Indigenous Thinkers

Chapter Five: The Literate Essay: Using Ethnography to Explode Myths

SHIRLEY BRICE HEATH Stanford University

THE ESSAY AS EXAMPLE

The essay, a written genre shrouded in myths and mystery, lies at the heart of academic performance. Beyond asserting general rhetorical principles of persuasion and argumentation, relatively few critical analyses explain the internal structuring of essays and how their composition is revealed to authors and readers. The goal of this chapter is to bring members of the reading audience - most especially teachers - into the composition and reception of the essay form so that they may feel they have stepped inside a literate essay. Reading this essay and following its argument should lead readers to experience something of the role of participant that students and teachers in a learning community can create as they explore their own language forms and uses.

It is somewhat surprising that within the current mood of deconstructing literature, so few language scholars have tried to understand what makes each essay that English teachers might regard as "well constructed" or "literate" an instance of the genre essay. It may well be that of all the literary forms, the essay has suffered most from an unwillingness on the part of scholars to make strange such a familiar form; academics are, after all, forced to reveal the results of their examination of the essay in that very form. Structural studies of the essay carry the same drawbacks as research on language or the brain. We are forced to transmit our studies of language through the linguistic medium; we must use the brain to study the brain. We resist researching the essay when the reporting instrument is the object of the inquiry.

Thus, instead of turning intense and closely argued analyses on the essay as a genre, we create and perpetuate myths and common-sense theories, such as the "five-paragraph essay formula" and prescriptive rules about teaching outlines and observing rules for choice of voice, person, and organization. This essay attempts to break open some of these myths and to look at ways in which the essay seduces the reader by pulling the reader inside its structure to ensure that the reader becomes a co-participant in the recomposition of the piece. What follows here is then both a programmatic display of ways that students across different writing backgrounds and cultural experiences can come to know an essay and a firsthand experience for the readers of this essay to be "inside the essay." We look at myths and the role of ethnography in reconsidering how certain myths may hold us back from membership in a learning community.

FINDING MYTHS

William Carlos Williams, an American pact, novelist, and essayist, as well as a full-time physician, probably knew more about the writing of essays than most teachers of composition or academics whose professional reputation depends on their essay writing abilities. Williams wrote numerous essays, but it is not from his essays as models that we learn about how to write essays. It is from his exposure of some of the myths about writing. He came to know about writing through acting as an early ethnographer of communication - an anthropologist within the tribe of the American literary elite who reveled in telling as much as possible about the ways of believing, valuing, and behaving that members of his literary community shared. He knew that other writers would not agree with him; they preferred to maintain myths not only about themselves as authors but about writing in general. Williams levied the same charge against academics, members of English Departments especially, who were, in his view, conspirators who placed knowledge "before a man as if it were a stair at the top of which a DEGREE is obtained..." (1970, p. 139).

If we examine some of the myths that Williams identified, we can consider how those who write essays might benefit from turning an ethnographic eye as participant-observers on the genre. For students learning to write, such practices may be especially helpful for removing some of the fear and paralysis which can result from the myths and mystification that currently surround essays in school. Williams is a good model, because he was at once a writer, critic of the teaching of writing, celebrator of those who wanted to learn to write, and a man that anthropologists who study methods of communication today are happy to embrace as a kindred soul.

Four myths to explode - or at the very least - to consider with a new perspective:

First: teachers of composition can teach students to write.

Second: the classroom is a place in which we can merely practice writing; real writing is almost impossible to accomplish there.

Third: thinking about one's writing is something apart from talking about one's writing.

Fourth: the direction of influence is from oral language habits to written and not the reverse.

Offered in place of these are not four replacement statements which will themselves become myths, but four thought-starters - points for consideration in our definitions of ourselves as members of the writing profession.

1. No one teaches anyone else to write. The process of composition in written form is far too complicated for any individual to be able to articulate the rules so that another individual can learn to write simply by following the given rules. For the same reason we cannot teach young children to talk by devising rules to describe how to talk, so we cannot teach writing by devising and transmitting rules for how it is done. Those rules will always be inadequate for capturing the actual process through which novices learn by intuiting rules, trying them, and finally fixing on what works in written communication.

2. The English classroom can be one of the most dynamic communication centers of any individual's life experiences.

3. Learning to write is fundamentally based on multiple, redundant occasions for certain kinds of talk about language as well as extended opportunities for talking about what is written and read.

