Narrative and Inquiry: Alternative Approaches to Student Composition

Although I have mixed feelings about Kathleen Blake Yancey’s “Attempting the Impossible: Designing a First-Year Composition Course,” both in terms of content and style, it contains a few ideas I would like to adapt for my class.

I like her first assignment, in which she asks students “to identify an object they associate with literacy” and explain how they understand literacy through that object (325). This is a nice spin on the traditional literacy biography because it asks students to approach literacy from an unusual angle, thus requiring them to think about it in terms that are related to, but which go beyond, personal experience. For the first formal assignment, Yancey has students write a longer narrative piece. The goal is to move students away from the five-paragraph-essay format by introducing them to a “building from the ground up that, in nearly all cases, is very different than what students [expect] or have experienced, yet very like practices of other narrative composers who work from the small to the narrative arc” (327). Introducing students to alternative styles of composition can help them think more freely about the diverse kinds of writing they encounter in the future, both in college and the working world. Yancey’s mention of Jennifer Egan and the New Yorker, however, made me wonder: What kinds of reading assignments would be most useful in the days or weeks leading up to this paper? We can’t assume that every student will be able to simply ditch the five-paragraph form that has been so ingrained in them in favor of new writing processes. Because of the New Yorker reference, my initial instinct would be to assign some contemporary short stories or personal essays, preferably written in an informal tone, and to hold class discussions about their strengths and weaknesses, structure, etc. Any behind-the-scenes access to the writers’ individual processes, through interviews or something like that, would also be valuable here.

Another of Yancey’s concepts that I find enticing is that of inquiry. She uses inquiry as the basis for another formal assignment in which students explore an unfamiliar topic together without the pressure of having to form an argument. While I feel that making an entirely separate essay out of this exercise might belabor the point, I believe it could work well as one of the preliminary stages of the research project. That is, I’m thinking of working a low-stakes inquiry activity into one of the pre-drafting steps of the process. This would require students to come up with a couple topics they might be interested in but don’t know much about and to conduct some informal research. We could then have a class period or two in which students would (very briefly) report some of their findings to the class and receive some feedback/bounce ideas off each other. Small-group workshops might also lend themselves to this activity. Anyway, I don’t have this nailed down yet, but the idea is to get students started early on their research and to discourage the last-minute hunt for 8-10 sources on a random subject.