Tim Bulster
ENGL 401
Correctness and Good Writing for Pre-Service Teachers at UIUC
A General Introduction
Writing is difficult. I realize, of course, that this is precisely the type of broad and
disastrously unspecific introductory statement that cause most teachers of writing to
automatically cringe and, as if conditioned to do so, yank out that dreadful red pen. After all,
introductions, as teachers say, are meant to be succinct, compact, and unambiguous. I,
nevertheless, simply cannot resist-- writing is difficult. It is a general statement that I think few
writers would refute. Often times trying to succeed in writing can feel like jumping for an object
that is consistently out of reach. As the writer, you jump and you jump. “That was close!” your
reader might encourage. Or, “Excellent, that time you were the nearest you have ever gotten!”
And yet, that object can never be truly grasped-- it forever remains an unobtainable entity
hanging in the balance above our heads.
But why is academic writing so difficult? There are, of course, many ways too answer
this question, all of which are valid in their own way. One possible answer to this question, for
example, lies in writings complexities and demands for higher order thinking. “Three
Perspectives on Writing”, by Bruce Bertram, draws attention to the multiple levels and standards
at which writing as a communicative act operates, and paints a clear picture of the intricate
cognitive processes associated with writing:
The tacit goals of writing are realized by at least three different kinds of devices: structural
devices, stylistic devices, and content devices. Sometimes a particular device serves several
different goals; sometimes it may serve only one objective, while interfering with another
objective. In different types of texts, each of these goals may be more or less important. (18-19).
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Based on this passage (and based on our own frustrating experiences) it is difficult to question
that writing is an intricate and complex process which requires a keen sense of reasoning and
organizational abilities. Yet, all the various articles that set out to describe the complex cognitive
processes that are involved in writing seem to confirm an idea that many of us already knew to
be true: writing is difficult. Therefore, for this ethnography I will attempt to turn my sights away
from the nearly undeniably difficult nature of writing, and expand my view slightly. I am
concerned therefore less with the intricacies that make the physical and cognitive acts of writing
painstaking. Rather, my research is concerned with the ways in which teachers (specifically preservice English teachers at UIUC) work to create, maintain, and modify the relationship that
students perceive as existing between themselves and their academic writing.
As part of my research I interviewed two fellow pre-service English teachers-- Nadia and
Julia. Both participants appeared enthusiastic and eager to answer my questions, evidence of
their passion and love for the teaching profession. Both being Juniors, they entered into the
teaching program at virtually the same time. My interviews with both participants consisted of
three general topics: 1) Their perceptions of academic writing as students, 2) Their perceptions
of academic writing as future teachers and, 3) The approaches they plan to take (and have been
taught to take) in order to most effectively teach writing within the context of their potential
future classrooms.
Perceptions of Academic Writing
“It’s just such a nit-picky process” Julia related, regarding the fact the many students
abhor academic writing. “There’s proper citing, attention getting introductions, effective
conclusions, grammar, flow, good support, and then on top of it all you have to sound brilliant. It
just often feels like you are set up to fail.” As she spoke about the difficulty associated with
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writing, I could see disgruntlement dimly lit behind her enthusiastic personality. Julia, though,
comments that she loves writing. The issue she has with academic writing, as she sees it, is that it
offers an endless amount of opportunities to get things wrong. Julia’s comments about her
experiences with writing probably reflect the experiences of many students-- and even many preservice English teachers. “It’s not like math,” she added to explain writing’s many ambiguities-“Every teacher expects different things.” Yet, my second participant, Nadia, seemed to find
academic writing very similar to math-- methodical, structured, and systematic. While Julia
found academic writing frustrating due to its ambiguous nature, Nadia’s frustration arose out of
academic writings incredibly confining nature. Like Julia, though, Nadia does comment that she
does in fact love to write.
“Writing is beautiful”, was the opening statement from Nadia when I asked about her
personal opinion of writing. “Writing is who I am, it allows me to transcend the humdrum of
routine life. It allows me to create a product-- to create something of beauty”. Sitting across
from me, her eyes lit up in an animated sort of way as she took me through a somewhat
philosophical understanding of the way writing works: “Writing radiates the essence of what I
am feeling”, she stated at one point. As I listened and became enraptured by her language and
her incredibly optimistic take on the process of writing, I began to worry. Perhaps that
discouraging and unfavorable relationship which I perceive students as having with writing is not
as prominent as I had thought. Perhaps I stigmatized academic writing before academic writing
had even stood a chance.
Considering also the possibility though that I had simply not been specific enough with
my initial question, I decided to test the waters with a more limited question related to her
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opinions on academic writing specifically. Immediately I had almost regretted doing so as the
light faded from her eyes-- it was like realizing you had accidentally stepped on a butterfly.
“Figurative confinement” was the expression she used in order to describe the experience of
academic writing. “When I write academically, I am forced to put on this strange, academic,
outsider voice. When I am angry, upset, or sad, I am not going to turn to an essay. I turn to
poetry. It expresses my feelings more than a five paragraph essay ever can”. I found it
interesting, of course, that Nadia’s opinions of writing in general were markedly different from
her opinions of academic writing. Creative writing and academic writing seemed to her to be two
completely separate entities. The difference, I deciphered, when it came to academic writing,
was that Nadia felt a lack of connectedness, individuality, and freedom. She felt a lack of
personal style, essentially. According to Nadia, creative writing is beautiful and expressive.
Academic writing, to use her own phrase, can be described as “machine-esque”, meaning “I
crank it out, I churn it out, as if it is just another product ready to be dismissed”.
Both Nadia and Julia point specifically to the ambiguities and constraints associated with
grammar and structure as the reasons for their strained relationship with academic writing. And,
they both seem to agree that it is precisely academic writing’s nature as so incredibly ‘technical’
that gives it its unenjoyable quality. To Nadia, for example, there is an immense amount of
confinement associated with the constraints of academic writing in particular. Most commonly
these constraints are thought of as grammatical and structural. However, they can even have to
do with content and stye. Is there even a style, for example, in academic writing? Some would
say yes, but Nadia and Julia seem to point out that style is often times excluded from the process
of learning to write academically. For, as Gage (1986) explains, there is a “the tendency to teach
writing strictly a ‘technical skill’ as opposed to an ‘intellectual process...’”
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ENGL 401
Both Nadia and Julia show a unfavorable relationship to academic writing, but is this
unfavorable relationship the result of academic’s writing as merely difficult? Does Nadia enjoy
creative writing more because it is simply easier? The relationship seems to be rooted in more
than it being merely difficult in nature. Julia, for example, mentions the expectation to “sound
brilliant”, and Nadia points to that “strange, academic, outsider voice” which she so poetically
describes. Nadia and Julia, like many students, seems to find it extraordinarily obvious that that
voice of academic writing is not their own. This naturally leads us to the question-- To whom
does that strange, outsider voice belong, and why do writers feel that they need to use it?
The Academic Voice
One possible answer to this question can be found in English With An Accent: Language,
Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, a book written by Rosina Lippi-Greene. A
chapter within this book is entitled “The Standard English Myth”, and seems to address that
mysterious academic voice which Nadia is so confident does not belong to her:
The myth of standard English persists because it is carefully tended and propagated. Individuals
acting for a larger social group take it upon themselves to control and limit spoken language
variation, the most basic and fundamental of human tools. The term standard itself does much to
promote this idea: we speak of one standard and in opposition, non-standard and sub-standard.
The voice, then, that students are expected to take on within both universities and in high schools
is, according to Lippi-Greene, the result of a larger social group attempting to “limit spoken
language variation” by defining a strict and rule-governed “standard”. The voice writers feel the
need to use is the voice of Standard English, a voice that is carefully regulated and monitored.
Nadia and Julia feel the need to use a voice other than their own because it is what their teachers
expect. And, their teachers expect this because, quite simply put, this voice is the voice of the
academics, the voice of the educated, the voice of the politicians, the voice of mainstream
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America. Any deviation from this standard is a deviation from dominant culture then and is
consequentially labeled as “sub-standard”, or more even commonly labeled a grammatical error.
It is a phenomenon, Lippi-Greene points out, in which “people in power are perceived as
speaking normal English, unaccented English. And speech that is different from that constructed
norm is called a accent.” Nadia’s love for creative writing exists precisely, as she points out, it is
free of these authoritative constraints.
But are the constraints of academic English really the result of a dominant social group
attempting to control language variation-- or are these grammatical and structural constraints
simply inherent in the nature of academic writing? The answer to this question, I think, lies in
our definitions of ‘error’. What can be considered to be an ‘error’, linguistically speaking, can
vary from context to context. This can be easily understood by considering the slang used with
friends, or the languages other than English used with family members. In an academic paper,
these ways of speaking would likely be considered an error-- nevertheless within the contexts of
friends or family, these language variations are perfectly acceptable. Even within academic
English (and within all linguistic contexts for that matter) there is “great variation in our
definition of error, great variation in our emotional investment in defining and condemning error,
great variation in our perceived seriousness of individual errors” (Williams, 155).
