Michael D. Platt College English
Most teachers read, grade, and comment upon papers in the privacy of their study. Most students prefer to read comments on their papers in privacy too. Seldom do they show their work to other students. Indeed few papers written in college are read by more than the teacher and the student, and fewer still are read aloud. I have come to think that a change in this solitary practice might benefit students and their writing.
A few years ago I had a student with neat, but small and illegible handwriting. One day, to save my eyes, I had him read his paper aloud. Both he and I were pleased with the results beyond our expectations. Reading aloud reacquainted him with his work. (It had been written a few weeks before.) Letting him read aloud allowed me to interrupt and question him as he proceeded and then he could respond in turn. Even before this event, I had discovered that by giving public lectures one comes to see one’s own work in a better light; while preparing a lecture, one anticipates the response of the audience; then during the lecture, one hears the words departing from one’s own mouth more vividly and exactly through the ears of others. Before this discovery I had conducted creative writing courses in the customary manner, with the authors reading aloud their works to fellow students. These three experiences prepared me for what I learned from E. D. Hirsch (Virginia) during his visit a few years ago. What he said about his manner of teaching writing convinced me to adopt his procedure, with some modifications. Thinking that others might wish to employ it, I will describe what I have done and what I think I have learned from it.
To describe this procedure I must first describe what immediately precedes it. On the day that papers are due in my Freshman English class,[1] the class is devoted to discussion of the assigned question and the answers the student have come up with. Commonly we begin with an analysis of the question itself. Since the students have worked long and hard on it, the conversation seldom flags. While composing the paper a student keeps his ideas to himself; now is the time to share these ideas with others, and perhaps even to enjoy a moment of shared oppression just before the teacher enters the classroom (“You thought that was a hard question, too?”). Each of them has worked in private and most are pleased with the papers sitting in front of them; understandably, they are eager to present their answers and to win agreement for them. Then again, the privacy in which they have writen also makes them curious about their fellow students’ papers. Thus, the elation of completing the assignment is mixed with the curiosity of hearing what others have discovered. The satisfaction of “now it is done” is modified and haunted by the dread of discovering, in the comments of other students, all those neglected points which now seem so right, so obvious, and “just what I wanted to say.” However, if the strain of composing a paper is apt to charge such classes with speech, it is also likely to cover at least one student’s youthful face with weariness, with a look which says, “I have been up now for more than twenty-four hours. To be awake is to be in pain. Please, let me lie down, please excuse me from class.” This silent request is best ignored, for it issues from a bad practice, which the teacher should do his best to help the student put behind him, in part by insisting that the student turn in the paper at the beginning of class, stay through it, and contribute his best to it.
Such classes are primarily devoted to the substance of the assigned question and to the text which I have asked the students to read and ponder. What follows is primarily devoted to the art of writing.
Towards the end of this class, I ask the students to appear later that afternoon in groups of four or five in a smaller room, a room with white walls and an opaque projector. After they assemble, either a student volunteers or I select one paper and place it in the projector. While we look at the wall, the author reads aloud his paper; he reads slowly sentence by sentence, pausing for his audience to comment, criticize, question, praise, digress, or ruminate. Sometimes members of the audience wonder aloud what the author means; sometimes the feeling that something is wrong with the sentence just read is not accompanied by a ready correction or improvement; sometimes we praise, sometimes we censure. I had anticipated that some students would be too harsh and others too diffident, but it has seldom been the case. At the beginning of the term, I ask the authors not to explain, correct, add to, subtract from, or interpret what they have written, as they read. At the same time, I ask the audience to pretend that the author is not present in the room. Very soon both rules are broken; authors soon betray the discovery of error in their voice as they read aloud. They want to uncover errors before others do. They think the losses they suffer as writers may recouped by their winnings as critics. I had expected to hear “what I really meant to say . . .” accompanied by a scowl signifying “How could you not understand that I meant that?” My expectations were not fulfilled. I found that many students manage to regard their work soberly. Sometimes, they defend their work successfully. Sometimes a defense is overcome with the reply, “Then you must put that in your paper. If you do, we will understand you.” Often a student would point out that the counter to an objection or answer to a query would be supplied later in the paper. In the beginning of the term I find I must guide discussion: “Well, is there something there which needs correcting?” and “Well, does something there need improvement?” As the term progresses, the students need less guidance.
In my experience it takes about an hour to go through a one-thousand word paper in this manner. What is it like for an author to go through such a session and what benefit is it likely to provide? For some students, the pleasure of completing a paper is the pleasure of forgetting it. The student who has written all night regards a dreamless sleep as his right. Certainly reading aloud a paper a few hours after you have “finished” with it is sobering. “Can I still maintain what I wrote last night, especially after what was said in class today? Well, I am about to meet an audience: What will they think?” As the student reads, he thinks, “Ah, there’s a misspelling. Yes, yes I see it, another sentence with ‘this’ at the beginning and no reference. Another hour or two to look over this and I would have seen that.” Then, breaking into speech, “You like that? I thought about that for five minutes.” “Well, I thought it was okay to use a semicolon there. I’ve been meaning to ask you, What is the difference between a colon and a semicolon?” One student described these sessions as filled with “flashes of hindsight.” I hope today’s hindsight becomes tomorrow’s foresight.
