or
seventy-five. And we are handicapped as teachers when students are in our classes against
their will. (Thus high school teachers have the worst problem here, since their students tend to
be the most sour and resentful about school.)
Indeed, one of the best aids to liking students and their writing is to be somewhat
charitable toward ourselves about the opposite feelings that we inevitably have. I used to think
it was terrible for teachers to tell those sarcastic stories and hostile jokes about their students:
“teacher room talk.” But now I’ve come to think that people who spend their lives teaching
need an arena to let off this unhappy steam. And certainly it’s better to vent this sarcasm and
hostility with our buddies than on the students themselves. The question, then, becomes this:
do we help this behavior function as a venting so that we can move past it and not be trapped
in our inevitable resentment of students? Or do we tell these stories and jokes as a way of
staying stuck in the hurt, hostile, or bitter feelings–year after year–as so many sad teachers do?
In short I’m not trying to invite guilt, I’m trying to invite hope. I’m trying to suggest that if
we do a sophisticated analysis of the difference between liking and evaluating, we will see that
it’s possible (if not always easy) to like students and their writing–without having to give up our
intelligence, sophistication, or judgment.
* * *
Let me sum up the points I’m trying to make about ranking, evaluating, and liking:
-Let’s do as little ranking and grading as we can. They are never fair and they undermine
learning and teaching.
-Let’s use evaluation instead–a more careful, more discriminating, fairer mode of
assessment.
-But because evaluating is harder than ranking, and because too much evaluating also
undermines learning, let’s establish small but important evaluation-free zones.
-And underneath it all–suffusing the whole evaluative enterprise–let’s learn to be better
likers: liking our own and our students’ writing, and realizing that liking need not get in
the way of clear-eyed evaluation.
WORKS CITED
Diederich, Paul. Measuring Growth in English. Urbana: NCTE, 1974.
Belanoff, Pat and Peter Elbow. “Using Portfolios to Increase Collaboration and Community in a
Writing Program.” WPA: Journal of Writing Program Administration 9.3 (Spring 1986):
27-40. (Also in Portfolios: Process and Product. Ed. Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson.
Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann. 1991.)
17
Belanoff, Pat, Peter Elbow and Sheryl Fontaine eds. Nothing Begins with N: New Investigations
of Freewriting. Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
Bishop, Wendy. Something Old, Something New: College Writing Teachers and Classroom
Change. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
—. Released into Language: Options for Teaching Creative Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1990.
Elbow, Peter. “The Danger of Softness.” What is English. New York: MLA, 1990: 197-210.
Elbow, Peter and Pat Belanoff. “State University of New York: Portfolio-Based Evaluation
Program.” New Methods in College Writing Programs: Theory into Practice. Eds. Paul
Connolly and Teresa Vilardi. New York: MLA, 1986: 95-105. (Also in Portfolios: Process
and Product. Ed. Pat Belanoff and Marcia Dickson. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/Cook
Heinemann. 1991.)
Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic,
1983.
Kirschenbaum, Howard, Simon Sidney, and Rodney Napier. Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in
American Education. New York: Hart Publishing, 1971.
Lewis, C. S. Studies in Words. London: Cambridge UP, 2nd ed, 1967.
Portfolio Assessment Newsletter. Five Centerpointe Drive, Suite 100, Lake Oswego, Oregon
97035.
Portfolio News. c/o San Dieguito Union High School District, 710 Encinitas Boulevard, Encinitas,
CA 92024.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
White, Edward M. Teaching and Assessing Writing. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
Zak, Frances. “Exclusively Positive Responses to Student Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing 9.2
(1990): 40-53.
- University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Microsoft Word – Ranking Evaluating Liking .rtf
ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst
1994
Ranking, Evaluating, Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment.
Peter Elbow
Recommended Citation
Ten Ways To Think About Writing:
Metaphoric Musings for College
Writing Student
by
E. Shelley Reid
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3
Ten Ways To Think About Writing:
Metaphoric Musings for College
Writing Students
E. Shelley Reid
1. A Thousand Rules and Three Principles
Writing is hard.*
I’m a writer and a writing professor, the daughter and granddaugh-
ter of writers and writing professors, and I still sit down at my key-
board every week and think, writing is hard.
I also think, though, that writing is made harder than it has to be
when we try to follow too many rules for writing. Which rules have
you heard? Here are some I was taught:
Always have a thesis. I before E except after C. No one-sen-
tence paragraphs. Use concrete nouns. A semi-colon joins two
complete sentences. A conclusion restates the thesis and the
topic sentences. Don’t use “I,” check your spelling, make three
main points, and don’t repeat yourself. Don’t use contrac-
tions. Cite at least three sources, capitalize proper nouns, and
don’t use “you.” Don’t start a sentence with “And” or “But,”
don’t end a sentence with a preposition, give two examples in
* This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the
Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://
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Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105,
USA. To view the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.
org/terms-of-use.
E. Shelley Reid4
every paragraph, and use transition words. Don’t use transi-
tion words too much.
When we write to the rules, writing seems more like a chore than
a living process that connects people and moves the world forward. I
find it particularly hard to cope with all those “Don’ts.” It’s no wonder
we get writer’s block, hands poised above the keyboard, worried about
all the ways we could go wrong, suddenly wondering if we have new
messages or whether there’s another soda in the fridge.
We can start to unblock the live, negotiated process of writing for
real people by cutting the thousand rules down to three broader prin-
ciples:
1. Write about what you know about, are curious about, are pas-
sionate about (or what you can find a way to be curious about
or interested in).