The fact that what we consider to be error has such great variation within different
contexts reveals error suddenly to be something perceptual-- what is considered to be an error
exists in the person deeming it to be an error. Evidence, perhaps, of Julia’s statement that, “every
teacher expects different things”. For, if the audience does not deem a deviation from the rules to
be an error, than suddenly it is not necessarily an error:
“For all of us, obviously enough, error is in the essay, on the page, because that is where it
physically exists. But of course, to be in the essay, it first has to be in the student. But before
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that, it has to be listed in a book somewhere. And before that in the mind of the writer of the
handbook. And finally, a form of the error has to be in the teacher that resonated-- or not-- to the
error on the page on that basis of the error listed in the handbook... Because error seems to exist
in so many places, we should not be surprised that we do not agree among ourselves about how
to identify it, or that we do not respond to the same error uniformly” (Williams, 155-156)
In terms of academic writing, teachers expect certain things. Of course, likewise, there are
expectations upon teachers to expect certain things from their students. From where the
‘authority’ that governs academic writing comes is difficult to pinpoint. For when we try to, our
view is forced to constantly expand outward. Both Avani and Julia cite classes at the University
as well as their experiences in high school as creating their inner conflict with ‘correct’ grammar
and common structural rules: “When I receive a paper I worked hard on back and it is just filled
with corrections for structure and grammar I just feel like... Did you even pay attention to
anything I actually wrote?” For Nadia, the experience of having her grammar corrected was
slightly more personal: “It is like a little slap in the face. It makes me feel childish when I am
chided for not using appropriate verb or comma usage. More emphasis should be on the content
and analyzation of the paper itself... teachers become distracted by the rules of grammar. They
miss what I am actually trying to say to them.”
A possible consequence of this is the formation what Beverley Daniel Tatum describes as
the ‘oppositional identity’. The oppositional identity occurs, particularly in minority students, in
order to resist the authority they feel coming from society’s dominant culture. It is, in essence, a
resistance of all things associated with with his dominant group : “This oppositional stance both
protects one’s identity from the psychological assault of racism and keeps the dominant group at
a distance” (61). The ultimate repercussion of this oppositional identity can be students who
associate all things educational and academic as mainstream or ‘white’. However, I think that
this oppositional identity, in some form or another, can be felt by virtually any students when
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ENGL 401
confronted by a ‘standard’. Nadia, for example, definitely seemed to be picking up on this
oppositional identity-- she outwardly rejects academic writing while embracing the freedom of
creative writing.
A possible consequence of this is the formation what Beverley Daniel Tatum describes as
the ‘oppositional identity’. The oppositional identity occurs, particularly in minority students, in
order to resist the authority they feel coming from society’s dominant culture. It is, in essence, a
resistance of all things associated with with the mainstream or the dominant : “This oppositional
stance both protects one’s identity from the psychological assault of racism and keeps the
dominant group at a distance” (61). The ultimate repercussion of this oppositional identity can be
students who associate all things educational and academic as mainstream or ‘white’. My
research suggests that this oppositional identity, in some form or another, can be felt by virtually
any students when confronted by a ‘standard’. Nadia, for example, definitely seemed to be
picking up on this oppositional identity-- she outwardly rejects academic writing while
embracing the freedom of creative writing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the notion that writing is difficult is difficult to question, and I will
therefore not question it myself. The notion that it is complex and intricate will not be questioned
either. However, I think that there is something to be learned from the experiences of Julia and
Nadia. The discouraging and even helpless relationship students seem to develop with academic
writing lies in the nature of the writing as “academic”, and in what it means to be academic. As
Lippi-Greene points out, “An individual’s assertion of formal credentials, either university
degrees or public awards and distinctions make him an authority.” I think that the constraints that
we as teachers and students assume or perceive are inherent in academic writing are actually
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ENGL 401
associated with this type of authority. My research to me suggests that students do not resist
academic writing simply because it is challenging-- they resist academic writing because
ingrained in academic writing is the perception that students must either assimilate to the
mainstream or fail.
Bruce, Bertram C. “Three Perspectives on Writing”. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading. Cambridge, Mass.: Bolt Beranek
and Newman, Inc., 1983, May.
Lippi-Greene, Ronsina. English With an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the
United States. London: Routledge, 1997.
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McGinley, William, Robert J. Tierney. “Reading and Writing as Ways of Knowing and
Learning”. Center for the Study of Reading Technical Report; no 423: Champaign, Ill.:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading, 1988.
Tatum, Beverly. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. Perseus Books
Group, 1997.
Williams. Joseph. “The Phenomenology of Error”. College Composition and Communication,
32. (1981). 152-68
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