4. The influence of oral and written language on each other is bi-directional - learning to write influences how one talks, and an individual's ways of talking strongly influence the process of1carning to write.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE LEARNING COMMUNITY

Myth #1. The myth: Teachers of composition can teach others to write; the replacement thought-starter: no one ever teaches anyone else to write. We can only enable others to learn by providing adequate modeling, opportunity for trials, and chances for having successful communication in writing (cf. Freedman, 1985). My argument here is based not only on an endorsement of William's thoughts about the essay, but also on my long-term research on children learning their first language (Heath, 1983). Williams wrote of the essay: "To essay... is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is always sure, it remains from first to last fixed.... Whatever passes through it, it is never that thing. It remains itself and continues so, pure motion." (1970, p. 322). The analogue here is language: To use language is to establish trial. Language is always sure in that its structures - phonemes, morphemes, lexicon, and syntax - are fixed, arbitrary, and systematic, yet infinitely capable of creation within and through it.

Children learn their mother tongue in all its complexities not by imitation or by having someone spell out the grammar rules for them. Indeed such a proposition is impossible, because our analytical powers do not begin to extend far enough for us to be able to explain how our language works. Linguists spend decades simply trying to explain if-then clauses or case endings in a single language. Thus in the past two decades, we have had to admit that every neurologically normal individual has a human bioprogram that provides the language-making capacity that takes its ultimate shape through societal influences. With our abilities to learn, and our desire to be socially accepted, we observe, listen, associate, and generate rules that we then test and refine, all the while making judgments about the appropriateness of our applications of these rules. Hence, we come to learn to speak without being taught; what we need are models who communicate with us and meet our social and physical needs through language.

Learning written language is fundamentally very similar to learning oral language. What is needed to learn written language are models who communicate with us through writing and who expect us to transmit our knowledge, needs, and plans for the future through the written channel. Given sufficient opportunity to have such communicative exchange, we can internally generate and test rules for writing to meet satisfactorily the goals we set for ourselves.

However, beyond these fundamental similarities are two critical differences: learning to write requires tools, and the process involves internalizing conventions that are counterintuitive and in contrast to the rules of use of oral language. In most parts of the world, a single institution - the school - enshrines these differences in a nexus of value-laden expectations that give off the strong message that writers and readers should be highly self-conscious about written language. The symbolic power of "correct," "complex," and "comprehensible" written language lies behind educators' convictions of the importance of learning literate behaviors, and thus schools feel compelled to generate fixed rules for written language as well as labels to explain deficiencies in reading and writing. As a result, the internal motivation and self-defined goals for communicating which drive us to be successful oral language learners become displaced by externally established goals and criteria. Thus learning written language casts from the outset an identity-threatening rather an identity en-enhancing aura.

In addition, written language depends on c in artifacts; to obtain the repetitive, multiple, and reiterative opportunities to read and write which ensure academic success, the learner needs adequate tools of a certain quantity, developmental sequence, and level of complexity. Learners with access to only a few primers and charcoal and parchment cannot match in achievement those who have a variety of printed materials, some of which hold the most complex ideas of the society, and a multiplicity of supplies for writing.

Perhaps the most essential difference between learning written language and acquiring spoken language rests in the fact that learning to read and write requires exclusive attention and some isolation from other activities Speaking naturally embeds itself in the normal flow of daily life. In contrast, learning to use written language demands blocks of time in which the learner does nothing else. One can talk while one eats, works, travels, and plays; reading and writing demand a certain amount of attention to these accomplishments alone. Moreover, in most societies of the world, the pace of daily life and fundamental human needs can be met without written language, and even in societies where written language seems essential, one can solve most problems by oral language. If human beings can accomplish what they want and need by doing one thing which they already know how to do, they usually resist learning a parallel skill. Golfers, cooks, and auto mechanics generally have one way of swinging a club, putting together a soufflé, and cleaning a carburetor; only if for some reason the usual way does not work, will any of these individuals turn to a back-up or parallel method.

