Writing for the Teacher

I can honestly say that my writing ability is fundamentally the same as it was when I was in middle school. Sure, my vocabulary is larger and I write about more complicated things, but that's about it. I would, more or less, attribute this stagnation to the reasons identified by Inoue and Elbow. One of the factors that contributed to my lack of development is something that is inseparable from the traditional classroom: the students write for the teacher. I agree with Inoue when he states that this can lead to very unengaging writers, and I consider myself one of these.

Writing was always a game for me. The objective used to be to get the highest grade with the least amount of work. Over time, the goal became to make the teacher think I was really smart. In the first scenario, I hid my lack of rhetorical skill behind words; in the second, I hid behind ideas. These are not strategies I would have employed if I were writing for an audience, which is what students are forced to do in the systems proposed by Inoue and Elbow, where they learn to write for a variety of people who will engage with and react to their writing in different ways.

One could argue that a teacher could keep the conventional setup going and just involve some (or a lot) of peer-review, but I've been in classes like this before and in the end I was still writing for the instructor. The peer-reviewing felt perfunctory and it was just another hoop I (and the other students in the class) jumped through. Inoue's model is different because the students are engaged at many other levels than just revision, and in this way I think offers a viable method for getting students to improve as writers. Who knows, it may not be the most practical approach in the world, but if nothing else I think his criticisms are immanently valid. I also think that his model could work. As I sit here, writing for you, I am conscious that many people are (hypothetically I suppose, and 'many' is undoubtedly and exaggeration) going to be able to see what I post here. My main concern has become "I just want them to not get bored halfway through my post and stop reading it", so I think that this format can get an otherwise apathetic student to try to be more engaging. If I had to guess, I would say that Donna also buys into this idea of having students write for there classmates, since that's what were doing here.