Writing Toward Discovery

Using “Random Language Games”

Scott Simpson, Ph.D.

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Contents

Groundwork I. The Oral Language Model II. Environmental Issues III. The Importance of Relationship IV. The Benefits of Error V. Weaver's Model VI. Coming to Grips With the Audience VII. Who's the Boss? VIII. Personal Expression IX. "Dis-Covery" X. Following the Leader XI. Arbitrary Restrictions XII. High Stakes Random Language Games One-Word Book Poetry One-Word Partner Poetry Cut-Ups Found Poetry 60-Second Poetry Improvisations of Any Kind

Works Cited

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Groundwork

Language is a wonderful thing. As human beings, our thoughts and ideas and all of our progress as a society have been driven by, framed within, chronicled and retold through language. It would only seem right that such an important part of our social fabric be at the center of our pursuits in educating our children--- and it is. But for some reason, millions of "well-educated" high school and college students (as well as many working graduates) cringe with fear at the thought of an English class and, even worse, sit paralyzed and mute before the task of writing something that someone else might read. If we are an educated society full of individuals with new ideas and creative ways of thinking, why are we so fearful of expressing these ideas in writing? For the last five years I've been a high school English and speech teacher, and I've seen this fear of public expression (both in public speaking and in writing); and I believe it stems primarily from some long held attitudes that we as language arts educators, "English teachers", have allowed to insidiously shape the way we teach our language. In our desire to improve the quality of what is being written in English and our continued need to assert English as a "Literate Language," capable of producing "classics," we have also made it something to be feared by the masses. To get to the root of this problem, we may need to go all the way back to our language's infancy--- the Middle Ages. Mike Rose, in Lives on the Boundary, describes the Middle Ages' goddess of grammar, Grammatica, as an old woman. She has a scalpel and a pair of pincers, representing vigilance in the removal of error, and a bird in her right hand, grasped by the neck with its beak open in a silenced squawk. Rose points out that this depiction was not only a "memory aid" for the budding grammarian, it also is emblematic of the silencing that much of our focus upon grammar has brought. Our love affair with correctness has muted the voices of many who greatly fear making a mistake. I know this fear--- I've felt it myself, and I've seen many students who were nearly paralyzed by it. Part of the fear is perpetuated by parents, parents who passed through the same fear and the same focus on correctness themselves in some English class. The problem is, much about our model of teaching English makes students feel like something is wrong with them. So where did our model for the teaching of English originate? "Turn-of-the-century English education was built on a Latin and Greek-influenced grammar, primarily a set of prescriptions for conducting socially acceptable discourse." (Rose p. 207) We managed to develop a romance with correctness to the detriment of expression. And where did many of our educational terms come from? Medicine. (Notice: "disabilities," "deficits," "defects," "deficiencies," "handicaps," even "remedial"). We had to diagnose defects in the student's paper and come up with a prescription for the remedy. Rose mentions nicknames for remedial sections of a grammar text: (Rose p. 210) "sick sections" and "hospital sections." We have exalted "grammatical correctness" instead of the communication of ideas as the essence of writing. This makes the study of English boring, tedious, empty and, even worse, a very risky endeavor. What's the use of writing

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if everything inside you is bottled up every time you think of the myriad of mistakes you'll most likely make? Even the research has failed to support our continued bent toward the isolated teaching of grammar. In 1936 the Curriculum Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English stated that " all teaching of grammar separate from the manipulation of sentences [should] be discontinued... since every scientific attempt to prove that knowledge of grammar is useful has failed..." (Encyclopedia of Educational Research 1950, p. 392) Constance Weaver (1979) confirms in Grammar for Teachers that " the more recent research supports the conclusion that the study of grammar, in, of, and by itself has little positive effect on anything else. Indeed, even the grammatical knowledge itself is not long retained... " (Weaver p. 4) With all the research that tells us that the teaching of mechanics (punctuation, parts of speech, parts of sentences, sentence structures) isolated from the actual process of writing, is of little value and may even be counter productive, why do we continue to teach it? Tradition? Preservation of our "intellectual heritage?" Concern for "basic skills?" The I-went-through-it-so-you-can-too syndrome? Those who do well with language have an intuitive grasp of grammar. Students learn grammar usage indirectly (through the natural processes of writing) as opposed to directly (through grammar drills and exercises). Teachers of language skills certainly must have a knowledge of grammar to know better how to help their students, but most importantly, they need to possess "an understanding of the language processes (listening, speaking, reading and writing)." (Weaver p.6). In Inside Out, authors Kirby, Liner, and Vinz (1988) point out that writing and thinking are processes that are inextricably connected, stating that, "Tampering with the way someone writes is tampering with the way he thinks." What is a teacher really saying to a young child with the statement, "What you have written is incorrect because it doesn't fit my form?" Children are primarily concerned with what they are saying, not how. It is difficult for a first grader, for example, to continue to see the validity in what he is saying (and thinking) when his form is always being corrected. When a child is not yet developmentally able to deal with complicated forms of grammar and sentence structure, any "corrections" directed toward the misuse of those forms will frustrate the child and may build up a reluctance toward the use of language. Taken from Noam Chomsky's "transformational" model of language, sentences have both a surface structure ("linear sequence of clauses, phrases, words, sounds and letters") and a deep structure ("underlying propositions and the relations among them") (Weaver p 7). These propositions can be manifested to some degree in the surface structure, but "there is no one-to-one correspondence between sentences and propositions, between the flow of language and meaning." (Weaver p. 9) In other words, there may be myriad surface structures to express the same basic deep structure. At a young age, we don't possess the language proficiency to express as fully the underlying propositions. But as we mature, we become " able to express more and more of the underlying deep structure in the surface structure..." (Weaver p. 9) Even if the child manages to adapt to the "correct" forms, we run the risk of missing out on the student's real voice and developing a writer whose polished form

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is lacking in content. Every student will be most articulate in his own voice. We must encourage each student toward finding that voice, not developing someone else's voice, because the best form for a piece is reflective of the writer’s true voice. What about those who ask," How do we help kids grow if we don't correct them--- don't students need to learn some control as they write?" Simultaneous fluency and control would be great, but it doesn't occur with the inexperienced writer. Trying to force control on a student who is still struggling even to express what he or she wants to say, only results in a loss of fluency. And if nothing is even being written, there isn't much to impose control over. Ken Macrorie (1970) has developed a term, Engfish, to describe the lifeless prose we expect in our English classes, the type of voiceless writing that has at its center a strict adherence to "the rules."