Ironically, schools, the major locale for providing exclusive attention to reading and writing needed for societally-defined mastery, set aside these essential differences between learning to speak and learning to read and write. The goals and the organization of time and activities in most formal education in societies around the world limit the extent to which individuals can depend on the school as the place for learning to read and write. Schools have the goal of not only teaching writing, but also transmitting content knowledge. If reduced sufficiently in scope and complexity, knowledge can be tested through only a few words; hence, the majority of testing of knowledge docs not call for much writing - only single words or brief phrases, as Arthur Applebee's research on writing in American secondary schools has shown (1981). Demands for efficiency of evaluation and predictability of responses force teachers to limit students' opportunities for writing in classrooms. Teaching for "the answer" precludes using written language to explore how and why answers evolve and how they might change. Such limited models and opportunities for productive writing circumscribe the productive written language one can learn in school. If adults spoke with children in only simple straightforward language without affective elaboration or questioning expansion, and expected only one-word utterances or brief phrases of oral language in response, children could not learn to speak beyond the level of the model. Similarly, when the writing which is expected of students is always brief and when students are regarded as remedial or needing "special education," they are deprived of productive opportunities to write - or in Williams' words, they have no opportunity to "try." But are there ways in which classrooms can enable them to have the trials Williams sees as necessary for learning to write essays?

Myth #2. "Real" writing is nearly impossible in classrooms. The thought replacement: classrooms can create for the learning of writing an environment similar to that in which children learn to speak - situations of multiple, redundant, and meaningful opportunities to communicate out of children's felt needs. The classroom can be one of the liveliest communication dens of our life. However, the liveliness to which I refer comes from turning the language arts or English classroom into the place in which we explore language. Proust has told us in Remembrance of Things Past that "We are attracted by every form of life which represents to us something unknown and strange, by a last illusion still unshattered" (1934: p. 1120). It is this attraction to making strange that with which we think we are so familiar that can draw students into studying their language - oral and written.

We can for the purposes of illustration think of this study as the ethnography of communication, but it must be ethnography which is grounded in some understanding of the role of this type of work in anthropology (Saville-Troike, 1984). Ethnography is not - as far too much of the current craze for qualitative research makes it out to be - a method; it is instead the genre which results from t of methods which include long-term residence within a group, knowledge of the language of the group, an selection of methods o data collection which include participant observation, artifact collection, interviewing, and considerable quantitative work. The re- searcher who collects data in these ways must analyze them through a variety of conceptual frameworks; interpretations of these meanings come not only through the data collected, but also through returning to those from whom the data were collected and discussing interpretations which the researcher has reached (Ellen, 1984).

In numerous collaborative efforts in classrooms across the country teachers and students have collected language data as ethnographers of communication (Heath, 1983; Heath & Branscombe, 1985; Heath, 1985) Students go out into their own homes and communities, taking fieldnotes on the contexts of the talk they hear, the reading and writing they see others doing, and the actions which result from such communications. Accompanying these fieldnotes may be audiotapes of conversations, sermons, songs, jokes, riddles, or any of a variety of types of language uses. These materials become the data for much of the initial work on language in these classrooms. Necessary to making these collections of language data useful in classrooms is a teacher ready to engage students in language study. Such teachers are not now abundant, since most training programs for language arts or English teachers offer limited opportunities to study forms and uses of language apart from a prescriptivist environment. But for those who have either had such opportunities or are willing to immerse themselves in a collaborative effort with language researchers (see Heath & Branscombe, 1985, for example), the rewards can be unlimited. Students and teachers become involved in producing theories about how language accomplishes actions, relationships, and ideas; such theories generate practices, carried along by the need to test hypotheses and to shatter illusions.

Once accomplished in examining the language of everyday life around them, students can apply their newfound skills of analysis to their own writings and to the language of literary authors. Students can pose questions: who was talking, for how long, about what topic, with what goals? They must then figure out ways to answer these questions. What is countable, and what is to be gained by counting? If one is to count, one must identify the units to be counted - words, sentences, turns in a conversation, etc. This early analysis turns students' attention to the units of language for which they have to discover names and definitions - they can either turn to a book for these terms or devise terms of their own. Often, students from fifth grade on simply remember at this point that their teachers have already given them terms which now become relevant for something the students want to do; hence, they name the units they are identifying with such familiar terms as verbs, nouns, etc. But to count nouns or verbs, there must be agreement about what each of these is. Hence one must decide on definitions and try them out on the real language data the students have collected. Teachers must, in these circumstances, be prepared to acknowledge that most textbook definitions are entirely too limited to cover all the possible circumstances that occur in actual language use, and students will have to make informed decisions about entities that fall in border areas.

