Theory and Pedagogy for Instructors: Adaptation & Transfer of Writing Skills	"Many Fields" Home Page
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How can students more easily transfer
writing skills to other courses and to work?

            All "Theory for Instructors" pages such as this are introductory essays for instructors learning to apply theory to pedagogy.  This paper, a shorter version of which was presented at the 2003 Modern Language Association Conference in San Diego, discusses how and why students seem to have so much trouble transferring learned writing skills to other courses and to their professional work.  The paper offers several possible solutions, especially teaching students to reflect upon their own writing self, their writing community around them, and the metacognitive structures of writing they have learned to use.  

Inductive Writing: From Classroom to Workplace (4-28-04)

            I recall a third-year student majoring in literature whom I taught at the University of Minnesota, who--in editing--was one of the worst upper-division students I ever have had.  In her favor, her analytical writing and thinking were of at least middling quality, and her authorial tone and voice made her sound like a literature major.  However, not only was her use of punctuation atrocious; she also wrote sentences that were pretzels.  She bent them with comma splices, salted them liberally with incorrect punctuation, and broke them into fragments.  A year later, after working with her diligently and seeing some small improvement, I ran into her outside of the College of Liberal Arts Writing Center.  On the verge of graduation, she told me excitedly that she had gotten her first job.  A firm in downtown Minneapolis had hired her as a professional writer.  As I congratulated her, I wondered whether the company had asked for a sample, and I imagined that she knew as little about workplace writing as she did about editing.  As I bid her good luck, I actually felt sorry for her new employer and fantasized calling him to offer a warning.  The problem with teaching almost any kind of literature--and the content of nearly all courses--is that students remember little of the content and even less of the critical thinking underlying the teaching of the content.  Paul Gruchow, an essayist and author of The Necessity of Empty Places describes this problem well from his youth: "I have a keen memory of the two years I spent memorizing every single word of Luther's Small Catechism.  At the end of our study, you could give me a page number, and I could recite it from top to bottom.  But today I can't tell you one thing I learned from that class about the vocation of a religious life.  The only thing I do remember, as a matter of fact, is our pastor's halitosis" (Williams B6).

English Majors and the Workplace

            English majors maintain a peculiar place in the opposing academic and workplace poles of tension, supposedly like magnetic opposites.  On the one hand, they are the “lit” and “creative” people—concerned with high- and far-flung abstractions and sensitivities.  On the other, after graduation, many English majors enter the general business and professional workforce.  Like other liberal arts majors, they discover their writing skills are not easily transferable.  And while businesspeople say they like having English majors and, in fact, most middle-size and large businesses have room for “creative” types who can write newsletters and other publishable information, it is also is true that English majors—and communications majors along with them—are among the lowest-paid entering workers in the marketplace.  The National Association of Colleges and Employers “Salary Survey” shows this low pay in its Fall 2003 comparison of nineteen academic categories.  The survey states that English language and literature majors are offered an average, yearly, first-time salary of $28,786, and communications majors 30,565.  These contrast with computer engineering (51,343), business (42,244 and 36,012), accounting (40,647), economics/finance (39,438), nursing (38,751), and information sciences (38,282).  Even history, political science, and elementary education are slightly higher than English.  The only category lower than English is psychology (“University”). 

            As a result, while some English majors may be truly brilliant, the low starting pay for such majors means that an undergraduate English program also may attract a greater number of middling students—those who are less likely to attend graduate school, less competitive, and/or less able to master the mathematics or science necessary for many higher-paying professions.  The great irony of this is that in many instances, employers believe their English major employees are among those most capable of writing for the workplace. 

            The problem is not confined to English majors alone.  Elizabeth Tebeaux, who works with technical writing courses and their teachers at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Texas A&M,  reports in Teaching English in the Two-Year College that students who have had first-year required composition not only cannot transfer what they have learned to the workplace, but also do not have the skills needed for writing at work (“Trouble”).  It is arguable that even the best students in all disciplines have significant difficulty transferring writing skills. 

            Part of the problem is complexity.  Lucille Parkinson McCarthy points out in Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum, “Studies of writing in non-academic settings have shown just how complex these writing environments are and how sophisticated the knowledge—both explicit and tacit—is that writers need in order to operate successfully in them (Odell & Goswami, 1985)” (127).  Even in moving from one course to another, students experience difficulties.  McCarthy followed a student through one class per semester of his first two years of college, interviewing both him and his instructors.  She said that for him and most others, “the contexts for writing may be so different form once classroom to another, the ways of speaking in them so diverse, the social meanings of writing and the interaction patterns so different, that the courses may be for the student writers like so many foreign countries” (151).  Many college graduates feel that they must start over entirely in learning how to write when they begin writing in the workplace.  The writing world of the average English major in both literature and composition classes is a zeitgeist narrowly defined by the fields of literature and of belletristic writing for the liberal arts academy.  How, then, can students move from their major to the workplace?

