“A Study of Writer’s Block, Part Two”

Last time we got a glimpse of the composing processes of students who had a hard time writing. This time, we’ll pick up with some discussion of fluent writers.

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What about the students who weren’t stymied, who wrote with relative fluency? They too talked of rules and assumptions and displayed planning strategies. The interesting thing, though, is that their rules were more flexible; that is, a rule seemed to include conditions under which it ought and ought not to be used. The rules weren't absolutes, but rather statements about what one might do in certain writing situations. Their assumptions, as well, were not absolute, and they tended to enhance composing, opening up rather than restricting possibilities. And their planning strategies tended to be flexible and appropriate to the task. Fluent writers had their rules, strategies, and assumptions, but they were of a different kind from those of the blocked writers.

What to do? One is tempted to urge the blocked writers to clear their minds of troubling rules, plans, and assumptions. In a few cases, that might not be such a bad idea. But what about Liz's preoccupation with passive constructions? Some degree of concern about casting one's language in the active voice is a good thing. And Gary's precise strategies? It would be hard to imagine good academic writing that isn't preceded by careful analysis of one's materials. Writers need the order and the guidance that rules, strategies, and assumptions provide. The answer to Liz's, Tyrrell’s, and Gary's problems, then, lies in altering their approaches to make them more conditional, adaptive, and flexible. Let me explain further. For the sake of convenience, I’ll focus on rules, though what I’ll say has application to the assumptions we develop and the planning strategies we learn.

Writing is a phenomenally complex learned activity. To write in a way that others can understand we must employ a large and complicated body of conventions. We learn from our parents or earliest teachers that script, in English, goes left to right straight across the page. We learn about letter formation, spelling, sentence structure, and so on. Some of this information we absorb more or less unconsciously through reading, and some of it we learn formally as guidelines, as directives ... as rules.

And there are all kinds of rules. Some tell us how to format our writing (for example, when to capitalize, how to paragraph, how to footnote). There are grammar rules (for example, "Make a pronoun agree in number with its antecedent”). There are preferences concerning style that are often stated as rules (“Avoid passive voice”). There are usage rules (“That always introduces restrictive clauses; which can introduce both restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses”). There are rules that tell us how to compose (“Before you begin writing, decide on your thesis and write it down in a single, declarative sentence”). The list goes on and on. Some of these rules make sense; others are confusing, questionable, or contradictory. Fortunately we assimilate a good deal of the information they contain gradually by reading other writers, by writing ourselves, or by simply being around print. Therefore, we can confirm or alter or reject them from experience.

But all too often the rules are turned into absolutes. And that's where the trouble begins. Most rules about writing should not be expressed (in textbooks), stored (in our minds), or enacted (on the page) as absolutes, as mathematical, unvarying directives. True, a few rules apply in virtually all situations (for example, certain formatting rules or capitalization rules). But most rules do not. Writing rules, like any rules about language, have a history and have a time and place. They are highly context-bound.

Should you always, as some textbooks suggest, place your thesis sentence at the beginning of your first paragraph or, as others suggest, work up to it and place it at the end of the paragraph? Well, the answer is that both injunctions are right ... and wrong. Students writing essay exams would be well-advised to demonstrate their knowledge and direct the reader’s attention as soon as possible. But the writer who wants to give a sense of intellectual discovery might offer a series of facts and events that gradually lead up to a thesis sentence. The writing situation, the rhetorical purpose, and the nature of the material one is working with will provide the answer. A single-edged rule cannot.

How about our use of language, usage rules? Certainly there’s a right and wrong here. Again, not quite. First of all, there’s a time in one's writing to worry about such things. Concern yourself with questions of usage too early in your composing and you’ll end up like Liz, worrying about the minutiae of language while your thought fades to a wisp. Second, the social consequences of following or ignoring such rules vary widely depending on whether you're writing formal or informal prose. Third, usage rules themselves have an evolutionary history: we aren’t obliged to follow some of the rules that early twentieth century writers had to deal with, and our rules will alter and even disappear as the English language moves on in time. No, there are no absolutes here either.