To collect more data, students can move out from their own homes to workplaces, analyzing the relatedness of talking to writing or reading and then retelling information gained from written materials to others or reworking such knowledge into actions which one must take. These data require more in-depth analysis - how do thoughts become connected so that people who hear them expressed realize that one thing comes before another, one thing is causally related to another? Students who begin to ask such questions of their data have to find grammatical items or components of language which accomplish these ends. Thus students find that when mainstream middle class native English speakers tell stories about events they have experienced, they use many ands to string the elements of the action together. However, when individuals give directions about how to accomplish an action, they tend to relate single actions to each other by using temporal or causal rather than coordinate conjunctions. Students become aware of their own ways of beginning and ending pieces of communication: a joke is known by its opening before it is told; a professor's turn from one topic to another is signaled by the use of "OK" or (in Great Britain) "Right."
A love affair can (and often docs) develop with language - oral and written - as students and teacher collect, analyze, and finally interpret their data from oral and written sources. Written texts - from bills to speeding tickets, conversations, and courtroom transcripts - prepare students as experts to move on to short stories, novels, and poems. As they analyze these literary pieces, they apply the same strategies they have applied to the data they collected in their daily world of language use. But such collection and analysis of the familiar helps students begin to act as experts over language, and they can recognize works of literature as creative language uses which are ultimately dependent on ordinary language reworked by nonordinary means. Imagination determines the limits to which teachers and students can explore and find unknowns in the familiar patterns of everyday talk and the types of writing which occur in different environments.

Such analysis leads to interpretation which depends on descriptions of contexts of talk and writing. Are there characteristics of written materials in work settings which differ from such features in home settings? Out of the stream of speech, how can we cut into chunks what is there? Are there genre conventions which tell us when one piece of text is one thing and not another? How do we know when a joke has ended? What role does anticipation play in the way we comprehend as we read or as we listen?

The search for understanding language is one in which teacher and students join as experts - all can use language, and yet all also join as novices in the exploration of ways to understand what it is. As students come to understand more and more through data collection, analysis, and comparison across types of settings for oral and written language, they will want to communicate their discoveries. Essays, reports, graphic representations, as well as other types of written messages can be the forms into which students place their interpretations of data. The audience for these writings can be those on the site in which the data were collected, for it is to those sites that the writer-researcher must return and seek verification of findings and interpretations. From brothers and sisters or parents at home, to ministers, or secretaries in college offices, those who are experts on their own language uses can be asked to read and discuss the reports on their language uses. Needless to say, students who go out into the world as ethnographers of communication must also be aware of the need to inform those who are being studied of the research; hence, to seek permission to carry out re- search, students must use written forms as well as oral explanations of what they are planning to do and what they have accomplished in their research. In essence, students at any level of the curriculum can become experts on their own language and that of the settings in which they can gain permission to observe, listen, record, and then analyze and interpret. These skills transfer to the study of literary texts and to roles as critics of one's own writing as well as that of others. Among those researchers who have repeatedly asked writers to engage in protocols in which they talk aloud as they write or read and explain what they are doing, there is acknowledgement that when students verbalize how they are using language as they write, this attention to language as such seems to be a treatment. It creates more interest in and awareness of one's writing and one's uses of language, which turns out to be a critical first step toward improved writing. Engaging students in language study before asking them to become essayists and literary critics in English classrooms enables students to come to know how to talk about language, and they find the enterprise entertaining, educational, and filled with positive transfer value to their own writing and speaking.

As students collect, analyze, and interpret their data, they generate rules about the structures and functions of language - oral and written. They do so to talk with each other and with those who helped create the data about the interpretations or findings. The tasks are not empty; they are filled with the rewards of detective work, and the types of writing the students do - from fieldnotes through brief summaries of' small portions of data, to reports, essays, or the like - have the goal of communicating with the informants from whom they collected the data. These informants respond to such reports, because they, like most subjects of writing, enjoy seeing their words and thoughts on paper. Mechanics, waitresses, fathers, little sisters, or secretaries are not exceptions to the near-universal attraction of seeing one's seemingly trivial daily habits and routines valued enough by others to be their object of study and report. The transformation of the data into interpretive essays to be discussed with those who are the topics of the essays guarantees response and engagement with an expert and critical audience.

