Helping Johnny Write

ALONGSIDE XEROX COPIES of three much reworked manuscripts, James's Portrait of a Lady, Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, and two poems by E.E. Cummings, the new Writing Center in Hilles Library displays a Doonesbury cartoon on its bulletin board. In the cartoon Zonker Harris is banging away at his typewriter. "Man, have I got a lot of papers due," he says to B.D., who is watching over his shoulder. "Most problems, like answers, have finite resolutions," Zonker writes. "The basis for these resolutions contains many of the ambiguities which condition man daily struggles with. Accordingly, most problematic solutions are fallible. Mercifully, if all else fails, conversely, hope lies in a myriad of polemics."

"Which paper is this?" B.D. asks.

"Dunno," says Zonker. "I haven't decided yet."

Asked what he would tell a student who came to him with a paper like Zonker's, Larry Weinstein, one of the two organizers of the Writing Center thought for a moment and said quietly "I would, in due course, get around to saying that it really didn't make much sense."

Larry Weinstein is very tactful. In his earnest but soft spoken manner, he explained that the Writing Center does not pretend that there is only one way to write. The staff only tries to suggest new approaches that might enable the student to express himself more easily.

When Weinstein meets with students he occasionally tapes the conversation with their permission so that later he can make sure that he understood clearly what the student needed and that he had responded to those needs. The advisors at the Writing Center are careful to work from the student's perspective.

The idea of a writing center, or in the words of one flier, "A drop-in center for persons interested in working on their writing with some company," had been circulating among the Expository Writing faculty for years. It had long recognized the inadequacy of a single term of Expos to serve a student's writing needs. Finally, last spring, Donald Byker, asstant director of Expository Writing, decided something should be done and asked Weinstein and Joan Bolker, each of whom bears the elegant title of Preceptor in Expository Writing, to organize the center. Assistant Director of Expository Writing Byker agreed to provide money for three part-time employees; the University found space for the center in Room 309 of Hilles Library; and the Writing Center was ready to commence operations this fall.

The organizers did not have great expectations about students' response to the idea. "I thought I'd spend weeks alone in the room waiting for someone to come," said Weinstein. Actually, this week, like most other weeks since the opening of the center, he's booked solid. Open three days a week to undergraduate, graduate and extension students, the center is flooded with requests from students with a wide variety of problems. Weinstein said the problems ran from "those of the undergraduate from Japan who is uncertain where to insert the definite article, to those of the senior who wants to write with more of his true voice showing."

Although Weinstein himself has written a play and some poetry as well as essays, most of his advising centers on the problems undergraduates have writing non-fiction. The students who come for help fall into two categories: those who are worried about what Weinstein calls "full and true expression" and those who just want to get better grades. Weinstein admits that he has an easier time with the former. As for the latter, he said, "I don't refuse to talk, but I let the student know there are higher ideals."

Many students have the impression that the faculty doesn't care what they think and that professors just want a student to give a "correct" response. Weinstein said that actually the opposite may be true. Before starting up the Writing Center, he asked 12 members of the faculty what their expectations were for students' papers. Most of them said they wished students would put more of themselves into their writing. "The faculty wanted to see more passion," Weinstein said. "It is really a shame that students think otherwise."

To explain exactly what goes on at the Writing Center, Weinstein gave the example of the undergraduate who came in hoping to clarify her thoughts for a paper about de Tocqueville. As with most of the students who come to the center, she didn't appear with a draft in hand. She was having trouble getting started. Weinstein suggested that she take a desk outside the office and "think the question through on paper." To explain what he meant, he posed another question for himself and demonstrated. The staff, Weinstein said, will never actually do any of the work on students' papers for them. The woman came back a short while later feeling that she still hadn't thought the question through. She couldn't come to any conclusion. Weinstein told her that it is perfectly possible to think about something forever. "The trick is to know when to start writing and to stop thinking," he said. The student said she felt that to stop thinking about a subject would result in an ambivalent attitude toward it. Weinstein replied that ambivalence is nothing to fear and showed her a newspaper article about a television documentary on dying that expressed an ambivalent attitude, but nevertheless was an effective piece of writing. With this example he ended the session with her.

The center has presented two lectures, Professor E.O. Wilson on "How to Write About Science" and Professor William G. Perry on "Styles of Agony in Writing." It has also sponsored six "mini-courses" on a variety of topics, including "What Does it Mean to Have Something to Say on a Topic?", "Writing Scared (Writing Blocks, Deadlines, and Panics)" and "Liberating Language from Sexism." Five women and two men registered for this last course, but only the two men attended the class.

Weinstein said he was not alarmed by the Newsweek cover story, "Why Johnny Can't Write," that caused such a furor in educational circles last winter. He disagreed with Newsweek's thesis that students' writing troubles are worse now than ever before, and pointed to a series of articles from previous eras to prove his point: a 1961 article in Look also titled "Why Johnny Can't Write," a report entitled "General Education for a Free Society," which in 1945 expressed precisely the same sentiments as the Newsweek story; and a 1912 issue of the English Journal which also described poor Johnny in equally hopeless terms.

So Weinstein is not particularly worried about Johnny, at least not the Johnny at Harvard. For the most part he just needs help getting started. Now, as for Zonker, that's another matter.