What Students Don't Say: An Approach to the Student Text

Margaret L. Shaw

doi:10.2307/357538

College Composition and Communication Feb 1991 Open Access

What Students Don't Say: An Approach to the Student Text

Margaret L. Shaw

Abstract

The more we read and respond to student writing, the more we are likely to become interested not so much in what students say as in what it is they don't say.What they say, after all, is generally what has gotten them, by in the past: the well-composed, polished exposition of received truths we all have come to know variously as themewriting or canned prose.The sheer quantity and repetition of this kind of common-sense, prepackaged discourse has increasingly led many of us to focus on those moments in the texts when something else can be said to happen: those moments when writers fall silent, refuse or fail to develop certain lines of thinking, or try to smooth over contradictions in their papers.By putting pressure on these places in their papers, we try, instead, to drive a wedge into the cracks of an otherwise closed structure, to make a space for thinking to take place, not only about their subject matter, but about the processes of writing and reading.In the last ten years, a great deal of composition research into the writing process has resulted in efforts to teach students how to generate material in early drafts of their papers, material that will help them resist settling too soon for closure in their writing.1 And even the most traditional models for responding to student papers have tried to address the appearance of "gaps" and contradictions in student papers, even if it be by simply telling the student to "DEV" a sentence or by placing question marks next to the most egregious contradictions.But one reason why traditional marginal comments have often failed in the past is that students invariably read them as directives to tighten up their closed fictions even more, usually by reducing complexity rather than increasing it.2What seems called for, then, is a way of discussing and responding to student texts which would take advantage of what we now know about textual production: a method which would help students rethink

Journal: College Composition and Communication
Published: 1991-02-01
DOI: 10.2307/357538
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Topics: discourse analysis
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What Students Don't Say: An Approach to the Student Text

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