As do other instructors, I like to browse through the textbook section of our college bookstore to look over the textual shoulders of my colleagues and see what they are teaching. Not too long ago, I picked up a very expensive, very glossy business writing textbook. I won't comment on the numerous sidebars and illustrations, the captions, headings, and the page layouts that reminded me of a secondary school textbook or a popular news magazine. I will too comment: it appears that business majors don't enjoy reading these days any more than their compatriots in other fields.
But this isn't about page layouts or beguiling students with pictures. As I glanced through the business writing textbook--always ready to steal a good idea--I came across a discussion of how to "embed" bad news in a memorandum. The author had included a hypothetical memo in which a company announced that although the company had been forced to cover rising insurance costs in the past, it could not afford to do so any longer. Thus the company would require employees to pay a larger health insurance premium in the future. This memo, short, clear, and to the point, was presented as an example of bad business writing.
A second memo was presented as an example of good business writing. In this memo, the writer began by discussing the company's caring relationship with its employees. Then the writer explained that the company had voluntarily underwritten the rising costs of health care in the past (not necessarily true in the context of the first memo), and suggested that the company would not be able to absorb these costs in the future. Finally, he reminded the employees that the company cared about them, their health, and their insurance needs.
As the textbook writer explains, the bad news about rising health insurance deductions is "embedded" in the good news about the company's caring relationship with its employees. Moreover, the company takes credit for what it has done for its employees in the past, offsetting what it plans to do to its employees in the future. Thus, the "good" memo and "good" business writing.
Momentarily I was indignant. Everything I had worked to inculcate in my students had been turned on its head: clarity, brevity, honesty. But the author, smiling at me from the back cover of a very expensive textbook, seemed undisturbed. And her lesson reminded me of some lessons I had learned many years before.
During my years in graduate school, I worked summers as a technical writer for a state agency. One summer morning, my supervisor asked me to write a committee report on a complex, inter-agency issue. I wrote the report and submitted it. A few days later, I received the report back with a note that I should see him.
My supervisor, began by telling me that the report which I had written was clear, concise, comprehensive, and well-organized. I had made a complex issue easier to comprehend. For that reason, the report would have to be revised. It should be two to three times as long, difficult to read, and seemingly organized, but not in a manner that would make it easy to follow:
I am going to present this report to a state committee made up of managers from several agencies. When I walk into that room, I want to put a report on the table which no one else in the room can understand. I want the committee to flip through the report and decide that it is all just too complicated to deal with. I want that committee to vote me the power to decide these issues.
I rewrote, padded, dis-organized, obfuscated, embedded, and en-jargoned. He presented. And the committee voted him the power he wanted.
Later, at the same agency, my supervisor asked me to put my composition training to work and run a workshop for the office's technical writers. To his amusement, and my chagrin, almost every recommendation I made about writing, he contested. As he explained later, what I saw as bad writing, he saw as useful writing. For example, he cheerfully explained that the passive voice was habitually used because of its inherent tendency to diffuse responsibility:
When we use passive voice in a state document, we can say that certain tasks will be accomplished without ever going into the thorny business of who will be accomplishing them. We can make everyone happy without committing ourselves to doing anything. We may want to argue later that those tasks belong to another state agency or to another level of government or to the non-governmental sector.He thanked me for my workshop presentations and sent me back to my desk, humbled.
I was happy to leave the agency a few months later to take up a position teaching English composition, a position where I was confident I would not be gainsaid by my supervisor on such matters as the balefulness of the passive voice. But lately it occurs to me that my fellow English teachers and I may have been wrong all along and my former supervisor right. And the business textbook was just one indication that I might be mis-teaching my students.
Another is the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Marginalia" column. Every week, examples of poor writing are culled from academic publications, advertisements, pamphlets, college handbooks and the like. We English teachers read them and chuckle, thanking God that we don't commit such errors. Yet, the persons who write such things--and who commit such errors--tend, almost without fail, to hold better positions than we do, take home fatter paychecks than we do, and sit in administrative authority above us.
What in the hell is going on?
