What We Need is a Strunk Revolution!

This is my official protest against many composition theorists who argue that the instructor should place less focus (sometimes none) on mechanics and more focus on issues with content and organization. While I believe that content is the most important of the two, many of these theorists suggest that mechanics should play little-to-no part in the evaluation of a piece of student writing. Many of the professors I've had at this university do nothing to correct punctuation, misspellings, or errors in usage--I know that these teachers are focusing on content, but they don't seem to mind gross errors in mechanics.

I want to argue that there is a very important place in the teaching of composition for helping students to hone and master mechanical rules and skills. Just as a student can have perfect grammar and still say nothing, another student can come up with a most-profound piece of writing, riddled with obvious errors in usage and grammar, and be looked at as partially uneducated. How is the informed reader to trust anything that this writer has to say? Mastering punctuation, especially elementary symbols such as the comma and semicolon, is, to me, one of the most telling features of a skilled writer. For us to abandon this notion and focus 90 percent of our efforts toward content, how can we expect the students to come out better writers, overall? Sure, they will be able to organize their thoughts clearly and produce a well thought out analysis, but if there is no firm grammatical structure or style governing this writing, then they will likely be immediately classified as a non-credible source.

Elementary rules of usage are the first thing that employers notice when evaluating the cover letter and resume of a potential employee. If this employee's college English class made no effort toward emphasizing grammar and style, then the employer can expect to find errors in the mechanics of the writing. I don't intend to argue here that mechanics should be given equal opportunity with content, but I think there is certainly a place for more emphasis on the former in the classroom. Maybe my perspective is skewed because I come from a professional writing background, but I think that learning these rules of mechanics is very practical for student writers and should be at least touched upon in every college composition class--especially freshman composition.

So go! Tell your students about commas, semicolons, and em dashes! Spread joyfully the news of subject-pronoun agreement and verb tense consistency! Announce the sheer wonder and stark reality of misplaced modifiers and sentence fragments! Don't allow these theorists to desensitize you into thinking that grammar isn't important--for it certainly is!

Complexity Theory and Teaching

While doing some research for a different class, I stumbled across an article that I think might be beneficial for GAs to read. The title is "Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Education" and it was written by Kate Kiefer of Colorado State University. It appeared in volume 23 of the journal Computers and Composition.

In this article, Kiefer demonstrates how complexity theory--the idea that all systems are not only comprised of nonlinear, interacting parts, but are also adaptive in the sense that they can change from within or as a result of outside influences--can be directly connected to teaching. The definition certainly reminds me of the "process over product" concept in writing. Although this theory is often applied to scientific or philosophical practices, Kiefer makes a strong case for its influence on the writing classroom. She states that writing classes develop their own distinctive personalities, and that we cannot describe what the "system" will look like because the classes change each semester.

Through the lens of complexity theory we see how students make choices about their own behavior and how they also react to the emerging pattern of interactions in the larger group. Thus, we can see how classrooms demonstrate key characteristics of complex, adaptive systems (130).

Kiefer then uses this idea to argue that distance learning classes might not be as effective as physical classrooms because of this lack of face-to-face relationships, social bonds, and attitudes. I don't think it's necessary to go into distance learning here, but it did, however, play a major role in this article.

The reason that I think this article is important is because of Kiefer's simple, yet elegant approach to classroom dynamics. She provides numerous first-hand examples of her conclusions and also a small research study she conducted on an online distance learning course. Her insights into how both teachers and students create a classroom dynamic demonstrate the importance of this dynamic in considering teaching methods, assignments, and communication with our students. I obviously don't have the space to discuss the article in great detail, but I think she brings up some very nice points about how essential a classroom dynamic is to the success of our students. Check it out!

Kiefer, Kate. "Complexity, Class Dynamics, and Distance Learning." Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 125-38.