Knowledge is Power: Mine and Refine Your Own Resources

Terri Tims
Dr. Brent Lynn
Teaching College Composition
11 February 2014
Knowledge is Power: Mine and Refine Your Own Resources
            What should the college composition course be?  Should instructors focus on literature, completely ignore literature, concentrate on teaching modes of writing or let students develop skill with the modes naturally?  Should students be encouraged to develop their own unique voices in writing, or should they learn language that will serve them in their own very insignificant places in the world of academia?  The questions listed here serve only as a mention of the many issues that surround the teaching of composition and rhetoric on college campuses.   As I approach the teaching of composition and rhetoric, I find my philosophy of teaching rooted in the student and the student’s need to understand the value of writing as learning and the value of his or her own words.  I believe the adage that “knowledge is power,” but I fear that students’ stores of power will remain untapped resources until students learn the process of mining and refining that knowledge through writing.
             I believe that students must gain more confidence in their abilities to think rationally.  I believe that teaching writing is teaching thinking.  A student may read a book that is full of novel ideas, but if that student does not actively engage in the process of reading, none of those ideas will become a part of the student’s understanding.  Writing is a bit different from reading in that the student must be engaged at some level in order to write.  Instructors are challenged to encourage and require students to more actively engage in their writing so that deeper concepts are explored and expressed in writing.  Through thinking more deeply about topics as they write, students gain new understanding and more knowledge.
            Students must also overcome the idea that their writing is unimportant or simply a process that must be endured.  Some may propose that students should be made aware of the reality of all of the thought that has come before them and will come after them in the academic world (Bartholomae 64).  However, I believe that stressing the insignificance of the student’s work in the scheme of academia only discourages students’ desire to attempt to contribute anything meaningful in writing at all.  I agree with Elbow in his opinion that students have something to say and have a right to be heard through both academic and more personal authorship (80).
Furthermore, I believe that students struggle with making meaning in writing enough without being discouraged. Often students string together “merely a series of scraps of thought” (Miles 7), in hopes of meeting the word count requirements and appeasing a teacher who might not read the written response, anyway.  Students should be helped to realize that their written words demonstrate their thinking processes and that, in fact, students’ written words assist in the learning process.  Wolcott reminds us that writing is a “means of thinking and learning” (43), and Strong reminds teachers to be faithful in encouraging revision of student work because more often “meaning is often shaped through revision than through prewriting agony in which one tries to ‘get it right’ in a first and final draft” (23).  Teaching writing is about teaching thinking and helping students learn how to tap into their thinking processes to make sense of the knowledge they are gaining.
            As students attempt to learn and incorporate more meaning into their writing, they must develop their own inner critic to evaluate their work.  Strong very well stated the purposes of students’ inner voices: seeking connections among ideas but also asking the hard questions about how the audience will perceive the work.  Even Dawkins in his essay on punctuation stressed the fact that students make decisions about intended meaning and should be supported in expressing the intentions of their inner voices through changes to the strictures of punctuation.  Miles described the need for an inner voice that criticizes a student’s own work when she discussed students’ lack of “individual responsibility of thought” (7).
            How can teachers assist students in developing these inner voices that challenge meaning and criticize flawed writing?  I believe that teachers can best help students attain these voices by being these voices for the students at first and by requiring students to resubmit work that can be improved.  Classroom writing needs to become more of a process in which teachers give work back repeatedly, asking students to give more thought and express ideas more clearly and logically.  Students should also be exposed to the criticism of their peers.  Through hearing both the teacher’s voice and peers’ voices of critique and suggested improvement, students will be more able to develop those voices for themselves.
            Finally, I believe that teachers can also help students in the process of becoming good writers by providing a variety of examples of good writing for students to read.  Teachers must carefully consider what readings assignments they give students and must have a reasoning behind those assignments.  If a teacher is going to assign literature to a class, the teacher should not be assigning that reading merely because he or she loves literature or is inspired by the content.  Composition and rhetoric is not a literature class, and though some may argue that literature teaches imagination and style and helps students explore their place in humanity (Tate), the reality is that the purpose of composition and rhetoric is to teach students to write effectively.  Though literature can be used to inspire effective writing, many other types of writing can serve that purpose and give students experience in reading a variety of types of writing (Lindemann).  Lindemann also reminds us that often, because of their love for literature, instructors who use literature in the composition and rhetoric class may talk too much and have students write too little (313).

 As Miles reminds us so clearly, students have access to worlds of data (especially through connections to the internet today), but students struggle with being able to interpret that data.  Writing instructors need to help students develop confidence in their writing, challenge students with a variety of sources of information, and require multiple revisions of work so that students can tap into the vast resources of their minds and create a finished written product that is refined and truly represents the depth of thought of which they are capable. 

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