When students ask, "How did you learn to write?" I answer that no one moment or experience marks "learning to write." Realizations pop up along the way, I say, but writing skills evolve. That answer sounds good, but I'm not sure it is true. An entirely honest answer would feature Ms. Ryder, and a series of faded mimeographs dissecting a five-paragraph essay on trains. First came an introduction that opened with a general not too bold and not too bland assertion followed by a sentence offering three quick examples of that idea, followed by a more focused version of the original assertion, followed by a sentence that somehow adjusts, amends, or turns the central idea, followed by a thesis. These five sentences, no more and no less, were further developed by three similarly mimeographed body paragraphs and a conclusion, each added like another coal car to the locomotive of the essay.

Like it or not, teachers are products of their education in the same complicated way people are a mysterious amalgam of their upbringing. They cling to mental habits, conceptions of correctness, and models of instruction that arise from—or are a reaction to—their own experience. I wince inwardly when I realize Ms. Ryder's dissected essay on trains has influenced me so deeply. However, if you define effectiveness as influence, I cannot deny those handouts' effectiveness. Every time I write an essay, I embrace or elude Ms. Ryder's thoughts on trains.

Though the structure of her essay dug a Grand Canyon in my cerebral cortex, I cannot reproduce a single sentence. The essay's thoughts on trains may be in me, ready to be retrieved by deep hypnosis, but it's the form that persists, not the content, which raises the question of whether her model is a model--and whether her method of instruction could be a model. If form is the only criteria for effective writing, why is so much of what we admire in the real world of writing so unlike the formal essay structure we teach? Will following a form, without absorbing the underlying value of that form, produce memorable essays? How can we teach students to fulfill the wider spirit of effective writing and suit their form to what they want to say…and not the other way around?

The answer may lie in teaching writing as an expressive act instead of a formal one, not a collection of structural rules but a set of adjustments necessary to tailor a piece of writing to the subject. It bears remembering that Aristotle's Rhetoric describes the effectiveness of communication in general terms, as a function of three appeals—ethos (ethical), pathos (emotional), and logos (logical)—rather than as a single form. Only one of his appeals is strictly formal. For Aristotle, persuasiveness lay in understanding how to present what you believe (ethos), how to move your audience (pathos), and how to organize your message to achieve these ends (logos). His "Rhetorical Triangle" provided the starting point for current expressive forms of rhetoric, particularly in the "Communication Triangle" described by Wayne C. Booth in "The Rhetorical Stance" in the early sixties.

Booth argues that every composition has three primary concerns, each of which is indebted to Aristotle's thinking. The first redefines ethos as the voice of the speaker, its authority in what he or she has to say on the subject, loosely defined as purpose. The second redefines pathos as an understanding of the audience's expectations and a sense of the writer's relationship with his or her audience. The last appeal, logos, is the limitation or potential dictated by circumstances, the form available to—or required of—the writer. Any one of these concerns can direct the others. The task of writing a manual for assembling a bicycle places pressure on form—an epic poem wouldn't do. If you were writing a story, knowing your audience was a third grade reading group would go a long way toward deciding what was appropriate to say and how to structure your work.

At first, teaching from a writing triangle may seem to complicate matters; it is so much less complicated to adhere to a boilerplate. Consider the questions under each category below:

Purpose:

• Why am I writing—what do I hope to accomplish?
• What feelings, thoughts, observations do I want to offer?
• What is my authority for writing on this subject?
• What is my role in this work—am I an observer or participant--in the background or foreground?
• How can I express the quality of my thought—insight, knowledge, resourcefulness, creativity?
• Do I have a secondary purpose I want to accomplish?

Any one of the questions above might spawn several others. In asking, for instance, what your role is in the work, a student has to consider questions about form (Do I use first person?) and audience (How might my audience react to confessions of personal feeling?). Most importantly, each question becomes a larger consideration of why the writer is composing in the first place. No doubt, these questions are daunting to a young writer, and he or she will need careful guidance through the questions. However, these questions are the real business of writing. They put a student in a position of control and make him or her responsible for thedecisions effective writing entails—instead of taking many of those decisions out of his or her hands. Questions like, "How long should this be?" or "Do I need to…?" suggest students have grown used to our rescuing them from these questions and are unpracticed in answering them themselves. If they absorb the forms we teach, can they adapt that form to suit the requirements of new writing tasks? They might develop a more versatile means of approaching writing and learn how to fish instead of getting a fish or two. They may begin to read like writers.