2. Show, don’t just tell.
3. Adapt to the audience and purpose you’re writing for.
When we write this way, we write rhetorically: that is, we pay attention
to the needs of the author and the needs of the reader rather than the
needs of the teacher—or the rules in the textbook.
Everything that matters from the preceding list of rules can be con-
nected to one of those three rhetorical principles, and the principles
address lots of aspects of writing that aren’t on the list but that are
central to why humans struggle to express themselves through written
language. Write about what you know about so that you can show not
just tell in order to adapt to your audience’s needs and accomplish your
goals. (Unless you do a good job showing what you mean, your audi-
ence will not understand your message. You will not meet their expec-
tations or accomplish your goals.) Make clear points early so that your
audience can spot your expertise or passion right from the start. Write
multi-sentence paragraphs in which you show key ideas in enough de-
tail that your audience doesn’t have to guess what you mean. Use a
semi-colon correctly in order to show how your carefully thought out
ideas relate to one another—and to win your reader’s confidence.
Writing will still be hard because these are some of the hardest
principles in college; they may be some of the hardest principles in
the galaxy. But if you write from those three principles, and use some
of the strategies listed below, your writing will finally have a fighting
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 5
chance of being real, not just rules. And that’s when writing gets inter-
esting and rewarding enough that we do it even though it’s hard.
2. Show & Telepaths
What does that “show, don’t just tell” idea really mean? Let’s try some
time travel to get a better idea. Can you remember being in kindergar-
ten on show-and-tell day? Imagine that a student gets up in front of
you and your fellow five-year-olds, empty-handed, and says, “I have a
baseball signed by Hank Aaron that’s in perfect condition, but I can’t
bring it to school.” You’re only five years old, but you know that she’s
got two problems, right? Not only can you not see the ball to know
exactly what “perfect condition” looks like, to eyeball the signature
and smell the leather and count the stitches, but you have no reason
to believe this kid even if she describes it perfectly. If you tell without
showing, your reader might not only be confused but might entirely
disbelieve you. So you’re two strikes down.
Another way to explain show vs. tell is with a story. There is a very,
very short science fiction story in a collection of very short science fic-
tion stories entitled “Science Fiction for Telepaths.”
This is the entire story, just six words: “Aw, you know what I mean”
(Blake 235).
“Wah-ha-ha!” go the telepaths, “what a great story! I really liked
the part about the Martian with three heads trying to use the gamma
blaster to get the chartreuse kitchen sink to fly out the window and
land on the six-armed Venusian thief! Good one!” Since the telepaths
can read the storyteller’s mind, they don’t need any other written de-
tails: they know the whole story instantly.
This story is a little like when you say to your best friend from just
about forever, you know what I mean, and sometimes she even does,
because she can almost read your mind. Sometimes, though, even your
best buddy from way back gives you that look. You know that look:
the one that says he thinks you’ve finally cracked. He can’t read your
mind, and you’ve lost him.
If you can confuse your best friend in the whole world, even when
he’s standing right there in front of you, think how easy it could be to
confuse some stranger who’s reading your writing days or months or
years from now. If we could read each other’s minds, writing wouldn’t
be hard at all, because we would always know what everyone meant,
E. Shelley Reid6
and we’d never doubt each other. If you figure out how to read minds
this semester, I hope you’ll tell us how it works! In the meantime,
though, you have to show what you mean.
3. The Little Green Ball and
Some People: Doing Details Right
Now we know: I can read my own mind, and you can read your own
mind, and this self-mind-reading is even easier to do than breathing
in and out on a lovely April morning. When I write something like “I
have a little green ball” on the whiteboard, I read my mind as I read
the board, so I understand it—and I’m positive, therefore, that you
understand it. Meanwhile, you read my sentence and your own mind
together and the meaning is so perfectly clear to you that it’s nearly
impossible to imagine that you’re not understanding exactly what I
intended.
I have a little green ball. Even a five-year-old could read this sen-
tence and know what I mean, right?
Try something. Bring both hands up in front of your face, and use
each one to show one possible size of this “little” ball. (You can try
this with friends: have everyone close their eyes and show the size of a
“little” ball with their hands, then open their eyes, and look around.)
Hmm. Already there’s some possible disagreement, even though it
seemed so clear what “little” meant.
Maybe “green” is easier: you know what “green” is, right? Of course.
But now, can you think of two different versions of “green”? three ver-
sions? five? In the twenty-five minds in a classroom, say, we might have
at least twenty kinds of little, and maybe a hundred kinds of green,
and we haven’t even discussed what kind of “ball” we might be talking
about. Those of you who are math whizzes can see the permutations
that come from all those variables. If I sent you to Mega Toyland with
the basic instructions, “Buy me a little green ball,” the chances are slim
that you would come home with the ball I had in mind.
If I don’t care about the exact ball—I just need something ball-like
and not too huge and somewhat greenish—then it doesn’t matter. I
can leave it up to you to decide. (Occasionally, it’s effective to avoid
details: if I were writing a pop song about my broken heart, I’d be de-
liberately vague so that you’d think the song was about your heart, and
then you’d decide to download or even buy my song.) But the more
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 7
I care that you know exactly what I’m thinking, the more the details
matter to me, then the more information I need to give you.
What information would you need to write down so that someone
would buy the exact little green ball that you’re thinking of while he or
she is shopping at Mega Toyland?