Just as the development of oral language depends on the context of the rich interaction between child and adults, so then docs the development of written language depend on a rich responsive context. This context is especially critical for older students who have reached high school or college without opportunity to participate in any extended interactive writing - my title for this kind of writing. Young children acquiring language search for units of symbolic behavior, construct systems of elements and relations, and try to match their production to those of selected others in recurrent situational contexts. The new writer must follow similar steps to generate internal rules for writing to communicate. Responsive, interactive writing frequently occurring over a period of time provides the experience from which students may search out meaningful units and systems in writing. The opportunity to talk about the writing - with classmates, teachers, and with the subjects - forces writers to realize what they have not communicated through the written word - the assumptions they have made, the presuppositions they have not fully explained, the backgrounds of understanding which are not shared. As students begin to initiate interpretation for themselves and to have content they want to expand, they will use language not only for interactional and personal functions - Michael Halliday's terms (1975) for the functions to which young children put oral language - but for heuristic and imaginative purposes as well.

Moreover, in this kind of inquiry, imitation and rule generation play a part in the acquisition of written language. One goes beyond simply observing and recording the data in looking for the patterns by which language works - for example, the recurrent design of administrative forms versus the design of letters of inquiry from charitable agencies, or the relative length of sentences used in giving directions as compared with those delivered in a sermon. From creating fieldnotes (which must use primarily descriptive language), to writing summaries which demand transitions and connections among sentences within the piece, to framing interpretive essays, students have the opportunity to write in various genres. They not only explore patterns and rules by describing them at work, but they also generate the needed inter les or knowledge about how to communicate in written form what they have learned about the uses of oral and written language in varying environments. In short, these students find the language arts or English classroom a place which docs not give them grammar rules, but allows them to come to own rules which relate not only to grammar but also to the conventions of appropriateness for different genres and conventions of speaking and writing.

In their discussions of data and analysis with other students and with informants or outside researchers, students have to resolve real crises in communication - cases in which others simply do not understand or believe what the students are saying or writing. Resolution of these crises has to come in part from students learning in Virginia Woolf's terms, to see the "face beneath the page." The communicator-audience relation thus develops through a process of mutual adjustment, just as oral conversation or any other form of give-and-take discourse does. Listeners seek clarification, register misunderstanding and disagreement, and question their conversational partner's information. In writing, the same processes must occur within the head of the writer who must play both listener and speaker, writer and reader roles, as Louise Rosenblatt and contemporary literary critics tell us so frequently (Rosenblatt, 1976; Mailloux, 1982; Thompkins, 1985).

Myth #3. Lest we forget that my organizing theme to these remarks is myths about student writing, let us turn now to the third myth - thinking about one's writing is something entirely apart from talking about one's writing. One of the most frequent admonitions we give students who are learning to write is that they must think before they write. Writing should reflect the prior organization of one's thoughts, and we place great emphasis on thinking to organize thoughts, and then writing to represent that organization of ideas. We place very little emphasis on talking "out" one's ideas before or as one writes.

We have turned increasingly to conferencing in the revision process or for help in editing, and teachers of composition are running conferences with students to discuss pieces they have written. But such conferences are essentially dyadic; multiparty talk carries more potential for egalitarian rather than hierarchical distribution of power and knowledge. Talk as one prepares to write helps writers generate and test ideas; talk and reading aloud of drafts further tests the "reasonableness" of information conveyed. Though we must acknowledge the multiple approaches to writing which we find reported by writers in the Paris Interviews or the occasional interview of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, we rarely acknowledge that the same types of variation may exist among our students. In teaching, we have generally prescribed the outline as the way to organize ideas before writing and to keep track of ideas as one writes. Yet, we laugh knowingly when years after we have taught students who have gone on to succeed in college, they return and tell us that they always had to write that needed outline after the essay, and not before. This familiar anecdote serves here just to remind us that there are many different ways in which writers organize their thoughts for writing, and outlining ahead of time may be one of the least frequently used means of doing so. Talking over one's ideas before and during writing and editing is the preferred strategy for professional writers.

