Abstract
Over twenty years ago, Robert Zoellner argued that our post hoc, artifactual approach to writing instruction, our teaching students by commenting on final drafts, is an especially inefficient system. In his College English monograph, Zoellner notes that in directing both our and our students' attention to characteristics of their written artifacts rather than to characteristics of the scribal act which produced those artifacts, we are dealing with effects only and thus adroitly avoiding the problem of cause altogether (272). In trying to teach writing by commenting on student papers, we are, he says, confusing texts with people, written words with the act of writing, the lever with the laboratory rat (280), history with behavior, the past with the present (283). In our confusion we end up trying to teach the page rather than the person, the product rather than the process, which, he notes, is patently hopeless endeavor (280). In other words, Zoellner implies, we are confusing declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge and thus teaching the what of writing rather than the how of writing. Four years ago in a lecture at Colorado State University, Zoellner was still voicing this same critique. In a telling analogy, he said: