A guest post by Angela Toscano, a graduate student in English who describes herself as an “elitist snob and misanthropic curmudgeon”, but who is actually slightly cuddlier than that. When I met her in New Orleans last year at the Pop Culture Association conference, I knew we had something in common. It turns out we are both Hug-averse Italian-American Women of Unexpected Religious Affiliation, a very rare breed.
Angela heard my plea for guest posts as I try to get my life in order after traveling for a few weeks. Here’s her post:
I wrote my first poem when I was five years old. It was a complex, metaphysical piece about Baby Jesus and the Christmas Star.
When I was ten years old, I wrote a play that my 5th grade class performed for the whole school.
I learned to write academically and scholastically during my junior high and high school years. A skill acquired through painful, excruciating episodes with my father in which he would sit at the keyboard and demand that I answer these sorts of questions: “What do you want to say about the Hopi Indians?” “I don’t know. I don’t know! I don’t know what to say.” “You have to say something.” “Ughhhhhhhhhhhhh! Uhhh, the Hopi Indians live in the Southwest.” “That’s not a thesis statement.” “Argghhhh! I hate this. It’s a stupid assignment”, cue throwing papers across the room in a fit of temper. All these episodes involved tears, fighting and the eventual but inexorable dragging of the words from my mouth onto the page and into some eventual cohesive and logical format. As such, I could write an essay and a research report almost entirely by myself by the time I graduated high school. Although, not very well.
Now that I am in my third decade, I have the great pleasure of trying to teach 18 years olds how to write as a part of my graduate work. I’ll tell you right off, and this is probably not a shock to any of you, but most of them can’t. Partially because they were never taught how, partially because they lack the inclination and the talent, and partially because none of them read very much; as such they have difficulty transferring their thoughts onto the page in a clear and coherent form. They only vaguely know what a thesis statement is. They don’t quite understand what the purpose of an essay is or what it means to cite sources. They have no concept of format or stapling. Worst of all, they have been consistently misinformed by high school English teachers about the Rules of Writing, which are nearly always wrong, wrong, wrong. For example, that you should never use “I” in a formal essay (untrue) or that you should never use the passive voice (not true) or, conversely, that you should always use the passive voice (equally untrue) or that you put a comma wherever you would take a breath (so, so, so not true). All essays are five paragraphs long according to high school pedagogy, and of course, you would never be so bold as to put your thesis statement at the end of the essay. These are the same idiot rules I learned when I was in public school but I had the great, good fortune of being a child of intellectuals so I never really took them to heart. And when I did, there was always someone around to tell me no.
Teaching is terrifying. I’m not a naturally extroverted person so every time I go into the classroom I have to psych myself up in the manner of Richard Gere in Chicago. Razzle-dazzle ‘em. The fake, teacher-me is chatty, friendly and assertive in a way that I am actually not. Teacher-me is similar to public-me, who is also not really me. My great fear is that I’m not actually teaching them anything, that despite the fact that I know how to write that I don’t know how to teach people to write. I felt as if I saw an improvement in the papers of my fall semester students, but I’m not sure if this because they actually improved or because I was exhausted from the semester. I felt myself getting weaker and less critical as the weeks rolled by so that by the time finals rolled around, I was not nearly as mean and precise a grader as I had been. This worries me because I do not want to do a disservice to my students. While I don’t believe that I am a natural teacher, I do want people to learn something, anything. Even if it is just that they need to staple their essays before they turn them in. Really, that was quite the problem.
In teaching people how to write, I am the one who has learned, mainly what I actually think about writing, if not something about teaching. The first thing I learned is that you can’t teach people to write, but that you can teach people to write better than they do. What I mean is that certain people are just by nature and talent better writers. They do the things you are taught to do, but they do them naturally. This, I think, goes against what many believe, which is that anyone can write. They can’t. But people seem to think this is true, especially of essays and genre fiction. I don’t know why this is true. I think it has something to do with how people regard language. But I don’t understand why there are so many out there who believe they can write a novel or poem when they clearly can’t and moreover, never do. It’s like believing you can be the conductor of the London Philharmonic when you’ve only ever conducted at church or a long with the TV. Sometimes watching the arrogance of would-be writers, whether in class or out, is like watching a particularly cringe-worthy episode of America’s Got Talent, which should be re-titled Most of America Has Totally Deluded Themselves into Believing They Have Talent. I have had to learn how to puncture arrogance without actually breaking people’s spirits.
