Learning Writing By Teaching Writing

Generally, there are few things that unite teachers more than a mutual aversion to grading. For some, the marking up of assignments and assigning of earned grades may be a mere annoyance; for others, the unavoidable nature of subjectivity inherent to that process, plus the amount of feedback necessary, multiplied by the time consumed makes for one distasteful equation. That being said, there are few things that further divide instructors of all stripes than asking them their preferred method for how to grade.

Those working and teaching in the humanities often find themselves faced with a number of different challenges in this regard, especially when considering what is most deserving of their attention. What can be done if a student writes a fair essay somewhat adjacent to the given prompt or topic, but for one reason or another, manages to completely miss the mark?  Does it bear repeating to stay away from broad and overly generic opening sentences proclaiming, “History has shown” or “Long has it been known” — or my particular favorite, “Since the dawn of time?” How many times can I point a student toward the multitude of online and print resources for proper MLA formatting, guidelines, and citations? How much time will a student truly take to run an eye over every correction of tense usage, verb-noun agreement, and improper uses of punctuation? (If by chance you are an individual who happens to enjoy grading, don’t hesitate to read on! This is neither a how-to guide for grammar police or self-proclaimed linguistic authorities of any kind, nor a tirade against the trials of reading the — occasionally trying, sometimes brilliant — work of our students. After all, aren’t we all still students ourselves, one way or another?)

In the papers of students past, present, and possibly future, two of the most common points of critique I have can be summarized by: 1) the structuring of sentences through passive versus active voice, and 2) the building and presentation of an argument.

The use of passive voice appears in a sentence where the subject receives an action, and is acted upon. In student papers, this typically reads as some variation of the following:

a form of to-be + verb

To correct this, one would remove the to-be, change the verb into its active form, and restructure the sentence so that the subject may perform the action. For example:

British women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote in 1918.

In 1918, Parliament granted British women over the age of thirty the right to vote.

Active voice encourages students to name a subject, focus on the responsibility of giving or performing that action, and keeps their prose from becoming cluttered with what I tend to call passive-aggressive voice. And yet as we all know, the use of active voice over passive voice is not a golden standard or an absolute requirement, but rather a suggestion to which there exist many exceptions to the rule.

On a larger scale, students have also tended to struggle with how to structure and organize an argument. “What is a claim?” they will ask. “Is it the same as an argument, or is it something different? Does this paper need a thesis statement? Is this too broad or too narrow? What do I do when I want to write about everything?”

Why are all of you so keen on restating the plot and leaving less room for your own original arguments? would be my common refrain, although it answers none of their questions. Usually, this cannot be achieved in a brief couple of paragraphs that comprise feedback on a student essay; this takes weeks of practice, and more than a semester of revising.

No matter the age difference or the amount of years we have spent writing, it seems we always need a group of readers to help take our draft, and then take it apart at different levels. My current dissertation committee consists of my main advisor, and two readers. The other two readers I have yet to approach, but at the moment, three are enough to take those same questions and turn them back my way.

• What is your thesis?

• Why have you close-read for ten pages, and left so little room for your own analysis?

• Footnote these critical arguments; you want your own to appear in the foreground, and for those to act as secondary support.

• Start with your largest claim, after which follow subsequent, subordinating, and scaffolding arguments.

Just this week, one of my readers warned me against using “ideological” when I meant “discursive,” due to the amount of baggage and theoretical weight the former carries with it. Maybe I’ll think of this the next time I circle a term or a phrase in a student essay and comment awkward wording. Yes, diagramming a sentence is difficult for most human beings, and no one likes verb conjugations in any language. Things like active voice and proper semicolon use can be taught or corrected; misspellings and comma splices happen even to the best of us.

Every writer can make use of an editor. 

It becomes much more difficult to show ourselves the same compassion when we think of writing as a skill, and one that we must have gotten good at by now; surely. Look at the years that have passed since undergraduate study! Look at the number of papers we have written. Pages upon pages of claims, material evidence, logical argumentation, and careful citation – how can we still look at an empty Word document with its blinking cursor and not know what to do next?

Truth be told, easily. But it is also fairly easy to accept that sometimes the mind falls fallow, for a season or for a day. Give it time. Give yourself some time.  

Perhaps one of the best lessons the dissertation process teaches us as graduate students is not another grammar admonition, but a good dose of humility and a flashback to the passive-voiced, plot-summarizing, incorrect-formatting student we all once used to be, and perhaps still are.

(Stop being afraid of using to be runs a close second.)

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.