Finding models is particularly challenging when you hope to match a narrowly defined form. Five-paragraph, three-point essays like Ms. Ryder’s treatise on trains are more rare in the real world than unicorns, and even fewer of the essays we admire fit such a strict form. For example, though I particularly admire "Tolerance" by E. M. Forster, my students have trouble underlining one thesis in the essay, breaking the argument into three parts, or accounting for two concluding paragraphs. A broader appreciation of writing’s form, audience, and purpose, however, allows closer reading. As keen observers, students can identify the choices Forster made and debate their effectiveness. While I have no guarantee that my admiration will win out in the end, I at least have the right criteria for the contest—the thoughtfulness with which Forster approached his task. By the time they reach my classroom, most of the students I teach have written more essays than they have read and written those essays without meeting similarly thoughtful and resourceful writers. They seem to appreciate feeling part of a broader tradition.

Working from questions of purpose, audience, and form does not eliminate the formal expository essay but recontextualizes it as one type of writing designed to fulfill the needs of particular situations. The reasons for a five-paragraph introduction may have been implicit in Ms. Ryder's introduction about trains, but I did not recognize them. Making reasons explicit may make them more memorable. Those reasons might also seed a healthy discussion of why a paper in English, history, or science makes different demands on a writer. Writing across the curriculum can't mean writing the same way no matter what subject you undertake, yet, to many students these differences seem matters of taste instead of substance, arbitrary instead of thoughtfully considered. To honor each discipline's particular way of thinking and recognize the conventions of writing in each discipline requires seeing the advantages garnered by addressing form as just one element of a writer's process.

Explaining why this or why that requires nearly infinite patience—for some reason, students don't seem to recognize how wise our experience has made us—but helping students with "why" can pay off inmore resourceful and engaging student writing. A teacher can address a broader spectrum of student strengths and learning styles by diversifying assignments and focusing on audience, purpose, or form. A piece focusing on audience, a paper attempting to convince a school board to continue/discontinue teaching Huck Finn, for instance, makes more compelling reading that a straight literary essay, as does a movie review that isolates and explains the conventions of the review form. Thinking of writing—and all art—as expressive rather than formal also contributes to discerning observations in more typical expository essays. A discussion of how a book and a movie are different (and why that difference makes all the difference) is only possible when a student thinks as the author and filmmaker did. One of my students who was particularly adept at recognizing writer's choices wrote a brilliant essay on the audience for Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street. Another used Thurber's "The Greatest Man in the World" to discuss how satire works. I've also read essays on the secrets of effective fables, effective political advertising, engrossing reality television. Many students seem better prepared to imitate and parody the work of the authors they study after thinking about form, audience, and purpose.

Teachers of "a certain age" experienced a very different sort of writing instruction than they offer; I doubt I am the only teacher with a Ms. Ryder in my past. We learned strict forms through imitation, and some of us learned to recognize the spirit of that form, the underlying values of focus, substance, and organization that forged the pattern. Those values are what we seek when we write now. Some have also unlearned the form after studying ways to break the mold and honor those values. However, we probably all have reached that epiphany when we recognized that the only true rule of writing is to know what you are doing and why. Form can lead to that epiphany, but more often it works against it, suggesting that expressiveness has a particular shape and appearance. We celebrate the variety and creativity of writing by nurturing writers' voices and introducing them to the other questions that lend composition its complexity subtlety, and power. Though I did not learn to write by asking and answering questions about my purpose, audience, and form, I've made my way back to those basic questions and, in them, seen a way for students to find their own voices.

References:
Aristotle. 1992. The Art of Rhetoric, Book II, Penguin Classics.

Wayne C. Booth. 1963. "The Rhetorical Stance," College Composition and Communication 14 : 139-45. Also included in The Essential Wayne C. Booth, Walter Jost, ed., University of Chicago Press, 2006.

In his twenty-fifth year of teaching English in Independent Schools, David Marshall is the English Chair at The Latin School of Chicago.

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