Writing well, so well that you actually move people—to tears, to new ideas, to action—is not something a person picks up simply by keeping a journal or going to workshops on the weekend, unfortunately. So just because I am awesome at Guitar Hero does not make me a suitable candidate for Julliard or even a garage band. Yet, unlike many other art forms, writing has been given the terrible reputation of being something anyone can do. To paraphrase a line from Ratatouille, not anyone can be a great or even good writer, but a great or good writer can come from anywhere.
However, most of my students know they can’t write. They just have no interest in writing. They think it is useless. A small minority of the students realizes the importance of clarity and grace in the written word and as they are good students and thoughtful people, wish to improve their skills. This is always the way I felt about math. I never innately understood it and none of my math teachers seemed to ever be able to make it any easier for me to understand. It always seemed to me that math was taught as if you innately got it. I don’t want to do that with writing. I would like to make sure that those students who don’t get it, naturally, can at least understand the parts and the structures of writing at the end of the semester.
Despite my belief that you can’t teach talent, I do think you can teach people to write better than they once did. You can better the little talent that is there. If nothing else, you can teach students to at least write clearly, even if you can never teach them to write beautifully. Several of my students wanted to know why they didn’t get A’s last semester. The real truth was because they just didn’t write well enough to deserve an A. Their writing was not interesting to read. It was not felicitous. Cruel and subjective but I do not believe in giving out A’s simply because a person tried and did a little more than the minimum expected. That’s bullshit and it’s unfair to the people who had to work really hard but for whom it doesn’t come easily or the people who have natural talent but for whom it is a honing of skills. If everyone deserves an A, then an A becomes meaningless. If college should teach you anything, it’s that you aren’t special at all and that you don’t deserve anything just because show up and do the work.
So what, if anything, does this actually have to do with romance? Well, I believe that romance, like most genre fiction, suffers under the same misapprehension that college freshmen have coming into composition classes: namely, that it is something easy to do. That if you are going to write, you should write romance because it will require less talent than another genre and you will be more likely to be published because romance readers are less discerning. Romance is easy because romance is trash. Students regard art and writing classes in the same way as non-romance people think of romance. They think it will be simple, that it’s just a matter of doing the work, of following the formula without thought or skill. They believe, almost uniformly in my semester and 2 weeks of experience teaching, that if you can speak the language, then you can write the language, and if you can write the language then you are a writer and deserve a decent grade. A thought as misguided as believing you should never use the passive voice or that a common belongs wherever you breathe.
In any case, my goals in teaching students how to compose an essay are similar to my goals for romance: 1) that I make clear to all that this is not simply a matter of putting slot A into slot B, stirring in some fancy adjectives and a few randomly placed quotes to create an essay but a matter that requires thought and yes, even talent to accomplish well. And 2) that the pleasure of writing is the pleasure of telling a good story, even if that story is disguised as an essay or even as a romance.
…my goals in teaching students how to compose an essay are similar to my goals for romance: 1) that I make clear to all that this is not simply a matter of putting slot A into slot B… And 2) that the pleasure of writing is the pleasure of telling a good story…
I love this.
Angela — Great essay. Which is to be expected, right?
I completely agree with you about people (myself included) being delusional about how well we write. When I tried to make that point some weeks ago on a Dear Author comment thread, several people responded by suggesting I was too hard on myself. Well, no, I still don’t think I was. Of course I think I’m a great writer. It’s one of the three things everybody claims to do well: drive a car, write, and make love. As we know, not everyone is good at those activities…
What other people (my critique partner in particular) can do is what you do with your students — help me to improve. Whether my writing is any good is something I may be able to discern as I watch it improve, but until I submit it to the “ordeal by market” I won’t know how it matches up. I may read a book and think, “I can write better than this!” as it flies across the room, heading for the wall. But that book got published, and I really have no assurance mine ever will.
So there’s an odd disconnect here: I’m considered too hard on myself when I claim that I’m not the best judge of my own writing, but all the self-assurance in the world doesn’t make my writing improve. What makes it improve is a willingness to accept criticism, see what needs improvement, and learn how to write better.
great post, but no concept of stapling? put a comma where you would take a breath? that is truly frightening! i now have a picture of you doing jazz hands and whispering “razzle dazzle” as you enter a classroom. good luck with your students!
Victoria — Thank you. I’m glad you liked that.
Magdalen — I know I’m an awesome driver. I tell myself every day in the mirror: Angela, you drive like a rock star.
