What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing?

 What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that? 

This week's readings have certainly emphasized that writing is a multi-faceted thing (skill?  subject?) and as such, a complex thing to go about teaching.  When I consider difficulties students have in writing, and what I'd like them to take from a composition course, my first instinct is to want to instill in them an ease with creating writing.  Of course, no such thing exists, even for experienced writers, and this goal is such a flimsy and unspecific one that it's of virtually no use to me.

What is of use, however, is tracing this teaching instinct back to a source, to a reason for existing, and then questioning the source.  Writing, as acknowledged previously, is such a multi-pronged activity that a difficulty with any one piece of this activity results in a difficulty with the whole process.  Reading through the pre-semester diagnostic assignments this weekend has revealed to me that many of my students do not feel comfortable with standard English conventions, and because of this discomfort, the whole process of writing is fraught with worry about these conventions.  How is it possible to move on to the discussion of composition without first addressing the question of standards?  Even when we tell students that it's okay to make mistakes, we still mark up their assignment and let them know how their writing has fallen short.  

The Reeves article, "Minimizing Writing Apprehension in the Learner-Centered Classroom," seems to have a pointed and practical answer to this question.  On page 40, in the section sub-headed "Contextualize and Customize," she mentions that grammar shouldn't be taught in isolation, and then gives specific instructions for addressing persistent grammar issues, using Nancie Atwell's mini-lessons in grammar and then having students proofread essays in small groups.  I have not seen Atwell's mini-lessons, but I'd like to.  I do start composition classes with grammar rules, one per day, as a sponge activity to begin the class, and as a class, we correct sentences.  We only address one grammar issue per class period (for example, pronoun-antecedent agreement) because otherwise I'd lose them.  But it seems to me that focusing a little on the standards of written English seems to remove some of the anxiety for student writers, and also helps them to understand feedback on their work.  

All of this is not to say that I think grammar instruction should be the heart of composition instruction, only that it is a source of anxiety for students, and that easing this anxiety is one of my primary goals as a composition instructor.  As Flower and Hayes note in "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing," translating (their term for "the process of putting ideas into visible language") "requires the writer to juggle all the special demands of written English, which Ellen Nold has described as lying on a spectrum from generic and formal demands through syntactic and lexical ones down to the motor tasks of forming letters."  The sum of these requirements can easily overwhelm, as they note:  "If the writer must devote conscious attention to demands such as spelling and grammar, the task of translating can interfere with the more global process of planning what one wants to say."  When we introduce explicit grammar instruction in a college classroom, we are not teaching grammar from scratch, but solidifying rules with which the student is probably already familiar, and my hope is that by acknowledging the conventions of language and spending a little bit of time with them, that we are easing the discomfort of the writer.

An aside here, and one about the teaching of writing in the elementary grades: as my children learn to write, I have followed their curricula, and I have seen two opposing schools of thought in their teaching.  One is the "Write, write, write, revise, revise, revise" school of thought, characterized by writing assignments being assigned early and often in the hopes of achieving exactly the kind of comfort with writing that I'm describing.  In its worst iterations, this method has kindergartners (who have often not yet learned to form letters) asked to write three sentences about George Washington for Presidents' Day.  This method embraces invented spelling and intense revision.  The other school of thought that I have seen is one that acknowledges that the development of writing is a step behind the development of reading, and has students spend time in fine motor skill development before attempting to craft written texts.  At its extreme form, this method of teaching writing progresses from letter formation, to copy work, to dictation, all in the attempt to separate the physical process of forming letters from the mental process of forming sentences, paragraphs, and texts.  In my entirely anecdotal experience, the second method seems to produce a more comfortable writer, precisely because we did not tell the writer that those rules don't matter.  And it's this comfort that I am after as a teacher.

Finally, after all of this discussion, I have to acknowledge that we never really reach comfort, and that writing, even for the most experienced writer, is a painstaking process even on the best of days.  My hope is that, by introducing but not focusing on the conventions of written English, that we at least make students more comfortable with this one aspect of writing, in order to shift our focus more fully to composition as a way to join the larger conversation.