Trying to Dance to the Professor’s Tune

Let me tell you a secret: as I write this post, I am nagged by a voice that asks whether I am meeting my professor’s expectations. Am I using the right voice? What about the content? You know, the usual writing worries. Now, however, another concern occurs to me. After reading Valerie Perry’s article, “My teacher hates me!’ The writing center as locus for a rhetoric-based WAC program,” I wonder if I, too, am playing the “game” of figuring out what my professor wants in order to receive a good grade (1).

A part of me protests this image of myself trying to wheedle out each professor’s likes and dislikes. Yet every time I turn in a paper, my immediate thought is, “I hope the professor likes my paper!” For students, the professor feels like the ultimate judge of our fates—the one who gives us a grade that goes on our transcript. According to Perry, instead of learning the given disciplines of writing and thinking critically, that dangling grade at the end of the course turns writing into a task of learning to satisfy individual professors, a type of learning she suggests many professors unintentionally perpetuate (3). As much as I would like to deny that striving to get a good grade means playing to the professor, I recognize the game.

In spite of that recognition, I was still surprised by the perception of the students cited in Perry’s article. While I have a keen awareness of the audience, who, in my mind, is usually a professor, I nevertheless think of writing assignments as a chance to explore my own thoughts and ideas, along with what I have learned in class. To the students Perry mentions, however, writing is not an activity that is intellectually stimulating, but a dry task of simply giving the professor what he or she wants to read. Upon reading these impressions, a classmate’s recent confession to me came to mind. This student said that it seems his professor just wants the students to reiterate in their papers what he has said in class. If students carry that type of notion into a writing assignment, it is no wonder they see writing as a chore.  Their purpose of writing could easily mutate into that dreaded “writing-to-get-it-done” approach that we have discussed in class and that Perry mentions in her article (3). After all, what is intellectually stimulating about regurgitating what someone else dictates?

That is not to say that students do not fall into writing-to-get-it-done because of other factors—even students who love to write can fall victim to stress or work overload. Nevertheless, the more classmates look at me like I have willingly signed my own death warrant when I tell them I am an English major, the more I realize how many people have not experienced the joys of exploring and crafting ideas through writing. When I think about the perception of writing described in Perry’s article, I cannot help but wonder if these perceptions may alienate some students from writing who might have otherwise found it interesting.    

Which leads me to Perry’s suggestion that writing consultants channel students’ “fondness for attempting to determine the motivations and desires of their professors” into determining the purpose of specific writing assignments (3). Along with using the game to help students figure out what is being asked of them, writing consultants can play a role in redefining what it means to write. In particular, I believe prompting students to figure out what interests them within an assigned topic—a strategy that has been mentioned in class—can lead to a shift in perceptions about writing. Redirecting students’ focus with such strategies could lead to the “original ideas and critical thinking” that Perry suggests expand students’ writing beyond reiteration (3).  In addition, using these strategies has the potential to awaken a student’s interest and when personal interest enters the equation, learning becomes easier.

As we wait for a day when clear-cut standards of “stylistic and rhetorical conventions” are introduced, perhaps writing consultants cannot help but perpetuate the game, as Perry worries (3, 4). What writing consultants can do, however, is clarify that writing should be a chance to investigate and learn, even while trying to figure out what individual professors want.