I think being an artist, any artist is a precarious balance between being intensely critical of one’s own work and having a ridiculous amount of arrogant bravado. You have to be your own critic, because one of the problems with writing, espeically stories, is that often the reader doesn’t really know what you are trying to do. This is most true for poets or anyone trying to do something experimental. Critiquers often just don’t get it and because of this sometimes you have to tell yourself you rock because nobody sees what you are trying to do. I want my students to be able to look at their own work and see what’s missing, but not crumple into misery just because it’s not great. That, at least, is the goal. Whether it is met or not is an entirely different proposition.
Lusty Reader — No concept of stapling. None. I’ve actually decided to take off points for failure to staple. As for the jazz hands, there’s actually a piano in my classroom this semester so I could have someone come and play me in. The students would still probably just stare blankly at me. Ah well.
I enjoyed reading this! Thanks so much.
I write all day and all night. I’m a lawyer by day (and night…) so I’m constantly drafting: correspondence, pleadings, witness statements, opinions, articles, materials for training seminars. This week has been taken up with a tender (pitch for work). In the evening, I blog and try to write fiction. So it’s constant. And I’m constantly shocked by how poor so many other people’s writing is. The person I’m writing this tender pitch with is a lawyer of many years standing and he cannot write decent English. It’s shocking.
Embarrassed to ask, but what’s a thesis statement? (I have an Arts degree, honest.)
Apart from that, you sound like a terrific teacher, and I wish I’d had someone like you teaching me in school. Perhaps I’d understand the comma.
However, I’d query the idea that badly written papers can’t deserve ‘A’s. If you’re teaching Writing, I can see that you can’t give poorly written papers ‘A’ grades. If you’re teaching anything else, I’d disagree.
Should say, my father, brother and youngest daughter are all dyslexic, and I know that colours my thinking. I’ve come to think that students ought to be tested on the subject they are studying, not on an ancillary skill set.
It just seems unfair that people who have to really work to achieve an education which is almost entirely transmitted through a medium that does not come naturally to them, are judged not for what they know, or understand, or think about a subject, but on their ability to do something else entirely.
I’m tone deaf, and I couldn’t have got through school if I’d had to learn and respond through music – no amount of work on my part could have made that bit of my brain work. And it seems education is sometimes like that for dyslexics – my (dyslexic) brother’s university had to fight to give him a 2:1 because the external examiner didn’t think his written work was up to scratch. But really, given his degree wasn’t a writing degree, why should his writing ability be relevant?
Rhetorical question – I do know why it was relevant. But at least in theory, his inability to write beautifully about Shakespeare doesn’t mean he knows less about Shakespeare than the chap at the next table who is innately literate – any more than my inability to sing beautifully about Wittgenstein means I know less about his work than a more musically gifted student.
Stapling, now, that’s different. If you’ve told them you want the pages stapled together, and they don’t staple them together, I’d happily allow you to deduct marks – even though stapling is a completely irrelevant ancillary skill set. (From which you can tell no-one in my immediate family suffers from staplexia)
Angela, I feel for and with you! One thing I’ve learned in the nearly 20 years since I taught my first class as a grad student: in those dark hours when you’re feeling that you can’t teach anyone anything, remember that writing is a skill that takes time to master or even improve at. There may be a payoff for students that you never see (it’s nice when they come back later to tell you so).
I think this does have to do with romance, too. I get the whole defending genre fiction as just as good as Literature thing, but I don’t read literary fiction that gets lay/lie wrong or confuses “corroborate” and “collaborate.” A lot of romance I read–not all–seems less carefully crafted at the sentence level. (At the very least, much literary fiction gets a more careful copyedit, I’d guess). That kind of stuff throws me out of the story. Content and form/style can’t be entirely separated (though as the parent of a learning-disabled child, I see Marianne’s point).
Finally (geez, wordiness is my pet peeve in students’ writing, and look at me), have you read Bird by Bird, by Ann Lamott? It’s aimed at fiction writers, but a lot of the advice applies to any writing, and it’s good.
This so encapsulates many of my frustrations with the teaching of writing, but I would like to add that in my own experience with teaching writing, it was less the lack of technical elements like theses and commas and more a lack of critical thinking skills that caused the greatest frustrations. It truly boggled me, and still does, the apparent inability to connect ideas that students have. And that is a skill that has much greater implications that Freshmen Comp, or Shakespeare, or even romance novels. One of my favorite writing quotes is, “Good writing is clear thinking made visible.” And it applies to any form or genre. It makes the jobs of writing teachers so much harder when students are not given a good grounding in critical thinking.
