Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite professional articles. I love Moffett's idea that we should have students "work from a place of plenty" rather than from a "place of scarcity."
I don't usually feel obliged as a speaker to start with a joke. I've found from experience that I usually commit enough goofs, glitches, and faux pas that it is unnecessary to schedule comic relief. But I did come by a joke, very recently, that I can rationalize. I heard a speaker who was a humorous storyteller, a kind of cracker barrel raconteur. In one of his jokes, he told of a family from the backwoods of Virginia. There was a boy who had grown up to be about ten or eleven and had never said a word. Everyone grew accustomed to this, but one night as they were sitting around the dinner table, the boy suddenly said, "There's too many lumps in the gravy."
They looked over at him absolutely flabbergasted and said, "If you could talk, how come you haven't said anything before?"
He replied, "Everything has been pretty good up till now."
I submit that there's a whole theory of language function secreted within this joke if you bother to extract it.
A speaker has a choice of whether to say something general and inspirational and uplifting, or to say something of some practical value. For better or for worse, I have opted for the latter. My subject is how writing teachers get students from the personal-experience theme, with its many colloquial terms, to the formal essay. This seems to be a national issue. We are under pressure to do the thing that colleges seem to value most--to teach the kind of essay that corresponds to term papers or essay questions. Colleges emphasize this because it is part of their testing program, and this pressure passes all the way down to the elementary school. I believe we are gearing up for this sort of thing far too early. At any rate, this tends to determine the bent of the writing curriculum we have. What I'm going to try to aim at here are ways of doing justice to other kinds of writing that will at the same time prepare for what colleges want.
There are two main ways I think we can bridge from the personal narrative to kinds of informal and formal essays. One is by way of intervening kinds of discourse, kinds of writing, that students might practice in between personal writing and essay writing, kinds of discourse that schools could take much more advantage of. The other way is by parlaying personal writing directly into essay. I'll try to give some examples of that later. I like the term "parlay." It comes from the French "to speak," but in Anglicized use it means to transform something on into something else and that's exactly what we are trying to do here in getting from personal writing to essay writing. We will look for ways of parlaying first-person narrative into essays.
I've been involved a good while in anthologizing student writing. The idea is that you use former students' writing to work with current students. Many teachers are doing this on their own, and I think that's excellent. I would certainly encourage that. You can array for students what the various kinds of writing look like when done by their peers. I also anthologize professional writing, but the problem with professional writing is that it is so intimidating that students sometimes do not identify with those writers. But I believe in using both.
In putting together these anthologies of students' writing, I wanted a repertory that would hold good for all the years. I didn't invent tricky assignments or cute stuff to write; I simply looked at what's going on outside of school. If school is a preparation for life, let's see what's going on out there. What do people outside of school who practice writing really do?
Figure 1 is my way of breaking down the main kinds of writing, the writing repertory, into five groupings. At the bottom is a category called Noting Down. The reason it's at the bottom is that journals, logs, diaries, and all sorts of notes are really the base for the kinds of writings above. I think you understand what I mean by the base. You write down things, and later you can write them up. This is a way of garnering material, jotting things down. Journalists write down everything that might possibly be used later as ideas for writing. At first, they plan to use most of it, but they usually just use some of it. Many professionals take field notes and lab notes. They accumulate materials that they write up into one of the above forms on the schema.
FIGURE 1. Kinds of Writing
THINKING UP THINKING OVER/THINKING THROUGH
(Imagination) (Cogitation)
Fiction Column
Plays Editorial
Poetry Review
Personal essay
Thesis essay
LOOKING BACK LOOKING INTO
(Recollection) (Investigation)
Autobiography Biography
Memoir Chronicle
Case
Profile
Factual article
Feature article
NOTING DOWN
(Notation)
Journal
Diary
Logs
There is a lot of hue and cry today about "thinking"; the buzz word is "critical thinking." If we look seriously at thinking and writing, we soon come to realize that we don't have to add thinking because it is already part and parcel of writing. If we are serious about thinking, we will allow students to work far more inductively than they have in the past, building up from sources of plenty instead of employing a strategy of working from scarcity. I will explain what I mean by that.
The deductive approach is to work from the top down, from the higher level abstractions to the lower. If you are given a topic, or if you choose a topic, or if the essay exam gives you some quotation and you are supposed to refute or support it, and your grade is on the line, then you start at a higher generalization and go downward, looking for something to support or illustrate the generalization. That is what I call a wrong strategy, working from scarcity. What we should work from is plenty, from too much material, so much that you have to waste it, throw some of it away, edit it, winnow it out--in short, compose and select, abstract. Memories and investigations represent materials both inside and outside, wealthy positions, a source of plenty and not a position of scarcity. That sort of wrong-headed strategy comes from working too deductively, starting students at high-level abstract topics, or generalities, and then asking them to go down. It puts us in the position of being professional naggers. We are nagging for details, nagging for evidence, nagging for support, illustrations, and examples, no matter what the kind of writing. This shouldn't happen. It is one of those problems to which we think up brilliant solutions, but it is a stupid problem. It comes from wanting to control the subject matter of student writing and from riding herd on essay before honoring other kinds of writing. If we really want to teach thinking and writing together and get from personal experience to essay, then we should emphasize inductive thinking, which is itself a bridge to deductive thinking.