            I remember my own difficult transition.  My first degrees were in philosophy, creative, writing, and theology, but I faced the same problems as English majors.  I first held a job in which there was little writing to do except brief, summarizing reports.  After several years, I decided to become a freelance writer.  I started by mailing a brief description of thirty-four academic and expository essays I had written to about 150 magazines.  The rejection slips poured in.  Only seven editors asked to see ten of my essays.  I sent the essays, and the editors rejected all ten.  Fortunately, three editors taught me a much-needed, simple lesson: they expressed a continuing interest in my topics and suggested that I rewrite according to the standards of the articles in their own magazines.  Like most important revelations, what they requested seemed so obvious that I felt rather silly in not having understood it before.  I promptly used the articles in each magazine as a template for writing for that magazine, sent three new articles, and had two of the three accepted for publication.  With that, I was on my way, and I continued on to have my articles and stories published in magazines some one hundred times before I changed my career to teaching, a reasonably significant success in a period of several years.  What is significant is that the editors had to tell me what to do.  So, I suspect, in one way or another, do most coordinators of new employees. 

            So, just what is it that you should “tell” your English majors, and more importantly, how do you tell them?  I believe that a first step is to perceive the learning of writing as an incremental or developmental series of events.  Traditionally, many people outside of English—and some within it—think of first-year required composition as a one-time fix, after which most students should be able to write well in any discipline.  Increasingly, however, studies and anecdotal evidence indicate the opposite. 

            For example, Lee Ann Carroll argues the developmental model in her recent book Rehearsing New Roles—How College Students Develop as Writers, a research project funded in part by the National Council of Teachers of English.  Carroll’s longitudinal study is one of very few research projects ever developed to examine student writing in the disciplines over a period of time.  Carroll followed twenty students from several disciplines through four undergraduate years of writing.  According to Carroll, after her students’ first-year composition sequence was finished,

it is clear that the next major transitions in their development as writers took place as they struggled to integrate the content knowledge, concepts, and research and writing conventions in . . . disciplines.  This is the “teachable moment” . . . .  We found that the research and writing courses that some of our study students took . . . , for example, in psychology and history, were quite effective in making explicit the often tacit expectations of the field and could be usefully instituted in other disciplines.  (124-5)

            Indeed, there are two excellent examples of collegiate writing programs in my own state, Minnesota, that recognize the developmental nature of writing as a bridge between first-year required composition and the later world of work.  About two decades ago the University of Minnesota and a private college, Hamline (now Hamline University ), both moved to develop a continuing writing program.  The University of Minnesota had a two-course sequence of required first-year writing; it moved the second course to the junior year in discipline-focused courses such as “Writing about Science,” “Technical Writing for Engineers,” “Writing in the Social Sciences,” etc.  All of them focused on writing for the workplace or for graduate school.  Hamline College took a different path: it began requiring students to take at least one “writing intensive” course per year—a disciplinary course with an emphasis on writing.  This model was sufficiently successful that the University of Minnesota switched to a similar writing-intensive system several years ago.  It now requires two lower-division and two-upper-division writing intensive courses of all its students after first-year required composition. 

            While discipline-specific, writing-intensive courses are becoming more common in American post-secondary institutions, still other universities are building writing (and, often, speech and critical thinking) skills directly into each disciplinary major or even each course.  Elizabeth Tebeaux describes, for example, in a 1988 JAC, how her school, Texas A&M, developed a graduate course, “Analysis of Technical Writing,” for its graduate students in English and encourages graduate TAs to teach a similar undergraduate course.  “The [graduate] course,” she says, “has been an unqualified success.”  In addition, “[e]very graduate student who has gained experience by teaching our basic undergraduate technical writing course has secured a teaching position.  Many have had multiple job offers” (“Training”).

            These useful developmental models of training students in disciplinary writing help students prepare better for the workplace.  However, an immediate question arises concerning English majors: how do you prepare them developmentally for the diversity of the general professional workplace?  And second, isn’t there some way you can help them transfer all the writing that they do in English classes to the workplace?