I suspect that some of us English teachers have been so blinded by our own education that we have failed to understand that our ideas about writing have no place in the world outside academe, and perhaps they have no place in academe outside of our composition classes. Most of us still teach under the influence of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, which argued for a clear, direct, honest style. Thanks to what we learned from Strunk and White and their disciples, we now live and work in an underpaid academic ghetto. We need to do better by our students. To help them compete in the world, we need to teach them how to write in the world. The following is a set of rules for real-life writing:
1). The purpose of writing is not to communicate. In the real world, communication is rarely the purpose of writing or speaking. Consider the convocation address with which you started the school year. What information was communicated? Exactly. You see my point. Your writing may have several purposes, to complete an assignment, to impress your instructors, to show what you have memorized. Rarely will you actually communicate something to an instructor. Nor should you try.
Real communication sometimes occurs in a confessional. There's a reason for that.
2). If you know something, keep it to yourself. This is obviously a corollary to rule one. Useful information is information that can be sold, bartered, or put to some personal use. Nothing devalues information as much as sharing it; the more people who know something, the less useful it is to the holder. As a student, it is not likely that you will know anything of value. If you do, don't share it.
3). Jargon and cant are important professional tools. Learn to use them. Jargon is useful because it separates the initiated from the uninitiated; it is a useful tool for keeping intruders out of one's professional space. Imagine the weatherperson who said "rain" instead of "precipitation activity" or the education professor who referred to "classwork" instead of "structured significant-learning activities." Both would be looking for new jobs.
Cant is similarly useful. Often defined as pious platitudes or hypocritical generalities by mis-guided English instructors, cant has the real advantage of showing one's ability to conform to the expectations of one's peer group and institutional structure. Without a working knowledge of how to use cant, most administrators, public officials, bureaucrats, and politicians would be hard pressed for something safe to say.
4). Redundancy is always, always good. Don't be afraid to repeat yourself. Any politician can explain the value of repetition; certainly repeating a slogan such as "no new taxes" hundreds of times is worth any amount of genuine communication. Advertising agency executives know that repeating an offensive advertisement night after night for months gains customers rather than losing them. Any football game, baseball game, basketball game, etc., is a powerful illustration that repetition is good, as are most situation comedies. Only English instructors dislike repetition, and your future supervisors are not likely to be English instructors.
5). Plagiarism is good. Slavish imitation is good practice for the real world; plagiarism is fine if you don't get caught. The rule for writing in the work world is the same as the rule for dress. Write like your supervisor. The more your work looks like she could say she wrote it herself, the better she will like it, warts and all. (And she probably will claim she wrote it herself, just as soon as she has changed your idiosyncrasies--which English instructors sometimes call errors--to more closely match hers.)
Plagiarism does not exist outside of the narrow worlds of academics, journalism, and belles lettres. Your supervisor will take full credit for your writing. Her supervisor will take full credit for her writing (which is your writing). And so on. Don't even think about getting credit for it. You won't. So why should you worry if you stole it?
6). Obfuscation is good. Don't be too quick to pass information on, even to your supervisor. After all, your supervisor will simply use that information for her own purposes and then claim it as her own. Obfuscate. Let your supervisor believe that you know things which she can not understand. Then you will be necessary. Once you have been emptied of information, you may find yourself out of a job when downsizing occurs, as it will.
7). Never be brief. Brevity is as dangerous as clarity because if you are brief, it will be easy to discover whether you are talking nonsense, or, just as bad, you may unintentionally pass on valuable information. Verbiage is a powerful friend and ally despite anything your English instructor might say.
8). Don't worry about grammar, punctuation, diction, or any of the stuff you find in your writing handbook. Buy that business writing text discussed in the first part of this essay, the glossy one with all the pictures. Learn from it. Once you are in a position of power, you can hire an unemployed Ph.D. in English to do your editing for you. The going rate is about $22,000 a year. You won't get a janitor that cheaply.
These simple rules will help our students survive in the world of work. In fact, these rules could help us English composition instructors move out of our ghettos and into the realm of paid employment. It is time that we faced the nature of writing in present-day America and put Strunk and White's moribund Elements of Style in a museum for quaint ideas.
Rule No.1, with some modification, "The purpose of writing [class] is not [to learn] to communicate," has been embraced far and wide by composition instructors, particularly, it seems, by graduates of doctoral programs in "Composition." For the many followers of Paulo Freire argue that the first job of the composition instructor is the political liberation of students to ensure that students realize that they are the "host bodies for the oppressor's ideology and that they have molded their lives to conform to this ideology's image" (Miller 12-13). Instructors who merely attempt to teach students to write coherent prose are not only mis-guided, they are ideological revisionists from whom students need to be liberated.
