A Better Way to Teach Academic Writing to Culturally Nontraditional Students

The cultural make-up of America’s colleges is undergoing an historical change.  Reflective of this change are growing numbers of students who, culturally nontraditional by class, ethnicity, and race, bring to the academy their own distinctive, often more personal discourses not usually recognized by the academic community. 

Fortunately, the traditional methods of assimilating students into the academic discourse community are being resisted by a growing number of composition theorists who recognize the need for discourses which blend the academic and the personal, and thereby accommodate the needs both of the culturally nontraditional student and the academy.  Using this blend to argue that the linear essay form of thesis-support-conclusion is not the only genre through which to teach academic writing, these theorists argue further that the historical essay, popularized by the 16^th century essayist Michel de Montaigne, should be used to introduce the culturally nontraditional student to the rigors of academic writing.    

Lydia Fakundiny, in her article, “On Approaching the Essay,” describes the historical essay as a form which “. . . steers away from logically or conventionally ordered sequences of elaboration. . .” (17).  This paper argues that, unlike the linear essay’s restrictive form, the historical essay is the ideal form to cushion the culturally nontraditional student’s entry into the realm of academic discourse. 

If one had to define the culturally nontraditional student, it may be easier to explain who the student is not:  she is not the child of middle-class, college-educated parents from the dominant culture.  In large urban areas, the culturally nontraditional student tends to be a first generation college student who also may be an African American or Caribbean student with a strong oral tradition but a weak writing background.  Or she may be a student of a Middle Eastern or Asian heritage where argument, the quintessential element of academic discourse, is not engaged in or carried on between persons of different levels such as student and teacher.  Possibly, she may be a poor adult student from a rural environment where literacy is defined through storytelling.  Whatever the case, the culturally nontraditional student does not arrive in the composition classroom having internalized the linear essay form of thesis-support-conclusion. 

Teachers who work in culturally nontraditional environments often find students who are more at ease writing personal and reflective writing, a form which emphasizes personal voice and experience as a basis for developing, and possibly supporting, a position.  This type of writing usually is tolerated in the early stages of composition, but generally is frowned on under more formal situations, such as the research paper.  The academy’s claim, however, that formal academic discourse is the best form of rational discourse may have gone unchallenged in the past, but no longer.   Instead, theorists who favor a return to a more historical view of the essay often use writing assignments which bridge the gap between personal experience and academic written discourse.  Again, Fakundiny appears to concur that the historical essay is a suitable alternative to the constraints of the linear essay form:

[The historical essay] is not a part of any formal system whatever, adheres to the methodologies, the discovery procedures, the criteria for proof of no established discipline.  It. . .obeys no compulsion to tie up what may look like loose ends, [and] tolerates a fair amount of inconclusiveness and indeterminacy (17).             

As mentioned earlier, the culturally nontraditional student often is more comfortable with personal, reflective writing, a form that tends to be strongly voice-based.  One could make the case that the historical essay, be it personal or argumentative, with its strong emphasis on voice and its less restrictive, less threatening form, may the ideal form of writing with which to cradle the culturally nontraditional student’s halting attempts to create meaning.  Voice, it may be argued, is the unconscious element of a writer's character which, when ejected into a piece of writing, distinguishes and differentiates the writing from that of another writer.  Taylor Stoehr elaborates this definition in his description of voice as "the pervasive reflection, in written or spoken language, of an author's character, the marks by which we recognize his utterance as his" (150).   

The concept of voice is essential to the historical essay.  In her introduction to Voices on Voice:  Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry, Kathleen Blake Yancey describes voice as that which, among other things, “infus[es] the process of writing” and “explain[s] the interaction of writer, reader, and text” (xviii).  She outlines various conceptions of voice: 

1.             as infusing the process of writing;
2.             as a reference for truth, for self;
3.             as a reference for human presence in text;
4.             as a reference for multiple, often conflicting selves;
5.             as a source of resonance, for the writer, for the reader;
6.             as a way of explaining the interaction of writer, reader, and text;
7.             as the appropriations of others: writers, texts;
8.             as the approximations of others;
9.             as a synecdoche for discourse;
10.             as points of critique;
11.             as myth.  (xviii)           

Voice frames the perspective from which the essayist writes.  In her article, "Different Products, Different Processes:  A Theory About Writing,” Maxine Hairston suggests that voice develops during the drafting stage as a piece is being directed to the audience (445).  Teaching culturally nontraditional students the fine points of writing essays with a clear, distinctive voice pushes the limits normally associated with academic writing with its emphasis on objective voice.  Stoehr appears to concur with this departure from tradition when he suggests that the objective voice is an impossible standard:     

The writer is always the "I" whether he admits it or not.  Finding one's voice may be partly a matter of trying out different roles, and imagining oneself as someone else, but these different stances must be more than poses.  They are imaginative attempts to discover one's natural posture and speech.  (161)            

The culturally nontraditional writer, already struggling with identity simply by being in academia, soon discovers, like Barbara Mellix, that she has become a mute caught between composing transitions:  aware that her natural voice cannot be used in her new environment, yet uncomfortable in the presence of the academic tongue (49).  Mellix explains how this volatile mix of native and academic tongues affected her ability to write despite her familiarity with mainstream discourse:

Although as a beginning student writer I had a fairly good grasp of  ordinary spoken English and was proficient at what Labov calls  "code-switching," when I came face to face with the demands of academic writing, I grew increasingly self-conscious, constantly aware of my status as a black . . . a traditional outsider.  (52)

This act of discursive shape shifting is not new.  In his article,  “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts?, ” Peter Elbow pinpoints the problem:  "There is a . . . reason--culturally produced--why we often don't hear a voice in writing.  Our culture of literacy has inculcated in most of us a habit of working actively to keep the human voice out of our texts when we write" (8). 