Are there benefits for weaker students? I think there are. When everyone in a group agrees that your sentence is not a sentence but a fragment, it is hard to reach for the balm of “teacher is against me.” When a fellow student can explain how to make a fragment into a sentence, it begins to seem that the writing of English is not an affectation or a plot. Finally, since any session can bear an extra member, weaker students can come to as many as they wish.
Sometimes in the course of discussing a paper, broader problems come to sight—problems which, it turns out, are shared by all students (how to begin papers, whether to use notecards, how many drafts to write, the “all-nighter,” etc.). Then everyone wants to hear and to share good advice. I suspect these moments comfort all students and especially the weaker ones, for they can see that better writers, too, must struggle. (I have also discovered that most students think they are “weaker students.” In an sense it is true, though not quite as they mean it.) For other students it may be the moment when they discover that their most private thought or misgiving about writing is shared. A certain sense of fellowship—we are all writers and we can talk together about its pleasures and its struggles—arises. I do not think a group of a different size is likely to achieve the same results. Going over a paper privately with the teacher is “my private problem.” Going over a paper in a class of twenty is “my humiliating problem in public.” Going through a paper with four or five remains, of course, “my problem” but it also becomes our problem. In my college experience (at Harvard and Oxford) and my later university expericne (at Yale), it very seldom happened that I read other students’ work or they mine. The occasion to read the work of others, especially work on the same topic—from which one might expect to learn a great deal—never came. By reading the writing of others, we learn next time, perchance, how to correct our own.
Gradually, I hope, the student will come to remember these sessions in the course of writing his next paper. I hope he will remember the particular comments made on his paper, but I also hope he will remember the experience of commenting on the work of others. Here the benefit is not just the avoidance of recognized errors but the anticipation and discovery of unrecognized ones. Such discovery seems to me the likely result of the student’s new experience of being a commentator on papers. Not until I began to teach did I have such an experience. Commenting on student papers made me, I found, more discerning as a commentator upon by own work. The beneficial effect of this experience on my writing leads me to believe that younger students will benefit from the same experience. As the student writes the next paper, I hope he will write with his reader more vividly in mind. When he himself becomes a reader both more careful and more strict that any he is likely to meet, he will no longer need instruction.
One word about pace—one suggested to me by my students. If the student’s writing is not utterly flawed at the sentence level, it is good to let him read through a whole paragraph at a time. Without this pace it is hard for students to pay attention to the arrangement of the paper, to comment on rhetoric as well as grammar.
In general, the matters discussed in these sessions are dictated by the papers and the student, by errors, problems, and inquiries. Should one exclude matters of substance from the scope of these discussions? I am inclined to say “yes.” In my case, the students have already discussed such matters for two hours together in class. However, the occasional discussion of a particularly striking point, especially one overlooked in the class discussion, does serve to remind us that correct, graceful, and coherent writing is desirable not for itself, but for the sake of thoughtful address to matters of substance.
The benefit of such sessions as I have described seems to rest upon a fundamental identity: all readers are necessarily writers and all writers are necessarily readers. By readers and writers, I mean all those who have the capacities, whether they exercise them or not. In these sessions this identity, though always present in discourse, becomes vividly present. Authors and readers are constantly changing roles. The author reading aloud hears his readers construing, misconstruing, correcting, understanding, not understanding, occasionally blaming and sometimes praising his discourse. In the next session, he becomes the reader of others. But even before he changes roles, he already stands everywhere in this identity, for as he reads aloud he listens to himself; and vicariously he listens with the ears of others. The connection between good writing and good reading, which is the consequence of this identity, is made especially apparent by the use of the opaque projector. Everyone looks in the same direction at the writing on the wall. Author and addressee stand in the very same place vis-a-vis the thing written. There must be few excellent readers who are not pretty good readers, and I submit that there are no excellent writers who are not also good readers.
It seems to me that this identity of reader and writer sheds light upon a number of questions now being discussed in the field of interpretation or hermeneutics. In these sessions we see that there is room for the view that an interpreter strives to understand an author as he understands himself and for the view that a text has an order and integrity which is separate from an author’s intention. The most obvious sign of the latter is where the irritated author discovers that he has not been able to make what he meant and what he said precisely and utterly the same. Or, as Montaigne says, conversation belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener. A lot more could be said about the relation of the teaching of writing to hermeneutics; perhaps it is enough, in the context of this paper, to point to it.
