Writing Centers’ Power

Written by Charles Dyer

Believe it or not, there is a group called the North Texas Writing Center Association (NTWCA). This association of writing centers is a subset of the South Central Writing Centers Association, which is an affiliate of the International Writing Centers Association. One might expect this to then become, in the distant future, a member of the Inner Solar System Writing Center Association – in due time.

The NTWCA hosts a fall conference, a short day to share stories of successes and failures, to discuss strategies and techniques, and to impart administrative know-how. One goal of the conference is to discover what works and what doesn’t. Part of the conversations center around the widespread apathy toward writing in general.

The stories are more or less the same at any writing center. Students feel that writing is a burden, a requirement, and something only few can do well. The reasons for this are complicated and not entirely understood because the way we teach writing and grammar is complicated and not entirely understood.

With the pressure of STEM curricula bearing down on schools and teachers, the study of humanities has been slowly pushed to the sidelines and seen as a luxury. Where there are calls for mandatory composition courses in high school and college, the ins and outs of those courses are muddled and – at times – do more harm than good. This is not breaking news and is something composition directors and academics struggle to untangle daily.

What writing centers are left with are frustrated students with lackluster drives to write anything at all. Part of a writing center’s job then becomes motivating students to write and write WELL. Easier said than done, of course.

These are the kinds of conversations had at writing center conferences like the NTWCA held in the fall of 2019 at Tarrant County College’s northeast campus. Out of the strains of the conversation emerged a central question: What do we tell students to make them care about writing?

There are a few ways writing enthusiasts answer this question. The first is that there is an innate need for writing of all kinds – that it’s both an art form and a necessity for civilization.

Another answer is one I heard at the NTWCA conference. “If you want any kind of substantial job, you need to be able to write well.” The more practical answer, this insight follows the expansion of career centers and services in higher education and the ever-shrinking baseline worth of a bachelor’s degree. The more skills you have, the more likely you are to earn whatever job you want.

The third answer – a favorite of mine – is that effective communication is the glue of a society. The ability to write clearly and sensibly eliminates ambiguity and inspires cooperation. The ability to tell stories entertains the heart and excites the imagination. To be able to write is to be able to move an audience or a reader. Words drive actions and thoughts until they become real and tangible.

That’s all well and fine, but how to make students believe that is a hefty question with a monstrous answer out there somewhere. For a writing center, however, it’s about the little things. Tutors and consultants can reinforce the importance of writing little by little. That’s why returning students are so important. We have the unique opportunity to impact a human’s life when it comes to their ability to express themselves. That’s so special.

Make sure students know how important it is for them to be able to write clearly and that effective communication is their key to the world.

How We Think About Writing

Written by Charles Dyer

As I write this, I’m thinking about what type of writing this post amounts to. It appears to be exposition at its core. I’m here to explain something – in a mediocre way, to be sure – and to describe the way in which we teach and think about writing. That sounds expository to me.

I only do this because I have been reading about the “modes of discourse” for the past two hours. They have been laid out in various ways, tweaked here and there, but the bare bones of this line of thinking are that writing can be divided into four different types: narrative, descriptive, expository, and argumentative.

Here they are as simply put as I can manage:

• Narrative: tells a story, describing events and details

• Descriptive: is pretty self-explanatory, but is meant to describe something in order to create an image in the reader’s mind

• Expository: meant to explain something factually, to inform

• Argumentative: is also self-explanatory, but is meant to persuade or argue a point

This was how writing and rhetoric used to be taught. Up until the mid-1950’s, teaching the “Modes of Discourse” was the entire approach to rhetoric (Connors, 452). This begs the question, then: why am I having to read “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse” from Robert Connors’ book, College Composition and Communication to understand any of this?

Why do I have a degree in “English/Creative Writing” and not something like, English/Modes of Discourse? That may be the question of my life, but let’s keep going. Connors says that the pieces of discourse curriculum – narration, description, exposition, argumentation – started going their own ways as the century progressed (450).

Narration and description took the path of creative writing (there I am!). Argumentation quietly stepped out of writing classes and slipped into speech courses. Exposition, Connors said, “had become so popular that it was more widely taught than the ‘general’ modal freshman composition course” (450).

Exposition took off because our culture began the shift to media like THIS. This blog and its purpose of explaining something to you right now is what businesses, schools, governments, organizations, multi-billion dollar corporations, and the dollar store down the street are doing wherever they can. Admittedly, there is a little persuasion in there, but they are constantly explaining things to you.

All of this to say, the dusty modes of discourse still exist, just not in our classrooms. They’ve evolved and shape-shifted – they’re hiding in plain sight. Our understanding of writing and rhetoric is, put more simply, an understanding of the transformation of human communication. How we process the world affects how we teach our writers to describe it.

Rhetoric and writing is never dead or obsolete, it just adapts.

Cited

Connors, Robert J. “The Rise and Fall of the Modes of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 32, no. 4, 1981, pp. 444–455. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/356607.