Murray, Piper. “Containing Creatures A Way to Move

Murray, Piper. “Containing Creatures We Barely Imagine: Responding to ‘Bad’ Students’ Writing. A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. Eds. Dale Jacobs & Laura R. Micciche. Boyton/CooK: Portsmouth, NH

“what is our relationship to our theories about student writing that they should find us—those who find ourselves both ‘out there in the teaching world’ and at the same time very much ‘in here’ in Composition—much more easily embarrassed by the ‘truths’ than some surly senior professor, who clearly knows nothing of such matters?”

“No matter how much pleasure we may take in its telling, few of us entertain any illusions that the writing process movement really brought the revolution in the teaching of writing that we like to think it did” (95).

There’s been not genuine revolution, only a gathering of ideas and information in order to re-evaluate how we teach in order to use old ideas in combination with new to teach in a better way.

“Here we find that the responses associated with each form do indeed break down into fairly oppositional—and fairly telling—terms: frustration and blame belonging to one grand category, interest and analysis to another” (96).

“Thus, at the same time as Miller exposes as fantasy the idea ‘that two ‘grand theories’ have sequentially controlled the teaching of writing’ (70),it would seem that she ultimately preserves that fantasy—if only as an ideal-- when it comes to how we respond to ‘bad’ student writing (96).

“Writing theory may have done away with the idea or ‘theory’ that students ought to be faulted for writing ‘badly’. But as our ongoing frustration and blame continue to assert—in spite of all our wishful thinking that it were otherwise—writing theory cannot do away with the feeling that at least some ‘bad’ student writing is, after all, the product of ‘bad’ students(97).

Now, and only now, does this sense that we must “throw away” older theories make sense to me. We are not disregarding the theories, whether we know it or not, we are fighting against the urge to “blame” students when writing is poorly executed!

“In other words, reread as a structure of feeling, the dissonance we feel between interest and analysis on the one hand, and frustration and blame on the other, might be taken, not as a sign that our theory and practice are often at odds with one another (which is news to no one), but instead as a sign that there are aspects of our experience that remain in tension with both our theory and practice” (100).