Another essay, this time about teaching writing:

In my twenty five years of teaching upper level college writing, I have found that most professors approach the task in two opposing ways. The first assumes that the student has a basic desire and reading background to make an argument about something. The second assumes that only through some level of focused scholarship can a student prepare herself for developing a position on something.
The division starts as soon as students are introduced to critical articles, often in elementary school and certainly by high school. There is an immediate sense that the critical piece has a higher value than anything the student might come up with.
By the time students reach college, they have been subjected to this division for long enough to believe that their own thoughts are secondary to what a skilled critic can say. In most cases this is true but the question is whether that knowledge is useful in developing the student’s ability to think or write on his or her own.
Freshman readers are often theme oriented and offer opposing arguments on a number of issues, including abortion, the death penalty, global warming, etc. The articles are usually well written and informative and for most freshmen they work well enough, educating students about a wide range of topics. However, by the time the students begin writing their papers, there is little original they can say since the articles they have read have taken almost all the interesting positions. If this were to stop right after freshman year, I think it wouldn’t be that much of a problem. But that is not the case. For most students they have been so trained to respect what they have read that they do little more than regurgitate an unappealing mixture of various sources.
My own experience in graduate school is illustrative. I had the good fortune to study with Alfred Kazin, then a Distinguished Professor at CUNY. Kazin was remarkable for many things, but what I most appreciated about him was his profound love of books like Huck Finn or The Sound and the Fury.
In Kazin’s course on modern American novel, I decided to write my paper on William Faulkner’s Light in August, a troubling novel about racial identity. As I read the novel I was struck by the examples of movement in the text, and thought that motion was an important focusing and thematic element in the book. I worked hard on my paper, quoting extensively from the text, and produced an effort I was proud of. When Kazin handed it back, it had an “A,” on it, with only the comment that he would have approached it from the point of view of stillness. I didn’t give his comment much thought until I shortly found out that Kazin had many years earlier written a classic essay titled “Stillness in Light in August.” I was surprised and as I read his essay, I easily realized how much more fluent and insightful Kazin’s essay was but more importantly, I understood that if I had read his essay before writing mine, then I would never have written mine. And I would have missed the chance for a rewarding intellectual endeavor.
That is the problem with a student doing too much scholarship before attempting to write out his or her approach to a paper. Most of the rewarding topics have been handled by much more competent writers, so the student is forced to try to find a somewhat original position even if it is forced and narrow. At Radford, our senior seminar students have to come up with an extensive annotated bibliography before they even decide on a topic. This seems remarkably backward and often a waste of time. If students annotate 25 articles on Kate Chopin’s Awakening, then all too often the argument they might make, an argument that would be challenging and interesting to them, has already been taken.
I advise students to simply read the novel or primary text and in the course of several writing explorations, find out what they think about the works they have read. Students almost always will come up with something interesting and original to themselves. When they have a pretty solid draft of what they want to say, then I tell them to do their research. At this point they have a decent idea of what they want to say, and they can easily choose the relevant and irrelevant articles. Research at this point can help develop their argument but since it is secondary to their own ideas, it will allow them to further their own points without feeling that they are borrowing someone else’s ideas. That seems to be a very fruitful path to follow and I wish it were employed more in our upper level courses.