If you’re going to show me, or each other, what you’re thinking,
using only language, it will take several sentences, perhaps a whole
paragraph—filled with facts and statistics, comparisons, sensory de-
scription, expert testimony, examples, personal experiences—to be
sure that what’s in your mind is what’s in my mind. After my students
and I finish examining my ball and choosing rich language to show it,
the whiteboard often reads something like this: “I have a little green
ball about an inch in diameter, small enough to hide in your hand.
It’s light neon green like highlighter ink and made of smooth shiny
rubber with a slightly rough line running around its equator as if two
halves were joined together. When I drop it on the tile floor, it bounces
back nearly as high as my hand; when I throw it down the hallway, it
careens unpredictably off the walls and floor.” Now the ball in your
mind matches the ball in my hand much more closely.
Showing is harder than just telling, and takes longer, and is depen-
dent on your remembering that nobody reads your mind like you do.
Can you think of other “little green ball” words or phrases that you
might need to show more clearly? How do you describe a good movie
or a bad meal? How would you describe your mother, your hometown,
your car? Try it on a blank page or in an open document: write one
“you know what I mean” sentence, then write every detail and example
you can think of to make sure that a reader does know what you mean.
Then you can choose the most vivid three or four, the ones that best
show your readers what you want them to understand.
There’s another kind of description that requires mind reading. If I
write on the board that “some people need to learn to mind their own
business sometimes,” would you agree with me? (By now, you should
be gaining some skepticism about being able to read my mind.) In my
head, I’m filling in “some people” and “their business” and “some-
times” with very specific, one-time-only examples. It’s like I have a
YouTube clip playing in my head, or a whole season’s worth of a reality
TV show, and you don’t have access to it yet. (I might as well be say-
ing “I have cookies!” but not offering to share any of them with you.)
E. Shelley Reid8
If I give you a snapshot from that film, if I use language to pro-
vide a one-time-only example, I show you: “My ninety-year-old grand-
mother needs to stop calling up my younger cousin Celia like she did
last night and telling her to persuade me to move back home to Lara-
mie so my mom won’t get lonely and take up extreme snowboarding
just to go meet some nice people.” Does that help you see how the one-
time-only example you were thinking of, when you read my boring
sentence along with your own mind, is different from what I wanted
you to think? As writers, we need to watch out for the some-people
example and the plural example: “Sometimes things bother me” or
“Frederick Douglass had lots of tricks for learning things he needed to
know.” If an idea is important, give an exact one-time snapshot with
as much detail as possible.
In a writing class, you also have to learn to be greedy as a reader, to
ask for the good stuff from someone else’s head if they don’t give it to
you, to demand that they share their cookies: you have to be brave and
say, “I can’t see what you mean.” This is one of the roles teachers take
up as we read your writing. (One time during my first year teaching,
one of my students snorted in exasperation upon receiving his essay
back from me. “So, like, what do you do,” he asked, “just go through
the essay and write ‘Why? How so? Why? How so? Why? How so?’
randomly all over the margins and then slap that ‘B–’ on there?” I
grinned and said, “Yep, that’s about it.”)
It’s also your job as a peer reader to read skeptically and let your
fellow writer know when he or she is assuming the presence of a mind
reader—because none of us knows for sure if we’re doing that when
we write, not until we encounter a reader’s “Hunh?” or “Wha-a-a-?”
You can learn a lot about writing from books and essays like this one,
but in order to learn how not to depend on reading your own mind,
you need feedback from a real, live reader to help you gauge how your
audience will respond.
4. Lost Money and Thank-you Notes:
What’s in an Audience?
Writing teachers are always going on and on about audience, as if
you didn’t already know all about this concept. You can do a simple
thought-experiment to prove to them, and to yourself, that you already
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 9
fully understand that when the audience changes, your message has to
change, sometimes drastically.
Imagine that you’ve done something embarrassingly stupid or im-
pulsive that means you no longer have any money to spend this se-
mester. (I won’t ask you what it is, or which credit card or 888 phone
number or website it involves, or who was egging you on.) You really
need the money, but you can’t get it back now. If I just said, “Write a
message to try to get some money from someone,” you might struggle
a bit, and then come up with some vague points about your situation.
But if I say, “Ask your best friend for the money,” you should sud-
denly have a very clear idea of what you can say. Take a minute and
consider: what do you tell this friend? Some of my students have sug-
gested, “Remember how you owe me from that time I helped you last
February?” or “I’ll pay you back, with interest” or “I’ll do your laun-
dry for a month.” Most of my students say they’ll tell their friends the
truth about what happened: would you? What else might you say to
your own friend, particularly if he were giving you that skeptical look?
Suppose then that your friend is nearly as broke as you are, and
you have to ask one of your parents or another family adult. Now what
do you say to help loosen the parental purse strings? Do you tell the
truth about what happens? (Does it matter which parent it is?) Do you
say, “Hey, you owe me”? Some of my students have suggested choos-
ing messages that foreground their impending starvation, their intense
drive for a quality education, or their ability to learn a good lesson.
Would your parent want you to offer to pay back the money? What
else might you say?
Notice how easy it is for you to switch gears: nothing has changed
but the audience, and yet you’ve quickly created a whole new message,
changing both the content and the language you were using.
One more try: when your parent says there’s just no extra cash to
give you, you may end up at the local bank trying to take out a loan.
What will you tell the bank? Should the loan officer hear how you
lost your money, or how you promise you’ll be more responsible in
the future? Should you try looking hungry and wan? Probably not: by
discussing collateral (your five-year-old Toyota) and repayment terms
(supported by your fry-jockey job at McSkippy’s), you’re adjusting
your message once again.
