Aside from poems and tales, many students trust themselves to do only two kinds of writing for school: reporting facts and expressing opinions on what other people should do. These are the jobs that seem to make sense—after all, our teachers have done them to us all through school. But this limited view, inherited from childhood, makes for a serious problem here and now. Of course, in some situations (for example, a cookbook recipe), a writer’s job may be to tell people what to do, but in this classroom it is never the student’s job to order the reader around. When students make that mistake, I will point it out; and after a while, it will cost you, grade-wise. Together, we will try to break the habit of commanding our readers, so that in the future we will no longer be artificially limited to reporting facts, giving instructions, and preaching opinions.
So writing can have many other purposes besides those two "textbooky" ones. One of the most important for academic purposes is to report on our thinking, not just on facts. We do this in order to bring our thought processes out into the open, into the public. But even more important is to bring this public thinking into a sort of conversation with other people's thinking. The sharing of thinking, thinking-through-writing, is the way facts get decided in the first place. It is a fundamental part of all professional discipline, but a shocking number of people have, in effect, never heard of it. Not just writers and professors, but scientists, lawyers, doctors, executives, engineers, managers, ministers, politicians, activists, and leaders of all kinds do this as part of their jobs.
Of course, facts are important, but they are useful only when placed in a framework of thinking. This will be the central concern of my teaching: how can we be of use to others through our thinking about the puzzles that surround us? How do people reveal their thinking to themselves in the first place, since so much thought happens automatically? Can our thinking be improved? Should it be controlled? What are the best ways to organize our thinking, clean it up, and display it to others? What are the roadblocks we can expect on the road toward a clear and convincing representation of our thinking, and how should we overcome them?
This kind of work is not easy, but it is doable. Once we get used to the idea that thinking-through-writing is really our job and really is useful, we can learn tricks and techniques to make it easier and more enjoyable for ourselves and for our readers. The method of thinking-through-writing works. It is a grade-getter for future courses and a step ahead on the career path. And practically anyone can do it.
Linguistics, the study of how language works, despite being a very ancient field, is always advancing toward better basic understanding. The emerging scientific view, especially on the way the brain processes language, has shifted recently, and it appears that most people have not caught up with the changes. Many are only dimly aware that language processes need to be studied at all. But the linguists’ new understanding can make a positive difference in college students’ experience of writing instruction.
People who are not language professionals tend to take language for granted, the same way people who wear glasses are usually only dimly aware of the lenses they look through. I happen to wear glasses, and I find that I have to pay attention to them sometimes or else they get dirty and my eyesight gets fuzzier as a result. At first, I might not notice that they are getting a bit cruddy, because I'm looking through them, not at them. I cannot pay close attention to them all the time, and anyway, they do not need constant attention; but I do need to take them off occasionally in order to keep them clean.
A person’s language concept works in a similar way: language functions as the transmission medium (singular of media) for some of the most important stuff in our lives, but it does most of its work automatically. One might quite understandably want to avoid tampering with it, for fear of messing it up. But if we carry a false image of its capabilities and requirements, we might hurt our ability use it to our best advantage. And most people, consciously or unconsciously, picture it falsely indeed. At present, “most people” really means most people, educated or uneducated, rich or poor, smart or dumb. Even many English teachers are not up to speed on basic linguistics as it is currently understood by language researchers. Somehow, life goes on, just as we can survive with a fair amount of crud on our glasses. But why settle for that? Perhaps there is a difference between glasses and language that can explain the difference in the average person’s attitude toward polishing them up: crud on glasses is easy to see, whereas we have no obvious way to take off our language and look it over, nor any easy way to wash it off.
That, however, is what the college classroom is for. We look at the ways we use our words and try to gain a measure of control over them. This holds for every subject: psychology, for example, is not just about the mind, it is about speaking and writing usefully and intelligently about the mind. And one of the most interesting recent findings in psychology is that the brain seems to have no central controller. Psychologists and linguists together are finding that language is not simply a system of rules that produce meaning out of sounds and scribbles, but something a bit more complicated.
The way most people imagine it, first we have thoughts and then we find words to express them. Linguists have strong reasons to believe that this is not what really happens. We have needs and feelings of various kinds, and we get ourselves into situations where communication is the thing to do, and so several areas of our brains begin to work together to produce language. The thought does not come before that process, it is that process. According to cognitive linguists such as Ray Jackendoff (whose Foundations of Language is the source for most of the technical claims in this essay), in one part of the brain/mind—no, excuse me, it’s at least two parts, one for the common words and one for the rarely used ones—we find the sounds or squiggles that will signify our intents; but yet another part puts the words into sense-making order. Each of these brain areas seems to use a separate method. So grammar cannot be a simple rule system. At least three automatic decision systems go on at once, without the need to consciously control the output: as we all know, perfectly correct language can just spill out of us. We can think out loud. And so we should—some of the time.