Experience-oriented Classrooms

            Some immediate possibilities spring to mind in response to the first question about preparing them developmentally.  One is to encourage or even require English majors to take professional-writing courses.  Recently a colleague of mine suggested that graduate schools of English should offer a course in grant writing, writing for academic presentation and publication, and writing a curriculum vita, which are the material writings of the profession of English.  This brings to mind once again Texas A&M’s development of its graduate course in technical writing as part of its graduate rhetoric program (Tebeaux, “Training”).  A third answer is to encourage the development of courses that teach writing in specific disciplines and of writing-intensive courses across the curriculum, and then somehow to reward English majors for taking such courses.  A fourth answer is to create a business and professional track within English-major programs. 

            All of these possible solutions rely on experience.  Diane Hacker, author of A Writer's Reference and The Bedford Handbook, says what has become obvious to the great majority of professionals in the teaching of writing during the past thirty years: "Most learning [about writing] occurs during the process of writing" (298).  By “process of writing” she means in its most basic sense active writing.  Thus the entire concept of the value and meaning of writing as a “developmental” event throughout college and beyond means developmental experience. 

            Barbara Couture argues in Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric, “All essences or truths are located in subjective experience . . .” (4).  The essences and truths students need to learn about writing are available not just through abstract lecture and text but also—and more appropriately—through their own experience.  For this reason, it is important to develop experiential classrooms.  In the experiential classroom, students learn to respect their subjective experience and that of other writers, student or professional.  Such experience seems to be the only relatively sure grounding that many students will respect and, more importantly, the only one from which many of them can learn.  Kurt Spellmeyer, writing in a 1996 College English, calls such experience a paradigm of “ordinary sensuous life, which is  . . . the ground of thought itself . . .” (“After” 893-4).  “For all our celebrations of resistance and revolt, no alternative is more revolutionary than . . . the pursuit of wholeness in our immediate experience” (910).  While it may not be necessary to cast aside “resistance and revolt” in English theory—in fact, an experiential approach actually can assist them, as noted later in this paper—still, Spellmeyer’s insistence on “ordinary sensuous life” is important in considering how students can transfer their writing to the very immediate, ordinary, and “sensuous” workplace.  

            Regarding "ordinary sensuous life," mimicry plays an important part.  Recent research suggests that learning by mimicry recreates not just the external appearance of a skill but also the inner sense or spirit of its milieu.  Judy Foreman, a lecturer on medicine at Harvard Medical School and an affiliated scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, reports on Paul Ekman's studies of empathy.  Ekman is a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.  According to Foreman, Ekman says that empathy "builds on primitive imitation" (Foreman E5).  Foreman adds that Ekman's work supports the idea that "merely imitating someone's facial expression can elicit that feeling in oneself.  But his work also suggests that facial mimicry is not absolutely necessary for empathy.  His studies show that patients with facial paralysis...can develop normal cognitive and emotional empathy."  The implication of this work in empathy for writing skills is that students may best learn how professionals not only write but also feel about that writing, and how these professionals live within their own professional skins--with a holistic world view that not only needs such writing and causes it to happen, but also that interconnects deeply with the lived experience of the profession.  The same can be said of academic disciplinary writing: the lived experience of a discipline may be gained at least in part by mimicking the writing patterns and rituals of the discipline.  Mimicry by a first- or second-year writer may not duplicate a discipline's work, but it can more easily lead a student to the core of the discipline.  Nancy Sommers, Sosland Director of Expository Writing at Harvard, says of "imitative behavior" that "it is the means through which students learn and grow passionate about their work, as well as the means through which they eventually have a chance to write their way into original ideas" (1).  It is for this reason, she argues, that we should ask each freshman student "to do the work of an expert" through teaching them the writing methods and tools used by academics.  Mimicry thus is not only a way to teach people through experience how professionals write, but also a method to teach beginning college students how to become good academic writers.

            With that said, the more interesting question to me of the two I posed above is how, indeed, might students transfer the writing lessons common to traditional English courses? 

            I remember a moment of surprise I experienced as a young writer in my last year of high school in the 1960s, long before concepts of process, audience, and the like had come to my prairie community.  We students had a very brave, innovative English teacher, fresh from college, who asked us to write and to develop several types of speeches.  The assignment that really turned my head was to write and then present to the class a speech that was humorous.  I loved writing and had already won a county award for an historical paper, so my confidence was high as I began to work on the speech.  I immediately was shocked as it dawned on me that I had no idea how to write for my class, especially, as the assignment directed, to “make people laugh.”  In the midst of a seizure of fear, I first discovered the real meaning of the term audience.  I solved my problem by writing a pseudo-report on Mad magazine that successfully had some people crying with laughter (a paper I still remember with both fondness and guilt, the latter occasioned by using a form with which I was familiar—a book report—incorporating humor that was not my own invention.  As I later reflected, however, I learned not only that I could vary the style, tone, and content according to a specific audience, but also that real experience can change writing requirements dramatically. 

