Low-Hanging Fruit

“Big Data” is an idea that seems to be everywhere these days. Whether you believe that relying on big batches of data to tell you the truth is the answer to life’s ills or possibly less helpful than other forms of thoughtful analysis (I refer you to the “surprise” outcomes of the 2016 Brexit vote and the election of Donald J. Trump as US president as moments that point out the limits of big data’s predictive powers), we find ourselves in a moment when we have the technology to find patterns in vast swathes of data—though perhaps we are still learning to read those patterns in productive ways.

Long before big data emerged, a writing teacher named Mina Shaughnessy made an argument that intersects with today’s thinking in interesting ways in her 1977 book Errors and Expectations, now a classic in the field of composition studies. (It’s also a really good read.)  Shaughnessy, who taught what was called “basic writing” to students at City College, then an open admissions college in New York City, began to feel overwhelmed by her students’ mistake-plagued work. Worse, she felt that trying to respond to all of the errors at once was overwhelming—both to her and to the students who would get their papers back covered in red ink (yes, people really used red ink back then!) —and ineffective. In short, she was knocking herself out trying to help her students, but the comments she gave them seemed to make their writing worse.

Not one to shy away from hard work, Shaughnessy’s response was to perform a labor-intensive survey of thousands of placement essays written by entering students at City College and assess the types of errors she found. Her theory was that focusing on patterns of error rather than individual errors would be empowering to students and lead to better writing.  Once student understood their habitual patterns of error, she reasoned, they would be more able to find and eliminate their mistakes as they revised their work.

Shaughnessy’s approach can be empowering and useful for us as teachers of literature (a position which, as we know, makes us de facto teachers of writing as well). We can think with our students about patterns in the texts that we read together, in exercises as simple as “Find every reference to hands/blood/birds in Act III of Macbeth” or “What vowel or consonant sounds occur multiple times in Dickinson’s poem? What different effects do these sounds have when you read the poem aloud? How would you classify these patterns according to the poetry terms we’ve been working on?”  Training students to recognize patterns in texts is a critical skill for reading and for writing about literature—it’s something most of us do as readers without even thinking.

So we should be especially adept at seeing patterns in our students’ work—and if these patterns weaken the writing, Shaughnessy argues, this is where we should start if we want to help them improve.  It’s one thing to mark every comma splice, every misspelled word, every comma outside of a quotation mark, or every paragraph that covers three or four topics instead of focusing on just one. But how much more useful for the student to step back, take a meta view, decide what ONE change would help the student’s writing the most, and make that the focus of your comments.  Helping identify patterns in their work is a gift to any writer who wants to improve; sometimes—even often—we are far too close to our own work to recognize how much better our work could be with some relatively small changes.  Our students are, too—but as skilled readers even beginning teachers are well-positioned to make a large difference.