We can speak and write without conscious control, but doing so limits us to the variety of language we learned from our parents and peers, and this is hardly ever the shared standard of edited academic English, as our English teachers never tire of telling us. But when we realize that our output is not standard, we almost always find that the simple rule system our teachers showed us in grade school does not work very well to change that output. We find we cannot speak correctly simply by being more careful and following the rules, but instead, it's more as if we have to learn a whole different way of speaking and writing. This leads many to give up or rebel, pretending that the standard is too difficult or somehow wrong.
But it is not too hard: millions of people learn it all the time. It is not wrong, either: we need a shared standard; without one, we would soon be unable to communicate as a society at all. Language groups would drift even farther apart than England and America, city and country, old and young, or black and white already have. The standard is not “elitist”; it is simply necessary
Linguists who study this problem usually conclude that we should all regard the standard as simply a new language to learn. Some people see this as wrong because they think it harms or insults their “home” language. It does not. There is no danger of forgetting one language just by learning another. Most people in the world, including many of the poorest, are multilingual. Only in America, it seems, do large numbers of people believe language learning is too hard. It is not. But it is better to start young.
Another thing we notice about the “social construction” of language is that it originates in dialogue, both inner and outer. We often, mistakenly, think of communication as one-way, from sender to receiver, but that is not the complete picture. Language is “transactional” from the start, but we are not always conscious that it is. We tend to feel that our thoughts and minds are our own, but none of us originates the words we use, and those words shape most of our thoughts. We might as well stop trying so hard to “express ourselves” and work instead on making clear, purposeful connections.
Let’s picture a simple language event this way:
Note that it is complex and not one-way. Imagine that the process of communicating does not start with the sender—it started a long time ago, as the enabler took its present form. The “enabler” can be any medium: in this case, it is the English language itself, together with the traditions of its usage, which limit and mold what we can say (the television industry, to give a contrasting example, molds messages in a different way from writing). We can imagine it as containing meaning-making machinery we can use for our own purposes, but it also contains meaning-shaping machinery that works whether we want it to or not. It allows us to say new things—our own things—but it was built out of other people’s communications and retains their echoes. We should also imagine it as very large, like an ocean liner: it moves, but no single person can move it far, and it steers very slowly. In order to get it moving our way, we need to cooperate with others. So many people (many of them already dead) are “in on” the language we speak, we should always envision it as much bigger than we are—more like a territory to explore than a tool we could totally contain and master.
We can use this insight about the dialogical (that is, more than one-way) nature of language to make our academic writing easier by remembering that we are always part of a discourse community, but each of us probably participates in more than one of them. As in any community, we end up doing things “their” way much of the time and our own way only some of the time. And by the way, this is every bit as true of "street talk" as it is of academic discourse. Slang is no freer than the strictest formality is: people who decide not to talk White, for example, still do not get to decide how to talk Black—others have already established that. (Anyway, Standard English was Martin Luther King Jr.’s language, at least some of the time, and it was not the language of the person who shot him, so it’s quite questionable what “talking White” and “talking Black” really mean.) This is the true meaning of “common sense”: you have to do the thing some way, and here’s how we do it in our community, so either get with it or get left out.
Americans, it seems, want a lot of personal autonomy (that is, the freedom to choose and control what we do). This brand of freedom, if it is taken too far, works poorly in the arena of discourse: I cannot just say “Ubba bubba” and expect people to know by that that I want a drink of water. I have to use the words they understand, or else I’ll go thirsty. Likewise, we not only try to use words people understand; we are wise to use them in ways people understand. In most forms of discourse, we use them to accomplish shared or shareable purposes, not merely to “express ourselves.” A lot of discourse is like wiring an electrical outlet: either do it right or else we’d rather you don’t do it at all, because it’s stupid to wire an outlet creatively—you’ll burn the house down or give somebody a nasty shock that way. We really start writing well when we learn to take the focus off our self-centers and work instead on making connections. We can exercise real, effective freedom only within the discipline of that sharing. And after all, it’s basically just a “golden rule” attitude: we need to use language with others in the same ways we want and need others to use it with us. The moral of the story here is, in my view, quite delightful: essentially, we get what we want by means of sharing.
We seek out background information to be sure we know something about our topic and the subject area of which it is part—in order to do a credible job of writing. Often, though, students merely report this background knowledge, thinking that that is the job they have been assigned. It is not! We seek a basic understanding in order to move beyond it.
This means first of all that a college-level research assignment involves more research than many beginners anticipate. It also means that the students must begin immediately to equip themselves with the ability to process difficult texts. Real academic discourse is not meant to be easy. The readings I assign in my courses are beginning steps in that direction; most textbooks in higher-level courses are further steps; but the real challenge is in reading the books and articles that are not aimed primarily at students, but instead are written by professionals for other professionals in their fields. It can be a scary step to take, away from the safety of texts designed for easy comprehension, into the real world of thinkers and researchers chiseling away at the edge of the vast unknown. Such texts can be hard to comprehend, less likely to agree with other texts on the same topic, but therefore, maybe, a little more real. Compared to these texts by scholars for scholars, ordinary textbooks are a little like baby food—very digestible but very bland, not sufficient to satisfy adult appetites.