"The grade school student is told by his teacher that he must learn Engfish because the high school teacher will expect mastery of it. The high school student is told by his teacher that he must learn it because the college professor will expect mastery of it. The college undergraduate is told by his professor that he must learn it so he can go to graduate school and write his Ph.D. thesis in it. Almost no one reads Ph.D. theses." (Macrorie)

Most of our traditional approaches to the teaching of English and writing have directed students away from originality and personal voice, and toward this hollow, sterile prose that is almost unreadable. Engfish rules out experimentation and risk taking. All "good literature" began as a risk. We forget this because, after years of canonization, what once was on the fringe of acceptability has become the standard. Of course we must build upon that which we know works, but "building" frequently requires new tools and (in writing) always requires a fresh voice. Instead, we tend to gauge ourselves by the "classic" literary standard. Admittedly, the "classics" can inspire and prod us onward sometimes, but writing, and all communication, is a unique sharing that is bound to the circumstances that brought it about. Certainly great literature endures, but it endures as a legacy to the original "who," "when," "where," "why" and "how." To emphasize some universal literary model above the individual's circumstantial expression is the same as focusing on grammatical and syntactical forms to the exclusion of content--- it severs writing from its root in the human spirit, and tries to graft it onto the deadness of an old model. It may be a model for "correctness," or a model for "great literature," but any model that attempts to prescribe the form or content of all future literature that is to be considered "good," denies the organic process of writing. Writing grows out of individuals in specific circumstances. Both our dedication to grammatical correctness in writing and our dedication to canonizing the "great classics" narrow our focus from learning to "that which must be learned." Both tend to emphasize the structure or history of the discipline, not the growth of the student. Both tend to smother the student's sense of personal validity with the elite, academic culture.

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Mike Rose found that many of the students he worked with responded to the "human connection" in settings where "some of the strictures of the standard curriculum had been momentarily suspended." It seems that in our drive to assess and individualize, we restrict and solidify lower classifications upon students; and as we attempt to simplify a writing process for these identified children by breaking it down into its smaller parts, we condemn them to a language that is mechanical and empty and, most importantly, insufficient to express the real experiences that make their lives rich with joy and pain. In other words, we undermine the validity of their personal languages by categorizing the students as having some type of deficiency and then "stopping them up" with an obsession for correctness. We categorize so we can better serve them individually; but our categories brand them, set up the limits of their success, and keep them from breaking out of whatever group they have been found to occupy. Generally, students simply justify their identity by living up to the labels. Unfortunately, too many students and adults have felt themselves labeled by the educational system as a "non-writer" or a "non-reader." I've even heard teachers say, "Oh, I'm not a writer..." We've managed to effectively cut off a large number of humans from using the great tool that shapes our culture and our thinking simply by making the tool more complicated and more hazardous than it truly is. The following is at the heart of my theory:

I. The Oral Language Model

So how should we approach solving some of these problems in our traditional ways of teaching English and particularly writing? Kirby, Liner and Vinz, as well as many others, suggest a model based on the natural acquisition of oracy. Untrained parents usually have remarkable success in teaching their own children oral language--- so why not base a model for teaching writing on what we know naturally occurs in the successful learning of spoken language? This is the model they developed: Principles operating in the acquisition of oral language to be used as a model for the teaching of written language: (Kirby, Liner and Vinz) 1. Incredible Motivation. 2. Constant Support. 3. Instant Response. 4. Wide Tolerance for Error. 5. Frequent Practice Trials.

Good writing grows out of individual experience, and moves the writer toward some self discovery. Writing can be, in its initial stages, subverted, and the writer silenced by fear of deviating from corporately accepted forms, themes and subjects. This silencing occurs when the "acceptable" forms, themes and subjects are misperceived as having more literary validity than does the original personal expression.

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6. Form-Finding Freedom. This connection between oracy and literacy is clearly supported as well by Weaver. She gives the following evidence in support of this link:

1. The language processes all involve propositions. In listening and reading, we extract propositions from the flow of language, while in speaking and writing we express propositions in language. 2. The language processes all reflect an imperfect correspondence between surface structure and deep structure. 3. The language processes all are active processes. Speaking and writing involve an active expression of propositions in language, while listening and reading involve an active search for propositions. 4. Just as there are natural stages in the child's acquisition of oracy (listening and speaking), so there may be natural stages in the child's acquisition of literacy (reading and writing). (Weaver p. 11)

II. Environmental Issues

Where do we begin to make the changes needed? It all has to start the first day in the classroom with the environment established by the teacher. A child learns to speak because he or she wants something--- a cookie or milk, or because he or she wants a reaction from someone else--- a hug from Mommy, a laugh from Daddy. The motivation to write must stem from these same sources. For this reason, trust among students and teacher, among the class as a community of writers, must be strong. Real needs must be addressed. Responses must be supportive, and usually, student responses are far more potent as motivating factors than the teacher's. Trust can only be established among people who know each other. The first several weeks of a writing class must be full of activities that bring students into contact with other students and their writings. Active sharing and disclosure are vital. There are many activities that promote self-disclosure, but students will get to know each other best by sharing writings. One goal of the writing teacher must be to establish a supportive community of fellow writers; this means recognizing, accepting and utilizing the diversity present in every classroom. Making the differences work for the individual writer, not against. Kirby, Liner and Vinz talk about the writing classroom being a "sage place". I tend to promote some of the mysticism of writing. Not that we should make it out to be something it isn't, but there is something magical and awesome in the writing process. Keeping the classroom a bit holy is important. There isn't time in one class period to waste in pursuits like skill drills or teacher pleasing. It's all writing time.