            All of you could easily write a list of such lessons that you would like your students to learn.  And I assume you all would like your students, with each writing assignment, to absorb the elements of good writing (while, of course, they also deliver brilliant contents) and transfer all these writing elements from that writing task to the next.  The truth is, however, that in content courses, usually only a minority—the top students—make the transfer, and then only incompletely.  The remaining students do so even less completely, and in fact many of them remain blithely innocent of their writing needs from course to course, let alone for their future jobs and the professional writing tasks they will be asked to assume.  Art Young says in his December 2002 CCC review of Anne Beaufort’s Writing in the Real World that if the college students in Beaufort’s study “had learned to create . . . abstractions and their attending conceptual language, especially regarding discourse communities and genres, [they] might have constructed a metacognitive framework for problem solving to aid their development from novice to expert writers…” (314).

            For most English majors, I would argue, this metacognitive framework must be developed from the ground up, starting with experience—an inductive approach, as this paper’s title suggests.  Inductive instruction is part of the legacy of the American educational establishment of Jerome Bruner.  However, in this paper, inductive does not in any way refer to the current-traditional method of teaching starting with grammatical units in early education and then building to rhetorical modes in college.  Rather, Bruner argued for education as a process of “discovery” from students’ own experiences.  The process writing movement, the inclusion of small-group work in classrooms, the creative writing “workshop” method, the WAC movement, and the recent “learning by doing” movement all have contributed significantly to what this paper perceives as the current or, perhaps, “neo-inductive” discovery model for developing writing skills which is current in the practices of teaching writing. 

            In the context of this paper’s subject, transfer of writing skills, I intend “discovery” and induction simply to mean that Art Young’s “metacognitive framework,” along with its writing elements and writing lessons, should come primarily from the concrete, experiential, moments that Spellmeyer calls “ordinary sensuous life,” and that such moments lead to what Young calls a “metacognitive framework.”  This “life” and this “framework” must be, in learning and teaching writing, simple, concrete, existential conditions of immediacy.  That is, they must be writing moments that come from real writing in real situations, whether academic or work related and whether real or modeled in role playing.

            Such moments also can come from shared experience—for example, in reading about and sharing the real experiences of other real writers.  I would argue, however, that the further you abstract such writing lessons from the existential experience of the writer herself, the less likely she is to really learn the lessons.  Abstract lessons may be useful, but they disappear quickly from a typical student’s memory if they are not repeatedly applied. 

            So, the original question remains: how can you provide existential writing experiences in typical English courses, especially content courses, that are transferable to the workplace?  I would argue the typical student cannot transfer her writing skills well precisely because she perceives the skills as specific to a particular task.  When, for example, she is working on an interpretive thesis, she does not perceive herself as a writer who happens to be using one particular mode or genre of writing; rather, she sees herself only as a student of literature who is thinking about literature.  She needs, instead, as part of her writing experience, to step away from the content enough to see herself as a writer doing writerly things using one of more of many possible modes, genres, and elements.  She needs to develop a metacognitive framework that builds on each writing experience.  And she needs help in developing it. 

Three Learner Modes: Writing Self, Community, and Structures

            There are, I believe, several ways to help students develop a metacognitive framework..  One with which I have recently experimented is a heuristic methodology--a systematic method of inquiry--by early twentieth century philosopher Edmund Husserl.  He called his method (and the philosophy supporting it) “Phenomenology.”  As some of you probably are aware, the word phenomenology was in use long before Husserl by Kant, Hegel, and others.  As a general term it means, simply, “of or pertaining to phenomena.”  After Husserl developed his philosophy by that name, many philosophers and language theorists used his philosophy to develop applications that are considered more contemporary, especially in the United States: e.g., Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida, and others.  However, here my concern is not with his philosophy but rather with the methodology of inquiry he claimed for it.  This methodology is particularly well suited to developing a heuristic, learner-centered understanding of making knowledge more transferable.  

              In this methodology, Husserl offers three elements useful in heuristic inquiry: self, community, and structures or patterns.  With apologies to Husserl, these three may be specified in terms of learning as the learning self, a community of learning selves, and the structures of learning.  Husserl intended the elements of his methodology to be applicable not only to general inquiry but also to inquiry in specific disciplines.  Thus it is possible to specify the above three elements further, in their application to the student experience of learning writing.  The result of this is, for each student,

1. a writing self,

2. a community of writing selves (whether directly experienced among peers or through writing textbooks and guides), and 

3. the basic structures or patterns of writing (which writers experience and learn to use).  

