Much of my job for the past two decades and more has been teaching composition to first-year university students. It’s never been easy, and over time it’s gotten more challenging as our culture and the experience and expectations of our students have all changed, and I’m committed to trying to address those challenges. That’s why, when I ran across Kristin Dombek and Scott Herndon’s book Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition in the university library, I was curious enough to take it off the shelf and open it.

Critical Passages was published in 2004, in a very different time, and Dombek and Herndon teach at New York University, a very different kind of institution from the one where I teach, and yet their introduction reflects the challenges I and my colleagues face in our work:

Writing is always hard, but for students making the transition from high school to college, it is especially so. Students are met on arrival by professors who expect different kinds of essays than those they were trained to write in high school. To complicate matters, expectations vary from discipline to discipline, and from class to class. For first-year college students, these expectations, and the reasons behind them, can feel as arbitrary as they do mysterious. Students attempt to accommodate these demands by means of a game of anticipation. Caught in a vacuum, forced to learn their craft before they understand the conventions and philosophies that structure academic writing at the college level, they construct a set of ad hoc methods to get by, trying to make the grade by guessing the values of their teachers as best they can. Among those who succeed at this task, many remain baffled by the reasons behind the demands. Too many do not succeed, and slip through the cracks. (1)

Those issues aren’t related to the abilities of their students; rather, they are “symptoms of a substantial gap in their writing instruction,” and if we can start to understand the nature of that gap, “we can provide them with strategies designed to address not only the symptoms, but the deeper problem” (1). I was intrigued. If that was the case before social media and smart phones in an elite university, perhaps what Dombek and Herndon have to say might help me in my own teaching practice.

One of the problems I’ve seen, and one that Dombek and Herndon also identify, too, is that students have typically been taught that only one kind of essay exists: the five-paragraph theme. That structure is a stultifying, a coffin where thinking goes after its death, and often students are frustrated when people like me demand they produce something different. Dombek and Herndon argue–and this is their book’s thesis–that students can learn the “formal conventions” of academic writing better if they are “invited to develop complex ideas and value their questions” (2). In other words, working with forms of writing and argument can generate new forms of thinking, and working with those new forms of thinking can generate better forms. They refuse what they call the “false dichotomy that positions work with form as developmental and leaves thinking work to those who can speak standard English”; instead, they “teach the grammar of thinking, the syntax of ideas, and thus the architecture of the academic essay” (3). Okay, I thought, standing there in the library stacks, the book I was searching for temporarily forgotten. I’m in. Show me how that works.

Dombek and Herndon start by getting students to see the default forms their thinking takes; that’s their first step in getting them to think in new ways. They want their students to write in ways that reflect the etymology of the word “essay”: “to courageously attempt not only to carry one’s most complicated, new thoughts into writing, but also to see them through until they teach readers something” (4). The best academic writing asks its authors “to pose rigorous questions and complicated trains of thought, wrestle with contradictions and paradox, and develop new ideas” (4), writing that takes courage because it’s difficult (4-5), but that’s not out of reach of university students, even if it’s difficult to learn (9).

The way to begin, Dombek and Herndon suggest, is by getting students two read essays and to use their interpretations of them to help them develop some idea that comes from their own life in “an insightful, personal, or exploratory method of thinking,” instead of just “reporting facts or arguing for a commonly held opinion” (11). In other words, they ask their students “to bridge thinking about facts and intellectual arguments with the nonlinearity and personal engagement of the personal essay,” which helps loosen the grip the five-paragraph theme has on their thinking (11). The essay structures students know, their default forms, rely on an accumulation of sameness, or narratives of conversion, or polemical arguments in support of a thesis, and those structures “manufacture the appearance of knowledge at the expense of all that might threaten that knowledge–in other words, at the expense of thinking” (12). For that reason, students “hide their excess or surplus thinking“–anomalies, questions, speculations–behind demonstrations of knowing, and instead they want to encourage their students to take “that path which is able to sustain ‘not-yet-knowing'” (12-13). Academic writing isn’t about authority, although students think it is, and Dombek and Herndon believe that the writing instructor’s task is “to devise ways in which students can take their subtle, perhaps unarticulated thought and bring them into language, without rushing to an immediate conclusion or judgment” (13).

