Teaching writing cannot be uniform because people are not uniform. We all have different methods and practices to get to our destinations. As Lunsford asserts in “Writing is Informed by Prior Experience,” “Even when writing is private or meant for the writer alone, it is shaped by the writer’s earlier interactions with writing and with other people and with all the writer has read and learned.” Implying we are all shaped by widely different experiences, resulting in different voices, personalities, and writing styles that cannot be replicated. Yet, when teaching writing, we utilize practices of repetition in order to drill the process in rather than allowing students to explore their own growing thoughts and ideas on the matter. This has resulted in the degradation of student authority. Meaning that students don’t feel what they have to say is an important contribution to the conversation. In fact, most students are so ashamed of their thoughts and questions that they struggle to say them aloud in class, let alone write them down.
When young writers don’t develop the critical thinking skills necessary to appropriately format their writing for specific audiences or venues, all of the skills we have taught them actively begin to work against them. They have been trained to write in one specific way through repetition, and when their format does not jive with the venue, then everything they’ve memorized through repetition becomes a process they need to unlearn so they can learn to write in this new way.
Instead of teaching students to do what we have always done in order to be “good enough” for the community, we should be encouraging them to have faith in their own ideas. In “Reading and Writing Without Authority,” Penrose and Geisler claim that authority does not come from domain knowledge, but personal knowledge (i.e. conclusions made via critical thinking, the student’s personal claim on the topic), and it is in the denial of this personal knowledge that students lose their authority. By making students feel as if their voice is not yet good enough to be part of the conversation, we are discouraging them from trying.
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