Peter LehuEng 688Dr. Moneyhun28 May 2003

Borrowing Tools from the Workshop;

Using Creative Writing Pedagogy to Teach Composition

As pedagogical trends in composition studies shift from output-based to revision-based,

from linear to recursive, and from focusing on ranking to focusing on evaluating, the field

strays further and further away from its classic form. In the past twenty years the

philosophy behind teaching students to write has been revolutionized. However, the

structure of most freshman composition classrooms has not kept up with these changes.

Peter Elbow and other modern-day writing pedagogy experts have taught us that learning

to write is an organic, social process that is mastered only through practice and revision.

The composition class is not structured in a way that optimizes this process; rather, it

conforms with the traditional structure of a classroom, recognizable to kindergarten

students and college professors alike. The instructor is the focus of the classroom while

the students watch, listen, and occasionally contribute. Meanwhile, down the hall from

the composition class, in an often smaller, windowless room, a different type of class

format, the workshop, is successfully being used to turn students into better writers.

Components of the creative writing workshop encourage creative freedom and foster a

social environment, both which encourage and incubate students' writing ability. These

components, including centering the class around students’ writing rather than on

published essays from a reader, implementing an open discussion format, reserving

grading until the end of the term, and scheduling in-class readings or presentations of

students’ work, should be fitted to the composition class to make it a more appealing, and

therefore, more effective writing environment.

This is not to argue that creative writing workshops should replace composition classes

which serve a critical role in preparing students to write at a college level. SUNY

Binghamton, my alma mater, does not require that students take a freshman composition

course. Rather, the university demands that they take any one of a group of select courses

demarcated with a “W” (including creative writing workshops) from fields that span the

university. Students can fulfill their writing requirement by writing history papers,

science labs, or short stories. While students in a “W” course probably tend to be more

enthusiastic about their specialized writing assignments, this is an ineffective

composition teaching method because the focus is taken off of the writing process. There

is no instructor in these specialized courses trained to encourage revision or say "Do you

see how writing that essay helped you and your audience to understand the Magna

Carta?" In the same way, creative writing workshops should never be substitutes for

composition classes. Creativity is a major part of expository writing but there are

structural aspects of composition studies that are beyond the scope of creative writing.

That said, workshop formats have much to offer composition studies. Robert Brooke

utilizes and advocates the writing workshop because it facilitates what he calls "identity

negotiation" in the classroom. He describes learning as the way of defining one's future

roles in relation to knowledge and social environment (11). Students want to learn from a

composition class their roles in terms of how their writing ability positions them in their

academic and future professional spheres. In a workshop, students are best able to

negotiate their roles as writers and members of an academic community because their

roles as "students" are obscured. Brooke goes as far as to suggest that allowing students

to negotiate their identities as writers is more important than teaching them the writing

process. He writes, "Learning about writing becomes important when it operates within

individuals' ongoing negotiations" (5). While it seems contrary to the definition of a

composition class to put any goals above teaching writing, Brooke correctly regards

identity negotiation as an omnipresent activity in the classroom as well as in society.

Students come to class with a sense of identity. For many, the role of "student," is

oppressive to that identity. That the students are relegated to an inferior social stratum

deprives the classroom experience of much of their voice and enthusiasm. They do not

recognize the activities that they participate in in class as related to the negotiations of

their identities. Their writing assignments are not viewed as social acts but as rhetorical

hoops they must jump through in order to walk out the classroom door with a passing

grade that enables them to succeed in the social, “real” world. In the workshop classes

that Brooke observes, the freedom of open discussion, not just in small groups but as a

member of a community that includes the instructor, allowed students to negotiate their

roles as writers and individuals with something to say. Students in workshops realize they

can disagree with what a fellow student or even the instructor says. They assume the

identity of the defender of a stance or the expert on a subject. Their personal opinions and

experiences which become the basis of the classroom discussion attain the level of

significance of those expressed in the published essays in their textbook. Thus, students

regard their writing as something worth working on to improve.

The genres of creative writing and composition overlap to a great degree. In Writing With

Power, Peter Elbow bases his writing instruction on a central thesis: writing requires both

“experiencing”-- recording one’s thoughts instinctively and thoroughly-- and

“disciplining”-- forming those thoughts into instructive, readable, and truthful text. This

is true for all writing. Elbow writes, “...a good essay or biography requires just as much

creativity as a good poem...a good poem requires just as much truth as a good essay.”

(11). Therefore, the distinction "creative writing" is a misnomer. All writing is creative.

