Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2000 12:51:02 -0700 (MST)From: Nick Carbone <ncarbone@lamar.ColoState.EDU>
To: "Writing Center Mailing List" <wcenter@lyris.acs.ttu.edu>
Subject: [wcenter] North quote: was Re: Theorizing, reply
North's quote about writers not writing, because it is so pithy, frequently gets misapplied in much the way that Wordsworth's line about poetry being the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions does. Wordsworth goes on to say the powerful emotions need to recalled in tranquility by one who has the habits of mind of a poet. Likewise, North used the term to sum up a more complex argument about the general shift from WC's as clinics where writing was fixed to places where consultants worked with writers to become better at making improvements in their writing on their own down the road. In other words, we teach rather than repair.
But like all things pity, North's quote can be misunderstood to mean we never talk about writing or we never address the writing or we never should tell students something directive about their writing. Those nevers, like most nevers, become straight-jackets if you believe and try to consult by them. In the context of talking to a writer about what they want to do, we all frequently look at the writing to see if it is in fact doing what the writer says they intended it to do. If as a reader, the goal doesn't work, we say as much and explain why we aren't getting what the writer intended. From there we might ask the writer questions, say to elicit the kind of detail and information we needed as a reader, and in the course of the answers we point out the relevance of the questions and suggest the writer write those answers into the next draft.
The metacomment and questioning to help the writer discover why we did not read as intended is a way focusing on both the writer and the text and the writer *via* the text in a way that's consistent with North's description. It's possible to do this at any number of textual levels too, including, I believe, the surface level.
The thing with writing is that sometimes it is intimately connected to the writer, and sometimes we have to show writers how to find a critical distance. Being outside the writer's head, we can do that by sharing what we see. But even with that critical distance, the writer does not remove themselves from the writing, they learn instead to see the writing as aspect of themselves. The words come from them, in some way, and they learn that they can control and shape those words, make decisions and choices, and in that shaping, change--both on the page and in their minds--who they are, what they know, and how they are viewed by their readers and by themselves.
Nick