STRANDED 101

Writing Workshop (ENGL 101) is a one-semester course which nearly all first-year Mary Washington students must take. It introduces them to college writing, focusing on exposition, research, and argument. It’s not a disguised introduction to literature; as a department we insist that the course focus on writing.

Both Gardner and I have been relatively successful teaching this course in the past. But we both felt that the students’ engagement in their work often lacked passion, so we weren’t getting the best writing they were capable of doing. Instead most were producing the kind of bland, safe monochrome prose with which they had succeeded in high school. It wasn’t usually very good monochrome prose, of course, so we always had plenty of work to do. But we wanted more. We wanted writing the students really cared about.

For completely irrelevant reasons Gardner read Stranded, insisted that I read it too (we talk about music a lot), and the idea of using it in Writing Workshop blossomed. Because music is the art form with which most students are most deeply engaged, we guessed that they would be interested in and care about it. Stranded offered a simple premise for writing, and we knew that the range of styles and attacks in the various essays would noticeably enlarge our students’ sense of possibilities.

After a good deal of talk we came up with a common syllabus carrying our students through a series of increasingly demanding writing assignments. We also decided to make the writing real by “publishing” their final piece on the World Wide Web. Then we added one last riff: a listserv (electronic discussion group) to which every student had to contribute at least two substantive postings a week.

None of this is remarkable, of course. Our design simply implements a few ideas widely circulated among writing teachers: make it interesting, make it real, use interlocking assignments that build constructively on each other, use the web, use email. I thought it would work.

I had no idea it would work as spectacularly as it did.

I don’t think Stranded is a magic book, and I’m not sure music is a magic subject for writing. But I do know that Stranded offers a stylistic energy and variety absent from any other set of readings I’ve used in over 25 years of teaching composition. And I realized, about halfway through the semester that music just might be a magic subject for teaching writing. First, it’s tangible. You can bring it into the room and hear what people are trying to write about (we did this every day). But it’s also very hard to describe with any kind of success.

One story. We were reading Ariel Swartley’s essay on Bruce Springsteen, so I brought in the CD she was writing about. First we read her words describing the intros to three Springsteen songs. Then we listened to one intro, read her words again, and speculated about what the second and third intros would sound like. Then we listened and read again. Was she right? Yes and no. Then (this was Gardner’s idea), we spent the rest of the period listening to songs and writing paragraphs which narrated the musical events in the songs, not the stories the lyrics were telling. For the first time (I kid you not) in my years of teaching composition, students began to really look at the words a writer was using, testing Swartley’s writing against the sounds we were hearing. In the following weeks, a garden of specific, careful diction blossomed in their writing (no, not everyone’s). I had actually taught something about style, about specificity, about living prose, to nearly a whole class of freshmen. Thank you, Ariel.

As we know, reality bites. Two students in their anonymous course evaluations reported that they didn’t like writing about music, and one of those two complained that I talked more about music than I did about writing. Not true, but everyone who’s taught writing has gotten this response: when you’re not talking about something like comma splices you’re not teaching writing. So the course wasn’t magic — or it wasn’t magic for every student.

But it was magic for me.

The course elements that worked especially well, I think, were the assignment sequence, the listserv, and the goal of web publishing.
The Assignment Sequence

Our students wrote four essays: a response to Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature,” an explanation of their DID (Desert Island Disc) in purely personal terms, a response to their research on the DID, and the final essay for the Web, which ingested, rethought, refelt, and reexpressed everything else they had written (follow the links for our assignment handouts).

In responding to the Percy essay, we wanted them to deal with a strong, slippery piece of writing in a way which required not only textual but introspective analysis. We wanted them to read and watch themselves reading, write and watch themselves writing. We wanted them to break through the distinction between perceiving subject and perceived object which makes the world dead and in doing so kills the observer. It was a tough assignment, and most of my students didn’t quite rise to it. But nearly all of them really tried.

Their first essay on the DID was a personal, subjective paper in which they didn’t have to convince anybody of anything except that they had chosen their disc thoughtfully. But we insisted that this essay be vivid, evocative, precise — that it convey truly their own involvement with music that meant something to them. They had to dig beneath the cliches and the casual expressions of taste through which we usually talk about art that moves us.

Their research essay had to be more than a report on the band or the singer. They had to find information, digest it, reframe their thinking about the DID through the information they had located, and produce a formal piece about the disc (with appropriate documentation, of course).

The final essay required rereading everything they had written and rethinking everything they had thought for a new audience (you). Up to this point, they had been writing to each other. Now they had to imagine a whole range of audiences who might visit this web site and really face the challenge of speaking in front of the world. The idea of real readers — not just teachers and other students — made everything about writing real. They (most of them) really worried about style, structure, even punctuation. Because they had begun to imagine you, their writing became real to them.

The Listserv

We set up a listserv which all students in both classes were required to join and to which they were required to offer at least two substantive posts per week. One of these was to be a “Treasure Island” entry — a very brief, almost haiku-like description of a single song or album that deserves attention (Stranded provides models for this genre). As listservs usually do, ours took off; it reached orbit in the first week with Jeremy’s impassioned post on the Grateful Dead. Then we had a flame war (the first of several), followed by the students’ absolute, complete appropriation of the list: they began setting their own topics for discussion which they pursued thoughtfully (or not), complete with flak on the margins and in the background.

I’ve used journals in Writing Workshop for years as a way of getting students to do a fair amount of ungraded writing, hoping that they get in the habit of writing. But journals have never really worked for me. On the listserv, about half my students wrote far more than they had to, and they wrote with real concern, sayingthings they wanted to say (I guess they wanted to say them). They also had to deal with real readers, who did real things like misunderstand or misread them. So they had to take responsibility for the confusion their writing caused. I think the experience of backing up and explaining themselves — or watching others do it — helped them begin imagining real audiences.

Most of the time Gardner and I stayed out of the conversation. We answered direct questions, and occasionally volunteered a thought. So the list helped us teach by providing a way of communicating outside of class. It also, I think, helped us become real people for our students.

Web Publishing

As we moved into our last weeks and preparing the paper for the web, the list suddenly tossed up an interesting anxiety: several students expressed reservations about having their essays available for anyone to read. What better evidence that web publishing was real for them? And several other students wanted to know if they could change their papers after the semester was over. Think about this: both of us had students coming to us wanting to work on this essay after grades were done. Of course we said they could. By that point in the semester, you — the unknown web visitor — were present in their minds. You were making them nervous, and you were making them want to offer their absolute best work.

I’m still not sure music is a magic subject for freshman writing, and maybe we were just lucky this time. Certainly we had wonderful students, and both of us were deeply engaged in what we were doing. But we’ve always got pretty good students, and both of us always work hard at teaching this most difficult of all courses to teach. So I’m thinking that maybe we struck gold. Music, the assignment sequence, the listserv, and web publishing fused into a course that was in every way as good as I had dreamed it could be. It was different from what I had imagined, and I’m sure that next time it will be different again, in some new way. But it was as good as I had dreamed. That’s never happened to me before.

Thanks, guys. You were great.

Bill Kemp

March 1998