All writing requires originality, the formation of new ideas, and unique ways to express

ideas. While compositionists have a more defined objective and are more restricted to a

set structure, all the composing that goes on within the frame of an essay- the flow of

ideas, the transitions, the engagement of the audience, the sentence-level construction-

depends on the creativity of the writer. There are standard suggestions composition

instructors give to their students (i.e. write the thesis statement at the end of the

introductory paragraph) but there is no singular, correct way to create the text. In both

genres, the more creativity imbued in a work, the more effectively the work will be what

the author intends it to be. Most of the freedom that the creative writer relishes in is also

available to the compositionist. Susan Miller writes, "While the requirements of

Freshman Composition may seem more rigid than in a short story writing class, the basic

creative processes are, in fact, the same. Rather than being the specialized activity of a

special kind of person, creativity is an ordinary process that you engage in everyday"

(33). If anyone at anytime is capable of creativity, then it is a major component of the

composition classroom in which students are creating text. Creative writing workshops

succeed because creativity is contagious. Classmembers inspire and instruct each other.

This self-motivating ability of the creative writing workshop is equally available to and

should be adopted by the composition class.

Wendy Bishop faults university English departments with the creation of a rift between

creative writing and composition studies. Most composition instructors are graduate

students in literature; they are much more accustom to writing persuasive essays than

fictional poetry or prose. Meanwhile, most composition students are fresh out of high

school where they have had to write stories and poems; they have just as much

background in writing creatively as in writing persuasively. Therefore, it is very likely

that a student is more receptive to studying the writing process through creative writing

instruction than his or her instructor. Yet, focusing on the creative aspects of composition

writing is a seldom-used method of getting students to enjoy and appreciate the craft of

writing in composition classrooms. A critical objective of the composition class is to get

students to find pleasure and a sense of accomplishment from their writing. Composition

class writing must be associated with the students' interests and past experiences if it is

not to seem like a strange new code that was briefly overviewed in high school but only

primarily exists on college campuses.

Another problem caused by English department genre-building is that English professors

and graduate students who teach composition courses have been conditioned through

their own studies to view good writing as "Literature"-- a type of unattainable perfection.

The quality of writing that their freshmen students produce is nowhere near that level.

Freshman composition instructors tend to have preconceived notions about their students

that label them with, in the words of Bishop, "the demeaning, disempowering concept of

'student writer'" (193). There is no room for identity negotiation. Bishop urges: "Our

students aren't writers the day they are finally hired as writers....They are writers

whenever they write, and they will believe us when we say so only when we

acknowledge their rights through our course designs and our attitudes toward their work"

(193).

Students may not be trained in writing good expository essays. A recent New York Times

article about the decline in high school and college student writing ability faults students’

apathy toward writing. It reports that secondary school teachers in America are

overworked and teach overcrowded classes and, therefore, “resort to teaching the five-

paragraph essay formula.” The article continues, “Partly as a result, many students enter

college thinking that writing is not important.” (Beale 14). Students know the essay-in-a-

can that they were taught to produce in high school is of little value. However, the

majority of these essay-producing students have relied on writing at some point in their

personal lives, whether it be that they wrote diaries, love letters, or song lyrics. They

recognize the value of being able to write. Freshman composition courses must enforce

that recognition. Creative writing is closer than expository writing to what writing

instructors appreciate as "Literature" and to what college freshmen consider valuable.

Encouraging creativity in the composition classroom is not only a positive goal in itself,

it can also bridge the gap between instructor expectation and student ability. Furthermore,

it can help students overcome the fear of being in an environment with higher

expectations by sugarcoating the expository writing concepts that they regard

frighteningly as "college-level."

David Starkey, an MFA student who taught composition classes, writes that he began to

teach his classes like workshops because that was all he knew. At first, he found it to be

an extremely successful method: "Students had a stake in the day's work, discussion was

fluid, voices were raised--the class seemed to care" (249). Later, however, he recognized

that workshops had flaws. He quotes Joseph Moxley who writes, "by focusing primarily

on revising and editing, the workshop fails to address prewriting strategies" (252). This is

an important problem but one that is easily remedied. Just as creative writing workshops

can have prewriting exercises-- such as writing out a detailed description of a character or

setting before inserting it into a story-- composition workshops can include open

discussions on paper outlines or freewrites. Also, prewriting can be discussed in the

context of revision. The instructor can suggest that a student try a prewriting strategy as a

way of avoiding a problematic tendency that occurs later in the writing process. Starkey

writes, "It is inexcusable for creative writing teachers to ignore the many advances that

rhetoric and composition researchers have made" (252). The teaching of a composition

class as a workshop is not so radical a concept that it should abandon the tenets of the

field of composition. Workshop teaching techniques do not excuse TAs from their

responsibility as instructors nor do they excuse English Departments from preparing

incoming TAs. Teaching skills and the composition curriculum remain the same; they are

only to be used and applied through a more organic means- namely through open

discussions of student's papers rather than through teacher-led question and answer

periods on published essays from a reader.

