A Timely Reminder

Response to James N. Britton’s “Now That You Go to School”

I must admit that after reading any article about teaching, pedagogy, rhet/com theory, etc., my immediate reaction is “how can I use this in my classroom.” I am guilty of some of the very bad habits I try so carefully to rid my students of. I rush to judgment, to utility. I neglect to dwell in the details of the article. I don’t always give it the time necessary to figure out what it is saying, not what I think it is saying upon a first quick read. I leapfrog over thorough comprehension straight to utility.

Perhaps that is why I initially struggled with Britton’s categories of expressive, transactional, and poetic writing. And, more specifically, what he calls the participant and the spectator. I read through the article, struggled with the ideas, and then left them alone. I found the exercises we did in the NIWP Summer Institute yesterday particularly valuable (thank you, Christy, for not simply answering my question, but asking me to go through the activities first to see if I could figure it out myself!).

The funny thing is, the process of trying (in groups) to come up with ways to explain his categories to the rest of the class is something I frequently ask my students to do! Like the article we read today (Anne Elrod Whitney’s “Opening Up the Classroom Door: Writing for Publication”) suggests, in synthesizing ideas to present to others, we can better come to understand the ideas we are working with in the first place. If I had just taken the time to try to summarize Britton’s ideas, I might have come on my own to the minor victory I arrived at yesterday in class:

When Britton says that “transactional writing is writing in the role of participant fully differentiated to meet the requirements of that role: and poetic writing is fully differentiated to meet the requirements of the role of the spectator,” there is a specific function of the words “participant” and “spectator” and their relation to “transactional” and “poetic.” Namely, that participants are the audience for transactional writing because transactional writing is always trying to do something, and needs its audience to participate in that doing. Poetic writing only needs spectators, the audience need only read.

I’ve been constantly reminded this week of how important it is to occasionally do what you ask your students to do!!