How to bring that fundamental change about? Dombek and Herndon suggest a lot of in-class freewriting that responds to prompts which ask students to describe problems and try to see them differently–to realize that there are no simple solutions to those problems–and to share what they’ve written aloud, with the rest of the class, without worrying about grammar or syntax, since what they’ve come up with is a preliminary draft. Then they ask students to reflect on how what they’ve written is different from the essays they’ve been taught to write. The writing such exercises generate breaks out of the “thesis/supporting points/conclusion form,” because it explores an ongoing process of thinking, a consideration of “truths in tension with one another” (16-17). They encourage “problem-motivated” writing, rather than “thesis-motivated” writing, and they ask students to read “texts that both stimulate them to develop their own questions, and serve as models for the kind of writing we want them to do” (19). Those texts are records of a process of struggling with ideas, and that’s what they want to see their students doing.

They suggest that the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, in which parallel structures in a sentence are inverted, is a way to break down binary oppositions and thereby complicate thought. They also draw the distinction between declarative sentences, which state an idea, and cumulative sentences, which add modifying phrases and clauses to that idea, expressed in an initial clause, in order to complicate it (24-25). Cumulative sentences are another tool for generating complex thinking; they begin with modifying phrases and clauses before coming to a conclusion about them (26). Periodic sentences are the reverse of cumulative ones–their main clauses come at the end, after a series of modifying phrases and clauses, thereby creating drama and, Dombek and Herndon claim, “a bit more of an idea at the end” (26)–are another way to generate complex ideas (26). “Once students can recognize and imitate cumulative and periodic patterns at the sentence level,” Dombek and Herndon argue, “they can use these patterns to conceptualize the organization of paragraphs and essays” (26). Most students write declarative essays and cumulative paragraphs, whereas most professional writers construct periodic paragraphs, “leading up to the most important thought in their paragraphs in their final sentences,” because “their ideas are often so complex or counterintuitive that they could not be understood without the train of thought and pieces of evidence that precede them” (26-27). However, students need to know how to write both periodic and cumulative patterns, at the levels of the individual sentence, the paragraph, and the essay, and one way to do that is to help them identify those patterns in the readings they are assigned (27).

Since a picture is worth every so many words, here are Dombek and Herndon’s diagrams of the thesis/supporting point essay, and the periodic essay with subordinate modification (28-29):

Dombek and Herndon also distinguish between arguments that are tied together by coordinate and subordinate modification. For instance, the five-paragraph theme is cumulative (it begins with its thesis) and uses co-ordinate modification (all of its ideas refer individually back to that thesis) (27). That structure “masquerades as ‘absolute knowledge'” by “communicating a singular idea, which the rest of the essay attempts to clarify, exemplify, and argue” (27). However, asking students to write in cumulative and periodic structures that are connected by subordinate connections asks them to “find relationships between each of their subordinate ideas, and construct a more complex pattern of subordination with more nuanced connections. A periodic essay structure using subordinate modification–in other words, in which each paragraph builds on the idea in the paragraph before it”–takes that initial idea and then clarifies, resets, and fashions it anew with each subsequent paragraph (27-28). In great essays, they continue, “you’ll see even more complicated subrelationships; you’ll see thought circling backward, returning to concepts that haven’t been mentioned for pages, suddenly revealing the form of an idea of a breadth and significance it never could have possessed without such a movement” (28). Teaching these syntactical forms in this way encourages students to pay attention to the shapes in which they think, and it helps them to find new shapes that challenge their typical ways of thinking (29), and their students are encouraged to imitate the way professional writers use those forms of syntax and argument (31).

To get students to write beautiful sentences, instead of clunky, awkward, or incoherent ones, is a matter of helping them develop confidence, Dombek and Herndon argue, and motivating them to think about how language works (31). One way to do that is to draw their attention to powerful sentences in the assigned readings, and then asking them for verbs that describe the kind of thinking those sentences perform (32). Instructors can then compile handouts listing the various types of sentences the class has encountered, using examples from both professional writers and students (32)–although the latter would be trickier now, given privacy restrictions. “As students’ consciousness of complex forms is increased, and as they develop language for naming the shapes they see in sentences and paragraphs, their ability to wrap their mind around the whole of each piece of writing they do will increase as well,” Dombek and Herndon contend, another way that imitation or mimesis helps apprentice writers learn their craft (32-33). All of this work happens in the classroom; students are trained to train themselves to see these forms of syntax and argument outside of the classroom.

