Balance, Clarity, and a Side Note

I had two major thoughts running through my head while reading this section:

1) “Can’t we just find a balance?”

As Williams discussed the benefits and fallbacks of different rhetorical models, I kept thinking the best solution is to introduce students to each style. I don’t think any writing class should be taught in one absolute format. Yes, students need to know how to write in a professional manner, but you don’t want to kill their interest by assigning research paper after research paper.

And although it seemed that many people have come down hard on the need for romantic rhetoric, including Williams, I do see a benefit in writing that is meant to encourage self-growth. I think it may in fact be easier to teach students lessons about style and clarity that they can employ in analytical writing by introducing them to these concepts through personal writing.

On a side note, I particularly took some offense to this statement: “Although there is no question that vivid, interesting, and moving writing is better than the opposite in some situations, this pressure ignores the fact that most teenagers have not lived long enough to accumulate many interesting or moving life experiences.” –According to whose notion of “interesting” and “moving” Mr. Williams? Maybe you’re not interested in reading about a student winning a track meet, but that event could be very moving to them. Also, you may be surprised to find out the events that many teenagers, even those in your average middle-class suburbs, have stored in their backgrounds. Giving them a chance to be heard can do wonders for encouraging their writing development as well as their basic desire to learn.

2) “Clarity is a common denominator.”

This was my mantra in relation to the WAC conundrum. Williams states that Writing Across the Curriculum is designed to allow students to practice forms of writing that are not just indicative of “English papers” since many students will never write another English paper in their lives post-high school. One problem Williams proposes is that writing instruction becomes more focused on style rather than content.

I think that teaching students the importance of clarity in what they are writing is a good way of uniting style and content. If I assign a critical essay for an English class, I can say to a student who has not done well that their paper lacks clarity. Their thesis has not convinced me because they did not include enough references to back up their argument and/or other supporting information from the text (content), or the information was poorly arranged (style).

I think it’s completely possible to move this same basic lesson for writing improvement to a different classroom environment. For example, if a student in a science or math class presents a hypothesis, I could go back to the same forefront notion of clarity. I am not sold on their hypothesis because I did not see enough evidence to back it up (content) or because the way the evidence was presented was confusing (style).

I was taught that no matter what you may be writing, whether it’s for a biology class or an AP English class, you always need to keep this in mind: Who is your audience, and will they be able to understand your point of view by what you have written? I think keeping that same basic criteria on an interdisciplinary level will help students realize an effective way to check their writing for different subjects they approach.