Untangling the Web > Chrissine Rios

“Writing is like a spider web,” wrote one student in response to the prompt, “what is writing like?” And he continued, “but I am not the spider; I am the fly.” At the time, his analogy didn’t excite me the way the comparison of writing to washing a car or hiking a mountain did. I wanted to know the students’ attitudes toward writing at the beginning of the term, but I also wanted them to see writing as I did, as a process. Yet wetting, sudsing, then rinsing, even packing, climbing then surmounting, when applied to writing, undervalues prewriting and the recursive dynamic of the process and similarly over simplifies the purpose, making outcomes more important than meanings.

My favorite analogies align writing with relationships. In this way, writing is about getting to know another, and in the process, also one’s self, or more, one’s mind. College students, from their initial attraction and flirtation with an idea to the inquiries, insecurities, and revealing moments of truth, are for the most part dating a topic, and before long they feel confident enough to say something about it openly and with conviction and maybe even with flair, unless the student’s interest uses another language. Thoughts clear in the mind are harder to communicate when using a foreign language, especially with the eloquence needed to affect a reader in a particular way.

Yet every day at Kaplan University, students engage in the writing process using a foreign language: Standard American English. ESL students, many of them graduates of U.S. high schools and the rest having obtained qualifying scores on the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), come to KU to study and succeed. They commit, engage, learn, and have as much to say as their native speaking peers about topics both important and relevant to them. Yet when one’s form determines the outcome of the communication more than one’s thoughts and intentions, heartbreak is sure to follow. It makes sense to identify errors to justify a grade, but feedback during the drafting process needs to nurture and encourage critical thinking.

Typically, nonnative speakers learn English in product-oriented ESL classrooms where error correction makes accuracy a higher order concern than the pursuit of ideas. My concern is that error correction will remain at the forefront of their college writing experience if tutors and professors alike become too quick to tend to the inaccuracies in the text to untangle the ESL writer’s meanings. No denying it, ESL students must learn to use Standard American English to succeed in college and beyond, but only more writing breeds better writing; Standard American English is not the embodiment of syntax alone.

Culture also informs the ESL writer’s concept of effective communication. Harkalu (1999) described prewriting discussions in college composition classes as opportunities for ESL students “to learn the values and assumptions of the culture of the mainstream classroom and strategies for communicating successfully in writing in that culture” (p. 112). Accordingly, WAC positions students to learn the culture, content, and rhetorical conventions relevant to their professional pursuits, but writing instruction being secondary to content in non‐composition courses, there may be fewer opportunities for students to engage in prewriting discussions with peers about their writing. And when this part of the process receives little attention in class, students rely more heavily on the rough draft review by a tutor or professor to make sure they are doing their assignment correctly. But correctness does not equate to college‐level inquiry or ideas. Hence my student who compared himself to the fly, entangled in his own writing, a victim rather than a weaver.

To his credit, Vygotsky (1896‐1934) also described writing as a web: a “web of meaning,” referring to the “deliberate semantics,” the required relationships, and the intricacy of writing compared to speech (as cited in Emig, 1983, p. 127). And how intricate the web woven by thoughts in more than one language! But if those thoughts have not been clarified during the exploratory and recursive process of writing, the result will be repetition, disorganization, shifting perspectives, and faulty agreements. There are tutorials that address these issues in the Writing Center, but helping students to uncover their viewpoints, ideally early in the process, would do more to improve these areas and the students’ overall command of Standard American English while also producing more confident and thoughtful, college‐level writers, and that to me, is the perfect outcome.

Untangling the Web, Chrissine Rios from Chrissine Rios on Vimeo.

Emig, J. (1983). The web of meaning: Essays on writing, teaching,
     learning, and thinking. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook.
Harkalu, L. (1999). Generation 1.5 meets college composition:
     Issues in the teaching of writing to U.S.‐educated learners of
     ESL. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chrissine Rios is a staff member at the Kaplan University Writing Center.

[This article was originally published in our August, 2009 issue.]