Sometimes writing teachers talk about a “primary” and “second-
ary” audience, as if that were really a complicated topic, but you know
E. Shelley Reid10
all about this idea, too. Take just a minute and think about writing
a thank-you note. If it’s a thank-you note to your grandmother, then
your primary audience is your grandmother, so you write to her. But
if your grandmother is like mine, she may show your note to someone
else, and all those people become secondary audiences. Who might see,
or hear about, your note to your grandmother? Neighbors, other rela-
tives, her yoga group or church friends? If you know your note will be
stuck up on the fridge, then you can’t use it as a place to add snarky
remarks about your younger brother: you write for a primary audience,
but you also need to think for a minute to be sure your message is ad-
justed for the needs of your secondary audiences. (If you haven’t writ-
ten a thank-you note recently, try to remember the last time someone
forwarded your email or text message to someone else, without asking
you first.)
In a writing classroom, everyone knows that, in reality, your pri-
mary audience is the teacher—just as during rehearsal or team practice
the primary audience is the director or coach who decides whether
you’ll be first clarinet or take your place in the starting line-up. Your
classmates (or teammates) may be part of a secondary audience who
also need considering. It can be tempting to take the middle-of-the-
road route and forget about any other audiences. But in all these cases,
you won’t be practicing forever. It helps to imagine another primary
audience—sometimes called a “target audience”—outside the class-
room, in order to gain experience tailoring your performance to a
“real” audience. It also helps to imagine a very specific primary audi-
ence (a person or small group or publication), so that instead of staring
at the screen thinking vague “some people” thoughts, you can quickly
come up with just the right words and information to match that audi-
ence’s needs, and it helps to consider some exact secondary audiences
so that you can include ideas that will appeal to those readers as well.
(Who do you suppose are the specific primary and secondary audi-
ences for this essay? How does the writing adapt to those audiences?)
5. Pink Houses & Choruses:
Keeping Your Reader With You
Once you’ve identified a target audience, and put down all the detail
you can think of to help show your ideas to those readers, you need
to focus on not losing them somewhere along the way. Earlier in your
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 11
writing career as you worked on writing cohesive essays, you may have
watched writing teachers go totally ballistic over thesis statements and
topic sentences—even though some teachers insisted that they weren’t
requiring any kind of set formula. How can this be? What’s up with
all this up-front information?
The concept is actually pretty simple, if we step out of the writing
arena for a minute. Say you’re driving down the interstate at sixty-five
miles an hour with three friends from out of town, and you suddenly
say to them, “Hey, there’s that amazing Pink House!” What happens?
Probably there’s a lot of whiplash-inducing head swiveling, and some-
one’s elbow ends up in someone else’s ribs, and maybe one of your
friends gets a glimpse, but probably nobody really gets a chance to see
it (and somebody might not believe you if she didn’t see it for herself!).
What if you had said instead, “Hey, coming up on the right here in
about two miles, there’s an amazing huge neon Pink House: watch for
it”? They’d be ready, they’d know where to look and what to look for,
and they’d see what you wanted them to see.
Writers need to advise their readers in a similar way. That advice
doesn’t always need to be in a thesis statement or a topic sentence, but
it does need to happen regularly so that readers don’t miss something
crucial.
“But,” you say, “I’m not supposed to repeat things in my essay; it
gets boring!” That’s true, up to a point, but there are exceptions. Have
you ever noticed how the very same company will run the exact same
advertisement for light beer five or six times during one football game?
It’s not as if the message they are trying to get across is that complex:
Drink this beer and you will be noticed by this beautiful woman, or get
to own this awesome sports car, or meet these wonderful friends who will
never ever let you down. The ad costs the company hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars each time, but there it is again. Beer: sports car. Beer:
sports car. Contemporary Americans have a very high tolerance for
repeated messages; we even come to depend on them, like football fans
relishing the instant replay. Beer: sports car.
If you’d rather think like an artist than an advertising executive,
consider popular music. Pick a pop song, any song—“Jingle Bells,” for
instance, or whatever song everybody’s listening to this month—and
the next time you listen, count the number of times the chorus, or
even the title phrase, comes up. Do we get bored by the repetition? Not
usually. In fact, the chorus is crucial for audience awareness because
E. Shelley Reid12
it’s often the first (or even the only) part of the song the listener learns
and can sing along with. Repeating the chorus helps bring the audi-
ence along with you from verse to verse: the audience thinks, “Aha, I
know this!”
Now, what you’re trying to say in your essay is much more complex
than beer: sports car or I will always love you. If you only say it once
or twice—there, in the last paragraph, where you finally figured out
the most important point, or maybe once at the start and once at the
end—we might miss it, or only get a piece of it. Here you’ve spent
hundreds of minutes working on this idea, and we zoom past it at
sixty-five m.p.h. and miss it entirely! You have to bring it back to our
attention throughout the essay. Of course, you don’t want to repeat
just anything. You certainly don’t want to repeat the same examples or
vague “some people” theories, stuffing baloney into the middle of the
paper to fill it out. But the core idea—beer: sports car—needs to ap-
pear early and often, using the same key words, even, as an anchor for
all the complex ideas and examples you’re connecting to it, as a place
for the audience to recognize the main idea and find a way to “sing
along.”