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III. The Importance of Relationship

Beyond establishing a safe environment, the type of relationship developed between the teacher and the student is essential. Mike Rose relates his experience in this way:

"Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance. You didn't just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk. You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water. Maybe nothing was "intrinsically interesting." Knowledge gained its meaning, at least initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation.... My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me." (Rose p. 102)

Students want to know teachers.... and this desire for relationship also drives their desire to write. Unfortunately, teachers have had a tendency to put a desk, rules, textbooks, worksheets and anything else handy between themselves and the students. This promotes the idea of teacher-as-authority, but it doesn't get students to write and it doesn't open up meaningful interaction about that writing. A writing teacher, or any teacher for that matter, must never become cut off from the students, physically, intellectually, socially, whatever, to the point that he or she no longer relates to students on a human level. Students need human models... real people to attach themselves to educationally. Sharing opens things up, helps the student understand that the teacher's perceptions aren't the only valid ones. Students are insightful and sensitive and have the advantage of still having that adolescent perspective. A teacher doesn't have to abdicate his or her authority to acknowledge the authority of students. A young writer needs to see the teacher as a fellow writer. Modeling is a must. I have shared with my students not only what I was writing in the way of poetry and fiction, but also would frequently play songs that I was writing for them as well. Students like to think of the teacher as one who is struggling along with them and excited along with them and just simply along with them. Teachers should let the students see their own mistakes and revisions as well. The only way students will begin to look at writing as a process instead of a product that the teacher wants turned in by next Monday, is if the teacher models the real essence of writing--- an individual struggling with language and meaning, trying to craft a vehicle for his or her own ideas. Not that the teacher should model the process. The authoritarian attitude forgets to take into account varying styles of generating and revising. We must be flexible. Students should have the choice not to revise--- revision is difficult if you really don't care about the piece. But many students who don't feel confident about their ability to write will just want to "finish it and turn it in." Sometimes we must push, nudge or otherwise cajole them to keep a piece alive and improving. As students develop more fluency and trust, and as they begin to stretch into experimentation

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with newer and more difficult forms, the teacher's strength should be in that trust--- in the sharing, not in the "role" of teacher. Frequently, one of the biggest barriers to a positive, effective teacher-student relationship is the typically defined role of the teacher. It is so ingrained in the fabric of our society that it is sometimes very difficult to escape, for teachers and students. This role type affects the way teachers respond to writing and the way those responses are received by the writer. The most effective response a teacher can make is to respond as a person, or as a fellow writer--- and nothing more. The only true authority over what goes in, what stays out, and what is acceptable in a student's paper, is the student. The key to effective response is stated very succinctly in Inside Out: "help writers discover what it is they want to say..." (Kirby, Liner and Vinz p. 129) Too often teachers put words into their students' mouths or onto their students' papers. That does no one any good because the only "author" it creates is the teacher.

IV. The Benefits of Error

Number four on the Kirby, Liner and Vinz model for the acquisition of oral language was "Wide Tolerance for Error." In our zeal to stamp out error, we have turned the process of writing, for many, into a struggle with "correctness." Many people have the notion that good writing is simply mistake-free writing, as if a glossy surface were the goal of writing, the apex of language. Proficient listeners and readers are active in the search for the underlying propositions. This is the core purpose of language-- the conveyance of meaning--- the deep structure, not a mistake-free surface. Because the correspondence between surface structure and deep structure is imperfect, the reader or listener must be actively searching--- actively engaged in creating meaning as guided by the surface structure. Admittedly, error in surface structure will affect a reader's ability to understand the deep structure, but writing teachers need to see error in light of what it tells them about a student's progress. Much early error is to be expected, and is often even a sign of growth. It is important at this point to look again at students' early dealings with language in the school setting. Weaver has hypothesized that acquiring literacy follows these stages:

1. Language learners initially attend more to deep structure (meaning) than to surface structure (form). They look more for underlying propositions than for elements of the sentence (Weaver p. 13). A child's early utterances preserve only the very basic propositions that underlie a simple surface. When a three-year-old hears the sentence "The baby feeds the girl," the child will ignore the apparent surface structure "in favor of a deep structure that makes more sense"--- that the girl feeds the baby (Weaver p. 14). Similarly, when a child is making his first attempts at scribbling and writing letters--- the first words that are formed are those that are basic to the underlying propositions that are most important to him. (Weaver p. 14) Children who are learning to write do not

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catch up with their own verbal syntactic maturity until somewhere between the 5th and 8th grades. The syntactic mistakes they make in this early writing result from the fact that they are dealing primarily with the underlying structure. To some degree they have to "relearn" the surface structures as they attempt to express in writing, the underlying propositions. This is why children learn content words more easily than function words---- function words are rarely used to express the basic elements of a proposition and, out of text, their meanings are imprecise. (Weaver p. 15)

2. Language learners make errors that are a sign of progress not regression.

3. Language learners unconsciously make hypotheses about the structure of their language and about the nature of the language process.

These last two go together because many of the hypotheses they form lead to "mistakes" that show signs of progression, particularly the over-application of grammar rules (endings particularly--- Weaver pp. 16-17 for examples).

