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Voices

A Professor's Voice: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age by Michael McGregor

Of all the students I've taught, few seemed less likely to spark an epiphany than he did. A white-haired, hard-faced man in his 50s, he had squandered his post-high school years dealing drugs and living the high life. When we met to discuss his writing, he told me he once had a mansion, expensive cars, and his choice of any number of women. Then the police arrived at his door. He spent the next seven years inside one of America's least-enlightened institutions, a Texas prison. After his release, he drifted to New York and somehow found his way into the continuing education program at Columbia University. He was still on probation that year and his writing, as you might imagine, was a mess.

When I met him, I was a second-year graduate student teacher. My first year, I'd learned to cruise through freshman composition papers. I could mark a two-page essay and add an endnote in 10 minutes flat. But the continuing education students slowed me down. Life experience made their writing more diverse and many of them had idiosyncratic habits of thought. The man from Texas did more than slow me; he stopped me dead. As I stared at his paper one day, trying to understand his syntax and word choice, I realized I was looking at something other than an essay: I was looking at a map.

It was a tortured map, granted—one you wouldn't want to use if you were seeking the shortest route from A to B—but it was a map nonetheless. A mental map. The map of a mind shaped by a particular set of circumstances and experiences. And it changed my thinking about how to teach writing, especially the creative kind.

The counterpoint to the man from Texas was a young woman who'd been in one of my freshman composition classes the year before. She was the smartest student I've ever taught—from Columbia, she went on to graduate work at Oxford—and she had an interesting ethnic background that might have enriched her writing in unexpected ways. But her writing was completely conventional. When I required a revision, she revised exactly as I suggested. Each essay came out technically perfect, but lacking life. She had a map, too, but its contours were completely different.

When I moved on to teaching creative writing fulltime, I held on to this idea of reading maps—studying an individual's patterns of thought before offering writing advice. In these times of shrinking budgets and larger class sizes, writing teachers are tempted to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, offering a set of guidelines or imaginative exercises meant to lead all students to the same creative pot of gold. But each student's mix of education and life experience is different, and the sources and destinations of compelling writing are unpredictable. The type of guidance one student needs might be the most damaging kind for another.

For example, the man from Texas needed to be made more aware of how grammar and syntax usually work, so readers could understand his writing—but without losing the uniqueness in his use of language. The Oxford-bound student, on the other hand, needed to have some of her mental fences torn down, so her imagination could roam through fields of the unexpected. A careful study of their maps revealed their differences, showing me how best to work with each of them.

Since my days in graduate school, reading students' mental maps has become more difficult, and yet more important, because technology now plays a bigger role in students' lives. Whereas schooling and life experience alone once determined how young people thought and wrote—with schooling supplying forms and conventions and experience voice and content—in recent years, technology has come close to overwhelming these other influences.

In America today, television, movies, video games, and computer programs flood young people with a standardized set of images, ideas, and storylines that tend to systemize their thinking. Unlike the systemizing that takes place in school, which provides the building blocks for independent (and perhaps creative) thought, the systemizing offered by consumer technology substitutes passive reception for active engagement, conventionalizing both thoughts and creativity. Instead of running free, the mind follows paths traced out by others. The result in writing classes is student writing that has neither the Texas man's intriguing idiosyncrasies nor the Oxford-bound student's understanding of form but only mimics what is mass-produced. In other words, the maps a writing teacher tries to read today are often mere facsimiles, not authentic tracings of an individual's thought.

Distance learning can make the task of reading students' mental maps even harder because the teacher's contact with students is mediated entirely by technology. Because the teacher has little chance to get to know students outside their writing or observe their behavior, it is extremely difficult to separate skill in the use of forms and conventions from mindlessly absorbed conventionality, or experience-based content from the array of secondhand ideas and images that swirl around us. The problem is exacerbated if the teacher uses pre-packaged software that offers the same exercises and instruction to all students.

Teaching writing in an era of technology-induced mimicry and mediation is not impossible, simply more difficult. We have to fight the systemizing tendency of technology and pay more attention to, perhaps even praise, the idiosyncrasies we are prone to call "mistakes"—the tortured syntax and odd word choices, for example, offered by my Texas man. We have to take out the magnifying glass and examine our students' mental maps minutely, looking for the faintly traced paths that might lead to unexpected fields if drawn more skillfully and boldly.

We might lack the time to make cartographers of everyone, but if we, as teachers, don't help students see and create something new from who they are, we condemn them to a life of borrowed and/or tangled thoughts, diminishing the chance that they will put together meaningful, creative lives.

Copyright © 2004, Michael McGregor, Portland, Oregon.

Michael McGregor is an assistant professor of English at Portland State University where he teaches literary nonfiction writing. He is writing a biography of the minimalist poet Robert Lax.