Hardest Part of Writing and the Teaching of it

Janet Emig states that “writing is originating and creating a unique verbal construct that is graphically recorded” through the act of putting words on a page (8). Her statement points out the fact that writing is a very personal act of bringing something into existence that was previously only imaginative thoughts in a writer’s head. Emig, points to work from Dewey and Piaget, noting that “learning is the re-organization or confirmation of a cognitive scheme” (10). She then aligns with Bruner, listing three major methods for learning: enactive – learning by doing; iconic – depicting through imagery; and representational or symbolic – restating in words. So, looking at the writing prompt for this week about “the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing,” I would have to say that teaching the process of invention, specifically the act of moving words from thought to page would be most challenging.

To illustrate this, I’m reminded of a situation a few years ago when I was asked to train a guy that was transferred into my Technical Publications group from a Training group – I believe my supervisor’s words were, “See if you can make a writer out of him.” My initial reaction was that since this person studied the same engineering data and vendor documentation while creating the training material he used to teach users in a classroom, surely he’d be able to transition into the role of being a writer responsible for creating manual content for that same audience. I showed him where information could be found and provided examples of similar documents from other projects. I gave him reference books, guided him through the basics of desktop publishing, and walked him through the process of developing a few basic procedures. After about three weeks, he came into my office and admitted that he had decided that he was not cut out to be a writer. He told me that he had no idea that it took so much research and admitted that he just couldn’t sit in front of the computer screen and get words to form from the research that he had done.

Ede and Lunsford look at Mitchell and Taylor for defining invention as “methods designed to aid in retrieving information, forming concepts, analyzing complex events, and solving certain kinds of problems” (79). So when I ran across an online interview of T.R. Johnson, I felt that something he said could help answer the second portion of the question of how to go about teaching the hardest part of writing. Johnson says that “a great deal of what we're after as writing teachers has to do with coaxing our students into a certain kind of rigorous experience with language.” He hopes that composition courses help students “see the classroom environment as a place where he or she can try out different ways of saying things, and, as such, the student is rescued from the view of academic discourse as an alien monolith of perfect authority that he or she can never hope to master.” I feel that teaching the process of invention as an encouraging language experience would be the most comfortable learning situation for aspiring writers, as opposed to a workplace situation where one is forced to sit and write on a project with the pressures of a budget and schedule always in mind.