One of the most common ways of organizing ideas is talking about what one is going to write before as well as during writing. I refer to these writers as the "in-process" creators. For them, either the act of talking and/ physical act of writing stimulates creative thinking. "How can I know what I think until I've heard myself say it - or seen myself write it?" This is a common plea from children who have difficulty "getting it all right" on paper. Once again, strategies of the anthropologist in the field are helpful here. Find time to allow students to talk among themselves about a piece they will be writing; tape recording such sessions and allowing students to play tapes back to hear themselves think aloud is a very rewarding device for those students who are reluctant to think that this talk helps. Particularly for older students, years of imposed silence while writing can make it nearly impossible for them to adapt to the idea of talking out what they think before and during their writing. This experience seems to work best for those who consider themselves the poorest, the slowest, or the least creative writers. Once they have heard themselves argue on tape or try to persuade someone else of an idea and succeed, they gain confidence that they can transfer that idea to written form.

Another useful way of moving those students who have judged themselves entirely unsuccessful in writing is to ask them to transcribe a short portion of their talk from the tape and to work with the teacher or another student to turn the oral language into a written form (sec Heath, 1982, for an account of high school students transcribing the audio portion of videotapes they had made and realizing the changes necessary to produce an acceptable written version of their videotapes).

Data of a different sort also suggest the benefits for writers and readers of talking about ideas gained from or about to be put into written form. A survey of several hundred literacy programs around the world indicates that for those programs for which data exist about the effects of the program after the initiators of the program left the region, all those programs from which learners retained literacy skills provided sustained opportunities for new literates to talk about what they had been reading and what and how they had been writing (Heath, forthcoming). It appears that a critical factor for the retention of both reading and writing habits is the opportunity to talk about knowledge gained and produced through literate behaviors. Textual communities (such as churches, health centers, agricultural self-help groups, etc.) allow such opportunities. The process of learning from written materials includes reflecting on the meaning of such knowledge for changed values and behaviors. For reading and writing to be sustained, interaction must take place around the ultimate goal of an agreed-upon meaning for the text. Thus the maintenance and extension of functions and types of literacy within a society depend upon opportunities for participation in redundant, multiple, and reinforcing occasions for oral construction of the shared background needed to interpret written materials.

Myth #4. The final myth is one which teachers of writing have held for decades. This myth has been helped along by the interpretation of much of the research on the so-called oral-literate dichotomy. The myth maintains that oral language heavily influences written language, and that those who come from societies with "oral traditions" find it harder to learn to write than those who come from societies with "written traditions."

Scholars from the anthropologist Jack Goody (1977) to humanists such as Father Walter Ong (1982) have been interpreted as saying that particular ways of thinking go with those who write - especially those who write in the essayist tradition; those from oral societies are less likely to have the ways of thinking which allow them to decontextualize their materials and make their texts "autonomous" than are those from "literate" societies. Recent work by anthropologists who have done fieldwork in newly literate societies (Duranti & Ochs, 1986; Besnier, 1986) make clear the need to go beyond simple examinations of reading and writing to analyses of the integration of these activities in the social construction of different kinds of knowledge and the relative value of various types of information in the society. Scholars must answer the complex question: How are forms and uses of written and oral language interdependent with other features of the society? Moreover, the ways in which children learn the oral language of the society can affect their orientation to written language. If the society has ways of taking language apart and holding it up for examination for its own sake rather than keeping it exclusively embedded within the stream of communication, then members of that society seem to adjust more readily to learning to write in formal schooling than do members of societies who do not take language apart in such ways. For example, mainstream middle class school-oriented parents around the world have ways of stopping talk to focus on words as labels, to call attention to forms of language play, and to comment on particular genre conventions (e.g., reminding a child that telling a joke means getting the punchline in and just remembering the opening lines is not enough). These ways of approaching language are deeply embedded in language socialization practices of communities around the world (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986).

A view that it is somehow "natural" to consider language as such underlies materials, methods, and motivations for teaching writing and reading around the world in formal schooling situations (Olson, 1984). For success in these situations, it appears that the ability to analyze language as a system of bits and pieces in patterns is fundamental to comprehension in reading and production in composition. This analysis requires the learning of a metalanguage used to dissect language as an artifact by segmenting, isolating, labeling, and describing bits of language apart from their communicative contexts. To become literate then is to be able not only to recognize patterns in print and to link these patterns in oral language, but also to talk about how one knows words, sentences, etc. Some sociocultural groups may carry within their habits of talking about language the precursors of the development of a metalanguage; other groups may have to acquire, along with literacy, new ways of viewing language and new occasions for interpreting what it is that written language signifies.