I know that doesn’t address the talent issue, but I am willing to forgive a lower talent set if it is clear that thought went into the work – though that tolerance is more for undergrad papers than romance novels. It could also be that my grading criteria for undergrads is very different from my grading criteria for novels. There is some overlap, but the main purpose is different, so my approach is different. For undergrads, that thoughts are expressed coherently and effectively is more important than the style with which they are expressed. Style is icing. Which actually makes me a bit sad about the state of our educational system. With romance – or novels in general – I am much more ok with grading on the elements that frequently come down to the haves and the have-nots of talent. That said, I do agree with you (and the others who have said it) “that the pleasure of writing is the pleasure of telling a good story, even if that story is disguised as an essay or even as a romance.”
Unfortunately, I think the reason people think romance is easy to write is because there are lots of badly written romances out there–I myself got into the game after throwing a romance against wall one day, twelve years ago, and claiming in disgust, “I could do better.”
The truth was I couldn’t for a long time.
Character-driven anything is difficult to do. Character-driven drama that must come to a believable happy ending–as opposed to everyone just dying or living apart–is even harder, because it is far easier to mess up a life than to repair one.
And I so hear you on trying to teach people to write. I’ve had to reluctantly step in at home to make my children better writers. The blank stares, the repeated whines of “I don’t know what to put down”, the seemingly ocean-deep inability to separate a main idea from a detail. Ack. That whoosh you heard was me setting my hair on fire.
One more thing. Long ago I meant to write a blog post, while I was still in grad school, called “Write Less.” I was doing a project with some undergrads and boy they were padding their essays.
Because most writing assignments come with length requirements, and lots of students just don’t have that much to say, so they bullshit, say stuff that have no purpose other than to occupy space on paper to reach that blessed three pages.
Serious writers realize at some point that one crucial aspect good writing is saying what you have to say with the greatest economy of words. The best kind of clarity is a concise clarity. The best kind of wit is concise wit. And the best kind of writing happens when every word matters.
Sometimes I think about proposing a workshop on writing less, but then I’d have to pad it, because what I have to say could be said in ten minutes, and what am I going to do for the remaining 40 minutes?
Great post, btw.
Angela,
Just this morning we were reading and discussing bell hooks in my fem philosophy course. I showed my students a few minutes of hooks on video (trying to be a 21st century professor, don’t ya know), and I thought you might enjoy this quote (starts about 5 minutes in to vid):
It may not always feel like it, but she is talking about you.
Tumperkin — I’m always surprised by that, too. My father and my sister are both lawyers and I think that the reason they are both good lawyers is because
they can write, clearly and well. Clarity leads to clear thinking and that IMHO, is very important in the law. And yet, the law is never clear. Possibly a case of bad writing?
Marianne — I like to tell my students that a thesis statement is the point of it all. It’s the angle, the lead, the opinion. Personally, I think thesis statements are one of the hardest things to understand in writing academic essays. Even when you understand what they are, it is incredibly difficult to come up with one.
And let me clarify, I think that students who work hard and improve can deserve A’s regardless of their natural ability. I am a geometry idiot so I understand your brain just not working in a different langugage and pattern than it is wont to do. The students I’m talking about, are the students who do the minimum, are good students and have always gotten A’s. And because of this, they think they deserve A’s. These are the kids who think that just because they are there doing the work and sucking up that that’s enough to be a good student. The people who struggle, those are the people I want to help. But the people who simply feel entitled to the grade because they meet the parameters of the assignments, no. I want to push those kids, I want to make them think. That’s why I talked about the two kinds of writing. And I admit, it is a hard
balance. I want to encourage the ones with natural talent, and encourage the one’ who are working in a medium that just isn’t their natural mileiu. But I do not want to encourage laziness of thought. That’s why I’m reluctant to just give A’s, just cause it was pretty good.
Tessa — Testify, sister. I agree. Clear thinking is key, but I think I would be aesthetically pleased by clear thinking. Does that make sense? There’s something beautiful in a well-thought out argument laid clearly out on the page. And I do think that style is more substantive and integral to good argumentation than many people believe. I think style enables clear thinking, it reflects it because it shows the person is thinking on many levels at once. Unfortunately, style is the hardest aspect of writing to actually teach.
