Expressionistic Writing:
A Stepping Stone to Writing Competency
by Michael John Buckhoff
This paper will explore the need of
expressionistic writing in its forms of free-writing, journal writing, personal
narratives, etc. and show how this writing is a stepping stone to the more
abstract rhetorical forms of audience based writing. I will examine excerpts of
historical research from David Foster's book A Primer for Writing Teachers:
Theories, Theorists, Issues, Problems, and then I will look at the
philosophical research of James Moffett in his book Teaching the Universe of
Discourse. Lastly, I will study the practitioner research of Peter Elbow in
his article "Closing My Eyes As I Speak". The purpose of the review of
the literature is to show how the above historical, philosophical, and
practitioner research have approached the topic of expressionistic writing. The
identification of these different paradigms of research is based on Stephen
North's book The Making of Knowledge in Composition Portrait of an Emerging
Field.
Historical Research
I start with this mode of research because it
is necessary to provide a historical framework of expressionistic rhetoric.
First, let me define expressionism. Loosely defined, the verb express means
"to give or convey a true impression of: show, reflect; to represent in
words"; or "to make known the opinions of oneself" (American
Heritage Dictionary 405). Hence writing is way of learning to express oneself.
Here the student focuses on what he wants to say in the most personal way
possible. Only after maturational and intellectual growth can the student move
from the "I" focus to the more abstract process of considering writing
for someone else. In evidence of this, Foster historicizes work form Piaget in
regards to the cognitive stages of development. Language in this aspect is seen
as cognitive and the child goes through various stages of language. These stages
are represented as sensory motor (infant response to environment in
non-linguistic ways), semiotic ability (child associates symbols with language),
concrete operations (child can use language to represent reality abstractly),
and formal operations (abstract language and complex logical problems). Language
is seen as a "decentering" process in the sense that it enables the
child to be less and less ego-centric as it learns to interact and understand
the world around it (Foster 11-12). Foster then continues with the problem of
the relationship of thought and language by citing evidence from Vygotsky that
language is more than the expression of thought. The Piagetian concept of
egocentric speech is altered somewhat and is seen differently:
Piaget says Vygotsky, defines egocentric
speech as an expression of the child's egocentric understanding, so that when
decentering occurs egocentric speech vanishes. Vygotsky argues otherwise by
saying that the decentering in egocentric speech develops abstraction from
sound, the child's new faculty to think words instead of pronouncing them (12).
As a result of this process, a separate speech function
referred to as inner speech is created.
Foster starts with the cognitive psychologists
Piaget and Vygotsky as a way of establishing the first stage of historical
inquiry that North refers to as the empirical stage by identifying the problem
of thought and language and at the same time gathering and determining the
validity of relevant texts (North 71). In other words, Fosters first searches
for texts that will establish thought, language, and development. All this is
done to enable the reader to see a pattern in the text: that pattern is how
thought and language are related. Furthermore, he uses Moffett and Britain in
order to link the cognitive stages of development, that is from egocentricity to
a higher abstract level of thought, to the initial tendencies of a writer
writing for oneself (egocentric) and then gradually moving toward a decentered
expression of writing (38-39,44). The creation of a pattern, the pattern being
stages of cognitive development compared with the hierarchal stages of writing
in the respective texts of Piaget, Vygotsky, Moffett, and Britton enable Foster
to start a new narrative on writing. It is at this point that we hear the
communal dialectic as Fosters positions Moffett's theories against the genre of
meditative writing "The Pensèes" of Pascal. It is argued that
Pascal's writing while deeply personal in tone and address may appear to fit at
the top of Moffett's hierarchy, but are at the same time very abstract and
theoretical (42). In simple terms, can personal writing also be abstract and if
so how can Moffett's system of classification be considered valid. In short,
though Foster provides a historical framework in which to explain what the
research is in expressionistic composition theory, he clearly contends that the hierarchal
level of writing proposed by Moffett and Britton is a potentially
challengeable theory.
Philosophical Research
Moffett establishes an argument in response to
the question in his book Teaching the Universe of Discourse as to how
should discourse be taught in the schools to native speakers. In a clearly
philosophical fashion, his argument does not concern itself as to what should be
done for he leaves that responsibility to the school curriculum but rather what
are the preconditions of those understandings which might allow us to decide
what to do. In other words, an argument here is founded on a specific set of
premises about the nature of discourse and development designed to be tested not
against execution but as North would say, for dialectic (96-99).