"A beginning writer who has previously produced papers with only one or two short, "correct" sentences may suddenly begin to write more sentences, but with some errors in grammar--- provided the teacher doesn't squelch these efforts by insisting on absolute correctness." (Weaver p. 17)

We forget that mistakes teach us much about the thought patterns of students. As writers take risks they make mistakes. We should encourage mistakes--- if they are mistakes that come from experimentation with language. Experimenting is the only way to grow as a writer, but a writer who is overly concerned with correctness will not experiment. Surface correctness, though it is part of revision, should be the last part of revision. Revision itself is primarily concerned with content, with ideas, and with clarity. "What is fundamental is involvement by the teacher in the substance of the child's writing." ---Martin and Mulford Kirby, Liner and Vinz describe revision as recursive--- circling back upon itself, changing, tinkering, like wandering in the woods trying to find the way out, changing directions, running into trees, planning, backtracking, running ahead. Revision doesn't lead to a glossy correct finish. It is a matter of discovery, or perhaps "un-covery." Honing something out of sheer rock and watching it take shape, take form is very similar: getting it just right, not "correct". The following are their "steps" for revision. They are helpful as a reminder of what goes on in the minds of many writers, but certainly they are not "prescriptive." 1) In-process revision: reading aloud while you write, pencil in-hand, make it sound right.

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2) Re-vision: Seeing it again in a different way, rewrite sections, especially tough beginnings, point of view? order? sound? 3) Editing: involves at least two (people), supportive, probing, non threatening, have author tell group what he needs them to look for or at, concrete responses. 4) Proofreading: cleaning up surface errors, always comes last. (Kirby, Liner and Vinz p. 183) They also suggest an approach that helps students take the emphasis off mistakes and onto the process of writing frequently, and then reading to find what is usable. They call it "mining the slagheap" and it more closely reflects the processes many writers really use. The teacher can take up a writing assignment, "mine" the student's writings for paragraphs, sentences, phrases, even word combinations that stand out, type them up, and hand them out for discussion in class the next day. "Mining the slagheap" moves the emphasis from failures to successes. Writers who expect to make mistakes and even produce unusable material, are writers who are willing to take risks. This process of risk-taking is how we become fluent and confident in any language.

"A traveler in a foreign land best learns names of people and places, how to express ideas, ways to carry on a conversation by moving around in the culture, participating as fully as he can, making mistakes, saying things half right, blushing, then being encouraged by a friendly native speaker to try again. He'll pick up details of grammar and usage as he goes along. What he must not do is hold back from the teeming flow of life, must not sit in his hotel room and drill himself on all possible gaffes before entering the streets. He'd never leave the room." (Rose p. 142)

V. Weaver's Theory

At this point we need to look at Weaver's theory of the hypotheses children unconsciously form as they learn to write. (Weaver p. 20) She proposes that a child may start out with the following hypothesis: 1. Writing means expressing meaning in written language. (deep structure) An emphasis in school or at home on "correctness" may result in the following: 2. Writing means producing sequences of words with correct usage, sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. ("correct" surface structure) Hopefully, the writer will bypass stage two, or quickly move to stage three: 3. Writing means using as many conventions of usage, sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling as necessary to convey meaning. (using surface structure to convey deep structure). The second hypothesis is formed when we try to make children "audience conscious" at too early an age---- or when we, as teachers,

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focus upon the standards of "correctness" to such a degree that students become convinced of this second hypothesis, and that they can't write--- because they can't write "correctly." If teachers focus time and time again upon the forms, the surface structures, aspects of mechanics--- the student may never get beyond hypothesis #2.

"Unfortunately, many students become so convinced of the second hypothesis that they never get form and meaning back together, they never become convinced that writing has any purpose other than to display their ability (or inability) to command various conventions of usage, sentence structure, capitalization, spelling, and the like. They seldom if ever know the satisfaction of written self-expression, the pleasure of conveying thoughts or provoking feelings through writing." (Weaver p. 60) James Britton (1975) separates writing into these three function categories: Expressive--- directed mainly toward the self

Transactional--- directed toward someone else Poetic--- directed toward a larger known or unknown audience The expressive function is seen in all young children--- it is a natural consequence of the ego-centrism of the pre-operational stage (before age 8) (Weaver p 57). It is an important stage in preparing them for the later transactional and poetic stages, but young children aren't even able to understand adaptation to an audience's needs. From page 59:

"A seven-year-old is not much concerned with his reader beyond the fact that the writing is often seen as an "offering" to someone who is assumed to understand it just because he has written it. The child will not usually make any modification in what he writes, as an adult would, in order to communicate what he is saying. In short, he is writing above all for himself.... For a young child to put on record what he wants to say, to write it so that his language closely fits himself, his experience, to his own satisfaction, seems to us to be skilled writing at this stage of his development...." ----Martin and Mulford

VI. Coming to Grips With the Audience

To grow as a writer, one must become, to some degree, audience conscious. It isn't enough just to write, any more than it would be enough just to talk into the air with

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no one to listen. At some point a consciousness of the reader has to come into play--- an implicit communication with the reader. But there must be a balance, or at least a give-and-take between expression and the control imposed upon that expression to make it more palatable for an audience. Too often, as I've said before, we make young writers so conscious of audience by focusing on forms and structures that the potential expression is "bottled up." Through Weaver's model we can see the inside workings of our early and obsessive emphasis upon grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. The creating mind is like a stream, and the young writer needs to know that there is a certain amount of control he or she can impose upon what he or she pulls out of that stream. The big question is: What ways can we impose control or restrict what flows from this stream of the mind with out causing the stream to dry up? Without pushing young writers to think that writing is primarily a practice of correctness and not a conveyance of meaning? And, at what point should that restriction or control be used? This question deals very much with the process of writing and not the product. If writing teachers are to deal with students, not just with assignments and corrections, then they must deal with the process of writing in all of its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, not simply the product. If we deal only with the product then we're already too late. Growing a healthy sense of audience requires an audience. Writers must be continuously reading and publishing for their peers. As they mature and their audience expands---- so will there ability to write to a larger, more diverse group of readers. Students must continue publishing and reading for others. Experimentation and classroom readings must be frequent, and it is very important that students share with one another the process as well as the final products. Most students are still very unsure of how they write, and they are ever changing as they read new styles and work with different peers. There are many ways to encourage writers to keep expanding their craft. Language is a tool not like a circular saw that has numerous safety precautions and rules for usage, but rather like a paintbrush that can hold varying degrees of paint, can be laid against the canvas in many different ways and can be pulled or pushed across it in many ways as well. We must play with it to become adept with it, to make it an extension of ourselves. Weaver says that " as young writers experiment with transactional and poetic forms they become increasingly aware of the desirability of adjusting surface form to meet audience needs." (Weaver p. 60) As we allow students to experiment with new forms and new styles without the fear of being somehow "wrong," they will naturally develop the desire to adjust to an audience.

