Is pretence of simplicity implicit dishonesty?

Yes, it is.

Outline, draft, draft, revise, proofread; Standing in front of the blackboard explaining how to write an academic essay: the professor suddenly realizes that this is not how writing happens. And, most certainly not in that professor’s own ivory colored room piled high with drafts, crumbled pages and unruly dust-bunnies. I’ll bet you, most college instructors of writing have had that feeling at some point or another. I certainly have. This manifesto asks that particular writing instructor, who looks suspiciously like me, to come out in the writing classroom as a struggling writer. Would that inspire the students? Would it make them procrastinate less (or at least more productively)? Would it make them work harder on understanding their writing and, through that, the content of their analysis? Or, would it simply give everybody license to be imperfect?

The intelligent and aware reader has of course guessed by now where this is leading. It’s time to consider strategic self-revealing in the writing classroom. I am wondering whether or not outing myself as a writer whose process does not usually follow any sort of model except that of unfettered anarchy could help my students become more comfortable with their own writing process and—why not?—maybe inspire them to reflect on how their own processes are related to their thinking. It’s time to inspire our students to write and revise more productively by discussing our own labyrinthine and labor-intensive writing process.

Is it possible that our students’ sudden recognition of themselves in us would open up an exploration of their thinking’s interconnectedness with their processes of ongoing drafting?

Lately I have been thinking about how my work as a Writing Fellow will influence my future teaching. It’s now obvious that the workshops I conduct at Queens College convey something about writing that I actually do not believe: that academic writing is a neat, organized, and stringent endeavor. It certainly isn’t for me. The model I offer students in the classroom does not influence my own practice. There is a serious disconnect between my words and my actions.

Maybe it’s a case of me not taking the medicine I prescribe? Maybe I just lie to my students because it’s easier? Maybe it is that I would like to follow the model I propose but find myself unable to do so? If the latter is the case, maybe it would be good for my students to know that?

I might do a workshop on outlining when—I admit—I very rarely actually outline anything. I lecture on the utmost importance of letting oneself “just write” to keep the engine going and to develop ideas, even though I never develop ideas in that way myself.

How does my initial message about the complexity of the writing process square with the neat model that I subsequently ask students to follow?

Feminist scholar bell hooks has written in “Engaged Pedagogy” that “Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any that way I would not share. When professors bring narratives of their own experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators.” (1) Though hooks here contemplates more personal narratives, her thoughts also resonate with the academic writing process, particularly in W-classes dedicated to the very process of learning and exploration.

By letting our students assume that we don’t struggle with our own writing (simply because we are their professors and thus in an immediate power relation to them), are we indeed exercising power in a way that sharing our own struggles would undo?

Simply admitting that our own writing process contains the same challenges that our students face (on a different level, albeit) puts us in a position where our students will be more open to start writing (which I often find to be hard) and then judge, instead of the other way around. If they don’t assume we immediately judge their process, maybe they won’t either.

Hooks’s suggestion to eliminate myself as an all-knowing expert of everything has led me to contemplate sharing a draft version of a piece of my book in its different phases: the draft I sent to my reader, the version I received back with its many (many!) corrections and suggestions, the revised piece I sent to the editor, the version I got back from the copy editor, and finally the published chapter. This would let my students see the stark differences a published piece of writing undergoes and understand the changes in both content and tone that occur along the way. We must realize that our students do not know how the publishing process works. They believe they are supposed to mimic the articles they read, articles on which much red ink has been put to use by multiple readers and capable copy editors. Showing my students that I, too, receive feedback (sometimes hostile feedback, not unlike what they might receive) might corrode my power, but it enhances my authority as someone who knows what the writing process feels like. And, here, I use feeling deliberately in an attempt to acknowledge that in the writing classroom we deal not only with critical thinking. We also deal with how that thinking gets expressed through writing which, as this issue of Revisions undertakes to show, is a combination of emotions, psychology, and thinking. We should realize that if we are honest about it, writing, thinking, and feeling are interconnected for us as writers. It’s time to let that be the case as professors as well.

Another way to do this is to develop a paper alongside our students on the same topic as them, participating in our own demands.

What would that feel like?

Obviously we bring to the seminar table a radically different set of skills, but it might help our students understand the academic process in greater depth if we investigate our own thinking alongside them. Honestly.

Doing this would for sure make us come up with more interesting assignments (since we would have to answer them as well) but besides that, what would it do?

I think, again, that like sharing the publishing process we would allow our students a peek behind the curtain of meaning-making that they find in their textbooks, critical articles, theoretical texts, and our brilliant lectures. If we employ one or both of these possibilities, we make education the collective production of new knowledge. Showing our students that we, their professors, too are writing laborers would help to eradicate the developing sense that students are simply consumers in a factory of knowledge. Might we actually end up rewarding the academic and intellectual process instead of its product, the insightful paper, by acknowledging our own imperfections and struggles with academic writing?

Lately I have pondered these questions with a colleague, and the main objection (or at least the one we got to the fastest after “oh, how very interesting”) is how truly to evaluate the process through the grading system we all categorize within. The objection seems to be that an evaluation that puts value upon the academic process and self-reflections on writing (a meta-process, if you will) would be devaluing the importance of the correct and masterful managing of content.

If so (and I am doubtful that the managing of content wouldn’t also improve with the process, in fact, I am sure it would) is that always bad in classes constructed as writing intensive? Can we truly ignore toil and effort when grading papers in a W-class and if we do, aren’t we actually maintaining the distinction between form and content that we attempt to break down? Can we disregard the progress made in the writing itself on behalf of content? Shouldn’t the writing process in itself be part of the learning objective of such a class?

I believe it should.

Should it be all that the student is evaluated on?

Absolutely not! But, in the balanced classroom, in which a true community of writers has been created (the students and the professor together), it becomes impossible to rigidly separate the managing of content from writing.

So, ultimately, this is what coming out to my students about my own writing does. It makes our (my students and my own) classroom into a community of struggling writers who take their process very seriously, but who also knows that sitting down to write every morning is not all sunshine, mariachi bands, and balloons. It creates authority while undoing power. It allows us to trace our own development in writing while we create new knowledge and insights. Most importantly, however, it ultimately makes writing a shared experience, which, I believe, imbues the writing with meaning for the individual as it slowly becomes more of a way to think than a task to excel at.

1 bell hooks, “Engaged Pedagogy,” in Women/Writing/Teaching, ed. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, (New York: SUNY Press, 1998), 231-38. 237