Language is seen as related varieties of
discourse concerning itself with the interaction of the referential relation of
"I-it" and the "I-you" phenomena (Moffett 11-12). This
interaction between the first and second persons with a particular audience is
examined thorough expressionistic lens. It is important to mention that North
claims that for whatever reason, Moffett seems uneasy with philosophical
research and he tries at all costs to maintain practitioner status, but the way
he goes about doing his research is clearly philosophical. Thus his
philosophical premises are, as I previously stated, specifically designed to be
tested not against execution, but in dialectic. In this manner, the set of ideas
concerning the nature of discourse hopefully as Moffett sees it, will help
advance the current task of reconceiving education in the native language by
allowing correction and completion by other minds (96-107). Moffett proposes
that there are two types of situations; one has to do with the referential
relation of the person called "I/It" and it concerns itself as to how
someone extracts information from raw phenomena. The next type concerns itself
with the relation of communication, and it is called the "I/You"
relation. It is how someone extracts for an audience (11-13, 18-19). The
relationship between the information and communication is an interaction that
enables a writer to distance or "decenter" himself from the more
personal "I-it" to the "I-you" type of writing. By
demonstrating the possibility that a writer may move through writing in this
fashion, Moffett is able to classify different types of communications as being
1). Reflection: Intrapersonal communication between two parts of the nervous
system; 2). Conversation: Interpersonal communication between two people; 3).
Correspondence: Interpersonal communication between people in groups with some
limited but personal knowledge to each other; and 4). Publication: Impersonal
communication to a large anonymous group over an extended period of time
(32-35). Implicitly embedded within these classifications is the consideration
that they may teach the students to consider more effective writing strategies
by making them aware that there is a hierarchal level of learning writing . As
a result, the students can learn to re-think or unthink the strategies they use
when writing. If one enables the student to identify with the "I/It"
relation first, which seems according to what Moffett describes as
egocentricity/Piagetian theory, and with that idea the student identifies and
abstracts from the raw phenomena and information first, later they can be taught
in the steps that lead to a higher abstraction or the "I/You" relation
that identifies with the rhetorical audience in which they are surrounded.
Though it is not directly claimed as a solution, it is considered a strategy
which may lead to writer competency. Moffett offers these strategies not as
solutions but rather a framework in which to debate the nature of discourse. The
interesting thing here with his particular mode of research, that, of course,
being philosophical, is his attempt, to what North contends, to try to identify
himself as a practitioner(101). Moffett wants to be a person who can make
successful changes concerning the writing curriculum within the classroom. For
example, he identifies the problem of setting up a writing curriculum in the
schools, but instead of finding necessarily solutions and attempting to validate
these solutions by testing them in practice as practitioner research would
attempt to be sure, Moffett is establishing premises as I mentioned before, as
to what kind of discourse should be taught, and he is meticulously constructing
the premises in which to ground these modes of discourse. Along this line of
reasoning, he never offers any solutions but rather set these questions up for
further argument.
The failure to recognize that there is a hierarchal
level of abstract learning in the classroom may impede the students'
progress toward writer competency. In order to prove that this failure could
result, Moffett makes an argument for abstraction to more than just a word or
sentence. He contends that abstraction should apply to whole monological
compositions:
Concept formation and propositional
statement are very important as parts within the whole and as parts that
may expand into wholes, but a curriculum sequence must be based on the
growth of entire monologues, such as a student would be asked to read
and write, not on discrete particles (30).
At first, children are limited in the kind of
discourse they can produce, and therefore, they should receive a lower
abstraction of language or writing. But as their ability to understand more
abstract concepts matures, one can add to the repertoiring kinds of discourse of
increasingly higher abstraction. This enables Moffett to bridge the gap in the
composition field between cognitive psychology and writing. He concludes that
these new positions in teaching represent different levels of learning as far as
levels of abstraction by helping the student learn to identify with abstractive
type concepts. The implications to this argument is that Moffett empowers the
personal authority of the writer by allowing them to progress from personal to
more general abstract levels of writing for an audience. These students will be
taught to identify first with the expressionistic mode of writing, which is
considered the "I/It", an then progress toward the more abstract
rhetorical writing or as he identifies it as it being the "I/You"
relation. In Moffett's terms, the spectrum of discourse along with its hierarchy
of levels of abstraction from lowest to highest are represented as interior
dialogue, vocal dialogue, correspondence, personal journal, autobiography,
memoir, biography, chronicle, history, science and metaphysics (47).
Practitioner Research
Peter Elbow in his article "Closing My Eyes as I Speak" begins his
article with the following statement:
When I am talking to a person and
struggling to find words or thoughts, I often find myself involuntarily
closing my eyes as I speak. I realize now that this behavior is an
instinctive attempt to blot out awareness of audience when I need all my
concentration for just trying to figure out what I want to say (50).
It is obvious here that he wastes no time getting
to what the problem is, how to solve it, and then show how the solution works.
All in the first two sentences of his paper! Quite remarkably, this is a drastic
difference from the historical and philosophical research of Foster and Moffett
that I examined earlier. Elbow makes no attempt of establishing a continuing
dialectic of debate but rather gets to the heart of the matter: that of course
being providing strategies for students that struggle to write, especially those
that may suffer from writer's block.
