Style vs Standardization

Deborah Mutnick explains, “In Errors and Expectation, anticipating composition’s use of methods of literary criticism to read student writing, Shaughnessy analyzes thousands of CUNY placement exams, categorized under the chapter heads ‘Handwriting and Punctuation,’ ‘Syntax,’ ‘Common Errors,’ ‘Spelling,’ and ‘Vocabulary.’  On the basis of her experience at CUNY, she believed that the kinds of errors made by basic writers are key to their development as writers."  Ever since I can remember, I’ve struggled with English grammar.  This is probably because attempting to write correctly, or attempting to write without mechanical errors, makes me nervous during the writing process.  In the past, I never considered the writing process as a thought process – a process that gives students the freedom to write whatever they please during the beginning stages.  On the contrary, the writing process never gave me a feeling of intellectual liberation; it was simply one of the most daunting experiences of my life.  Instead of thinking about what I was saying, I was obsessed with trivial things like, “Is this comma in the right place, should I be using passive voice here, or have I used the right preposition?”  Writing papers, expressing my views, and documenting my thoughts was all a terrible nuisance.  Focusing on all these trivial errors, of course, deterred the thought process, potential substance, and individual voice I could bring to my papers.  To this day, I don’t enjoy writing as much as I enjoy reading and discovering new ideas.

I adamantly believe that if I were taught writing as a method of expression in a particular language instead of as a prerequisite for standardization in the academic world, I would have enjoyed writing.  Instead of teaching the mechanics of “standard” English, why not teach students the nature of the language, demonstrating, for instance, that passive voice is an inversion of a verb and noun phrase in a sentence; that writers choose this method of syntax for particular purposes, which should not be characterized as correct or incorrect; and that writers make these choices to develop style.

When did some composition teachers eliminate free choice from the writing process?  I wonder if students are making fewer choices today and are doing more of what I religiously did: searching for ways to conform to a standard grammatical formula.  Mutnick references, “The key conclusion he [Hartwell] draws is that error is not a linguistic problem but a ‘problem of metacognition and metalinguistic awareness.’  In other words, written language functions as both statement and linguistic artifact, demanding of the reader an ‘awareness of language as language.”