Understanding Error
Research in rhetoric and composition offers a number of insights into how you can learn to write effectively at the sentence level in your academic and professional writing, however, maybe not how you expected. For example, this composition course will not “fix” your errors; you will probably make many of the same errors in the writing you do for this class and the rest of your college career. Also, errors in your writing may get worse before they improve. Stay with me though. Before you drop your composition class and demand your money back, keep reading.
First, the extent to which readers notice a number of errors depends on context. For example, an instructor grading a stack of college writing projects may read them expecting to find a number of errors as they assume the student-authors are less experienced with academic discourse communities; however, that same instructor, engrossed in the interesting, lengthy content of a scholarly article may unwittingly overlook nearly 100 errors. Such a scholarly article with 100 errors actually exists. Joseph Williams published the article “The Phenomenology of Error” in the journal College Composition and Communication in 1980, and in cahoots with the editors he purposefully inserted 100 errors in the text, not announcing their presence until the final paragraph. He explains the phenomenon of noticing error this way:
It is the difference between reading for typographical errors and reading for content. When we read for typos, letters constitute the field of attention; content becomes virtually inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic structures constitute the field of attention; letters for the most part recede from our conscious. (154)
In addition to demonstrating that error is context dependent, Williams illustrates how instructors and other readers vary when it comes to which errors they consider to be actual errors (especially with usage), how serious they are or even whether or not they matter (155).
TRY THIS to understand error. Williams writes, “The most obviousest set of rules be those whose violation we instantly notes, but whose observation we entirely ignore” (160). Can you find all of the errors in that quote (read it multiple times)? What do you think about them? Which affect meaning? Which did you not even notice at first? Why or why not? Were you reading the quote for content or looking for errors? Which kinds of errors are obvious and which are not? Why?
Error and the History of Composition
Since its inception, composition has focused on error; it’s part of the field’s history. According to Covino and Jolliffe, until the middle to late 19th century, students at American colleges and universities completed courses in rhetorical theory, as well as public speaking and effective writing, all four years of higher education (712). They write, “[H]owever, with increasing numbers of people enrolling and a mission emerging for colleges and universities to prepare graduates to work in business and industry, as well as professions of law, religion, and medicine, courses came to emphasize a rather utilitarian training in written composition” (712).
In 1874, Harvard, concerned about a perceived lack of preparation in written composition by their incoming students, began requiring a writing entrance exam, which “eventually led the college to concentrate composition instruction in a single, required first-year course that would remediate students whose secondary school training was deficient” (712-13). Most colleges and universities in the United States followed suit and first-year “comp was born” (713). In the second half of the 20th century, enrollment growth at American colleges and universities spurred increased demand for first-year composition courses and instructors: “These instructors usually lacked any formal preparation to teach college composition and many felt little commitment to it. Their primary interest was in the study and teaching of literature, and they generally saw teaching composition courses as a service, often an unwelcome one, to the college or university” (713).
These conditions for composition instruction led to a reductive view of rhetoric called current-traditional rhetoric, and despite the recent decades of rhetoric and composition theory and research you have been reviewing in this book, this older view lingers. Covino and Jolliffe draw on the work of Richard Young to explain that current-traditional rhetoric “ignores invention, assuming that gifted writers somehow tap into vital veins of engaging subject matter or gain their ideas solely from extensive reading regiments” (714). They add that current-traditional rhetoric also “mandates inflexible structural guidelines for two genres deemed of primary importance to composition instruction: the informal essay and the research paper” (714). Of course, you now know that there is much more to genre in academic and professional writing—including other knowledge domains of writing—than such general, nebulous forms.
Covino and Jolliffe further that current-traditional rhetoric also
focuses too much attention on abstract, decontextualized rules of usage, such as syntax and spelling, and abstruse qualities of style, such as economy and unit. Student writers in composition curricula dominated by the worst excesses of current-traditional rhetoric are seen as isolated, unthinking ‘objective’ reporters, unaffected by either their own or their audiences’ ideologies, simply following the rules of organization, format, and style that they have been taught to follow. (714)
Most composition curricula today strive to teach beyond current-traditional rhetoric: “composition instructors are now urged to help their students understand themselves as ideologically situated writers in real rhetorical situations” (714). As you know, there is no such thing as writing in general—no general rules to follow for every writing situation and context—and this is true even at the sentence level.
Studying Error
Although we know that composing in writing is so much more complex, composition’s legacy still seems to be the expectation that students will learn to produce “error-free” prose. To study error in student writing, in 1986 composition researchers Connors and Lunsford replicated studies they found that had been conducted in 1917 and then 1930 that involve counting errors in a sampling of student compositions. Then, in 2006 Lunsford and Lunsford tried to replicate the 1986 study, but they had to work with a reduced sample size due to changes in research protocols and rules. So, what do you think they found out about errors in student writing? Over time, have students reduced the number of errors in their writing overall or have they increased? Why or why not? What about the kinds of errors?
In the 2006 study, here’s what they found: the error rate—the number of errors per 100 words—in student writing in the four studies from 1917 to 2006 stayed about the same at around two, “though the types of errors vary considerably”: “student errors are not more prevalent—they are only different (Lunsford and Lunsford 800-801). For example, you might find it interesting that the 2006 study found more wrong-word errors due to spell-checker suggestions. The example provided is a student’s accepting the spell-checker suggestion of “fanatic” when they meant “frantic”—possibly an issue of autocorrect and then not proofreading to catch the error before submitting the writing project (796).
The researchers found the most intriguing error to be “faulty sentence structure,” and they provide the following example: “However, Marlow had put caps in the gun, proving that Carmen became infuriated because she was rejected by Regan, as Marlow had also done, and killed Rusty” (798). As readers we all find this sentence difficult to follow and understand, and the researchers agree; however, they claim erroneous sentences like these “may actually signal syntactic growth” (798). This means that to grow as a writer at the sentence level some kinds of errors are necessary. This makes sense when you recall from Chapter 1 the discussion of prior knowledge and transfer of learning. Remember the uncomfortable reality that part of the learning process for writing is failing in order to succeed? This means some errors at the sentence level—those failures—are actually opportunities to acquire new skills for new writing tasks, taking risks with more complex diction and syntax, as well as grammars.
Lunsford and Lunsford acknowledge Williams’ work, however, when they conclude that their study results are perhaps not so much about the rate of error students make in their college writing but rather the “rate of attention to error” by the instructors and researchers who participated in the study (801). Their overall conclusion about errors in student writing based on this study is the following:
When readers look for errors, they will find them. For the current study, our coders were looking for 40 different types of errors, and they found an awful lot of them. Even so, the rate of error in this study remains consistent with results across nearly 100 years. Those who believe that we ought to be able to eliminate errors from student writing may need to realize that “mistakes are a fact of life” and, we would add, a necessary accompaniment to learning and to improving writing. (801)
According to research in rhetoric and composition, therefore, completing traditional grammar exercises—skills and drills work correcting sentences found in handbooks or worksheets—won’t necessarily result in knowledge or skill transfer for your own writing. How then can you best study grammar and style to grow as a writer? Try adopting a rhetorical mindset.