Sherry — Oh man. Well, one day your children will thank you for stepping in. I thank my father on a daily basis–not really
I thank my mother on a daily basis. But I do appreciate it all the miserable evenings of pain and suffering that my dad endured with me over all my school essays. And I couldn’t agree more with write less. I am going to steal that. There is so
much filler in student papers, sometimes rambling nonsensical filler.
You could always entitle your presentation “The Write Less Presentation: An Ironic Exploration of Writing”
Jessica — I hope so. Half the time, I feel like their mother. Especially since at a big university, I’m teaching one of the smallest classes any of these students are in. Last semester, I had two students with major family crises. On those days, it was a bit like being a psychologist . . . or a bartender.
Thanks, Angela. I know I’m being stupid, but I’m still not clear what is is.
Say I’m writing an essay arguing that infanticide is unacceptable. (It was a moral philosophy course – the lecturer had argued that in theory infanticide could be morally acceptable.)
Is the thesis statement simply ‘Infanticide is unacceptable’, or is the thesis statement a brief encapsulation of the argument I intend to make – ‘Infanticide is unacceptable because…’? Or is it something else again?
Sorry to be stupid.
No, it’s not a stupid question. Thesis statements are really hard. I think everyone still struggles with them no matter how long they have been writing.
A thesis statement is usually more than just a simple statement of opinion like, to use your example, “infanticide is unacceptable”. It usually has the “because” in there as a way of making the thesis more specific. If I were writing a thesis statement for such a class, I would start from my own opinion (infanticide is unacceptable) and then move on into something more specific and argumentative. So the thesis statement would look something like this “Infanticide is unacceptable because each human being is an unrepeatable phenonmena, and as such, both an irreplaceable and irreducible instance of being” or something like that. So that you’ve stated the what (infanticide is unacceptable) and the why (because of this reason and that reason). Often just stating your opinion is too vague.
You could also arrange the thesis statement as an if/then proposition. “If infanticide is morally acceptable in theoretical terms, then we must push the discussion back further and ask ourselves whether the theory of morality being used is itself morally acceptable.” I’m just pulling this stuff out of my head, but I hope you get the idea.
The purpose of the thesis statement is to centralize and specify your argument, usually as a contrast to what others have argued. In textual analysis the thesis statement is some variation of “This is what this is about/doing and here’s how/why”. Sometimes it helps to pose specific questions in order to discover the thesis statement. You can have a thesis question, too. In journalism, the thesis is the lead and in conversation its usually the point you are trying to make.
Well, I hope I haven’t confused you further by adding all this stuff. I honestly think the best way to understand thesis statements is to read other people’s essays and try to find their thesis statements. Seeing thesis statements other people have written really helps, I find.
Never doubt that a writing teacher can change someone’s life!
My daughter signed up for a wrting course the semester before she was required to write an essay-style entrance exam. First day of class, she approached the teacher, explained her reason for taking the course, and also explained that every assignment she submitted would be a “first draft”; she did not anticipate having time to do real editing on exam day.
She was willing to take a C in the course, but she wanted honest feedback to improve her writing, and she wanted to be comfortable with the process, so she could focus on the content.
Happy Ending! She got in her program AND she got an A in the course.
Oh, Angela, everything you say in this post has a perfect echo in my own experience teaching literature and writing to university students. I struggle(d) with my students’ lack of experience with and enthusiasm for reading, with the lack of intuition this gave them about the workings of the English language, with their belief that an effort was all that was required to earn an “A,” and with the question of how to make my grading more consistent and precise, rather than subject to the vagaries of instinct, sympathy, and late-semester exhaustion. Finally this year I hit on a ten-part rubric that I use to grade students. Ten points apiece for each of ten fields, some intangible but vital (like “Originality” and “Persuasiveness”) and many technical and easy to master given hard work and attention (Citation, Spelling and Grammar). It has made my grading more confident and consistent, but I am still not convinced that my students pay any strategic or intellectual attention to the standards I clearly lay out in the rubric or what ideas about writing lie behind them. So next year in my Intro to Lit class I am going to spend even more time with it.
Also, I too wrote a play for my fifth grade class to perform. We were studying Greek mythology, and wanted to do something special for the Grandparents’ Day assembly. I chose the myth of Niobe, and staged the wholesale murder of her children by Artemis and Apollo, enraged that she had bragged about her children’s accomplishments giving her almost godly superiority. In front of a room filled with beamingly proud grandparents. Sigh.