The Tool... Continued

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Monday, September 19, 2011 9:16:51 PM EDT

Those techniques are often applied to single sentences or to two sentences occurring far apart in an essay. Since many programs also teach a research-writing class as the second half of the writing requirement, I search for tools which describe the entire body of an essay as well. Therefore I latched on to Rowan’s article on forms for public discourse. In my first year of teaching courses for credit, I was saddled with Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, which took its structural theme from Toulmin outlines. My students could make neither heads nor tails of it, and I didn’t blame them. I could explain the key terms, claim, data, and warrant, and I could make them understand my use of the terms. What I couldn’t do was differentiate between them without the definitions in front of me. Many editions later, the WRAC has dropped Toulmin outlines entirely, but I’m haunted by my lack of success in those first ENG 102 classes. Last semester I tried to salvage the experience by taking a diagram from Oracle’s Thinkquest.org, my students’ ideas, and a courtroom metaphor, and putting them all together on the projector and whiteboard. (I will attempt to post a copy here, but if not, I’ll bring a copy to class.) For any teacher faced with explaining the Toulmin model, I offer these handouts from Winthrop and Vanderbilt:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/ans/english/mwollaeger/cdw.htm
http://www2.winthrop.edu/wcenter/handoutsandlinks/toulmin.htm

Last semester, I found a good substitute for my Toulmin embarassment. Crowley cites Kenneth Pike’s term tagmemics, which he turned into a pre- and re-writing structure with Alton Young and Richard Becker. I said in class that I am interested in explaining the process of invention. Students have great trouble, I have discovered again this week, coming up with what to write. It appears that college in absentia is long gone—that practice of showing up to class on the first day to pick up a syllabus and turning in a term paper the last day, then collecting a B grade. The last week or so brought me at least ten requests from students to tell them how to begin writing. They received ten total prompts from me regarding seven articles we have read. Crowley cites James McCrimmon: “the writing process is a process of making choices” (211). They have a hard time making choices, and they just won’t get excited on cue, so I am looking for a structured method. About a third of my job is teaching them how to invent and idea and put their fingers on the keyboard without trepidation.

I was feeling trepidation myself when I read Crowley’s assessment of Richard Young’s 1976 study involving in-class theme writing: teachers were not accustomed, she says, to ”the suggestion that teachers might evaluate the quality of students’ thoughts” (208). I have to side with Murray’s school on this one—if we were teaching so many rhetorical tools and mechanical techniques as to ignore the sense and quality of students’ pieces, the whole field would need revamping. Crowley recaps this problem when referencing tagmemics, which preceded Richard Young’s study by twenty years. “Teachers who were not used to evaluating the content of students’ papers may have felt constrained by the tagmemic heuristic’s focus on the invention of material,” says Crowley (210). This set of constraints is precisely what I wanted for my own teaching. I am sure that Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poets Society would object stringently to the table which results—on one axis, Particle, Wave, and Field, and on the other axis, Contrast, Variation, and Distribution. Like a chart-style rubric, this gives students a pre-writing method and a quick reference chart to create paragraphs and fight writers’ block.