Well, how about some of the general, commonsense rules about the very act of writing itself? Certainly rules like "Think before you write” ought to be followed? Again, a qualification is in order. While it certainly is good advice to think through ideas before we record them for others to see, many people, in fact, use writing as a way of thinking. They make major decisions as they write. There are times when it's best to put a piece of writing aside and ponder, but there are also times when one ought to keep pen in hand or finger on keyboard and attempt to resolve a conceptual tangle by sketching out what comes to mind. Both approaches are legitimate.

I'll stop here. I hope I've shown that it's difficult to make hard and fast statements about the structure, the language, or the composing of an essay. Let me be clear: I’m not calling for an abandonment of rules, strategies, etc., but for a more context-sensitive and fluid use of them. Unfortunately, there’s a strong push in our culture to make absolute statements about writing, especially when issues of style and usage are concerned. But I hope by now the reader of this essay believes that most roles about writing – about how to do it, about how it should be structured, about what words to use – are not absolute, and should be taught and enacted in a flexible, context-dependent way. Given certain conditions, you follow them; given other conditions you modify or suspend them. A teacher may insist that a young writer follow a particular dictum in order to learn a pattern. That’s fine. But there also comes a time when the teacher extends the lesson and explains when the dictum is and isn't appropriate.

Our writing and how we do it can be such a personal thing. Certainly, most of us are at least a little sensitive about the writing we do. I hope this discussion has been helpful, if for no other reason then it gets us to reflect on how we write and make some adjustments to make that writing go a little easier.

A Study of Writer’s Block, Part One

We’ve been focusing on education policy – understandable, given the times – but I’d like to shift gears over the next few weeks and return our attention to teaching and learning, particularly to a study of writing that has applications for both the classroom and the tutoring center.

First, though, I’d like to briefly comment on the strong response I got to my last entry questioning the content and rhetoric of “21^st Century Skills” initiatives. Thanks to Andy, Roderick, some/one, ArtSparker, Joe, and Candace for your thoughtful responses. A shout-out to Andy who was one of the teachers I profiled in Possible Lives, a smart and decent guy, as you can see. And a reply to Candace. You ask “who or what are you pushing against exactly?” I suppose I’m pushing against the lure of the magic cure, which always comes packaged in the rhetoric of the “new”. (I say more about this in previous blogs.) And I’m concerned about the increased influence of technocratic approaches and corporate-speak on educational policy and practice.

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Now to the study of writer’s block. I’ll break it up into two parts: the present entry and a second to follow in a week or so. The study itself is one I did a long time ago, but it has just been reissued with a new preface (Writer’s Block: The Cognitive Dimension, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984/2009). In my experience teaching writing, I still find it pertinent and useful. What follows is a summary of the study, also written a long time back, though I revise it a bit for this blog.

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The students in the study are college undergraduates, but I think that the principles underlying their behavior hold true – in different manifestation – across a range of populations, your humble blogger included.

Here's Liz, a junior English major, at work on a paper for a college course. She has been given a two page case study and must analyze it using the ideas contained in a second, brief handout. She has about one hour to complete her assignment. As she reads and rereads the handouts, she scribbles notes to herself in the margins. Liz is doing what most effective writers would do with such materials: paraphrasing the main points in the passages, making connections among them, recording associations to other pertinent knowledge. But a closer look at all these interpretative notes reveals something unusual: Liz seems to be editing them as she goes along, cleaning them up as though they were final copy. In one of her notes she jots down the phrase “is saying that not having creative work is the....” She stops, thinks for a moment, and changes "is the" to "causes” (Later on, explaining this change, she'll comment that "you're not supposed to have passive verbs.") She then replaces "is saying" with "says," apparently following her directive about passive voice, but later changes it again, noting that “says” is "too colloquial." Liz pauses after this editing and looks up – she has forgotten what she initially was trying to capture in her writing. "That happens a lot," she says.