VII. Who's the Boss?

One of the delicacies of learning an awareness of audience is keeping the balance between personal expression and audience-minded control while at the same time maintaining personal authority for the piece. Many young writers, young readers and students in general tend to relinquish authority for the content of their own work and for the interpreting of literature and for their own learning in general to a higher

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authority--- namely the teacher or the school. In teaching students that there is a correct way to write, a correct interpretation of literature, and by forcing students to learn on our terms using our methods and on our timeline, we have left many students in a completely passive role when it come to writing, reading and learning. This assumes a "banking" model of education in which students are passive receptacles for all the proper knowledge that we as teachers decide to pour in. Nothing that we know about learning supports this model, and certainly the writer or reader who looks primarily to someone else for what meaning to make of the language he or she is dealing with is not truly writing or reading. Research supports the idea of including students in as many classroom decisions as possible. In developing criteria for a good poem, the teacher should go to the students. In exploring possible audiences and how they affect our modes of expression, teachers should go to the students. Students must be given authority for their learning. In reading literature, students should be encouraged to discuss varying peer interpretations, not with the idea of finding the correct one, but because reading and learning and writing are processes--- processes of questioning, theorizing and communicating. Thinking about writing and talking about writing are almost as important as doing it. Assigning personal journals where "anything goes" develops writing in which the student writer makes all the decisions--- the student is the authority. Frequently the language of journals is much more natural, communicative and human than anything else teachers ever receive from students. If students can transfer what they learn about their own personal voice in a journal to what they write even for wide, unknown audiences, then we may begin to see more personal and vibrant writing in general. A passively cooperative student has little invested in his or her writing. Only when a writer takes ownership of a piece will the piece come alive.

VIII. Personal Expression

At the root of writing is the making of meaning. This meaning that is made is not some broad, universal "literary meaning," it is a personally significant meaning. Kirby, Liner and Vinz demonstrate this with the example of a young girl beginning guitar lessons. If a student has a real goal in mind, whether it be a song he or she is writing or a song from the radio that he or she wants to play, then, in the process of writing or learning that song, the student learns new chords, rhythms, picking and strumming techniques and so on. In my own experience in writing, I've observed the same thing. I despised grammar and composition classes, but I have always enjoyed creating stories or poems. My focus was on the whole, when I was forced to work on fragmented skills, divorced from what that I was creating, my interest in "writing" (as it was defined by some of my teachers) plummeted. We turn off many would-be writers in this way. Writing is an art, and at the heart of any art is the final product--- the sculpture, the painting, the song. Just because we focus upon the process of writing doesn't mean we can divorce it from its product. We must help students experiment with the process that will help them find that product they long to create.

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The final product of writing is the thing that needed to be expressed. It springs ultimately from within the writer, though it is generally "inspired" by something outside of the writer. "Expressive writing we think is the seed bed from which more specialized and differentiated kinds of writing can grow..." (Kirby, Liner and Vinz p. 59) When writing is forced by some outside pressure (teacher-assigned topics, length requirements, content stipulations), and the student never sees a significant or consequential fruit, the writing becomes a game of forms... lacking in substance, primarily a calling of words and phrases, not writing and certainly not real communication.

IX. "Dis-Covery"

We've established that the writer must be the authority, and that the expressing of something meaningful to the writer must be the goal, but where does this meaning come from? Certainly it comes from inside the writer, at least to some degree, but how does a young writer get at it if he or she hasn't had much practice? Often the real implications of the whole piece aren't discovered, even by the writer until the piece is finished. This turns our writing process around ( at least the process we have always implied in traditional classes). Writers don't get the great idea, blueprint it, and then construct it; they frequently write their way into what it was they wanted to say.

"There must be content in an effective piece of writing. It must add up to something. This is the most important element in good writing, but... it is often discovered last through the process of writing." --- Donald Murray (1979)

Unfortunately, we as teachers have always been much better at helping our students edit or "correct" their papers than generate them. Don Bogen (1984) suggests many methods for shifting our college "workshop" classes from their current focus on product-oriented revision to process-oriented experimentation with composition methods. The goals of his alternative model are “To decrease students' initial anxieties about writing, to help them become more flexible when they begin to write, and to give them a sense of potential." (Bogen p. 155) Bogen's goals fit nicely with what we've established as many of the problems in our present techniques and some of the solutions. He mentions "students' initial anxieties." This takes us all the way back to the beginnings of our search--- Grammatica. Those ancient fears instilled originally in high school, junior high, elementary and even in the home during the preschool years, that fear of mistakes and that focus on "correct" structure rear their heads in the undergraduate and graduate classroom, even at the desk of the practiced but "blocked" writer. Whenever concerns over matters of form pre-empt simple expression during the initial generation stage of writing, the writing is severely hampered if not altogether halted. This is primarily a problem of power. The writer feels powerless to make

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language do what he or she wants it to do. We have a misconception that meaning is constructed out of language in the conscious mind (somewhat in the fashion of Weaver's insidious hypothesis #2), and then decoded by a reader who has a grasp of the rules of our structures. All the worry over correct forms and structures in the world won't express the meaning we long to get out. In fact, much of the meaning that readers find in language is not anywhere on the page. Weaver tells us that much of a reader's knowledge of underlying propositions comes from semantic clues. 1. We bring meaning to what we hear and read. 2. We determine grammar to a large extent from meaning. (Weaver p 26) The Pollack and Pickett study (1964) found that we use content words and context, and word order to determine which function words we've heard. We are actually able to interpret sentences from fewer words than are available to us.

