Patton's "Situated Writing Lessons: Putting Writing Advice In Disciplinary Context"

Patton, Martha. "Situated Writing Lessons: Putting Writing Advice in Disciplinary Context." The Writing Instructor 2004: n. pag. Web. 30 May 2011.

In conducting writing-in-the-disciplines workshops, Patton notices that faculty’s desire for ways to teach “good writing” is often rooted in a theoretical mindset that is about fifty years out of date by a compositionist’s standards.  They hold with “something close to current traditionalism, a rule-bound pedagogy giving unqualified prescriptive advice” (Patton).  While the workshop attendees recognize other attendees’ suggestions as more valuable than theory, Patton seeks to offer sound theory or at least theoretically sound practices.  She aims to help the faculty recognize that writing is rhetorical, determined by “audience, purpose, and context,” and, moreover, that “by over-generalizing one’s own writing conventions, one might inadvertently perpetuate prejudices about other disciplines that for good reasons have different writing conventions.”  This concern is what attracted me to Patton’s article.  At the secondary school in which I teach, the English department has not prioritized composition instruction, allowing literature to dominate course content.  At the same time, the history department has developed a strict formula for writing a thesis-driven essay and applied it department-wide. As a result, students absorb that oft-repeated formula as a prescriptive model of how to write, and they inherit the belief that the conventions of that department are universal.  Since becoming department chair, I have been searching for solutions to this and related problems.

Patton says that writing-intensive faculty tend to give writing advice in two ways: in “absolutist terms” that prescribe one correct method, or in no terms at all.  She says that even some composition teachers are so uncertain about conventions that they do not deal with “issues of grammar, mechanics, and formatting.”  Patton argues that both approaches are inappropriate because neither offers students an accurate understanding of discipline-specific conventions.  “Particularly at risk,” she writes, “are English as Second Language (ESL) students or any students new to an academic discipline” who, according to Silva, Leki, and Carson “’need grammatical input that is unavailable in sufficient quantity from their peers.’”  Patton explains that this input should not be correction but “context-specific alternative[s].”  This sounds lovely, but I do not know what it means; without further explanation, it sounds like a non-threatening label for corrections—“You know, one alternative here would be to use a subject and verb that agree.”  Pretty transparent.

Having established the need for writing-intensive faculty to recognize the rhetorical nature of writing and teach based on composition theory, Patton somewhat awkwardly transitions into a lesson type that she has used successfully: situated writing lessons.  These lessons take only a few minutes and include examples, context, rationale, and counter examples.  In her appendix, Patton offers several samples.  The best example, one on thesis statements, demonstrates how a teacher can offer specific instruction on writing without sacrificing much class time and without implying that the method taught is universal.  In my particular case, I see great value in creating several versions of such lessons to offer faculty in other disciplines.  A well-designed situated writing lesson seems an effective way to connect theory to practice—even when the teacher does not see value in (or even know about) the theory.