Liz was one of the many college students I studied over a two-and-one-half-year period The purpose of my study was to try to gain insight into what causes some young writers to compose with relative fluency and what leads others to experience more than their fair share of blocks, dead-ends, conflicts, and the frustrations of the blank page. What I uncovered was a whole array of problems that I would label as being primarily cognitive rather than primarily emotional in nature. That is, many students were engaging in self-defeating composing behaviors not because they had some deep-seated fear of revealing their thoughts or of being evaluated or because of some long-standing aversion to writing, but rather because they had somehow learned a number of rules, planning strategies, or assumptions about writing that limited rather than enhanced their composing. We saw Liz lose her train of thought by adhering too rigidly to stylistic rules when she should have been scribbling ideas freely in order to discover material for her essay. Let me offer two further vignettes that illustrate some of the other cognitive difficulties I uncovered.

Tyrrell, also a junior English major, says he doesn't like to sketch out any sort of plan or draft of what he's going to write. He’ll think about his topic, but his fingers won’t usually touch the pen or keyboard until he begins writing the one, and only, draft he’ll produce. As he writes, he pauses frequently and at length to make all sorts of decisions about words, ideas, and rhetorical effects. In short, he plans his work as he goes along. There's nothing inherently wrong with writing this way, but where difficult assignments involving complex materials are concerned, it helps to sketch out a few ideas, some direction, a loose organizational structure before beginning to write. When a co-worker and I studied Tyrrell's composing, we noted the stylistic flourishes in his essay, but also its lack of direction. As my colleague noted, “[His] essay bogs down in description and in unexplained abstractions." Perhaps the essay would have had more direction if Tyrrell had roughed out a few ideas before composing his one and only draft. Why didn't he do so? Consider his comment on planning:

[Planning] is certainly not spontaneous and a lot of times it’s not even really what you feel because it becomes very mechanical. It’s almost like – at least I feel – it’s diabolical, you know, because…it’ll sacrifice truth and real feelings that you have.

Tyrrell assumes that sketching out a plan before writing somehow violates the spontaneity of composing: to plan dooms one to write mechanical, unemotional prose. Yet, while too much planning may sometimes make the actual writing a joyless task, ii is also true that most good writing is achieved through some kind of prefiguring, most often involving pen and paper or keyboard and screen. Such planning does not necessarily subvert spontaneity; in fact, since it reduces the load on the writer's immediate memory, it might actually free one to be more spontaneous, to follow the lead of new ideas as they emerge. Tyrrell’s assumption, then, is inaccurate. By recognizing only this one path to spontaneity, he is probably limiting his effectiveness as a writer and, ironically, may be reducing his opportunities to be spontaneous.

Gary is an honors senior in biochemistry. When I observed him, he spent half of his writing time meticulously analyzing each sentence of the assignment’s reading passages on one of the handouts. He understood the passage and the assignment well enough but wanted to make sure the passage was sufficiently broken down to be of use when he composed his essay. As Gary conducted this minute analysis, he wrote dozens and dozens of words and phrases across the handouts. He then summarized these words and phrases in a list of six items. He then tried to condense all six items into a thesis sentence:

I have concepts…and my task here is to say what is being said about all of those all at once.

Gary's method was, in this case, self-defeating. He worked in too precise a fashion, generating an unwieldy amount of preliminary material, which he didn't seem able to rank or thin out – and he was unable to focus his thinking in a single thesis sentence. Gary’s interpretive and thinking strategies were inappropriately elaborate, and they were inflexible. It was not surprising that when Gary's hour was up he had managed to write only three connected sentences. Not really an essay at all.

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This is the first cliffhanger in my blog’s history. Tune in next time to meet some of the fluent writers in the study.