Each of these three is, in turn, heuristic--a tool of inquiry giving rise to writing knowledge leading to expertise.  Let me next describe each of these heuristics—writing self, writing community, and the structures of writing—as Husserl have.

            First is the writing self.  It is the most basic, immanent self or awareness each person has.  Husserl argues that in order to perceive fully and accurately, people must be full of awareness, able to perceive their own experiences as what they are in themselves, rather than immediately labeling the experiences.  He calls this state or predisposition of awareness the fundamental “ego cogito”—the “I-Knowing”—which he considers “the ultimate . . . basis for judgments” (31).  This ego or self, he says, is “prior in the order of knowledge to all Objective being” (27).  Each student has this fundamental awareness, which in writing experiences may be termed a writing self.  The linguistic or social theory counterarguments that each person is, instead, simply a biological unit reflecting language and/or society may have validity in another context.  However, in constructing an existential method that assists with transfer of real writing skills from real academic writing situations to real workplace experiences, it is useful at the least, and perhaps necessary, to work with the universal working myth of an independent, individual self.  As Michael Polanyi says in Personal Knowledge, “As human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves. . . .  Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity” (quoted in Murphy 72) or, one might say, uselessness—at least in terms of the workplace.

            Second is the community of writing selves.  The individual writing self has its parallels in others physically or psychically nearby.  There is, says Husserl, “an intersubjective world . . .” (91): a community of what he calls “monads,” such community being a “harmony of the monads” that coexist as a simple, basic “fact of the experiential world . . .” (107-8).  In writing experience, there is, then—by Husserl’s terms—a community of writers composed of individual writing selves.  This is, emphatically, a community of experience: of differing existential writing events experienced by differing individuals. 

            There are several levels or layers of closeness in this community that exist in interwoven concentric circles.  The closest for student or workplace writers often is each other, working in groups or as a class, sharing actual writing experiences and stories of their writing with each other.  This also includes any instructor who participates in class, group, or course writing equally with her students.  At second remove is the instructor who tells stories about her past writing experiences, and guests or speakers in the classroom who tell their own stories about writing and demonstrate their own practices while the class observes.  At third remove are testimonials, explanations, and stories from such sources as textbooks, videos, and general public speeches about writing.  Generally, the most immediate community generally tends to create the strongest retention among students; however, all three of these circles are important to developing writing community.  Often, it is better to explain this community to students just as it has been above: as a central community—the specific class or workplace—that really is composed of multiple extensions or multiple communities.  . 

            The third element is the structures of writing.  They are the existential, experiential, repetitive patterns of writing that people use to organize their writing—the organizing structures and events of writing.  They are what Husserl calls “universal . . . forms” (28).  For example, process writing is identifiable in what Husserl calls the “universal . . . immanent temporal form,” and freewriting is identifiable as Husserl’s “stream of subjective processes.”  Other Phenomenological structures include the rhetorical modes (in Husserl’s “pairing,” “synthesis,” “analogy,” and “identification”) and, more broadly, any standard, experienceable writing structure or event that is commonly recognizable.  For example, Kinneavy’s communication triangle (with writing equivalents in parentheses) of “encoder” (writer), “decoder” (reader), “reality” (that to which the message refers”), and “signal” (language) is one (19).  Others are the elements of rhetoric such as style, voice, tone, and audience.  Methods also are structures: for example, Ann Berthoff’s “close reading.”    

            According to Mari Haneda and Gordon Wells, research consistently shows that “[w]riting is first and foremost concerned with developing a structure of meaning . . .” (432).  Noteworthy in Haneda and Wells’ comment is the word “developing”: in a phenomenological methodology, structures cannot be mere abstractions.  They must be existential to students, who need to discover them in an experiential context.  They cannot remain unspoken and unstudied.  They should not be merely transparent or intuited.  And they cannot be merely discussed without practice.  They must be clear, obvious, repeatable, and practicable sufficient for students to see them clearly, learn them, and be aware on some level of them always operating in the background.  In short, the structures must be heuristic realities—tools that students learn from their own experience or that they learn from others and then apply on their own continually.  There must also be a metacognitive perception of using them—a perception that behind the contents of their papers, their structures are operating like quiet background machines to smooth the process and, indeed, to make the delivery of the contents work well. 

            Such structures are what Derrida found in Husserl as the background and primal substance of a series of unveilings and reconstructions.  Essentially, using Husserl’s methodology, you want students to unveil old writing assumptions and (re)construct new writing experiences, new writing selves, and new writing communities from very real structures.

Writer Experience, Writer Thinking, and Writer Sharing