So as you’re revising, add your chorus back into some key middle
parts of your essay—the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, like
commercial breaks, can be places that readers expect repetition—until
you start to really feel uncomfortable about your repetition . . . and
then add it one more time, and it might be enough, but it shouldn’t be
too much. (Since you read the essay dozens of times and you read your
own mind, you’ll get antsy about repetition long before your readers
will in their one trip through your essay.) If you get a good balance,
your reader—the same person who keeps laughing at the beer ad or
mumbling the chorus to the pop song without knowing the rest of the
lyrics—won’t even notice that you’re repeating. When I work with my
students, I say: “I promise to tell you—no harm, no penalty—if you’re
ever too clear about your main point.” I find that very few people make
it that far, but they like having the encouragement to try. You and your
peer readers can make the same agreement.
6. Fruit Jell-O: Balancing Arguments & Examples
“Great,” you say, “so I’m supposed to have all these examples and to
have all these Pink House reminders, but it’s hard to keep it all straight.”
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 13
That’s a very smart observation—because one of the main challenges
writers face, when we can’t read someone’s mind or get them to read
ours, is learning how to balance the writing that states our theories and
arguments with the writing that provides our evidence and examples. It
turns out that it’s easier to do just one of these things at a time when
writing, but having theories and arguments without evidence and ex-
amples is a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding.
I find that it helps sometimes to think about fruit Jell-O™, the kind
my mom used to take to family get-togethers: lime Jell-O with manda-
rin orange slices in it, or berry Jell-O with cherries in it. Fruit Jell-O is
a pretty good balance of foods to take to an informal family gathering:
it meets the needs of the audience.
You wouldn’t want to take plain gelatin to show off to your fam-
ily, after all. Think of the last time you ate plain old Jell-O, with no
additional food (or beverage) added to it. Weren’t you in a hospital, or
a school cafeteria, or some other unhappy place? Hospitals serve plain
gelatin because it looks and behaves like food, but it has so few ingre-
dients that it won’t irritate your mouth or upset your digestion. That
same blandness means that not a lot of family members will choose it
over the tortilla chips or the macaroons.
Writing just your opinions, theories, and arguments is a lot like
serving plain Jell-O: it seems like you’re doing something productive,
but there’s not much substance to it. Politicians often write plain Jell-O
speeches with no details or examples, because that kind of talk moti-
vates people but won’t irritate voters with tiny details about time or
money. Talent-show contestants sometimes choose to sing plain Jell-O
songs for the same reason.
On the other hand, if you took a bowl of cherries with you, your
family might perk up a bit, but cherries are kind of hard to serve. They
roll out of the bowl and off of those flimsy paper plates and end up
sliding into the cheese dip or being squished into the new carpet by
your two-year-old cousin. People finger all the cherries but take just
a few (using tongs on cherries just seems too formal!), and it’s hard to
know how to handle the pits, or to eat gooey already-pitted cherries
with your hands.
Writing just your examples, reasons, and details is a lot like bring-
ing cherries to the party: it’s interesting and lively, but readers don’t
know what to make of it all. Some of your reasons or stories will roll
out of readers’ heads if they aren’t firmly attached to an argument;
E. Shelley Reid14
some readers will meander through all your details and just randomly
remember one or two of them rather than building a whole picture.
Good writers blend argument and evidence as they write, so that
readers get both elements together all the way through. Good revisers
go back and adjust the recipe, seeking a workable combination. Some-
times as you’re revising it can feel odd to be just adding cherries: it can
seem like you’re packing in too many extra details when there’s already
a perfectly good piece of fruit there. Other times it seems weird to
be just adding Jell-O, because all those “chorus” sentences sound the
same and have the same flavor, and you don’t want to repeat yourself
unnecessarily. It’s hard to get the balance right, and you’ll want to have
your readers help you see where to adjust the ingredients. But if you
remember that the fruit/evidence is the tastiest part (so you want the
most vibrant examples), and the point of Jell-O/argumentation is to
provide consistency to hold everything together (you want statements
that sound alike), you may start to gain additional confidence in bal-
ancing your writing.
7. Wash-and-wear Paragraphs
If you’re going to have Jell-O and cherries, a chorus and one-time-only
examples, in every paragraph, that’s going to take some managing—
and you’ll want to manage rhetorically rather than going by some rules
you once heard about exactly how long a paragraph should be. What
paragraph-length rules have you been taught? Should a paragraph be
five to eight sentences? always more than two sentences? never longer
than a page? Some of my students have learned rules that specify that
all paragraphs have twelve sentences and each sentence has a specific
job. That sounds complicated—and you know that a rule like that
can’t be universally true. What if you’re writing for a newspaper? for
a psychology journal? for a website? Paragraph length doesn’t follow
clear rules, but once again depends upon a rhetorical negotiation be-
tween the writer’s needs and the reader’s needs.
Switch gears for a minute and try out another metaphor: what do
you know about how big a load of laundry should be? Right: it de-
pends. What’s wrong with a very small or a very large load? Paragraphs
face the same kinds of boundaries: too small, and they can waste a
reader’s energy, always starting and stopping; too large, and they over-
load a reader and nothing gets clean. But there are no definite rules
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 15
in laundry or in paragraphs. Is there ever reason to do one tiny laun-
dry load, even if it might waste money or energy? Sure: maybe you’ve
got an important event to attend Friday night and you just need to
wash your best black shirt quickly, or maybe you have a small washing
machine. Is there ever reason to do one slightly oversized load? Abso-
lutely: perhaps you’re low on quarters or there’s only one machine open
in the dormitory laundry room, and you need to get all those t-shirts
clean. The same is true for paragraphs: sometimes, you have just one
important thing to say, or your readers have a short attention span, so
you want a short paragraph—even a one-sentence paragraph. On the
other hand, sometimes you have a complex explanation that you want
your reader to work through all at once, so you stretch your paragraph
a little longer than usual, and hope your reader stays with you.