"The fact that good readers make far fewer mistakes on content words than on function words suggests that they use the content words and word order to determine the underlying propositions and their relations, then produce a surface structure which may be in part their own rather than the author's. They assume that reading means not only using surface structure as a means for determining deep structure, but also using deep structure as a means for determining surface structure." (Weaver p. 29)

Language is not simply a product of the writer's mind, it is also a wick that pulls meaning from the mind of both the writer and the reader to give significance to what is on the page.

X. Following the Leader

"Well, forget that intention. Listen to the poem you are writing; don't listen to that conscious voice, that obligatory 'daddy' that says, 'No, thou must not do this.' Listen to what your imagination is really doing." --- Philip Levine (1983) "What provides you with subject matter is your own language--- and that's all. It sort of coils in your mind ... and dictates something to you. A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around." ---Joseph Brodsky (1987)

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I have frequently found myself becoming the tool of language. In my playing around, I will come into contact with a combination of words or a certain phrase that seems to dictate to me what will come next or where I'm going. It seems that writing is more a process of allowing one's self to be led than of directing one's own writing... at least it is in the beginning. The significance must be there--- that is what makes writing worth reading. But the process of writing becomes significant in itself, becomes as much a discovery as a creation. Writing isn't necessarily "mystical," however, writers who say they can pin down every phrase they've written and tell you where it came from, and precisely what it means aren't being honest with themselves. The wonderful thing about language is that it is elastic; it can expand to embrace all the baggage that any reader brings to it. One of the problems young writers have is the inability to allow themselves to write if they don't know exactly where it's coming from and what it means. They're afraid someone will call them to task on it and they won't be able to answer. This goes back to the learned attitude that there is one correct interpretation of literature. Even the writer, though he or she has supreme authority over the writing of a piece, doesn't possess, and cannot be called to render the "correct" interpretation. There are many things in my own writing that I wouldn't be able to fully explain ( in fact, many that others have explained much better than I could have). Student writers must come to understand that writing that begins without a conscious purpose and ends with a realization of "what they were trying to say" is still legitimately written. This will enable writers to be much more honest. "What do you think it means?" will become a valid response for a writer to make concerning his or her own writing. At this point it is important to return to my initial theoretical statement and expand it:

XI. Arbitrary Restrictions

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that to allow ourselves to be led by a dynamic, living language, we must throw off all restrictions. In reality, it is important to throw off the choking hands of "correctness" and early worries about form or audience, but paradoxically, early arbitrary restrictions--- even the most brutal, can set a writer free. I have had frequent success, personally and with students, imposing arbitrary restrictions upon the generation of a "zero" draft. For instance, my students may generate a list of words from an exercise. We can then use each word as the first word of each line of a sixteen line poem or write

Good writing grows out of individual experience, and moves the writer toward some self discovery. Writing can be, in its initial stages, subverted, and the writer silenced by fear of deviating from corporately accepted forms, themes and subjects. This silencing occurs when the "acceptable" forms, themes and subjects are misperceived as having more literary validity than does the original personal expression.

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short poems in which every other word is a word chosen randomly from the list. I've had students pull words randomly from books as every other word in "One-Word Book Poems." Exercises like these and other similar ones don't generate real drafts--- but they do open surprising doors. Two words may simply happen to fall together and spark some reaction that was completely unexpected and unexplainable, but it may lead the writer toward a poem that says something uniquely personal that would never have come out otherwise. I have found these games helpful, and I think many writers probably use arbitrary means to begin... to lead them to the point where their own fluency takes over, and to keep themselves from beating a path so smooth it's the only one they ever take. I propose that the random language games included and variations of the same type can benefit those who have been “silenced by fear of deviating from corporately accepted forms, themes and subjects." These games:

1. remove the emphasis from grammar and form correctness through their random nature, making it "all right" to have no idea where you are going and to produce "nonsense," and 2. allow the writer to "discover" meaning latent within odd combinations of words and phrases, "wicking" meaning from the writer, and causing a kind of free-association that releases meaning that might not otherwise have been released.

In essence these games say to the reluctant writer, fearful of mechanical mistakes, "It's OK--- they're only words, and you can do with them what you like." With more experienced writers, they not only help generate texts, they also keep language use fresh, forcing the writer to use language in unusual ways. Of course, they are always followed by revisions, rewrites, and certainly group and peer sharing. From this starting point, however, many writers, inexperienced and experienced are able to deal with issues that they could never deal with if they had started in a conscious, premeditated way. "After all--- these are mostly just words I pulled from a book!" Even the daily occurrences that suddenly spark the individual to respond expressively with language are often random, unrelated items, thrown together. Mike Rose discusses the first poetic stirrings that he had. Certainly the Cummings and the Eliot that he had read played an important role, but more important was his private experience, his personal connection to insignificant objects revealed as significant, and his "lyrical index"--- the radio.