A student’s paper can aid in the teaching of writing just as well as a published essay can.

The editors of traditional composition class readers choose essays for their books by a

standard that is attainable by any student’s piece of personal writing. McQuade and

Atwan, in the preface to their reader The Writer's Presence write that the essays they

include illustrate: "a lively individual mind attempting to explore one's self, shape

information into meaning, or contend with issues through conversation and debate" and

"the expectations as well as the uncertainties that surface when a writer attempts to create

a memorable individual presence in prose" (v). Therefore, although the essays included

are by famous authors it is not their fame that makes their subject matter conducive to

writing instruction. The editors admit that their choices are not perfect examples of

writing; just like any piece of text, they are merely "attempts" at relaying the author’s

intended meaning. A group of writers in a composition class talking about a Martin

Luther King Jr. speech or a Maxine Hong Kingston narrative are discussing similar issues

to those being brought up by a group in a creative writing workshop talking about one

member's nonfiction prose work. It can be argued that a published essay is a better

"attempt" than a student's work, that it provides students with superior examples of

persuasive, effective prose to recognize and follow. However, students learn by

recognizing deficiencies--learning what not to do-- just as well as, if not better than, they

do by recognizing positive qualities. Student papers have a healthy amount of both the

positive and the negative. Often these qualities are easier to discern than in a published

text. Also, students do not learn how to write by imitation, but by implementation and

experimentation. The usage of a general rhetorical strategy is more revealing to a student

than the particulars of how an author fulfills his or her objective. The "how" varies from

work to work and students should invent their own methods. Students will probably never

have to write the types of essays they encounter in a reader. Therefore, the subject

matters of the essays studied in a composition class do not matter as long as they interest

the students. However, understanding why writers approach their topics in certain ways

imparts the importance and abilities of the written word that students can attend to in

their own way when they sit down to write.

Turning students into better writers is the goal of a writing workshop. Since the only way

for a student to become a better writer is by writing regularly, it seems that a crucial “sub-

goal” of the composition class is to encourage students to write by making them excited

about writing. The best way to accomplish this is to let students choose what they write

about. While there must be some restrictions to enforce that students’ writing is suitable

to a professional environment, the use of a reader enforces more restrictions than

necessary. The preface to the reader Rereading America reads, "By linking the personal

with the cultural students begin to recognize that...they too have knowledge, assumptions,

and intellectual frameworks that give them authority in academic culture" (iv). It is

contradictory to write this in a reader; if students have authority then their writing should

be able to provide the course’s “intellectual framework.” Similarly, the editors of The

Arlington Reader purport to choose essays that both: teach social and historical values

and are "teachable," meaning that they are not "too technical, too allusive, too arty," or

too long. If an essay is teachable and if it functions as a template to which the standards

of good writing can be tested against, it serves its purpose as a tool with which an

instructor can show students how to be better writers.

Despite what editors of readers believe, it is not the responsibility of a composition class

to teach students social or historical values. To do so is at the expense of the quality of

writing instruction. While alluring essay topics with historical and social context

encourage students if they are the writers of the essay, they do nothing but distract

students from the rhetorical aspects of the text if they are the readers or examiners. If

instructors choose to teach with published essays from a reader, it makes sense that they

choose readers that represent a myriad of social and historical perspectives to fairly

accommodate all the cultures and backgrounds that may be represented by students in

their class. However, why use a reader at all? If the only objectives of a writing class are

to teach rhetorical strategies and to encourage students to write, then anything more than

the students' own writing is distraction. Furthermore, if the instructor focuses on the

writing of all of her students equally then her students' varied backgrounds and

experiences are automatically represented equally. If student papers are the subject

matter, the course's texts match the course's students perfectly.

Considering the similarities between creative writing and composition and what goes on

in both types of classes, composition studies has much to gain from what Wendy Bishop

calls, "cross-the-line pedagogical raiding" (190). The greatest asset that the field of

creative writing has over the field of composition is student favoritism. Bishop quotes a

student's journal: "Composition was writing about a certain topic, picked by the teacher

and had [sic] to be a certain length and certain form. Creative writing was anything you

felt like putting down on paper. My creative writing was most often poetry, or a short

story. Composition was an essay. So it's fun stuff vs. required stuff" (181). This student's

experience with both subjects is not representative of all of her peers but it is noteworthy

that she considers composition as the opposite of "fun" because it is "required."