You want to write paragraphs that your target audience can handle
without straining their brains or leaving suds all over the floor. I bet
you’re pretty good at sorting laundry into the basic loads: darks, colors,
whites, like the three body paragraphs of a five-paragraph essay. But
what if you’re writing an eight-page paper using three basic points?
What if you have an enormous pile of whites?
You sometimes have to split up even the loads that look alike.
Would you split an all-whites pile into all the long-drying socks vs.
all the quick-drying shirts? the dirty stuff vs. the really gross, stinky
stuff? the underwear you need tomorrow vs. the towels you could wash
later? You can find lots of ways to split a too-long paragraph based on
how you want your reader to think about the issue: pros and cons,
first steps and next steps, familiar information and more surprising
information.
Writers need to remember that paragraphs help readers focus and
manage their analytical energies. It’s good to have some variance in
size and shape but not to overtax your readers with too much variation;
it’s useful to write each paragraph with a clear beginning and ending
to direct readers’ attention; and it’s helpful if paragraphs come with a
blend of information and analysis to help readers “see what you mean”
about your subpoints and see how they relate to the overall point of
your essay. It’s not true that paragraphs are “one size fits all,” and it’s
not true that “anything goes”: you need to adjust your paragraphs to
connect your ideas to your readers’ brains.
E. Shelley Reid16
8. Hey Hey Hey and the Textbook
Conspiracy: Annotating Your Reading
I know, you thought this was an essay about writing. But part of being
a writer, and being a helpful companion to other writers, is being a
careful reader, a reader who writes.
Besides, I want to be sure you get what you pay for: that kind of
critical thinking helps all of us be better writers. Did you know that
you pay for most textbooks in two ways, and most students never do
the simplest thing to recoup their investment?
How do you pay? First, except for texts like the one you’re reading
right now, you’ve paid some exorbitant price for your books, even if
you bought them used. Why would you do that, instead of checking
them out of the library or sneaking a look from a friend? Right: you
can read them whenever and wherever you get around to it. (No, I
don’t want to know where you read your class book!) But you may be
overlooking one more benefit, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Second, you pay for the book—even a free one like this one—with
your time. You pore over page after page, the minutes ticking by, in-
stead of building houses for orphans in Botswana or coming up with
a cure for insomnia or even giving that double-crossing elf what he
deserves in World of Warcraft. Did you ever finish all that poring (with
a “p,” not a “b,” really) and realize you had tuned out and didn’t re-
member a thing? Now you’ve paid dearly, and you may have to pay yet
another time when you re-read it.
The simplest thing you can do to get your money’s worth and your
time’s worth from your books and other reading material is this: you
can write on them.
Whatever you pay for the book (minus whatever you might sell it
back for), the only two benefits you get are convenient reading access,
and the chance to write in the book. If you don’t write in your book, or
type notes into the document, you’re being cheated, as if you’d paid for
a Combo Meal but ate only the fries. (Do you think maybe you won’t
be able to re-sell your book if you write in it? Check with your friends:
I bet someone’s bought a used book that’s been scribbled all over. So
clearly someone will buy your book back even if you write in it. Don’t
let the textbook industry scare you out of getting what you pay for.)
Some of you may think you are writing on your text, but I wonder
if that’s true. Smearing it with hot pink highlighter pen doesn’t count
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 17
as writing. Why not? That takes another story and another metaphor.
There’s a classic Far Side cartoon from back in the twentieth century
that reveals what dogs are really saying when they bark all day long.
According to cartoonist Gary Larson, when we finally translate their
secret language, we find that they say, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” (144). You
can just see a dog thinking that way, everything new and surprising,
but not much complexity of analysis. Hey!
When you read something and gloss it with your highlighter pen,
that’s what you’re saying: Hey! Hey! Hey! You can come back six weeks
later to write an essay or study for an exam, and you have an entire
book filled with Hey! It’s a good start, but as a smart writing student,
you’re ready to go further to get your money’s worth.
Without having to expend much more energy, you can begin to
add a wholly intelligent commentary, putting your own advanced
brain down on the page, using an actual writing utensil such as a pen
or pencil (or a comment function for an electronic document). For
starters, let’s just vary Hey:
Ha.
Heh.
Hee.
Hooboy!
Hmm.
Hmph.
Huh?
Whoa!
Each of those responses records some higher-brain judgment: if you
go back later, you’ll know whether you were saying “Hey, this is cool!”
or “Hey, this is fishy.” You can also use other abbreviations you know:
LOL, OMG, WTH(eck), or J. You can underline short phrases with
a solid or a squiggly underline, depending on your reaction. And of
course, you can always go back to “Why? How so? Show me!” If you
get really bold, you can ask questions (“will this take too much time?”),
write quick summaries (“annotate so there’s no hey”) or note connec-
tions (“sounds like the mind-reading thing”). It doesn’t take very long,
and it keeps your brain involved as you read. What other short annota-
tions could you write or type on this page right now?
E. Shelley Reid18
Every time you write on the page and talk back to the text, you get
your money’s worth, because you make the text truly your own, and
you get your time’s worth, because you’re staying awake and you’re
more likely to remember and learn what you read. If you don’t remem-
ber, you still have an intelligent record of what you should’ve remem-
bered, not just a pile of Hey! Bonus: being a writer when you’re a reader
helps you become a better reader and a better writer.
9. Short-Time Writing: Use Your Higher Brain
So far, we’ve been thinking about writing when you have plenty of
time to consider your audience, play with your paragraphs, and re-
calibrate your Jell-O/cherry balance. But you won’t always have that
much time: sometimes you’ll get a late start or have an early deadline.
