Summary of Harris and Fangley

Lester Fangley first explains that definitions of good writing are either “circular or absent altogether” because in recent decades the wrong criteria is being used to explain grading judgments, especially when “writing teachers have been as much or more interested in who they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write.” He points out that textbooks, are of little help because they speak of good writing in general terms such as those Michael Adelstein and Jean Pival use to define good writing: "clear," "concise," "effective," "interesting," and projecting "the authentic voice of the writer". Seeking to change the way many teachers evaluate student writing, Fangley examines assumptions about selves in writing evaluation, and contrast a report from 1929 test in English that was used for making college admissions decisions with a recent collection of "best" student essays from Coles and Vopat's What Makes Writing Good.

To exam the assumptions of self, Fangley articulates that the notion of a socially constructed self has been discussed in anthropology for several decades, and shows that "I" can in some circumstances refer to others as well as the speaker, assuming multiple voices, constituting a self that is distinctly cultural. Also, he states that although readers might be from different cultures, of different genders, and from different social classes, it does not matter because reading is perceived as the one-way flow from one autonomous mind to another, and the text is a self-contained object for passive consumption. He points that assumptions from expressive realism were commonplace in college English pedagogy before World War 11, both in writing and in literature courses; writing courses at Eastern colleges in particular were based on reading and responding to great works of literature; and student subject was elevated by the experiences of reading great literature and drew moral lessons from those experiences.

Moreover he says that the assumptions underlying the evaluation of the writing of college students today would seem much more complex than in 1931. Given the resulting multiplicity of approaches to the teaching of writing, the relationships between assumptions about "good" writing and the privileging of particular selves among students would seem more difficult to analyze than ever. The Commission began with the same objection about the tautologies that persist in guidelines for writing evaluation. The Commission found these definitions vague, and they read 92 examination books written in June 1929 to determine why particular marks were given. They focused on the three-hour-long comprehensive examination that included three parts. Part I tested for knowledge of literature; Part I1 quoted a poem or prose passage and asked students to interpret it; Part I11 asked students to write a composition on a topic selected from a list of fifteen topics. The Commission saw the sorting of the "intellectually weak" from those with the "power of reflection about what they have read" as just one function of the examination.

Fangley analyzed a count of at least 30 of the examples in the collection as personal experience essays- 20 of them autobiographical narratives-and several of the remaining include writing about the writer and other examples in the genres of professional writing.

He finds that student achieves excellence because he or she is either "honest", writes in an "authentic voice”, or possesses "integrity," To exemplify he cites, Erika Lindemann, "Good writing is most effective when we tell the truth about who we are and what we think.” To conclude Fangley states that even though the ability to write in certain discourses is highly valued in technologically advanced nations, power is exercised in a network of social relations and reconstituted in each act of communicating. No matter how well we teach our students, we cannot confer power as an essential quality of their makeup. We can, however, teach our students to analyze cultural definitions of the self, to understand how historically these definitions are created in discourse, and to recognize how definitions of the self are involved in the configuration of relations of power.

Harris points out that teacher evaluation of student writing, offered as a final judgment on a finished product, is only minimally useful as a tool for learning and for offering feedback to student writers as they move from the unrefined subject to a well articulated written product. Moreover, she states that we need to provide students with different purposes and methods for each stage of evaluation to fit their needs as they develop each piece of writing and as their general skills improve. And, the instructor needs a format or strategy for evaluating the writing skills the student has acquired by the end of the course. The program of evaluation offered by Harris aims at achieving these

goals.

Harris summarizes the teacher's role during the stage of panel evaluation. She says that first teachers should structure the evaluation procedure so that students can practice and refine their critical skills; and second, to be available for help in recording the kind of evaluation that will also be useful to the writer. Moreover she makes it clear that evaluation begins where any writer begins, with the pre-writing stage, which the writer focuses on subject, spots an audience, chooses a form which may carry his subject to his audience. After the final draft is turned in, the instructor's role of evaluation is really that of a facilitator for useful responses. The more the writer is exposed to this kind of feedback, the better able he is to begin building some generalizations about the future audiences he will write for.

She ends the article stating that extensive practice in evaluation through each stage from pre-writing to final draft helps the student to sharpen his skills as a critic of other writing, guides him as he revises, and demonstrates to him that, finally, evaluating his writing is his job.