An Educational Trip to Composition-ville

Initially I could not figure out why Britton found it necessary to discuss the differences between literary and non-literary discourse (especially in light of the quote provided at the beginning of his essay; however, I so appreciated his distinction between a love letter and love poem—I certainly had never considered the use of one or the other in court), but thankfully it all came together in the end, as I figured out (somewhat—I never really feel comfortable with my synthesis) the method to Britton’s madness in “Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing.” Once I got through it, I realized he really needed to dive into all those subtitles in order to fully provide the rationale behind his argument: writers cannot be taught to write—they must learn to write. Sure there are principals, guidelines, and formulas that we learn as children (centering and chaining, to name a few), but what it all comes down to the need to put our thoughts and ideas into words, to express ourselves. And once we learn to express ourselves, we can venture towards either end of the continuum that connects verbal transaction to creation of a verbal object. It all sort of came together for me as I thought about my own desires as a young child of wanting to express myself. It seems to start with one’s name, doesn't it? I remember wanting very badly to write my own name, my identity as a person, not just a child who didn’t matter. Once I could write my name, I wanted to be able to write in cursive for that seemed to be the ultimate format to express oneself. After all, that was how all the “big people” around me wrote and I very much wanted to be like them. Reading about Clare (no doubt a British girl—they always sound so much better than us Americans) reminded me of some writing I produced in kindergarten. I was not nearly as precocious as Clare, but I remember being very proud of the chocolate chip cookie recipe I produced, no matter that my required oven temperature was 5000 degrees. I knew of a formula by which I could express myself, and my writing followed that formula, that of a recipe for a very favorite food. And, as I look back on other instances where I wanted to express myself during those early formative years, no one had taught me grammar. As Hartwell points out in “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar,” as native English speakers we already inherently know our grammar rules. The problem lies with unfamiliarity of nomenclature for purposes of discussion, word selection, sentence combining, and those details that provide the finishing touches to a text. Because I had read this essay for Dr. Wilson’s English 470 and included it in a paper discussing this very topic, within the confines of composition-ville are the grammarians who constantly rebut each others’ arguments and rationale. Hartwell’s biggest critic, Martha Kolln seemed to back off from her original stance in the grammar department, taking an important cue from the NCTE when it called for an end to formal grammar and replacing it with “instrumental grammar.” Seriously, even though I’m a certified nerd and love discussing grammar now (I know—it’s a sickness), I could not stand grammar instruction as an elementary and secondary student, especially since it almost always was out of context. I can't even say I really even learned anything but the basics.

Curiously paralleling the opposing grammar gangs who cannot agree on the inclusion of grammar instruction or the type of grammar instruction (grammars 1 through 5—who would have thought we could entertain so many variations of grammar?) within their grammar society are the composition communities wherein some members cannot accept the fact “fluent knowledge makers” can belong to more than one such community and that their society depends upon that very notion. North’s anthropological approach makes sense: Social construction comes into play here—just as our world constantly changes and shifts, so must, too, our modes of inquiry. Can we ever find a large piece of common ground that Google Earth will display as unchanged in five years?