In college, you might encounter essay questions on an exam. Learning
how to be a good timed-exam writer can help you in lots of short-time
writing situations.
What’s hard about writing an essay exam? The stress, the pressure,
the clock ticking, the things you don’t know. It’s like trying to think
with a jet airplane taking off overhead, or a pride of hungry lions rac-
ing your way. But wait: the coolest thing about the essay exam is that,
in contrast to a multiple choice exam that shows what you don’t know,
the essay exam allows you to focus on what you do know. The problem
is that only your higher brain can show off that knowledge, and for
most people in a stressful situation like an essay exam, the higher brain
starts to lose out to the lower brain, the fight-or-flight brain, the brain
that sees breathing in and breathing out as one of its most complicated
tasks, and so the writing goes awry.
Essay exams—or those last-minute, started-at-1:22-a.m. essays
that you may be tempted or forced to write this semester (but not
for your writing teacher, of course!)—generally go wrong by failing
to meet one of the three principles described at the beginning of this
essay. Sometimes students fail to study well so that they can write from
knowledge. (Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can help you with your
midnight cram sessions.) More often, though, some very smart, well-
prepared students fail to adapt to their audience’s needs, or fail to pro-
vide specific support. All that late-night study-session agony goes for
nothing if your lower brain takes over while you’re writing. Your lower
brain can barely remember “I before E,” and it knows nothing about
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 19
complicated rhetorical strategies like ours: you have to make sure your
higher brain sets the pace and marks the trail.
So the teacher hands out the questions, and the first thing you
do is . . . panic? No. Start writing? Heavens, no. Never start an essay
exam—or a truly last-minute essay—by starting to write the essay,
even if (like me) you generally prefer to “just start writing” rather than
doing a lot of restrictive planning. Freewriting is an excellent writing
exercise, but only when you know you have plenty of time to revise.
Instead, ignore all those keyboards clacking, all those pens scribbling:
they are the signs of lower brains at work, racing off screeching wild-
ly about lions without remembering the way writing happens. You’re
smarter than that. You’re going to use your higher brain right at the
start, before it gets distracted. Speed, right now, is your enemy, a trick
of the lower brain.
The first thing you want to do is . . . read the gosh darn question.
Really, really read it. Annotate the assignment sheet or exam prompt,
or write the key question out on a separate piece of paper, so you
know you’re actually reading it, and not just pretending to. (If you’re
in a workplace setting, write down a list of the top things you know
your audience—or your boss—wants to see.) In every essay exam
I’ve ever given, somebody has not answered the question. When I
say this in a class, everyone frowns or laughs at me just the way you
are now, thinking, “What kind of idiot wouldn’t read the question?
Certainly not me!” But someone always thinks she’s read the whole
question, and understood it, when she hasn’t. Don’t be that writer.
Circle the verbs: analyze, argue, describe, contrast. Underline the key
terms: two causes, most important theme, main steps, post–Civil War.
Read it again, and read it a third time: this is your only official
clue about what your audience—the teacher—wants. On a piece of
scratch paper, write out an answer to the question, in so many words:
if it asks, “What are two competing explanations for language ac-
quisition?” write down, “Two competing explanations for language
acquisition are ___ and ___ .” In an examination setting, this may
even become your opening line, since readers of essay exams rarely
reward frilly introductions or cute metaphors.
But don’t start to write the whole answer yet, even though your
lower brain is begging you, even though the sweat is breaking out on
your brow and your muscles are tensing up with adrenaline because
you know the lions and probably some rampaging T-Rexes are just
E. Shelley Reid20
around the corner. In real time, it has only taken you two minutes to
read and annotate the question. Some students are still pulling out
their pens, while across campus at least one student is just waking up
in a panic because his alarm didn’t go off. Meanwhile, far from being
hopelessly behind, you’re ahead of everyone who’s writing already, be-
cause you’re still working with your higher brain.
You have one more task, though. You know that showing takes lon-
ger, and is more complicated, than telling. Given the choice, your lower
brain will tell, tell, and tell again, blathering on about Jell-O generali-
ties that don’t let readers see all the best thinking going on in your
mind. Before your higher brain starts to abandon you, make it give
you the cherries: write yourself a list of very specific examples that you
can use in this essay, as many as you can think of. Do not just “think
them over.” That’s a lower brain shortcut, a flight move, and it’s a trick,
because your lower brain will forget them as soon as the lions get a bit
closer. Write them down. If you don’t know all the possible transmis-
sion vectors for tuberculosis that were discussed, write down excellent
examples of the ones you do know. If you can, number them in an
order that makes sense, so that you leave a good breadcrumb trail for
your lower brain to follow. Don’t call it an “outline” if you don’t want
to; that can feel intimidating. Just call it a “trail guide.”
Now you can start writing: take a deep, calming breath and begin
with your in so many words sentence, then follow the trail your higher
brain has planned. About every two or three sentences, you should
start out with “For example, . . .” or “Another example of this is . . . ,”
to be sure that you’re not forgetting your higher brain’s advice or slid-
ing into a vague “some people” sentence. About every three or four
sentences, you should start out with “Therefore, . . .” or “In other
words, . . .” and come back to a version of that very first, question-
answering sentence you wrote on your paper. Bring the chorus back in;
stay in tune and on the trail. Don’t try for too much variation or beau-
ty. Knowing that your higher brain has already solved the problem, all
you have to do is set it down on paper, to show what you know. Writing
is hard, especially under time pressure, but when you use higher brain
strategies and don’t get trapped in the rules or caught up in random
flight, when you take control and anticipate your reader’s needs, you
can make writing work for you in very powerful ways even without a
lot of time.