So far I have spoken only about correcting in public. The wide adoption of the procedure I have sketched here can change the circumstances prevailing in most colleges only slightly. There can be few colleges where time and money make it possible for every student to have every one of his papers read aloud and commented upon in the manner I have suggested. (However, it would not cost very much to employ good upper classmen, trained by the teacher, to run these sessions. Apprenticeship is a idea worth reviving anyway, apart from the cost.) Necessarily then, the majority of the papers will continue to be read in private. The fatigue of correcting for the teacher is well known. Every student who reads through papers and finds “A, very good” or “C, you fail to treat the whole question and your writing is sloppy” has reason to lament the fatigue or lethargy of his teachers. When all a student receives on his paper is a grade and a few words “humanizing” it, or more commonly justifying its lowness, the student is surely correct to conclude that he must teach himself. In some measure it may always be true that writing is self-taught; nevertheless, I believe that at present it is more true that it need be.
I have found that the fatigue of correcting and commenting upon papers is somewhat alleviated by the following procedure.[2] Except for corrections of spelling and punctuation I type all my comments on a separate sheet of paper, keying the comments to the paper by numbers in the margin. I return the student’s paper with this sheet or sheets and keep a carbon copy for myself. By retaining a copy of my comments and responses I believe I am in a better position at the end of a course to survey the student’s work. At a later time when the student may wish me to write a recommendation, the same is true, though for this purpose I usually ask the student to return all the work he has done for me, so that I may write the recommendation with his work freshly in mind. But it is not primarily with a view to grading or to writing recommendations that I decided to separate my comments from the margins of the student’s papers (where I used to write them) and to keep a carbon of these comments. As I roll the two sheets of paper and the carbon into my typewriter, I think, “Perhaps there is something of great interest in the paper. Perhaps I may learn something. Perhaps the student has discovered something; perhaps he has said something so finely and beautifully that I will wish to retain it. Or perhaps something I say in reply to his paper, or something I saw while correcting it, will be worth saving.” As a consequence of adopting this procedure, together with the expectation, which it its raison d’etre, commenting on student papers has become for me one of the chief intellectual pleasures of teaching. It seems to me that the teacher who adopts this procedure and reads with the expectation of learning something will be less disappointed than he may at first think. In any case, it is fairly certain that the students will benefit.
It is often said that there is research and then there is teaching; the implication is that the twain seldom meet, that they are so separate that only coincidence or a yoke will unite them. I have come to think that nothing is more revealing of the poverty of both research and teaching in the modern university than the widely held opinion of their separateness. However, before a teacher is likely to come to regard correcting students’ papers as a moment in the life of the mind, as perhaps a start on research, he must set questions for his students’ papers that are of genuine interest to himself. In my experience there is nothing more obvious to students, in examination or essay assignments, than a question the teacher has asked with no interest in the answer, that he would not ask himself, or that he would not ask a friend. Probably there are some students who can recognize the questions that no serious man would ask anyone. Thus, even the teacher who does ask questions of genuine interest to himself might do well to ask himself from time to time, “Is this a question one a serious man would ask?”
In any case, the private correcting of student papers will be somewhat less fatiguing for teachers and somewhat more beneficial for students if we teachers ask questions that are of genuine interest to ourselves. It is the importance of such questions and the matters of substance they point to that led me to begin this essay with an account of classes devoted to talking about such questions and the students’ papers addressed to them. It also led me to include the remark, a little later, that correct, graceful, and coherent writing is desirable not for itself but for the sake of thoughtful address to matters of substance. Both the more public correcting I described earlier and the more private correcting I have just described seem to me conducive to the kind of writing I desiderate in my students and in myself.
Dr. Michael Platt
Friends of the Republic
NOTE:
The above is a slightly revised version of my essay, with the same title, published in College English XXXVII (1) September, 1975, pp. 22-27.
Add to Correcting in Public:
Something else, I just thought of. When a student goes through two writings (drafts), there is not a sufficient distance between the instances (which someone else corrects in that first draft) and the principles or goals (which is what you learn or strive to learn in the sessions I desiderate, so that you will do better next time. My way you look at your paper, its flaws, mistakes, and merits with a view to the future, the next paper, and even to acquiring the art of writing well. With the two drafts, first one corrected by another, you are only looking to this paper, its merit. But, in any case, its merit is not really your own. It is your own plus whatever someone else put into it.
[1] At Dartmouth the majority of students take Freshman English; the course aims to encourage its students “to think, to write, and to appreciate literature.” During the ten week term all students are required to write eight themes, usually of about one thousand words, read Milton’s Paradise Lost and one Shakespeare play and each section has no more than twenty students. It is left to the instructor to choose a grammar and rhetoric book; I lament that my choice for many years, Thomas Cain’s Common Sense About Writing (Prentice Hall), is out of print. (Note of 1988: John R. Trimble’s Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing (Prentice-Hall, 1975) is one of the few books good writing on the market that is itself well written.) Near me I always keep some older guides, all James C. Fernald’s books I know of, especially his English Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions (New York: Funk and Wagnallis, 1914 and ff. ) and Crabb’s English Synonyms (Harpers). Fernald I require students to buy and let them bring him to tests.
[2] I owe this procedure to my friend Professor Roger Masters (Government Department, Dartmouth College).
Friends Of The Republic 