Because “the thesis/supporting point essay form can limit students’ ability to develop their ideas,” Dombek and Herndon continue, teachers need to challenge that form so that students can learn how to reimagine it (34). For instance, students can be encouraged to see how “ideas grow, accumulate, are questioned, and are continually revised” over the course of a periodic essay. They can also be taught to see the moments when ideas shift and change:

The internal structure of advanced essays, both familiar and academic, can be characterized as a progression of ideas, introduced and interwoven as the essay progresses. These introductions and interweavings consist of a number of turning points, surprises, twists—moments when the essay’s established thinking is added to, revised, called into question, problematized, or transcended in some way. When professional writers make these turns, they do so with rhetorical emphasis, by shaping sentences and paragraphs that are designed to frame the turn in a rhetorically powerful way, so that it is clear to the reader not only that the writer’s thinking is moving, but that it is moving in a particular, intended direction. Turns in thinking, and the rhetorical shapes that house them, though distinguishable from one another, occur simultaneously. They organize the essay, guiding readers through a careful choreography that displays each new idea as flowing from those that have come before. We call this double motion, this intersection of powerful thinking and rhetoric, a thinking move. (34)

Other thinking moves include dialectical argumentation that challenges a thesis with an antithesis before moving forward towards a synthesis, thereby giving the writer an opportunity to occupy multiple perspectives (36-37). Another is “reading the levels,” showing how “one’s thinking progresses beyond a too-simple or untenable interpretation”; that kind of thinking move shows the incremental progress of their thinking (37). Yet another is “either/or,” in which two possible interpretations are set up as oppositions, to be transcended later on (39). The last is “inversion and contradiction,” which resembles the chiasmic sentence shapes they’ve already learned (40). Asking students to think in these ways will help them question their simplistic claims and thesis statements, and increase the number of contradictions in their writing; that helps them to see why revision is important, “so that complex and sound ideas can develop over several drafts” (40). As instructors, our job is “to gently point out the contradictions they’re falling into, and ask them to state their contradictory ideas about the problem explicitly, as a thinking move” (40). They also need to be encouraged to identify what’s trivial in their argument, and what’s important, something Dombek and Herndon call “drawing the line” (41). They also encourage something they call “weaving,” a way to build connections over the course of an essay by introducing new evidence while also reflecting back on evidence previously presented; building those connections, they suggest, results in new ideas (42).

Dombek and Herndon require students to make a specific number of thinking moves in each exercise and each draft. I’m starting to see how their model would be difficult to implement in the courses I teach: we have too many students to mark multiple drafts of essays, let alone exercises and reading journals, which their students complete weekly. Students here would rebel at the amount of assigned reading and writing, too. They often work 35 or 40 hours per week, after all, and have little time for assignments, let alone reading. The material conditions of learning here are different than in their time and place, obviously. When they argue that “our students cannot become wise and mature writers until they allow generous and rigorous reading to transform their thinking” (44) I am absolutely with them, but it’s very difficult to create space for that kind of reading here.

Nevertheless, I would love to see my students achieve the goal Dombek and Herndon set for their students in using textual evidence: “good reading and text incorporation consists in creating reciprocal, recursive, and dialectical relationships between the thinking of the writer and that which is found in the written source” (44). That means discouraging “sacrificial readings,” in which students sacrifice their own thinking to the authority of the writers they quote, or sacrifice the texts they read to interpretations that simplify their complexities (45). Teaching nuanced interpretation strategies needs to be taught, and that “takes time and care” (45); it also means identifying the assumptions that underlie those assumptions”sacrificial readings,” like the idea that quotations “self-evidentially articulate the same thing as what the student is saying,” and the contradictory belief that bits and pieces of a text can be used without taking the entire text into consideration (45-46). Instead, students need to be encouraged to read texts “as traces of a process, as products constructed through choices, and to search for “the assumptions buried in the foundations of texts,” and to find “the traces of the rituals through which the writer has made his ideas so sacred, so beyond questioning” (46). It means encouraging readings that go beneath the surface. In my experience, though, students often jump for those deeper meanings before they have a good grasp of what’s happening on the text’s surface, which is a serious problem. All of this strikes me as incredibly difficult, and probably far more than one can expect from one 13-week course.