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 21
10. Rules vs. Rhetoric, or, The Five
Paragraph Essay vs. “Try Something!”
We started out by thinking of all the rules—all those “Don’ts”—that
writers can face. Each of the metaphors here replaces a rule with an
idea that helps you consider how real people communicate with each
other through writing, and how writers make judgments and choices
in order to have the most powerful effect on their readers. That is,
we’ve been thinking rhetorically, about the audience and purpose and
context of a writing situation.
Interestingly, many of those rules are just short-cut versions of re-
ally good rhetorical principles. If you were a middle-school teacher
faced with a room full of thirty squirrelly teenagers who all wanted
to know What’s Due On Friday? and who didn’t have patience for one
more part of their chaotic lives to be in the “it just depends” category,
you might be tempted to make some rules, too. You might even come
up with The Five Paragraph Essay.
That is, instead of saying, “Most readers in the U.S. prefer to know
exactly what they’re getting before they invest too much time,” which
is a thoughtful rhetorical analysis that can help writers make good
choices, you might say, “Your thesis must come in the first paragraph.”
Instead of saying, “In Western cultures, many readers are comfortable
with threes: three bears, three strikes, three wishes, even the Christian
Trinity,” you might make a rule and say, “You must write an essay
with a beginning, an end, and three middle paragraphs.” Instead of
saying, “Your readers need to know how your examples connect to one
another, and how each set of examples is related to your overall point,”
you might say, “Every paragraph needs to start with a transition and a
topic sentence and finish with a concluding sentence.” And instead of
saying, “Writers in the U.S. face one of the most heterogeneous groups
of readers in the world, so we need to be as careful as possible to make
our meaning clear rather than assuming that all readers know what
we’re talking about,” you might just say, “Each paragraph needs to in-
clude two concrete-detail sentences and two commentary sentences.”
You would intend to be helping your students by saying these
things, and for many young writers, having clear rules is more useful
than being told, “It depends.” But eventually the rules start to be more
limiting than helpful, like a great pair of shoes that are now a size too
small. Good writers need some space to grow.
E. Shelley Reid22
As a writer in college now, and as a writer in the larger world full of
real readers—whether they’re reading your Facebook page, your letter
to the editor, or your business plan—you need to free yourself from
the rules and learn to make rhetorical decisions. From now on, when
you hear someone tell you a rule for writing, try to figure out the rhe-
torical challenge that lies behind it, and consider the balancing acts
you may need to undertake. What do you want to say, and what will
help the readers in your primary audience “see what you mean” and
follow your main points?
There aren’t any easy answers: writing is still hard. But the good
news is that you can use a few helpful “rules” as starting points when
they seem appropriate, and set aside the rest. You can draw on some
key principles or metaphors to help you imagine the needs of your
readers, and when you come to an open space where there doesn’t seem
to be a perfect rule or strategy to use, you can try something. In the end,
that’s what writers are always doing as we write: trying this, trying
that, trying something else, hoping that we’ll make a breakthrough so
that our readers will say “Aha, I see what you mean!”—and they really,
truly will see it. You know James Bond 007 would try something; Jane
Eyre would try something; those Olympic medalists and rock stars and
pioneering cardiac surgeons and Silicon Valley whiz kids are always
trying something. In the same way, being a good writer is always more
about trying something than about following the rules, about adapting
to a new situation rather than replicating last year’s essay. So take a
deep breath, push all those nay-saying rule-makers into the far corners
of your brain, focus on your current audience and purpose, and write!
Discussion
1. Which section of this essay do you remember most clearly?
Write down what you remember about it, and explain how you
might use an idea in that section to help with a writing task
that you’re doing this week. Why do you think this section
stuck with you?
2. Without looking back at the essay, what would you say is the
chorus of the essay, the “beer: sports car” message that keeps
getting restated? Write it down: it may be a sentence, a phrase,
and/or a few key words. Now go back to a section of the essay
and underline or highlight sentences or phrases where Reid re-
Ten Ways To Think About Writing 23
peats this chorus or key words. Does she repeat them as much
as you thought she did?
3. What other rules for writing have you been told to follow, ei-
ther at school or outside of school in your workplace, com-
munity group, or online setting? List a couple of rules that
weren’t described in this essay, and note down whether you
think they’re most connected to the principle of writing from
knowledge, showing enough detail, or adapting to readers’
needs. Also, if there’s another principle for writing that helps
you a lot, something you always try to do, add a note about it
so you can share it with your classroom peers.
4. Where in this essay does Reid practice what she preaches? Go
back through the essay and label a few places where she seems
to be doing what she says writers should do (“here she gives a
Pink House heads-up sentence at the start of a section”), and
note a few places where she doesn’t. Even though Reid admits
that writing is hard and depends on a specific context, her es-
say may make some of the strategies sound easier or more uni-
versal than they are. Which one of her suggestions seems like
it would be the hardest for you to do, or seems like it would
be the least effective in the kind of writing you do most often?
Explain why this suggestion is trickier than it looks, and how
you might cope with that challenge as a writer.
Works Cited
Blake, E. Michael. “Science Fiction for Telepaths.” 100 Great Science Fiction
Short Short Stories. Ed. Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph D.
Olander. New York: Avon, 1978. 235. Print.
Larson, Gary. The Far Side Gallery 5. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel,
1995. Print.
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