Suzanne Diamond Past Interviews

VOICES ON: Decriminalizing Error Suzanne Diamond is an assistant professor of English and co-director of the composition program at Youngstown State University. Previously, she has directed several writing centers, at Rutgers University, where she received her Ph.D. in 1996, and at Marietta College, in southeastern Ohio, where she taught for two years. A generalist by inclination and not default she has published articles on a range of topics including writing center administration, fin de siecle literature and culture, and film studies. Presently, she is doing research on confession as a cultural form and practice. When you respond to student writing, how do you address error? I constantly strive toward my "better self" in the writing classroom, for the stance that best enlists what is happening here in the service of what might. Sometimes I am stumped. Many, if not most, writing instructors labor under extreme institutional and pedagogical pressures, and these can be exacerbated by students who, perhaps conditioned by a quantifying educational culture, relentlessly push to know how they score or push for voluminous correctional documentation when they receive grades of less than B. Those of us in a position to do so must maintain for writing teachers a culture — a "safe house," to resurrect a now-tired concept — wherein they might resist that resilient pressure to grade for error, wherein they might become as inclined to read for "what is happening here" as energetically as they scan for "violations" in Standard English usage. This is not to dismiss the emphasis on sentence-level error, but only to maintain a tenet we have worked hard for: that sentence-level error is an editing concern, finally important for certain audiences, but initially subordinate to questions of purpose, procedure, and audience. How do you tailor responses, though, to students who want to learn "correct" grammar and usage? As a teaching assistant and later a writing program administrator at Rutgers University, I learned and fine-tuned some tangible ways to both satisfy students' legitimate request for instruction about error and yet to adhere, in principal, to the decriminalizing philosophies I take from commentators such as Mike Rose. Philosophically, this stance entails enlisting the grade-oriented student in the project of promoting increasingly self-conscious revision processes. Practically, this way of evaluating writing entails reading for expressive patterns, both those that enhance and those that impede a student's meaning. When I train new teachers of writing, I encourage them to read with an eye toward these patterns; I suggest that it is instructive to type and to categorize these responses with headings that cover both categories — patterns of clarity or strength, on the one hand, and patterns of difficulty on the other — and to return this holistic "digest" to the student by way of feedback on a given essay's performance. I have found that this kind of feedback is more likely to produce later discussions about how revision might take place than is a rigorous, red-penned attention to particularized linguistic lapses. Don't we need to grade the students on something? Yes, of course, we remain institutionally bound to grade essays, but I have less trouble with this gritty reality than others whom I respect and have read with interest. What I think one can do, besides lamenting a world in which grades are a reality — for this world is indeed a stubborn reality — is to borrow some of that real pressure imposed by grades in order to motivate a student-writer to become self-conscious about her expository patterns. In my own classes, I go so far as to guarantee a higher grade to any student writer who, after receiving my observations about (no more than) three patterns that impede her meaning, turns in a subsequent essay that has eliminated these three particular patterns. The rule I impose upon myself, therefore, is that I cannot overwhelm a student about her errors; the three-pattern formula forces me to train my focus on the most significant impediments and to tailor instruction to a writer's most fundamental issues first. Yes, the "guarantee" always has this game-show ring-my professorial vanity, alas, was the first casualty of this better pedagogy — but I'm here to tell you that it works. Interestingly enough, what I take most from the tenor of students' complaints about their teachers — another facet of institutional discourse to which a writing program administrator is privy — is that many students view our requirements as moving targets and are therefore reassured by any rubric or performative assurances we can manage to provide. The guarantee I offer students helps them and me to get out of the "what do you want?" mode of conversation that can derail a potentially instructive relationship and send it careening toward a reductive litigiousness on both sides. This guarantee holds, furthermore, as I tell my students, even if they begin to evince new patterns of meaning impediment. What are the risks and benefits of responding to error as systematic, habitual patterns in student writing? My own anecdotal truth is that this presumable descent into new error — patterns that I declare I am willing to risk with them does not take place; students do not tend to evince new patterns of error simply because they are focused on eliminating older patterns of writing impediment. In my experience, students only tend to take on new meaning impediments when they approach more challenging cognitive tasks, which is to say, as they are tackling more complicated issues at the content level in their reading and writing. Hence, my decriminalization of error by way of an identification of pattern-strengths and pattern-impediments, and my seemingly mundane (but also well founded) impulse to link the reality of students' grade-consciousness directly to what I wish them to achieve in pedagogical terms brings about productive interactions and poses few risks. This is just my way of fusing sound theory to clever practice. Following the wisdom of Berthoff, Rose, and so many others, I want my work to be about finding — and, when culturally necessary, of repeating and then repeating again — ways that writing teachers might both clearly identify a project for students and tangibly link that project to extant rewards.

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