WHAT HAPPENS TO MYTHS EXPOSED?

Myths are never simple in their derivation or effects. Most myths are tightly intertwined with rationales for the existence of established institutions or behaviors; hence dismantling myths means altering established habits and organizations. Education is certainly an enterprise surrounded by myths, and most of its long-established practices, such as the veneration of essay writing, are much too organized to be easily dislodged. The thought-starters proposed here may provide an initial chisel with which to begin whittling away at some entrenched blocks of ideas.
To William Carlos Williams, such whittling had to begin with the smallest components of the education establishment. Without an understanding of the complexity of something seemingly so insignificant as the essay, academics had little chance of taking hold of larger components of academic learning. Of the essay, Williams said:

Whatever passes through it - the essay - it is never that thing. It remains itself and continues so, pure motion.... So it is said "to essay" to stand firm, that is, during penetration by a fluid.... Its vitality is the same as that of fashions: changelessness. Without one there is not the other. Periods and places by their variety function as do the fashions, to establish man who essays. Geography and history deal wholly with fashion. But the rigidity of the essay is itself human.... This is an essay: the true grace of fashion. The essay must stand while passion and interest pass through. This thing must move to be an engine; this in an essay means the parts are infinitely related to each other - not to 'unity' however. It is the crossing of forces that generates interest. The dead centers are incidental. But the sheer centrifugal detail of the essay, its erudition, the scope of its trial, its vanity or love, its force for clarity through change is not understood except as a force that is in its essence centripetal. The motion is from change to the variety of changelessness. (1970, pp. 322-323)

Williams argues that the genre of essay has no formulaic conventions as we have been prone to describe such; the essay is a form through which great varieties of content pass in the hands of journalists, historians, pop psychologists, physicians - other professional writers. In English classes, we have tried to create a set of conventions for the essay, but in reality, we have created a genre specific only to the classroom - the five-paragraph essay. In attempting to convey to students Williams' truth - that the essay must move to be an engine - its parts must be infinitely related to each other - we have provided a formula which we know is not that which Jonathan Swift or Matthew Arnold, or Edmund Wilson or John Ciardi could use to write essays. But we have replaced the vitality of the essay with an external skele-tonized rigid frame.

The essence which Williams is trying to capture here is the self-generation of rules which drives the engine - the essay. It is the case not that essays under the pen of good writers are written according to a formula, but that they are written so that the structure is built within the essay. Put another way, the reader must know how to anticipate what is coming - anticipation must precede comprehension. We have to know what is coming at some level in order to understand what comes. Note that in the organization of this piece, I have kept your memories propped and your anticipation appetite whetted by telling you what was coming and by providing you with numbers as pegs by which to organize memory. Moreover, you know that the organizational theme for this essay (or formal talk - the two are very much the same at the organizational level, though not necessarily at the sentence level) is William Carlos Williams' notes on the essay. Thus each time I as author return to Williams, you as reader regain a sense of familiarity and confidence that your expectations - or your anticipations - have been met.

Williams goes on to say of the essay's structure: "Not only is it necessary to prove the crystal but the crystal must prove permanent by fracture." (1970: p. 323) The essay is like the crystal - its permanence in our memory cannot be fractured. Much of the recent work on remembering stories has shown that well-formed stories - that is those which conform to a story grammar - are better remembered than are those stories which do not conform to expected genre conventions. The same is true of essays in a different way - if the structure is built within the essay, and the reader is helped along so that he/she can anticipate what is coming. It is the clues or pegs for memory which enable the reader (or listener) to remember the essay's content. Thus the essay will not be fractured; it holds together because the essayist tells the reader the structure which will come and builds a temporary frame for the content which passes through the essay.

In essence both stories and essays (or expositions) are part of the same continuum of narrative - the basic way in which we describe past experience. The raw components of the essay are situation with possibilities which are either actualized or not actualized and which either succeed or fail in the sense of coming to closure. In stories, situation includes character (agent) doing something (action) which results through conflict in resolution; these events take place in space and time. In the essay, the situation has possibilities which must be stated; actualizing of these occurs within the text. Success or failure is determined by how well the text itself - form and content - actualizes (or says they cannot be actualized) the possibilities of the situation selected at the outset.