At the next level I have two groupings or very important domains of discourse called
Looking Back and Looking Into. The one on the left is undoubtedly a lot more familiar to teachers, for that's really where you have the personal-experience themes, the first-person narrative. I use the traditional terms "autobiography," which is focused on the author, and "memoir," which is focused on others. So those two represent a shift of focus, and we are already on our way to essay. Memoir is somewhere between personal writing and essay, precisely because of that shift of focus from author to other. The less familiar category,
Looking Into (Investigation)--which deserves a lot of attention it isn't getting--is reportage and research. It includes traditional third-person types like "biography" and "chronicle" as well as journalistic forms like "cases," "profiles," "factual articles" and "feature articles." Investigation is an important domain in our society, for I believe most people who read are getting their information and ideas through newspapers and magazines and certain kinds of nonfiction books. In fact, many literary writers and novelists, such as Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, sometimes shift back and forth from fiction to nonfiction. Investigation deserves a lot of attention, in part because it has the attention of some of our major writers but also because this writing has gotten very good in our day.
I think people with a literature background are apt to look disdainfully at journalism. We create this little specialty of journalism, and it goes off in a box on the shelf, available only to a few students who elect it. But it ought to be mainstreamed, and I'll try to explain why. Reportage and research represent an important bridge between personal writing and transpersonal writing. (I don't like the term "impersonal." It sounds like nobody's home: there's no face, no voice-just some sort of ghost writing--so I use the term "transpersonal.") I had the most difficulty getting writing in this category, and it is fascinating to think about why schools have neglected the main way to bridge between first-person writing and essay writing.
I think you will agree that investigative writing has been almost universally ignored in the schools. There are many reasons, some of them practical, some having to do with our backgrounds. Even very good teachers, who have a strong background in writing, often don't bother with it. What I found is that most teachers, even very good writing teachers, work with only a few kinds of writing. I am sure they will say they don't have time for more, and it may very well be true. We need to understand why even the best teachers don't require a broader range of writing from their students.
There's a lot to be said about Looking Into precisely because we haven't been trained to deal with it, unless you happen to have had some journalism experience. Most teachers probably haven't written in this area, so they don't feel too comfortable with it. Nevertheless, we all have done this kind of reading, New Yorker reportage and the excellent kind of reportage that we often get in newspapers and magazines. We feel confident to assess this, so I think we shouldn't feel so wary about assigning student writing in that area.
What do you do when you do investigative writing? You go look, you go ask, or you go look it up--three main things that reporters and researchers do. They go on site, visit, observe, and take notes. Or they interview one or many people, and again they take notes. Or what they can't get from looking and asking they go look up and see what other people have said about this. They go to records, documents, books and so on. This is where the library research comes in. As you notice, what happens here is that you move more and more from firsthand into second-hand information, and that's part of the movement from personal writing to essay writing.
From first person you can draw an arrow, if you wish, going from the left over to the right in Figure 1, from Looking Back to Looking Into. One of the movements involved is in that direction, going from first person to third person, from writing about self to writing about others, and from first-hand information to second- and third-hand information. I believe this is a very natural movement.
Let's go to the top level. The reason it's above is that Looking Back and Looking Into form a concrete data base for these other two. The memory is a tremendous storehouse of materials that all professional writers use. It's not narcissistic or solipsistic or just about oneself; it's about all sorts of things. If you think of your own memories, you will recognize that they are about everything, everything you ever had a chance to observe, experience, or participate in. The memory has all sorts of potentialities for the transpersonal writing that goes into essay. The other domain, Looking Into (Investigation), includes many sources of materials outside oneself. These are the two main sources on which the top two categories are built.
Let's move into a consideration of the category labeled Thinking Over/Thinking Through. I am all for the essay, and I think we should do as much of it as we can. However, I believe that if we move into it developmentally we will get better results. This category includes "Column," "Editorial," and "Review," the journalistic forms of essay. I imagine most people read essays of this sort, and those who are writing them are writing in these journalistic forms. Many of them do exactly what we want students to do in writing--make a generalization and then support it with examples, documentation, and illustrations.
There are many avenues to this, two of which are Investigation and Imagination. A third way is to go directly from Recollection up into Cogitation, because memory is a main source of ideas. All we have to do is extrapolate memories, which is what many essayists do. It always amuses me that George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" has been anthologized ad nauseam in all the college anthologies under Essay. If a student had written it, it would be called a personal experience narrative. Most of it is narrative, first-person, telling about how he was compelled to shoot an elephant against his will under pressure of the group when he was in civil service in Burma. He knew how to extract and extrapolate the transpersonal aspect of his personal experience so that in the end we think of it as an essay, although it is a piece of autobiography.
But the point is that it is very hard to tell the difference because memory is one of the main routes to get into the essay.
