Week 2

What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?"

I think the answer to this question is in the Ede and Lunsford article where they state:

“One of the factors that makes writing so difficult, as we know, is that we have no recipe: each rhetorical situation is unique and thus requires the writer, catalyzed and guide by a strong sense of purpose, to reanalyze and reinvent solutions.”

I would have to agree with this based on my professional experience. Every document I write has a different purpose, specifications and audience, therefore, there is no formula to be rotely followed making the writing process unique for each document. Learning generally starts with the regurgitation of knowledge and then moves into application and analysis according to Blooms Taxonomy. Writing doesn’t work like this - it is a craft that has to be practiced and has a learning curve that must be overcome before basic proficiency is achieved. Also there are vast differences in the skills and/or knowledge required for different genres of writing that maybe prerequisites to any writing skills.

It is also very difficult to teach writing because it is a very internal non-linear and personalized process unlike reading, speaking or listening that are more linear and can be external evaluated. I think one way to overcome these obstacles is to view drafts of documents. Almost everything one reads, who is not an editor, is in its finished state, which may not be how it was drafted.

Addressing the audience aspect of the Ede and Lunsford article, I almost completely disagree with the idea of invoked audience, where the writer imagines the audience. This may be due to my past training and current work in biomedical science which is very product driven and not at all process driven. Every document is specifically tailor to audience that is very real, makes real decisions that have real consequences. While I may not personally know the audience, I do generally know their background and level of knowledge to which I tailor the document.

Also in the Ede and Lunsford article is the analysis of Mitchell and Taylor where they highlight the role on the audience in the writing process. As a biomedical communicator I feel it’s my role to effectively communicate the data and the implications where good writing effectively communicates and bad writing ineffectively communicates. More and more audiences are becoming interactive participants in the writing process via the post pubiclation peer-review process that occurs on sites such as Faculty of 1000 and PLoS. I think one learns how to write well by practice and feedback from a mentor or their audience.

Early in the Ede and Lunsford they highlight how Mitchell and Taylor advocate for writing instruction within subject matter courses. While some aspects of ‘good’ writing are universal, many more aspect are genre and field specific. Student would likely benefit from learning how to effectively write in their discipline of choice.