You can learn to write
Peters Cucciarre, Christine (2008-05-28)

>>CHRISTINE:  Okay, so this is a story about my experience in English composition. I went to two different schools as an undergraduate, and had similar comments from various professors regarding my writing. It was very poor. So here’s some of the comments, we’ll just start there.

So, this was a paper that I wrote for Elements of Poetry with Henry Taylor who is a Pulitzer Prize winner poet, wonderful teacher. I got a C plus on this paper. I was an A student, mind you, all through high school, A’s in everything. So, C plus starting college freshman year. “I hate to do this, but this secure and generally solid reading of this poem is badly marred by departures from English.”

“Christine, as usual, you’ve done some”, this is my composition, freshman composition class, and “as usual you’ve done some insightful thinking into a difficult problem. Ideas never seem to be your problem, writing is.”

“Although you have changed some elements of your structure here, I don’t think that you have resolved the structural problems in this paper.” Structure, grammar.

“There are some interesting observations”, so thinking, I always had the ideas, I just couldn’t get them down. I couldn’t get them described or explained clearly to an audience. So, “there are some interesting observations and insights in this paper, but it still needs to be more carefully written. Take more time with structure and phrasing of individual sentences. Strive for clarity”, underlined, exclamation point, “in your sentences. Concentrate on subordinating material with relative clauses and effective transitions.” Mind you, at that point, I didn’t know what any of those terms meant.

B minus. “In some ways, this paper has improved over the first; still however, there are problems with phrasing and the clarity of your prose.”

C. “There are some good ideas in this paper, but they get lost in the mechanical mistakes.”

C plus. “A fragment hurts. And so does your departure from English.” That was a Henry Taylor as well.

And this one talked about that this professor hated to give me this grade of a C minus because of my insightful comments in class, but that I had no grasp of the English language. And then this one came from my brother, who’s an extraordinary writer. He read a paper for me when I was desperate for help when I was a freshman. It says, “Very good, little sister. Next time, however, type with your eyes open.”

So I had quite a few, I hated writing papers. So when I knew that I wanted to go to graduate school, I thought do I really want to subject myself to doing this all over again and going through the trauma, the anxiety, and the embarrassment in graduate school of writing crappy papers, because that’s what I felt they were. I was not a big fan of grammar. I loved writing about ideas, I loved reading, I loved studying, but I never thought about the other person on the other side.

So I did take the plunge. I thought, I’m going to get my doctorate in writing. So, ironic, I know, but it wasn’t until graduate school that I started to realize that I could trust my own voice. And it was a moment when I knew that when I sat down at the computer I knew that I didn’t have to have that mortar board on my head. 

So every semester, since I’ve gotten my PhD in rhetoric and writing, very successfully, straight A’s mind you, good papers, I share this with my students, that I know the trauma of what this class could cause. And I do this the first or second day that the students and I meet. And they’re very surprised that I’m sharing this. I’m giving them, I’m showing them vulnerability. 

But what it does is it makes them realize that it really can be learned. If you have good ideas and I will help you cultivate those critical thoughts, but you can get them down on paper, as long as you trust your own voice. And I know that’s a very abstract way to think about it, but I describe it to students as sitting down and not feeling uncomfortable in what they’re wearing or in themselves, because that’s how I always felt. And as a result of that I would type language and in a tone that was cling-on. 
So when I share that with them they usually perk up a little bit, especially the ones who struggled with writing in the past or are maybe taking the class for a second time. And then I always end the little lecture with, and now I have my doctorate in rhetoric and writing and I’m teaching you. So I must have done something right, but also you need to know that it is not a lost cause. 

Even at parties, I meet adults who say; oh writing is my worst subject. And part of it is because they probably didn’t have an inspirational teacher, so that’s what I try to be. But also because I think they give up so easily because of the grammar. I mean they fear that those, what they believe are stringent, rules, unforgiving kind of prison-like structure that they need to have to write something that’s clear and readable. 

So I try to explain to adults, too, that grammar’s not what it’s about. Writing theory shows that the fact is that grammar is learned by hard work, but also by reading and writing, not sitting there and saying the period goes here, the comma goes here.  It’s by trial and error. It’s by students who are interested in proving and looking things up, but it starts with not being scared. And I think that if I instill anything in my students that’s what I hope to do.

So my literacy narrative is that writing can be learned and I know that I have a lot of fiction people and creative writers who disagree with me. Fiction and poems were never my problem, it was lucid communication. It was the sharing of ideas. And people, so creative writers aside, people who have to write papers, reports, lab reports, letters to their teachers, letters to their kid’s teachers, those are ones who shouldn’t be afraid and they should trust what they’re doing and remember that there’s somebody on the other side. It’s all about the audience.