I was going to write about atheism today, but I received a couple of comments on my description of how I write the blog, so I'll save atheism for the next entry.  I taught for 45 years, and there was not one semester, either here or abroad, when I didn't teach at least one, and usually two, classes on composition--developmental, freshman, and advanced.  (Rather than having two semesters of required freshman composition, Washburn has one semester at the freshman level and a second required course that is supposed to be taken by juniors.  Indeed, it used to be called Junior Composition, but Advanced sounded better, though it also created some confusion since more and more juniors put the class off till their senior year.  That procrastination created numerous scheduling problems, constant desperate calls when classes were full, and some delayed graduations.)  My favorite of these three was developmental English, where a diverse group of students who had been told all their lives that they neither spoke nor wrote well could sometimes be molded into a cohesive and interested group.  Although not all students succeeded, progress was also clearer than in the more advanced classes where I was never sure exactly how much value I was adding to their writing skills.

The most frustrating aspect of teaching composition was that there are no rules: everyone has his or her individual ways of approaching writing.  What works, works.  I used to feel as if I spent half my time undoing supposed rules that the students had learned in high school.  Almost all students were convinced that they couldn't use the word 'I' and produced sentences that began "This writer believes..."  They had all been taught never to begin sentences with 'and or 'but,' an opening that, as a glance at any of my blogs reveals, is one of my favorites.  My particular bête noire was the five-paragraph essay: tell them what you're going to say, provide three points of support, tell them what you've said.  If that's organization, it's particularly superficial.  Has any of us actually read a professional essay that followed that principle?  And though three may be a magic number in religion, why is it sacred in writing?  What if you have only one supporting argument, but it's brilliant.  Do you have to invent two weaker ones?  What if you have four strong arguments? Are you supposed to eliminate one of them?  

I've never made an outline before writing in my life.  If I was ever required to provide an outline, I waited till my essay was finished and then wrote one, one which always pleased the instructor since it followed the essay exactly.  Still, if students thought they benefited from outlines, I certainly wouldn't discourage them from creating one.  I might encourge them to try other methods, ones that left more room for discovery as they were writing, but if students felt comfortable with the structure that an outline provided and if they produced interesting themes, who was I to say that it didn't work?  We've all heard of authors who say that they never begin writing until they have a firm sense of the ending.  And we've also heard authors who say the opposite: that they don't know where their story or essay is going until the arguments and characters reveal themselves during the writing.  John McPhee, the famous non-fiction writer, had an essay about a month ago in The New Yorker in which he described his writing methods and how he taught them to his students.  The essay came complete with several diagrams, none of which made any sense to me.  When I read his explanation of them and how they related to his storytelling, I was even more baffled.  They clearly worked for him, but I would hate to have been a student in his class.  The long-time chair of our English department used to tease me that my teaching methods were like Carlyle's "organic filament" description of writing.  I took that, whatever Dr. Stein's intentions, as a compliment.  If I did make recommendations, I often suggested what works for me: just letting the ideas percolate in your thoughts for a day or two before beginning to write.  (Of course, that advice might have been more successful if the students had actually ever seen a percolator.) 

Ever since I was young, I've always written on a typewriter.  My mother worked in a bank till she married at age 35.  My father, who himself had trouble holding jobs, wouldn't let my mother work outside the home, but he finally compromised (we needed the extra money) and let my mother do piece work in the home.  Once a week, my mother and two other women drove to Nevada (pronounced Ne-vay-da), the county seat, and returned with ten boxes with 500 envelopes in each, on which they typed mail order addresses from voter and car registration lists.  That equaled 5000 envelopes a week with no typos, erasures, or white-outs.  There couldn't be more than a 1% spoilage rate.  When my mother was cooking or doing other household tasks, I would sit at the black manual Smith-Corona typewriter, typing addresses and rolling in one envelope while I rolled out the completed one.  In high school, in college, even for my dissertation, all my writing was done at a typewriter.  I'd let ideas percolate, type a draft, make handwritten corrections, and type a second and final draft.  With the advent of word processing, I encountered a dilemma.  Before, I had always written fast and saved revision till a complete draft was done.  Word processing made revisions much easier, since after writing a sentence or paragraph, it was tempting to read it over and make changes on the spot.  Was this a good thing?  It changed the whole rhythm of how I wrote.  It's hard to teach old dogs new tricks (professor writes 'cliché' in the margin), so even with the ease of immediate revision, I generally prefer keeping whatever momentum I have.

I know what works for me--or think I do.  Teaching writing, however, despite 45 years of experience, was never so clearcut.  It was a constant experiment in trying to get students to trust their own intuition, to discover what worked for them, and to follow the organic filament of their thoughts.

If anyone would like a free, one-year subscription to Oklahoma Humanties, which I mentioned in the last blog, it's available at http://www.okhumanities.org/publications [Click on "Subscribe" in the left-side navigation menu.].

SuperBowl side note: Washburn will be represented by two players: Cary Williams, a starter for the Ravens, and Michael Wilhoite on the 49ers.  Not bad for a Division II school.