"This, I think, is where it started. And a room, quiet but for the running water, and a lost object wedged between the cushions of a couch would shuttle me back inside some ruminative core. I would hold the earring or the scarf or the page of someone's diary, and familiar longings and distant lyrics would reify into an image at the center of a poem." (Rose p. 74)

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Most importantly, these random language games encourage personal response at the most basic level, unadulterated by fears of failure within the accepted forms of language use. This freedom from fear during the first stages of generating a piece of writing is the door to releasing personal voice. "The human voice is the bearer of the human spirit." --- James Miller (1978) Once again, I will expand and finally complete my theory:

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XII. High Stakes

If we succeed inadvertently to separate individuals from their own emotional, developmental, cultural and even physical roots, we have succeeded in stripping them of the most important tools they have as writers. If we succeed inadvertently in convincing them that writing is primarily a product, prescribed by grammarians and teachers of composition, then we have succeeded in destroying written language as a means of expressing the human voice. Perhaps the greatest loss is not the loss that comes to those who have been silenced. It is a loss to those of us who cherish the human voice. The thing we've really missed is the richness of the language of the silenced. We have subverted so much of the "unacceptable" with the "correct" that we are missing out on an immense expanse of American culture. Mike Rose says it best. (Rose p. 214)

"Slowly something has been shifting in my perception: the errors--- the weird commas and missing letters, the fragments and irregular punctuation--- they are ceasing to be the slips of the hand and the brain. They are becoming part of the stories themselves. They are the only fitting way, it seems, to render

Good writing grows out of individual experience, and moves the writer toward some self discovery. Writing can be, in its initial stages, subverted, and the writer silenced by fear of deviating from corporately accepted forms, themes and subjects. This silencing occurs when the "acceptable" forms, themes and subjects are misperceived as having more literary validity than does the original personal expression. This misperception occurs because we have traditionally taught writing by emphasizing aspects of the expected product rather than fostering the sources that drive the process. If we succeed in fostering only that which can be expected, then language itself becomes static. However, playing random language games within a supportive community of writers can remove the fearful strictures of "Formal English," validate the personal response--- the source that drives the writing process, and return writing to a mode in which it is primarily a discovery of personal meaning.

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dislocation--- shacks and field labor and children lost to the inner city--- to talk about parents you long for, jobs you can't pin down. Poverty has generated its own damaged script, scars manifest in the spelling of a word."

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Random Language Games It is very important to note at this point that our language is a random language. By this I mean it employs random symbols, to represent random sounds that combine randomly to form longer sounds that have been arbitrarily assigned to represent ideas that jumble themselves together according to unplanned rules (and no, a grammarian did not originally write them up--- they just "occurred"), and all of this so we can sit and stare at little scratchings on a flat sheet of bleached-and-pressed fibers. The significance of all language lies exclusively in the experience of the individual. We bestow upon all this nonsense a meaning that resembles perhaps the meaning others perceive, but is never identical. It is amazing that we can even communicate as well as we do. Louise Rosenblatt (1978) points out that during most of the current instruction aimed at reading, what she terms an efferent approach is being encouraged. Rosenblatt's definition of efferent reading is reading that focuses upon what can be "carried away" from the text as opposed to aesthetic reading which focuses upon the experience during the reading. I would like to expand this idea to writing as well. We often focus so much upon what students should "put onto" the paper that we deny the experiential value of writing itself. Writing is an experience, not simply a documentation of an experience (real or imagined). It is also very much a social experience. I won't say that these games wouldn't be beneficial to the solitary writer, but they are best when shared within a group of writers. It is also important that you read what has gone before this section. It would be very easy for the traditional hands of English pedagogy to turn these games into dry exercises, and empty them of their usefulness. In any case, the writing teacher should adapt, change or rewrite these to suit personal preference, philosophy and, by all means, student need. Better yet, the writing teacher should come up with his or her own. There are many games of this type out there, and many waiting to be thought-of. You and your students should experiment--- play, and always expect to discover something unexpected. As Flannery O'Connor said once of fiction writing,

"If you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don't have to know what before you begin. In fact it may be better if you don't know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories. If you don't, probably nobody else will." (O'Connor p. 106)

I will move generally from the highly-structured, highly-random games toward the lesser-structured, lesser-random games in my descriptions. Usually it is best to work with writers in this way as well. The highly reluctant writer will generally do best starting with a highly structured game because he or she can rely on the "gameness" of it to alleviate initial fear. As the writer becomes more used to playing with language and discovering surprise meanings, he or she will be more prepared to participate in

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activities that would be more closely termed by the general populace as "writing." I have always termed what is produced by many of these games "poems" because the poetic form is usually more accepting of a syntax that doesn't produce anything similar to a sentence. If this creates a problem, if students are frightened by the idea that they are going to be writing "poetry," call them anything you like.

ONE-WORD BOOK POETRY:

I do this myself--- all the time when I'm "stuck," and I've used it in my classrooms with great results. Take a book. Open it. Drop your finger in--- anywhere. That's the first word of your poem. Now you write the next. You and the book take turns until you reach whatever time or space limit you've set for yourself. What occurs during this game is that odd combinations of words fall together creating syntactic havoc. The writer is forced to use words in unique ways, to adjust to accommodate sudden strange words that alter the feel of where it all was going. This can be expanded to "multiple-word" or "phrase" instead of one-word poetry. Make the rules you want to make and require strict adherence until the game is over. But always, once the game ends, the piece is the writer's to revise, change, throw away or whatever. It is always fun to read the "poems" in class with peers, especially when everyone has used the same "book words." Sometimes students will want to revise the entire piece, and after major rewriting, will have something really nice, something they could never have gone about writing by starting from a conscious level. Sometimes this game will produce a combination of words, even just two, that spark something that is written later. I once came up with a poem concerning a "disposable suicide," a phrase that just fell together for me in a one-word book poem. ONE-WORD PARTNER POETRY: This game is very much like the one-word book poetry, except that instead of a book as your partner, you have a real person. The two can take turns just like the book poetry, and most of the same variations can apply. The added feature of this game is that it requires real collaboration. It is very important that you stress that no communication or prompting or planning is to go on between the partners. Each partner must simply supply his or her next word--- that is all. If you play this game enough, with the same partners matched up, you'll find that a "connectedness" begins to grow between students. The individual will become frustrated with the other who "spoils" what he had in mind, but what you create is a situation in which two people are constantly "running ahead" in their minds and then readjusting to new directions and finally falling into a rhythm with one another. This also works well with each partner supplying an entire line of poetry. This is a great game between friends. Think of the potentials for writing dramas or dialogue! CUT-UPS:

