Adam Grant, in his essays on creativity in the New York Times Sunday Review, has explored similar roadblocks. In “Why I Taught Myself to Procrastinate,” Grant considers that the right kind of procrastination can lead to “divergent,” and more creative thinking. Most of Grant’s examples in this essay focus on experienced writers, such as graduate students or professionals. Andrea Lunsford’s January 26th Bits post On Procrastination summarizes the reactions of respondents on the Writing Program Administrator’s listserv to Grant’s thoughts on the topic.
However, in a subsequent essay, “How to Raise a Creative Child: Back Off,” Grant points to another issue that has recently arisen in my introduction to academic writing courses: the problem of too much practice. “The more we practice,” Grant offers, “the more we become…trapped in familiar ways of thinking.” The insights that Grant gleans from recent research seem especially pertinent to observations of my students’ writing processes over the last several years.
That is, many students now insist that the introduction and the thesis must be composed first before the body paragraphs can be written. The students’ prior knowledge of the writing process seems to have become a kind of checklist to complete in lockstep, even as they are presented with new strategies for writing, and even when the old process no longer worked for them.
As students undertake the difficult work of preparing for standardized testing in writing, they may have had all too much experience with practice in using a checklist or formula to shape their writing processes. By the time they reach our classes, students’ writing processes may resemble the format of the written product: introduction and thesis must be completed first, followed by the body and the conclusion. If students encountered a roadblock en route to completing their introduction, they often would stop writing completely, relying on procrastination and the pressure of deadlines to force their essays to completion. Students resist not for the sake of resistance, but from a deeper sense of cognitive dissonance and frustration. Some students made the difficult discovery that this practice of procrastination did not lead to their best work.
So this semester, we are experimenting with taking a different road. I posted a letter to students on my course website, offering the following suggestions for reconsidering the differences between the processes and products of writing in our classroom:
Later in the term, we will consider one of King’s most stirring refutations of his opposition, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” For the moment, as a class, we are experimenting with a change of practice, drafting the body first instead of the introduction. As this unconventional process takes hold, the hope is that students will gain comfort from having multiple strategies for approaching their writing.
