Rethink how we describe the work of “writing” to our students
One crucial goal I had as I wrote RYW was “Don’t mislead students about learning writing — even by implication.”
Most teachers I know struggle with the question of how to simplify the practice tasks we give to learners without getting so reductive that we are misrepresenting both the difficulty and the beauty of the work of the field. I think it’s particularly challenging for writing teachers to give supportive instructions and fair assessments to dozens of students when the true answer to most questions about writing is, “It depends.”
However, research shows that it can be as crucial—particularly for first-generation college students—for instructors to acknowledge difficulty as it is for us to simplify a challenge. When students who are struggling are told “it’s straightforward if you do it this way,” they may decide that “everyone else just gets it” and they are not personally cut out for a course, a field, or even college education as a whole. Instead of minimizing the challenges writers face, RYW addresses them up front, always aiming to demystify the work and invite more writers into it.
Here are five acknowledgments of difficulty that I have built into the foundations of RYW.
Writers get stuck—and can get unstuck—like all other practitioners.
RYW is designed at every turn to push back against the idea of “writer’s block” as a known-and-incurable condition unique to the work of writers. Imagine if we adopted the idea of “surgeon’s block,” “farmer’s block,” or even “teacher’s block,” and all those people just threw up their hands and went to get a snack from the fridge when the work got difficult. Writers’ work can be difficult: we all get stuck, novices and professionals, sometimes mightily. More often than not we can also assess the situation, try something for now, and keep moving forward.
Most writing tasks involve multiple purposes, mixed audiences, and blurry genres.
RYW is deliberately not organized by modes, purposes, or genres, because outside of a writing class, writing tasks are rarely identified in any of those ways. Novices can benefit from narrow skills drills: footballers jump on and off a block to build leg strength, cellists play scales, and writers map out argument strategies. But on the field or the stage, nobody confuses practice with the actual sport or the art. It can be convenient to assign an “expository essay” or a “research paper,” but those names can be misleading about the work of writing. RYW’s four purpose-focused chapters do support projects that are primarily one purpose, but they consistently cross-reference other purposes and practices that may be valuable, and they do not dominate the landscape of the book.
The most important work of a writer is choosing: not measuring, not imitating, and not fixing.
RYW coaches students to ask better questions about their goals, their resources, and their readers’ needs. Writing is not about producing a definable thing: a collection of this many words, using that particular structure, matching these narrow expectations about correctness. The new generative AI tools construct things, but they don’t write. Writing is about creating an experience, building a relationship, achieving a goal: I as a writer use a combination of signifiers to elicit a set of responses from you as a reader, or more often, from you all as readers. Since there are so many of you, and so many ways I might seek to provoke or engage you, I am awash in decisions to be made. The more we practice identifying choices, deciding, and assessing for ourselves how the decision played out, the faster we grow.
There is no “easy/ier type” of writing.
If I could have published RYW without numbering the chapters, I truly might have. The linearity of textbooks strongly suggests that their sequence is the sequence. And yet there is no one place that writers start. This is not just a question about outlining vs. brainstorming; it’s also a question about knowing the rules and breaking them; about asking questions or stating arguments; about the medium and the message. There are also no “easy” purposes or genres: narration is not always easier than argumentation, nor is a particular argument-focused rhetorical context equally difficult for all writers; likewise, we can imagine a heartbreakingly difficult 10-word text message and a fairly straightforward multimodal 200-page quarterly report. RYW chapters and modules are designed without assumptions about prior knowledge or earlier reading; they support faculty as they build in more or fewer hand-holds, guardrails, or resources, and engage students as they identify current areas of need or confidence.
Recursivity is pervasive.
The more a textbook appears to lay out steps for learners, the more it implies that the steps happen unidirectionally, even if one of the steps is stated as “do the three prior steps again.” RYW radically foregrounds recursivity. Reflection is modeled as a cycle that is so ongoing it’s almost fractal; inclusivity needs to be addressed in peer review as much as in editing; critical readers and researchers alike need to be active in at least three stages of their work; genres and modalities are contingent and dynamic; and a “brainstorming” exercise like “Off On a Rant” is as likely to be cross-linked in a revision-focused discussion as in a start-your-engines discussion. No chapter or module is an island, and no sequence is the best sequence.
An early working title for this book was Solving Writing Problems. However, feedback from a large number of faculty reviewers indicated that that title felt so negative that they would be hesitant to share it with their students, many of whom come to college burdened with doubts and injuries regarding their writing. RYW is still intended to acknowledge difficulty directly; I hope you will find that it is also inherently, inescapably encouraging of your students’ abilities to identify writing challenges, select and practice useful strategies, and successfully reach out to engage and move their readers.