Of course, as much as I try to deny them, there my actual interests are staring me in the face. I’m interested in the assessment of creative writing. In The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, D.G. Myers writes that Ralph Waldo Emerson coined the term “creative writing,” not to describe the writing of imaginative stories, poems, plays, and other genres that would typically be considered “creative” in today’s formulation of the term, but to describe a kind of writing that encouraged students to develop problem-solving skills, as opposed to the typical writing of lines and declamation of already-written texts that dominated the pre-1880 writing classroom (cf. Myers 31).
As I reflect on my first semester teaching at ISU, I realize that my students use the term in the same way—when they grouse that I’m teaching them “creative writing,” they do mean in part that some of the activities and assignments I set before them seem like writing stories, or poems, or plays. But they also mean that I’m giving them tasks that thwart their attempts to find an easy answer or a rote response.
I have a list of courses that I’d love to teach: The Rhetoric of Modern Comedy. A creative writing seminar that, rather than organize itself around a particular genre, organizes itself around a theme, and makes genre selection part of the task of writing. The Literature of Parody, Spoof, and Lampoon. Using Verse in Playwriting. I don’t know that I have all (or even any) of the knowledge and skills necessary to teach such courses. But one such “imaginary” course, which I’ll call “Creative Genres as Metadiscursive Tools,” suggests a kind of study I might design. (Again, a kind of study I might not yet know how to design—which suggests that this semester is about learning how to design it, and getting started designing it, whereas actually conducting the study might be a task for the future.)
As represented in the articles reproduced in the “Foundations” section of Assessing Writing, Samuel Messick’s ideas about using one form of inquiry to interrogate another appears to be the direction in which I’m headed. (In fact, I’m already using something like this in the way that I teach.) Specifically, I like to use writing “creatively” as a way to expose the tacit values and assumptions inherent in “academic” genres like the essay or the lecture-discussion class. Examples of the kinds of tasks I might undertake or assign:
· Write a play in which the typical parts of an academic essay (e.g. Thesis, Topic Sentence, Block Quote, Counterexample, etc.) talk to each other. Give them a problem to solve, and let them find their way to a solution. (Note that this problem should be academic in nature; e.g. “Block quote has amnesia, and can’t remember where he came from!” “MLA and APA are arguing over which one should be included in Essay’s posse!”)
· Imagine a conversation between three of your past teachers about one of the projects you’ve written for this class. What would they like about what you wrote? What would they dislike? About which things would they agree or disagree? What grade would they give you, and why? (What if the essay itself were a character in the play? What would it say to your teachers? What would its self-image be? How would it feel about you, its writer?)
· Using the aspects of writing typical to poetry (e.g., condensed language, rhythm and meter, sound agreement, line breaks, etc.), write a “sentient” poem that expresses what its place is in the English Composition classroom. Then, reply with a “sentient” essay that enters into dialogue with the poem using the elements typical of an essay (e.g., thesis, evidence, citation, etc.). (What might the essay’s place be in the Creative Writing classroom?)
· Using the examples from The Meaning of Liff and Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, create dictionary entries for at least five Types of College Student. (Rather than name your students descriptively, i.e., “The Slacker,” you can choose to follow Douglas Adams and pick a naming principle, i.e., “Surnames of U.S. Presidents” or “Flavors of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream” as a mode of inspiration. But you don’t have to. Likewise, you can appropriate Jung’s sentence-fragment style to help describe your college student, if you wish.)
The problem now is designing a study that DOES something like what Messick describes, but that uses what I know, and answers a research question. (The research question I want to start with is something like “What do Rhet Comp and Creative Writing value?” And maybe “How might those values cross sub-disciplinary boundaries to interact productively?”
Works Cited
Myers, D.G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996.
Williamson, Michael. “The Worship of Efficiency: Untangling Theoretical and Practical Considerations in Writing Assessment.” In Assessing Writing: A Critical Sourcebook. Huot, Brian and Peggy O’Neill, eds. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009.