Composition classes have been stigmatized by students as annoying obstacles because

they are almost always required. To make matters worse, instructors of composition

courses are often literature or creative writing students who have no interest in

composition studies and are, thus, also "required" to teach it. If universities want to keep

the composition class as a required course, there are steps that need to be taken to make

the class more appealing for both the instructor and the student. If taking the course itself

is a restriction (that is, from not taking the course), then universities should compensate

by eliminating as many restrictions from within the structure of the course as possible.

The creative writing workshop, which just happens to be teaching a strongly related

subject and has a much friendlier public image, is the place to turn for help.

1 The first pedagogical technique that the composition class would benefit from

borrowing is the open discussion format. Students, especially freshman enrolled in core

courses, are accustomed to lectures in which they sit and take notes and maybe

occasionally raise their hand or get called on. This is the role expected of a student in a

classroom. If a student walks into a composition classroom which is set up like all his

other classes-- with the instructor up front and the students forming a mass on the

opposite side of the room-- even if the instructor intends on holding a class discussion,

the student will assume the standard role of listener. Composition classrooms should be

set up in a circle to immediately let students know that this class is different. Each student

is no longer just a receiver of instruction but an essential link in a circuit of teaching and

learning. Discussion should be open and uninhibited. Students, like any large body of

people, have a pack mentality. They have been conditioned as classroom listeners but

once discussion begins they will coerce each other to join in. Friendly competition should

be used to the instructor's advantage. William Fawcett Hill points out that students spend

more time preparing for classes in which they have to demonstrate their grasp on the

material through discussion. Hill mentions a student who is "thinking about and

anticipating his contribution, something that cannot be postponed to the hour just before

the class meeting" (4). In discussion-based classes, not only are the students' educations

at stake, but so are their social positions (a.k.a. Brooke’s “identities”) in the classroom

milieu. Shy students who are accustom to camping out in the back of the classroom will

have no place to hide and may find that it is less embarassing to contribute than to be the

lone abstainee.

The instructor's role in a workshop is not drastically different from in a traditional

classroom structure. However, it should seem that way. Instructors are always the

authority figures but workshops give the illusion that they are not. Students have more

freedom but the instructors are always firmly in charge. Authority is intimidating and

students are more likely to participate in a class in which authority is disguised and the

instructor is only a link in the circle. The instructor is not responsible for responding to

every comment a student makes therefore a student will not fear being proven wrong by a

power-wielding expert. If a student suggests something that is unequivocally wrong than

the instructor has a responsibility to steer the student and the class in the right direction.

But workshops operate under the premise that students will discover the truths of the

subject on their own and most students' errors will be corrected by his or her classmates.

Hill writes that instructors leading discussion-based classes should act as resource experts

and group trainers (48). In the context of a composition workshop, this means the

instructors are responsible for providing factual information-- for example,

documentation techniques and essay-writing terminology-- and for training and

instigating the class to perform thorough and useful examination of the text being

discussed. These contributions should not be divulged all at once but rather as they come

up in the course of discussion.

By not leading the discussion but only loosely directing it down the right path, instructors

impart new communicative responsibilities upon the students. They are free to inhabit

roles naturally. In that writing is a form of communication, these new responsibilities

help students to become better writers. For instance, when a discussion erupts into a

debate a student might find herself adamantly defending one side. There might be other

students in the class who vocalize that they agree with her and contribute to her

argument. Her opponents strengthen her argument further by testing it against their

views. In supporting or challenging her authority on the subject being debated, her

classmates are teaching this student how to argue from different perspectives and how to

defend her views-- two skills that will come in handy when she writes her essay on the

subject that night. The power struggle that develops in a leaderless discussion exercises

the argumentative abilities of the students involved. Even the shy or unsure students who

are not confident enough to join the debate will acquire skills by listening which they can

put to practice later as writers. In a traditional class format it is out of place for a student

to become the initiator behind a stance or the authority on a subject. When a student

raises his hand he is asking for permission to speak. This automatically subjugates him

and restricts his communicative abilities.

Another teaching aspect that the creative workshop has greatly improved on for the

purposes of a writing course is grading policy. Creative writing instructors tend not to

grade individual assignments; instead, they write comments. Not only is creative writing

impossible to qualify with complete objectiveness but nobody is capable of perfectly

ranking the amount of effort put into a piece of work solely by examining the end

product, especially an instructor with twenty or forty assignments to grade in a week.