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I got this idea from a friend who got it somewhere else--- so I'm not sure where it originated, but it's fascinating. Take a section of an article or a page of print. Literally cut it up with scissors, and then reconstruct it randomly, lining up lines of print. Fragments of sentences piece together making surprising, if not bizarre sense. Sometimes a word will get cut and be spliced onto another. I usually rewrite making a new word or writing in a word that is close or "seems implied" by the spliced fragments. I like to take these through several wholesale revisions, sometimes taking very free license, sometimes trying to stick close to the original. FOUND POETRY: This term is perhaps used to refer to many different things. The way I've used "found poetry" as a random language game is to randomly limit the vocabulary available to a single paragraph. Writers can pull out words, whole phrases, sentence segments, and arrange them, repeat them, do anything with them they like but without adding to them. One nice thing about giving a finite set of words to be used for a writing game, is that the student rarely wastes time trying to think of the "right" words. They must use the words at their disposal to the fullest, whether those words are contained in a paragraph of a story, or a list generated by the class, or a combination of random "word storehouses." Of course there are many other types of "found poetry" that come from garbage cans, magazines or box-tops. Students who see themselves as "arrangers" of language that already exists find comfort in the fact that they don't actually have to "produce" anything themselves. The ironic thing is, that's all we're doing when we write anyway! 60-SECOND POETRY: This is more for the writers who have gotten to the point where they can release themselves to make associations and ramble without being critical. It is a very time-restricted form of what many call "free-writing." The group sits in a circle and one person is the time-keeper. The time-keeper doesn't have to write, he or she chooses the topic and watches the clock, giving warnings at 30-sec., 15-sec., 5-sec., and finally, "time's up, finish the line you're on." The topics can be anything from a single word to a descriptive phrase. The writers can do anything they want with the topic--- it can be their first line or word, or it may have little or nothing to do with anything in the poem. Of course some writers will produce only lists while others will produce rhyme and meter. The important thing is the only instruction: "Clear you mind completely, and write your immediate response to whatever the time-keeper says." Writers who are forced to write "without thinking" often produce very lucid and utterly truthful writing. We generally go around the circle and read after each one, but of course, anyone who doesn't want to read can pass. Just make sure you rotate the time-keeper responsibility each time so everyone gets to write and to give a topic.

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IMPROVISATIONS OF ANY KIND: Writing is only one form of language use. There are many ways to open students up to the possibilities that language provides for expression other than putting pen to paper. Invite students to bring instruments and use them to improvise songs, or as background for improvised dances or scenes. Turn on a tape recorder and capture students as they improvise stories or poetry or dramas orally. Get together with the drama, art music and dance teachers. All forms of creative expression feed each other. You'll find that you've created a society of writers and artists. It's no accident that artists seek each other out. Within the nurturing community of those who accept personal expression in any form as valid, individuals can escape the fear of being "incorrect" and discover what they've always wanted to say. Works Cited:

Bogen, Don. Beyond the Workshop: “Suggestions for a Process-Oriented Creative

Writing Course.” Journal of Advanced Composition. Vol. V(1984). Britton, James N. “Now That You Go To School.” In Children and Writing in the

Elementary School, edited by Richard L. Larson, pp. 3-17. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Brodsky, Joseph. From an article by Francis X. Clines. New York Times, October 23, 1987. Encyclopedia of Educational Research, ed. Walter S. Monroe. Rev. ed. New York: MacMillon Co., 1950. Jones, James. Interview from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3

rd Series,

ed. George Plimpton. Viking, 1967. Kirby, Liner, and Vinz. Inside Out: Developmental Strategies for Teaching Writing. Portsmouth, NH:

Boynton / Cook Publishers, 1988. Levine, Philip. From an interview in Reading and Writing Poetry: Successful Approaches for the Student

and Teacher, Oryx, 1983. Macrorie, Ken. Uptaught. Hayden, 1970. Martin, Nancy and Jeremy Mulford. Children Using Language. Ed. Anthony Jones and Jeremy Mulford, pp.

153-73. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. McCaig, Roger A.. “What Research and Evaluation Tell Us About Teaching Written Expression in the

Elementary School.” In The Language Arts Teacher in Action. Ed. Constance Weaver and Rollin Douma, pp. 46-56. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University, 1977.

Miller, James E., Jr.. Word, Self, Reality: The Rhetoric of the Imagination. New York:

Dodd, Mead, 1972. Miller, James E., Jr.. and Stephan N. Judy. Writing in Reality. New York: Harper and

Row, 1978.

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Murray, Donald. Workshop on Writing at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, Spring, 1979.

O’Conner, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus

& Giroux, 1961.

Pollack, Irwin, and J.M. Pickett. "Intelligibility of Excerpts From Fluent Speech: Auditory vs., Structural Context." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 3 (1964): 79-84.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Rosenblatt, Louise M.. The Reader the Text the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the

Literary Work. Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. Slobin, Dan L., and Charles A. Welsh. "Elicited Imitation as a Research Tool in

Developmental Psycholinguistics." In Studies of Child Language Development. Ed. Charles A. Ferguson and Dan Isaac Slobin, pp. 485-97. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.

Weaver, Constance. Grammar for Teachers: Perspectives and Definitions. Urbana, IL.: National Council of

Teachers of English, 1979.