It is not Elbow's claim to discredit or devalue
the concept of writing for an audience. Instead, he contends that the initial
ignoring of an audience at the beginning of the writing process, will enable the
writer to produce personal exploratory writing that, while often times it is
seen as unclear and jumbled, will coax his thinking into a process of new
discovery and development (51-53). Though his approach is different than Moffett
and Foster, he continues to lay out further ground work in expressionistic
composition theory. Later on in his paper, Elbow ambitiously claims that
ignoring audience can lead to better writing. It is at this point that Elbow
puts a unique twist on Piaget and Vygotsky developmental models of writing.
Elbow contends that "it's not a matter of whether the writer decenters, but
of whether the writer has a sufficiently strong focus of attention to make the
reader decenter" (54-55). It is this strong focus that gives the reader an
authentic voice in writing, and that may not happen unless we learn to ignore
the audience. "To hell with whether they like it or not. I've got to say
this the way I want to say it" (Elbow 55).
A further examination of Elbow's research will
reveal further characteristics that would as North ascribes classify him as
contributing to the practitioner house of lore (34-35). But whereas North
accuses the practitioner of taking particular values, beliefs, traditions,
customs of doing writing as Elbow seems to do, that cause the questionable
validity of the research to become embedded in a field characterized by
ritualized ramblings and findings to composition theory, I find Elbow as a
practitioner in quite a different light. Though I am well aware that Elbow makes
assumptions in his article, namely the problematic assumption of the need for
"authentic voice" and the assertion that prose is not "right for
readers but prose that is right for thinking, right for language, or right for
the subject being written about" (54) , I still see him contributing to the
field of English Composition as a legitimate way of "knowing" about
writing. Elbow, instead of taking a lot of time basing his need to ignore
audience on lengthy empirical investigations combined with the communal
dialectic, decides to propose solutions. By positioning his argument for
"writer based prose" against "reader based prose" and
further grounding his solutions in the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and
Meade, he succeeds in contributing in a weighty and respectable fashion in
regards to expressionism in composition theory. At least, the teacher has
something that they can implement in the classroom. Elbow and other practitioner
have given teachers not simply solutions concerning these implementations about
curing the ills in writing, but ways of attempting to address what those ills
are.
Conclusions
As I continue to teach writing, I will give the
students a sample writing assignment during the first week of class. This will
be my first priority on my teaching agenda so that I can determine the levels of
writing ability among students. If the students have poor writing abilities, I
will start from the lower levels of abstract thought as described by Moffett
earlier in this paper. I will encourage free-writing (i.e. invention stage as
ouitlined in St. Martin’s Guide), and I will also require journal writing as
part of the curriculum. It is hoped that these mental drills will encourage the
student's spontaneity and invention in writing. While at times, the students
will be given the freedom to choose their writing tasks, other times I will
provide more structured type assignments.
The expressionistic mode of writing is a stepping
stone and will lead students to more advanced and abstract forms of writing. I
recognize the fact that students may also acquire knowledge from external
experiences and in large part are directly affected by these experiences. In
this respect, I recognize the need to also promote structured collaborative
learning which will engage the students in high peer interaction. Though I have
not directly addressed this issue of social constructionism in this paper and it
has not been my intention to do so, I see it's inevitable merge with my topic of
expressionism. Maureen Newlin, in an interview stated:
Writing and reading tasks will focus on the need
for a recognizable purpose and an awareness of the rhetorical situation; such a
focus will help you to develop your writer's voice in all composing situations,
whether personal or social. (21 November 1993)
As my students begin with personal writing and
advance to the abstract forms of rhetorical writing, I will encourage them to
continue to focus on their voice. The main focus of the student should be
progress in their writing. Expressionism can allow the student to achieve a
better understanding of self by positing itself with the view of others. By
doing so, the student will learn how to write more abstractly. This in turn will
enable the student to better express himself. In the end, the student will
achieve an improved way of communication. It is this communication that will
allow him to interact (verbally and written) in a competent way with society. In
some aspects, expressionism may be accused of viewing society as a minimal part
in the language and invention of writing. To answer those accusations, I contend
that expressionistic composition theory can use society as a tool in which to
discover a better understanding of one's self.
Works Cited
Elbow, Peter. "Closing My Eyes as I
Speak." College English. 49, No 1, Jan. (1987):50-57.
Foster, David. A Primer for Writing: Theories,
Theorists, Issues, Problems. Upper Montclair: Boynton, 1983.
Moffett, James . Teaching the Universe of
Discourse. Boston: Houghton, 1968.
Newlin, Maureen. Personal Interview. 21 November
1993.
North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge in
Composition Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynyon/Cook,
1987.
