By Joey Yearous-Algozin
As a consultant and teacher, I’ve found that metaphors about the writing process can be really helpful, whether bringing needed humor to a difficult writing problem, helping a student re-approach something they are struggling with, or creating a bond with another writer over a shared cultural reference. For instance, when I teach topic sentences, I tell my students to avoid beginning their paragraphs with examples that are only made relevant later in the paragraph: “It’s like yelling ‘BROCCOLI’ in the middle of a conversation, only to say after a brief silence ‘Some foods are green.'” While this generally gets a laugh, I will have more than one student suggest editing a peer’s paper with the note: “broccoli.”
Just the other day, I was working with a student who was struggling to write a response to a three-part assignment within the 350-word limit given by the professor. Since this class emphasized writing for the corporate environment, the professor had stressed the need for brevity.
When we got to the final section, I realized that the student had restated the problem he identified in a previous section, instead of just addressing the prompt directly. While pointing this out, we also talked about his frustration with the technique of re-stating problems that he learned in composition classes. At this point, the student asked me point blank, “Why did I have to write all of those essays, if I can’t write like that now? What was the point?”
The question caught me off guard. Normally, I would have resorted to talking about the need for developing critical thinking in all forms of writing and how composition also helped with constructing arguments and audience awareness, but, for whatever reason, I didn’t feel like this would have actually answered the student’s question. Instead, I used a bicycle metaphor:
“You know how when you’re riding your bike in Manhattan and you only have so much space to bike in?” I said. “If that’s what biking is really like, then why do kids learn to how to ride a bike in something like a parking lot? It’s probably because if you tried to learn in really confined spaces, all you’d do is fail over and over again. Maybe you’d never bother learning at all because of the frustration. But in a parking lot, you have the space to get used to bike riding without the pressure of all the traffic and pedestrians. Essay writing is a lot like that. Those 6-8 page research assignments give you the space to develop your skills, so when the time comes that you need to use those skills that you developed in writing your essays in a confined space, you’ll be able to do it.”
Beyond lessening the student’s frustration, this conversation helped both the student and myself understand how the skills learned and developed in composition can be taken away from the classroom and applied to real life. For myself as a writing consultant, this interaction helped me better understand Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak’s recent investigation into composition and transfer, in their 2014 book, Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. In talking with the student about how his previous composition courses helped prepare him to tackle this assignment, he came to see writing essays and this shortened, almost memo-like assignment not as isolated tasks with little to no connection, but stages in his own development and growth as a writer.
Published April 21, 2016
