“Onemajor difference between the world of ancient rhetoric and the world we nowinhabit is that the ancients did not develop a rhetoric that was mechanical andformulaic.”

–Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students

(*This is a short “keynote” address I was invited to give for the Writing Program for the start of its academic year, August 2021)

For the next few minutes, for this keynote, I would like to tell a story. The reason for this is quite honestly because I’ve never done this before. I’ve talked at conferences, but I’ve never given a keynote. So, I’m a keynote novice. I don’t know what this sort of talk calls for. Like a true novice, I am going to rise to this uncertain occasion by doing what I know. I will tell a story. At all the Kickoffs I’ve attended this week, no one has been doing that. There’s been much urgency. We’ve been given bullet points and power points. And charts. And all are needed, I know. But no stories. I think we need stories.

I’ll begin with a version of the “Longago in a Galaxy far, far away” story trope. My hope is that if I do tell this,we will all recognize the realm I’m talking about.

For a week now I’ve been thinking aboutmy first semester as a full-time teacher fresh out of grad school. That’s thelong ago part. Fall, 1997. I had just finished my dissertation. I had taken afull-time teaching job at a small two-year school called Richard Bland College,located just outside of Petersburg, Virginia, where the Civil War ended. Thisis the far away part. Named after one of the lesser known signers of theDeclaration of Independence, RBC was a feeder school to the College of Williamand Mary. I had moved my family there. My daughters, now 31 and 29, were 7 and5. Oh, and I should tell you so that you don’t just think this is nostalgia, mymother had just died the week I was to defend my dissertation, a few weeksbefore we moved.

I was starting a new job in a newplace where I didn’t know anyone. We had left friends, our community, ourchurch, our Walmart all behind. And I was, well, facing loss. I had a 5/5 load,and most of my teaching was in what is usually called developmental English. I wasreplacing a teacher the school had let go because she had become known forgiving everyone in her class an A. All of her classes were full, and even waitlistedstudents were somehow getting in. She had become a problem for the schoolbecause Richard Bland’s agreement with the larger school across state was thatstudents could automatically matriculate to William and Mary if they maintainedat 3.0 or better at Richard Bland.

I was given my office keys and the textbookfor my developmental class, and it was clear to me what my role was to be: Iwas going to be a gatekeeper. I was going to make sure that only the worthy madeit through. The textbook I received started with drills in sentence structureand then moved to paragraphs. If I followed this text, my class would spend themain portion of the semester writing sentences according to patterns and thenfour or five types of paragraphs—comparison/contrast, cause/effect, process, orenumeration, and only get to writing an actual essay by Thanksgiving.

I decided I could not do that. Instead,I went to my new department chair and asked if I could teach my students essays.The chair was a literature specialist. Going into his office was to navigate a labyrinthmade of stacks and stacks of paperback science fiction and fantasy novels, allof which he had read. Once a year, he got to teach his scifi course as his rewardfor teaching so much developmental writing. But he had also once studied withEdward Corbett and Erika Lindemann, and he knew what I was asking and told meto follow my ideas.

So I set up my developmentalclasses like this. I would begin with the kind of essays students would composein Writing 1. In contrast to my Writing 1 classes, I would go a little more analytically.I gave them the assignment, opened it up, explained some of what most teachersdidn’t say they were asking for. I explained that there were different ways togo about doing the assignment. I gave a few examples of how people succeeded. Insteadof sentences, I had them freewrite. Instead of paragraphs, they did parts oftheir essays. I caught some obvious grammar errors but also noticed turns of phraseand content. At the same time that my Writing 1 class was bringing in a firstdraft of the narrative essay, my “developmental” class was still doing invention,still getting used to writing whatever was meaningful to them. After the first fewweeks, I saw my classes, over-filled with students expecting the previousteacher, shrink. Lots of dropping out and disappearing. But there was a core whostayed, and they are the real heroes in this tale. They are the people of interest.They wrote their essays and tried my feedback in new versions of their essays. Ikept reminding them that they were beginning to succeed at essays their peerswere writing in Writing 1.

The next semester, I saw many ofthese same students again. And this time, they had this sense of knowing whatthey were doing. This time, they were getting practice. It was the second timearound. As the narratives were followed by arguments, these students became thebest writers in my Writing 1 class. When it came time for research writing inthe course, they made some interesting decisions. One student, for example, usedan anecdotal opening he had found in Time Magazine and documented it for a paperon the Three-Strikes Law that President Clinton had passed. What was interestingin this was that I saw them beginning to think about the choices they had tomake as they composed their essays. Because they had had me for a second class,and because they had learned these assignments, they were able to practicedoing them. There was something valuable for them in not just doing a newassignment once, but doing it until they began to master it. I’m not sayingthis is the only way to teach, and I suppose not everyone needs this. But thesestudents did. They needed to understand the assignment. Practice doesn’t make perfect,but it can lead to a certain mastery.

I don’t know how well they didafter my classes with them. I like to fantasize, and so I give two endings tothis story. First, of course, was the real ending, the probable ending to mystory, the usual ending to the stories we have of people who enter and thenleave our lives after a short span. But then there is the more instructive version,my fantasy third act, which is conjecture, but I like to consider it.

So first, the fantasy: after thosetwo classes together, I like to think, these students left with new ideas aboutwriting processes and purposes to take with them, so that they could approachfuture teachers about their writing questions and think about opening up newassignments and learning to understand them. And their future teachers wouldknow something about what they had learned with me—this is the fantasy now,hear me out–and use the terms they knew to talk to them about their writingand encourage them to move into their next, newly challenging assignments. Ilike to think that with a good teacher they could now take their understandingof argument and bring it in meaningful ways to new writing situations and knowwhat to use and what not to use.

That is the fantasy ending. I havenever been sure. I do know that the movement through writing courses can lackcontinuity. When a student comes from a community college, this is problematicand made jagged by the goals of differing institutions. What they experience asfirst-year students may not be lined up with writing in junior and seniorclasses at another institution, no matter what the matriculation agreements maybe. We will see students this term transferring in from two year schools. As I’vesaid already, because my students began to navigate the assignments I gavethem, I like to think that they gained the necessary metacognitive skills to beginnegotiating new assignments they would encounter later on. I can’t be sure,though. We have them for 15 weeks, or as I did, for 30 weeks, and we can hopethat they will master what we show them. And that mastery can be a basis forfuture growth with new assignments. What we want is not a matter of learning aformula but of learning a genre in which certain moves are allowed and othersaren’t, and the more we demystify it, the more we help our students to usethese genres in their thinking in the future.

I’m going on about this because it speaksto what I might call my vision for our program this year—if an interim isallowed vision: it is that we increasingly work together to build our classes forour students to understand the assignment and to repeat it, redraft it, andbegin to master it; and then they are allowed to move to the next class withthe language to communicate with new teachers who know where they’ve been andwhat terms they’ve used. That is what I will be working on this year when I’mnot teaching, thinking of ways to build bridges between our classes. My visionis for our program to be one most concerned with the ongoing development of thewriters we work with as they move from first-year writing to graduation.

This is why I wanted to highlight thisstatement from Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee. We are not teaching formulas.We are teaching thinking and critical thinking about the rhetorical nature ofwriting in different disciplines and helping students to develop new choices tomake for their writing problems. We are giving them strategies and getting themto think about making choices based on whatever situations they are writing fromso that when they are given a new assignment, they have choices to make thatmight spring from abundance. It might work from these two points:

Explain the assignment. Help themunderstand it.

Then give them practice in doingit.

Thank you for listening, and thankyou for teaching. Many blessings on your work with your students.