The "difficulty" of teaching writing

In recent conversation with someone seeking a college teaching job that involves a large amount of writing instruction, that person mentioned twice that teaching writing is "difficult." The individual's background and scholarship are not in writing instruction, but if he's to present himself in job interviews in such a way that this "difficulty" doesn't come across as a disqualifier, he might consider some of the following ways to talk about teaching writing.

• "Teaching writing is really challenging. I've tried a variety of approaches over the years, and while I'm still not convinced that anything really works, here are the most successful strategies I've used in the classroom: . . . ."
• "Teaching writing is difficult, because we see our students for such a short period, really, in their development as writers. But in the short 14 weeks or so when they are working with me, I try to convey the ideas that . . . ."
• "I'm still not convinced that any one person can 'teach' writing to another, but I believe that a semester's conversations about writing, combined with a lot of practice of writing, can aid a student in developing greater awareness of . . . ."

Actually, I have to agree that teaching writing is difficult. But that's what I do for a living. So I spend a lot of time thinking about--and reading about and writing about--what might work in each situation I'm currently confronted with. In the time that I've been doing writing center work, I've been more firmly convinced than ever that most real teaching happens at the level of the one-to-one interaction. It is a luxury to work with one individual for a half hour or more on his or her paper while that paper is still evolving. It is also hard work. After I've spent a few hours in the writing center, working one to one with several students, I'm really tired. Such work requires continual adaptation--constant assessment of the text and of the student's understanding of what needs to be done, a repertoire of strategies for eliciting the student's thinking and for tutoring him or her in the writing skills most needed at the moment--and one may be doing this with one person working on a history paper, followed by another working on a research paper for a computer science course, followed by another outlining a speech, followed by another writing a critical paper on a literary text the tutor hasn't read. Even the peer tutors who staff the writing center, with all their youthful energy, attest to the tiredness they feel after a busy shift of several hours' duration.

And it's difficult to teach writing in the classroom, because literacy is developmental and, all standardized testing to the contrary, each individual writer's understanding and repertoire of skills, as well as motivation to communicate in a classroom setting, are different from those of all his or her classmates. In some way, the teacher of writing must outline tasks or facilitate investigations that draw students into engagement--because without engagement, no one writes well, or at least more than perfunctorily. And then the teacher must decide when to intervene in students' writing--at what stage(s) in the process--and how to intervene, whether through brief or detailed feedback, whether in writing or in formal or informal conference, whether to refer the student to a peer for feedback or give it oneself. And the teacher of writing must devise relevant instruction--ideally, "at the point of need"--and must deliver it in such a way that it reaches all those who need it (and doesn't confuse or terminally bore those who don't need that particular lesson), enabling them to apply the instruction to their practice of writing. And finally, the goal of the writing teacher is ultimately to be self-effacing: the successful student is the student who has made the writing instruction his or her own, with the strategies needed coming to mind as he or she composes or revises. What the student once heard only in the teacher's voice will eventually be heard in his or her own internalized voice--and often, that growth in writing seems simply to be natural--not the outcome of the timely help that a good teacher gives--so that ultimately, much of what the writing teacher does goes unacknowledged: the student is simply a better writer at the end of the course than at the beginning.

Sure, it's a difficult job. But the joys of working with texts and working with student writers--the joys of those breakthrough moments and suddenly inspired papers--make it really worthwhile!