This article over at Education.com about the state of writing caught my eye. Will Fitzhugh takes to task a report that the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) published earlier this year called Writing in the 21st Century . In it, Kathleen Yancey, NCTE Past President recounts a pretty dismal history of how writing has been received in the U.S. (e.g., it's been linked to testing and not given much ???cultural respect???). Fitzhugh is displeased with Yancey's solution:
So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like--only this time it will be part of the high school "writing" curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.
I don't entirely agree with Fitzhugh's assessment of Yancey's solution. True, her history is pretty slanted and her exuberance for new media a tad overwhelming. But ignoring how students communicate will not make them better writers (and no, I'm not saying texting does). Still, Yancey's right that composing at the screen today is often interlaced with plenty of on-the-fly web browsing. Further, we're not sure how ???access to the vast amount and kinds of resources on the web alter our [writing] models.???
I guess I'm not convinced that we need writing ???models.??? Certainly the ???process writing??? model of the 70's and 80's (a la Donald Graves , Lucy Calkins , and Nancie Atwell ) led to many a formulaic paper. That model went something like this: Brainstorm (with a Venn diagram preferably), prewrite, write, rewrite, start all over again. And pay little attention to writing conventions since you can automatically pick that up by reading and writing a lot.
Yancey concedes that the implementation of process writing led to ???formalization??? and narrowing of writing. Frankly, I don't see how devising another composing model--???one that somehow captures the highly interactive, even organic, nature of writing that now exists with technology???will ultimately benefit students in the long run. Whenever we try to bottle up a formula, it ends up being just that.