Still, getting students to “characterize the kind of thinking” a writer is doing in a quotation, treating each quotation as something that needs interpretation instead of something that presents a self-evident meaning, and returning to the ideas in a quotation at some point in the essay (53) is a worthwhile goal. So is getting students to interpret, in class, the “most provocative” idea they identify in a paragraph in something they’ve read (54). These reading strategies will help students to revise their writing, and to understand that writing consists of extending words “over a void,” of saying something before we understand what we think; they want writers to embrace that void, rather than hiding from it, partly by studying the forms that thinking and writing take (56). Revising is part of a process of moving from uncertainty to certainty, and it’s necessary “because our readers are not with us,” and we need to imagine ourselves into their place, thinking about what they need to know and in what order, and how to move them through our thinking (56). “Good revision means filling in this gap between writer and reader by ascertaining when enough has been written so that most readers will understand–when the thinking moves have been clearly articulated and sufficiently sustained, gaps filled, repetition eliminated,” Dombek and Herndon argue (56). In other words, to revise well, “students need to become strangers to their own writing” (57), something I try to teach every semester, typically without much success, because it’s so difficult. One strategy Dombek and Herndon advocate writing instructors use, though, is developing revision checklists together, as a class, before rough drafts are due, and those checklists become the guide for peer-review workshops (58). That might work, although, again, the courses I teach only run for 13 weeks, and our contact hours are limited. Thankfully, Dombek and Herndon provide their readers with a general checklist that’s worth using as a starting point (58-59).

Dombek and Herndon see three stages of revision. First is revision for discovery: finding new evidence and developing new thinking. Then comes revision for expansion: filling in gaps, building transitions, developing argumentation, ordering ideas, refining sentence and methods. Then, finally, comes revision to polish, or what I might call editing: clarifying awkward moments in argumentation, syntax, and tone; cutting excess and repetition; and correcting “surface errors” like spelling and grammar (59-65). They suggest that students freewrite about their essays as part of their revision process, particularly as part of revision for discovery (60-61)–a hard thing to ask them to do, unless the usefulness of freewriting has been clearly established earlier in the semester–and getting students to reflect on and articulate the writing principles that have helped them the most during the semester, something that might be very powerful. “What they can name for themselves, they can use later,” Dombek and Herndon argue (65), and I think they’re right. They do that by getting students to write down what they’ve learned about writing over the course of each essay they’ve produced in the course; in the process, they’ll begin to identify their patterns of thinking (65-66).

That’s the substance of the book’s first part. The second part, which focuses on the cultural forms Dombek and Herndon use to structure assignments–writing about visual art, writing about their cultural background in relation to another one, and writing about popular culture–is much less useful to me, partly because the approaches they advocate are just too difficult, as are the readings they assign (the students I teach cannot read Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler–their writing is simply too hard). The sample essays they use to illustrate the success of these assignments read like the work of professional writers, too; the way they move from text to their authors’ personal lives and back again is mature and sophisticated, worthy of a magazine contest winner rather than a first-year student. Again, the context of their teaching and mine are just too different for some of their ideas to translate across time and space. Nonetheless, I’m going to try to put some of this book to work, gingerly and with some hesitation, in the composition courses I teach from now on, particularly the use of periodic and cumulative argument structures to counter the malign influence of the five-paragraph theme, and the layers of revision Dombek and Herndon identify. The attempt will be worthwhile, even if it fails, as it might. Even if my students don’t benefit, by doing something different, by trying something new, by trying to grow and develop my teaching practice, I will.

Work Cited

Dombek, Kristen, and Scott Herndon. Critical Passages: Teaching the Transition to College Composition, Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2004.