As David Bartholomae points out in a much-quoted article in the Journal of Basic Writing,
To the degree to which the rhetoric of the American classroom has been dominated by the topic sentence, the controlling idea, gathering together ideas that fit while excluding, outlawing those that don't; to the degree that the American classroom has been a place where we cannot talk about race or class or the history of the American classroom,...it produces basic writing as the necessary institutional response to the (again) overwhelming politics and specifics of difference (11-12).What a sentence! There was more to it, but I was afraid my disk would run out of memory. Nonetheless, the conflation of coherence with oppression and the simultaneous barrage of verbiage in this article should make every composition teacher breathe a little easier. We have not fallen behind real world writing practices. (See Rule No. 6, Obfuscation is Good.)
In case we have missed the point, Bartholomae goes on to explain that students are not labeled basic writers because they can't write; rather,
It is a way of preserving the terms of difference rooted in, justified by the liberal project, [sic]...In this sense, basic writers are produced by our desires to be liberals--to enforce a commonness among our students by [the plot thickens] making the differences superficial, surface-level, and by designing a curriculum to both insure them [well, sic again] and erase them in 14 weeks (12).
Thus as witting participants in a bourgeois plot against students, we are assured that one measure we can take is to reform ourselves is to desist from our inherent tendencies to oppress, i.e., correct, student writing. Margaret Marshall agrees:
"...many of us have begun to think about error as another sign of a student's decision-making.... The challenge is to learn to read 'error' not as a violation of rules akin to sinning, but as a sign of a newly developing, though not yet controlled, type of literacy" (243).
This is wonderful indeed. If some of us have been feeling guilty about oppressing our students by pointing out their errors, we can rest in good conscience. For the more errors the student makes, the more development is occurring. And, by this logic, the less rhetoric we teach (the less we oppress), the better. But of course we are not to give primacy to teaching rhetoric in the writing classroom in any event. We are supposed to be teaching cultural studies which is defined by still another theorist as "the critique of how popular forms underwrite existing power relations in the most quotidian of ways" (Farmer 205).
Liberation cuts both ways. Once we are liberated from correcting student papers, in our newly acquired free time we can be writing articles about composition theory. More wonderful yet, these articles need not make sense and may be absolutely replete with jargon and obfuscation--I had already begun to suspect this from my reading--because, as Michael Carter explains, scholarship is a "rhetoric of display": "The goal is to make an impression, on those who hear or read our papers, on editors of journals, on tenure and promotion committees" (310). Again, the "essential characteristic [of scholarship] is that it is a game played by scholars with scholars" (311). Communication is not essential.
Clearly, today's composition instructors have mastered many of the rules for writing which I proposed in the first half of this essay. We have learned how not to communicate, how to use jargon, how to repeat ourselves, how to write long, nearly-incomprehensible articles, how to obfuscate, and how to ignore our own and students' errors in punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Why then, do we continue to be among the lowest paid members of academe? I can only guess that the fault is in failing to master Rule No. 2, "If you know something, keep it to yourself."
Thus, we need to make a mystery of our craft and stop selling it promiscuously on the street corner of First Year Composition. The cultural studies folks and composition theorists have already made a good beginning in mystification. But we can do more: the universal requirement of composition for every first year student should be abolished so that only a few chosen students are trained in the mysteries of communication. In the short run, this may mean unemployment for a few instructors. However, by following all the rules, those of us who survive will eventually join the real world, the world of adequate incomes, and finally lay Strunk and White to rest.
WORKS CITED
Bartholomae, David. "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum." Journal of Basic Writing 12 (1993): 4-21.
Carter, Michael. "Scholarship as Rhetoric of Display; Or, Why Is Everybody Saying All Those Terrible Things About Us?" College English 54 (1992): 303-312.
Marshall, Margaret J. "Marking the Unmarked: Reading Student Diversity and Preparing Teachers." CCC 48 (1997): 231-248.
Miller, Richard E. "The Arts of Complicity: Pragmatism and the Culture of Schooling." College English 61 (1998): 10-28.