When grading, an instructor must rely on standards that inevitably restrict students'

creative freedom. Therefore, since creativity is a major aspect of persuasive writing,

grading should be limited as much as possible in a composition class. While it is absurd

to put a grade on a single poem or short story, it is more acceptable to do so to an essay.

After all, an essay has a clear objective- it's right there in the thesis statement. There is no

conflict in deciding a grade for whether that objective was met or not. However, grading

for logic, persuasiveness, and language- all aspects that facilitate the attainment of the

objective- is at the sacrifice of the work's creativity. If logically and persuasively

supporting a thesis statement will get students a good grade, they will do so and nothing

else. Comments, rather than holistic letters or numbers, can just as effectively rank the

aspects of essay writing that can be ranked and also evaluate students’ writing while

allowing the students’ objective to remain the production of good writing, rather than the

acquisition of good grades. Grading, then, should be limited until the end of the semester

when it is absolutely required to rank students and when an instructor’s grading policy

will not sway any future writing that students produce.

In a composition class in which students are not just learning but actively creating, an

effective policy regularly used by creative writing instructors and some composition

instructors to implement end-of-the-term grading is to require that students submit

portfolios on the last day of class that include the sum total of their creations. Elbow

recognizes that there are a number of advantages to the portfolio system. He writes that

by the end of the semester instructors have a better sense of the abilities of their students

and the effort they have devoted to the class. Students are more likely to respect their

classmates' comments and suggestions rather than to turn their attention away from

everyone but the grade-giver. Also, it gives students more opportunity to improve their

work (“Ranking, Evaluating & Linking” 181). I add to Elbow's points that students will

view their writings with more importance if each assignment they complete is part of a

larger work rather than be a completed task that is never looked at again. Indeed, their

individual assignments are related to one another in that the techniques they found useful

in one assignment are likely to be reused in the next.

For the same reasons, creative writing workshops often include end-of-term

presentations. Students pick the piece of writing they produced during the workshop that

they are most proud of and read it aloud to their classmates. Another option is for the

instructor to collect a work from each student, bind them all together, and distribute to

each student a class anthology. The instructor can also post student work on a web page.

Again, each work is deemed more important because it is part of a greater whole. The

class becomes a team striving together to reach a goal. Each student will be more

concerned with the quality of their input, both in the writing they contribute and the

suggestions they give to their "teammates." Elbow writes about the importance of sharing

writing, even without expecting feedback. If work is shared, it becomes better. Having

others read something you have wrote frees it from the confines of the assignment and

imparts in it the role of communication. (Writing with Power 21-22).

Unfortunately, there are restrictions that may prevent individual composition instructors

from implementing these workshop components in their classes. A major problem is that

creative writing workshops are traditionally smaller than composition classes. There may

not be enough time in a semester to “workshop” an essay by each student. Classroom size

may make it impossible to hold class in a circle. These are issues that must be considered

by English department administrations. Indeed, maybe the role of composition studies

has to be reevaluated. The goal of most freshman composition classes is to prepare

students for the type of writing they will encounter in college. However, if composition

classes implement creative writing workshop techniques that goal can be expanded to

prepare students for the type of writing they will encounter in life, and, at the same time,

make the class more enjoyable and valuable to students.

Works Cited

Beale, Lewis. “What’s Wrong with Writing.” New York Times. 25 May 2003: Section

14. 14.

Bishop, Wendy. "Crossing the Lines; On Creative Composition and Composing Creative

Writing." Colors of a Different Horse. Ed. by Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Urbana:

National Council of Teachers of English, 1994. 181-97.

Brooke, Robert. Writing and Sense of Self. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of

English, 1991.

Colombo, Gary; Robert Cullen; and Bonnie Lisle. Preface. Rereading America.

Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. iv.

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating & Linking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment”

A Sourcebook for Responding to Student Writing. Ed. by Richard Straub. Cresskill:

Hampton Press, 1999. 175-96

---. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Second Edition.

New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Hill, William Fawcett. William Fawcett Hill's Learning Through Discussion. by Jerome

Rabow, Michelle A. Charness, Johanna Kipperman, and Susan Radcliffe-Vasile.

Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994.

McQuade, Donald and Robert Atwan. Preface. The Writer's Presence. Boston: Bedford

Books, 1997.

Starkey, David. "The MFA Graduate as Composition Instructor: A Self-Analysis." Colors

of a Different Horse. Ed. by Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom. Urbana: National Council

of Teachers of English, 1994.