Worse still, the demand for academic discourse often denies the student the opportunity to first find her authentic voice. Teacher culpability often is a co-conspirator, perhaps because so many teachers write in inauthentic voices. In the article, "Pedagogy of the Distressed," Jane Tompkins describes the problem this way:

I think that this essentially, and more than anything else, is what we teach our students: how to perform within an institutional academic setting in such a way that they will be thought highly of by their colleagues and instructors" (654).

Tompkins calls this type of writing "performing for the teachers who taught us" (655). This discursive song-and-dance act scarcely resonates with mainstream students and is virtually unrecognizable by those from a culturally nontraditional environment. Yet educators continue to teach writing, it would appear, for the ghost of Miss Grundy, the archetypal, comic book school teacher, whose influence continues to loom large in the psyche of many writing teachers.
Perhaps it is time for educators to focus their efforts primarily on developing the student's ability to distinguish her own voice. For starters, writing teachers may want to consider Toby Fulwiler's memories of being a college student alienated from his English professors by academic discourse. The experience led him to "always [try] hard to make my own writing intelligible to that confused kid who wanted in thirty-some years ago. If I can speak clearly so that earlier self understands me, maybe I can be understood by other equally confused, lost, or alienated [culturally nontraditional] people as well" (44).

Many writing teachers who support the concept of voice in composition belong among a group of composition theorists who encourage "authentic voice" in academic discourse. Elbow, a leader in the authentic voice movement, posits that people leave voice prints much the same as fingerprints. He also points out that voice has senses, that is, it is audible, dramatic, recognizable/distinctive, has authority, and resonates or has presence (2). Each of these elements may be applied to Elbow's theory of generic academic discourse. Coupled with the traditional essay, this speculative, voice-based essay discourse may provide a powerful vehicle for teaching writing to culturally nontraditional students.

Audible voice, according to Elbow, refers to writing that the reader can hear. Most readers hear a voice when they read. This is particularly true when the voice element is weak, at which time the reader inserts her own voice. Barriers exist (often unintentionally) which, according to Elbow, result in unsayable writing that keep us from hearing words. For example, he believes that "when written words are easy to say, especially if they are characteristic of idiomatic speech, we tend to hear them more; when written words are awkward or unidiomatic for speech, we tend to hear them less" (7).

When the reader is the teacher, the student often is expected to produce academic discourse which, more often than not, is to the student an unutterable writing that distances the student from herself and demands that she speak in an unfamiliar voice. The result may be writing that satisfies the academy but creates a form of validated voice, that is, voice that needs permission to express itself only after it can cite a stream of references. Such practices tend to say to the student that her voice is a Ms. Nobody and she needs the voice of a Ms. Somebody to give her credibility. The student pens words that do not originate from within her, words which, in effect, wall off her human voice from the writing texts. By de-emphasizing artistic conventions and objectivity, generic discourse seeks to include a stronger emphasis on the student's voice.

Dramatic voice assumes an implied author, or character, in writing. Many theorists, according to Elbow, believe that dramatic voice is present in all texts and is the easiest voice form for students to identify in an essay (11). Too often, however, dramatic voice used in academic discourse is characterized as having too much orality and, consequently, gets purged.

Recognizable or distinctive voice refers to the writer's tendency not only to have a unique writing voice but also to change that voice as appropriate. As Elbow points out, writing is another form of behavior and, just as no two people behave exactly alike, so no two people write the same (13). Elbow, however, also points out that behaviors are learned, and thus it is important that a student find her voice in much the way a child learns to walk--with practice, fully aware that a certain mystique surrounds the finding of one's voice. Even so, Elbow urges the student to stretch beyond one distinct voice and reach for Keats' ideal of the "protean, chameleon-like writer" by becoming "a really skilled or professional writer or writer [who] will be able to bring in craft, art, and play so as to deploy different styles at will, and thus not have a recognizable, distinctive voice" (14).

The challenge facing the academy is whether it will continue to uphold as ideal the confining language of academic discourse, or tune into the rising voices calling for what Peter Elbow calls a generic discourse, a primarily rhetorical writing form that is not shackled to stylistic conventions (153). Even then, the emphasis on rhetorical modes must be approached cautiously lest the end product be essentially more of the jargon that makes academic discourse so impenetrable for culturally nontraditional students.

Whatever the solution, changing hide-bound methods of teaching academic discourse clearly won't be easy. Nonetheless, using the historical essay to segue into formal academic discourse may result in student writing which truly is authentic, voice-based, and completely familiar to the writer. []
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.............................................Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. "Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshmen and Colleagues." College English 532. February 1991: 135-155. "What Do We Mean When We Talk About Voice in Texts?" Voices on Voice: Definitions, Inquiry. Ed.

Fulwiler, Toby. "Claiming My Voice." 36-47.

Fakundiny, Lydia. "On Approaching the Essay." The Art of the Personal Essay. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1991. 3-19.

Hairston, Maxine. "Different Products, Different Processes: A Theory About Writing." College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37,N. 4 December 1986: 442-452.

Mellix, Barbara. "From Outside, In." Essays on the Essay. Ed. Alexander J. Butrym. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. 43-52.

Stoehr, Taylor. "Tone and Voice." College English. 30. 2. November 1968: 150-61. Tompkins, Jane. "Pedagogy of the Distressed." College English. 52. 6 October 1990: 653-660.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, ed. "Introduction." Voices on Voices: Perspectives, Definitions, Inquiry. Urbana: The National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. xviii. ]