We can learn some winning tactics for dealing with these difficult texts, but the most important thing (as always) is attitude: we shouldn’t let previous failures convince us that we are not capable or that the texts are nonsensical. When we dip into a book or article and think “I don’t understand a word of it,” that is almost never strictly true. Usually we understand most of the words. Possibly, we don’t understand some key words, but those are easy to look up. Our real problems are usually not with the words themselves; what we lack is the right structure of understanding to place them in—their purposes, or the kinds of questions they are dealing with—because all these things change when we graduate from student-oriented texts to advanced, peer-oriented ones.
Here is a very useful key: these writers are hardly ever just trying to provide basic information, because they aim at readers who already know their stuff. But if their concern is not to inform, then what, students may ask, could their purpose be? Most are debating, not about the basic information in their field, but about various ways of interpreting and dealing with it. Primarily, their attention may be on the reasoning we use to further our understanding—they may, for example, be critical of the ways other scholars reach their conclusions. These more advanced texts, instead of just giving more advanced answers, first ask more advanced questions and thereby put our supposed knowledge to some sort of test. Unless we are looking for questions, not just for facts, we will miss the point of many, perhaps most, of these texts.
It's an open secret, I suppose, that the college composition process often leads the student writer down dead-end streets. If we want creative thinking and original ideas—and we do—we also have to admit that some ideas seem promising, even exciting at first, but fall apart in our hands as we try to put them into words. This happens often enough that it creates a serious motivational problem for many students, though I think we can and should overcome it. The logical first step toward that goal is to recognize and understand that some degree of disappointment is normal—part of the deal.
Working through a literary interpretation also leads quite frequently to disappointment—or, more precisely, to disillusionment. Like all higher education, these activities are not comfortable work for those who are easily discouraged. This comes about because everyone will react to an arguable issue or a piece of literature with feelings and ideas of his or her own, and some of those feelings and ideas will not be reasonable ones: not sufficiently based on the actual text and, therefore, “off base.” Some of our strongest positive feelings and ideas of significance might wander off base, and so might our negative judgments. Interpretive discipline means, first of all, getting rid of those mistakes. This feels bad to many, perhaps most of us, at first—like getting “shot down”--but getting “dis-illusioned” ought to feel good, not bad. Illusion, after all, does us no real good.
Sometimes, though, teachers say there are no wrong interpretations. This may be true in one sense, but in another, stronger sense it is quite mistaken, and it makes for even more bad feelings when students realize that their opinions can, after all, go off base. These teachers mean well: they want to encourage students to trust their own reactions. And truly, students should not feel bad for having wild ideas and unique reactions, different from others. However, thinking it over, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that some of our ideas and guesses will turn out well but some will not? If the student is afraid to ever be wrong, then the student will not be able to do what is needed—to put those wild guesses and unique feelings to the test of reasonableness, to find out which can interest others and which cannot. This isn’t being “shot down”—it is simply learning from experience.
Not everything in a story, poem, play, sample essay, or research source will be open to interpretation; but if the source is any good, something will be. This is because good research and literature are built around problems and questions that might never get completely solved and answered. Those problems and questions are not limited to individual works: they are the things people have to face regularly in life, such that they become thematized in literature and studied by sciences. Some of these themes change little from time to time and place to place while others may pop up and fade away according to the processes of historical change; but in either case, it is by connecting literature with any and all aspects of life that we gain insight into the literature, which leads to more insight about life, turn and turn about, like a snowball rolling down a hill.
Some of us may find that others (the teacher and some of the students) arrive at creative ideas and persuasive interpretations more easily than we do. Talent has a little to do with this, but it is mostly just a matter of practice. Once we get the feel for it, the ability to interpret enables us to discuss more deeply and creatively. And it comes mainly from the realization that interesting research and good literature concern questions even more than they concern answers—they revolve around problems more than their solutions. When the student learns to see topics and themes as expectable general concerns, recurrent human problems, within the specifics of each work, interpretation becomes a lot easier.
Many of us, at first, make totally individualistic interpretations, mistakenly explaining a character's problems, for example, as strictly her own, with no necessary connection to the rest of us. On the other hand, we might also do the opposite: see all our topics as if they were drowned in that massive generalization called “society.” That word "society" can mean many things, depending on how we use it, but too often it conjures up a fantasy of monolithic (one-sided) social authority, whereas in reality we live amid deep disagreement and lasting uncertainty. Interpretation and creative thinking make more sense when they connect with that uncertain reality—the part of life that our “society” (meaning our ruling ideology) likes to cover up.