Bad Ideas About Writing

We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old, such as the archetype of the inspired genius author, the five-paragraph essay, or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer, such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas, such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting, are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing, what makes a good writer, how should writing be assessed, and the like persist across contexts, technologies, and eras. The project has its genesis in frustration, but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive, inclusive, and useful ways.

Introduction

Beginning in 1998, Edge.org has asked a diverse group of scholars, intellectuals, and artists the annual Edge Question, a question designed to spark arguments about provocative ideas to be published online and collected into print volumes intended for a general public audience. Edge Questions have included such questions as “What is your dangerous idea?,” “What have you changed your mind about? Why?,” and the one that inspired this collection: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” That last question was the 2014 Edge Question, published in a book titled This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories that are Blocking Progress. Drew first saw the book in a publisher’s exhibit at the 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication, a big annual convention of writing teachers and scholars. After reading the book, especially in the context of an academic convention, Drew suggested on social media that the field of writing studies should publish its own collective effort to name particularly unhelpful or backward ideas and argue directly to the public about them. Cheryl replied right away that she would be on board, and thus this project was born.

This project is necessary because while scholars in writing studies (just as in any academic field) argue to and against one another in scholarly journals, books, and conference talks, those forms of knowledge-making don’t consistently find their way into the public’s understanding of writing. Yet “the public” in all its manifestations— teachers, students, parents, administrators, lawmakers, news media—are important to how writing is conceptualized and taught. These publics deserve clearly articulated and well-researched arguments about what is not working, what must die, and what is blocking progress in current understandings of writing. So our call for proposals sought contributions that provided a snapshot of major myths about writing instruction—written by experts for the educated public—that could collectively spark debate and have us rethink our pieties and myths. This collection is an attempt by a varied and diverse group of writing scholar–teachers to translate our specialized knowledge and experiences about writing for a truly wide set of audiences, most of whom will never read the scholarly journals and books or attend conferences about this topic because of the closed nature of such publications and proceedings. In keeping with the public purpose of these writings, it was important to us that it be published open-access. Because there are so few options for trade-like academic books that are open access, we decided—in consultation with the authors of this collection— to publish Bad Ideas About Writing as an open educational resource through the Digital Publishing Institute, which Cheryl directs. Bad Ideas will join other books in West Virginia University Library’s nascent digital publishing project, where it will be supported by librarians for a long time to come.

We intend this work to be less a bestiary of bad ideas about writing than an effort to name bad ideas and suggest better ones. Some of those bad ideas are quite old, such as the archetype of the inspired genius author, the five-paragraph essay, or the abuse of adjunct writing teachers. Others are much newer, such as computerized essay scoring or gamification. Some ideas, such as the supposed demise of literacy brought on by texting, are newer bad ideas but are really instances of older bad ideas about literacy always being in a cycle of decline. Yet the same core questions such as what is good writing, what makes a good writer, how should writing be assessed, and the like persist across contexts, technologies, and eras. The project has its genesis in frustration, but what emerges is hope: hope for leaving aside bad ideas and thinking about writing in more productive, inclusive, and useful ways.

The individual entries, which we came to dub as both opinionated encyclopedia entries and researched mini-manifestos, offer syntheses of relevant research and experience along with cross-references to other entries that take up related subjects. Instead of the typical trappings of academic citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, Oxford, etc.) that are specific to certain disciplines, we asked authors in the Bad Ideas collection to summarize the available research and present it in a way similar to how a newspaper, introductory textbook, or podcast might deliver such research— not through individual citations, but through a list of resources and further reading that would point readers to follow-up material.

The authors of these entries are often published experts in these fields, so searching for their other work at a library or online will produce additional information on these topics. We have provided keywords for each entry as well, which correspond to the academic terms that would appear in other peer-reviewed, published research on these topics.

The entries cohere around eight major categories of bad ideas about writing that are tied to the production, circulation, cultural use of, evaluation, and teaching of writing in multiple ways. The categories are bad ideas about:

• The features of good writing
• What makes good writers
• How grammar and style should be understood
• Which techniques or processes produce good writing
• Particular genres and occasions for writing
• How writing should be assessed
• How technology impacts writing
• Teachers of writing

Although we have categories (and there are thematic clusters visible within the larger categories), we encourage readers to read the entries with and against each other, looking for productive overlaps and disagreements. For instance, there are at least three entries on the five-paragraph essay—the genre perhaps most known by the various publics reading this book, and the most maligned by its writers—and each entry takes a different perspective, disagreeing as needed where the research and the writer’s experience pertain.

Without forcing a weak consensus or flattening out the individuality of the chapters, together they offer a practical, action-oriented group of rational manifestos for discontinuing unhelpful or exclusionary ideas about a subject and activity that all have a stake in. We hope that the collection is a conversation-starter, not a conversation-stopper, and we hope that it provides a catalog of support for productive conversations about how and why to stop the bad ideas about writing and start the good.