THIS ESSAY AS EXAMPLE

Human understanding is contractual; remember that Williams says that the essay is the most human literary form. Every writer (or formal speaker) makes a contract with readers (and listeners) at the outset of the essay. In this piece, I opened by setting up expectations and providing a framework for what was to come. To the extent that readers have been able to comprehend this essay's contents, they have done so because they have been able to anticipate the organization of this piece - by four myths and their counter thought-starters, and by the thematic structuring through Williams' writing on the essay. Several key topics have reappeared several times throughout the essay: oral and written language, their interrelationships, ethnography as linguistic exploration, rule generation as ownership and key to expertise, and defining oneself as language expert. Each reoccurrence of one of these has been reassuring for readers and has helped carry them along in the current of the essay's course.

The contractual nature of human understanding and the limits of the human memory make it such that written narrative must be so tightly structured through coherence and cohesion that word is tied to word. The essay, unlike the traditional story which is hierarchical, is encircling and enveloping. Stories have a master model of grammar which can be anticipated by a reader who has been socialized appropriately for understanding stories of certain forms. The essay has to build its own grammar or frame within each piece, in a new cooperative contract between reader and writer. Writers (and formal speech makers) must depend on internal form, must provide content and form so they are accessible, so readers can recover, reconstruct, and recompose the mental sequence of the writer responding to the conscious attended experiences which are narrated within the text. Process is recursive for good essays (and successful formal speeches), because writer turns text back again and again on itself, reassuring the reader that recovery is correct.

As essay writer, I have now fulfilled my contract with the reader by playing out the script I led you to anticipate in my opening, and I have exhausted Williams' points about the essay to the extent that I can without reproducing his full written text for your use as a text against which to play this text. My selection of his passages for discussion has been conditioned to some extent by the need for a visual image - the crystal - upon which the memory can hang certain abstract points. The essay and the crystal allow "things to pass through." The absence of conventional form ensures that each essay - like each crystal - "remains itself and continues so, pure motion."

As an ending note, I the author can engage you the reader in some sort of emotional commitment to the content of this essay. By laying out some questions which may have been in your mind as you read the piece, I can enter your frame of reference and sense of some future use you might make of the content of this essay. Why should scholars or educators who write and teach essays take up any of the ideas given here? Why should they entertain the idea that writing - and perhaps most especially writing essays - must be learned by the writer who through redundant, multiple experiences in responsive interactive writing generates rules for communicating through writing? What is it that opportunities for talk and taking language apart do to help ensure the retention of literate habits?

By enabling students to become inquirers or researchers of language which surrounds them, teachers and scholars together can strip away terms, fixed practices, expectations, routinized predictors of their own and their students' behaviors (see Myers, 1985). They can replace these with a spirit of imagination and intuitive knowledge - the stuff of which we as language-makers are made. Drawing out students' intuitive knowledge about language depends heavily on having them recognize the oral and written language they command. They come to this recognition as they collect, record, and analyze these data. All students can become experts, for they own the knowledge from which the group works together to determine what is in the data and what (he data say about their system, its features, and their relevance to other kinds of data. For students in mixed-language or mixed-dialect classes, there is the extra bonus that the study of the various systems and repertoires of language uses enhances a sense of language as a vastly varied and versatile instrument.

Teachers engaged in this enterprise cannot be the overt directors; students must cast, script, direct, and evaluate. They then become critics or analysts asking and answering what happen and why? The procedures described here do not mean that students will not come to know grammar or grammatical terms. They will instead find that as they cut apart and talk about language, they will need a metalanguage, and they can usually relate most readily - if they so choose - to terms they have already encountered (sentence, coordinate conjunction, temporal, etc.). But they come to internalize terms and rules for grammar as they shape its reality themselves and for their own purposes - to explain their data to their classmates and to their subjects. By so doing, they own the reality of language rules and conventions.

Teachers engaged with students in this researching force themselves to see knowledge in new ways. They become members of a classroom-learning community - an oral and literate community learning together. They allow themselves to explore learning freely in order to have an empathy that enables them to improve their identification with students as learners. By so identifying, they can hope to better their explanations of habits they have heretofore viewed as "natural." Those habits, attitudes, ways of perceiving and expressing educators often regard as "natural" are learned; they are not instinctual and they do not come along with eye color, fingernails, and the suckling impulse. Habits of observing, valuing, and organizing fundamental to formal schooling come only through long years of reinforcement and repetition in and out of school - years of habitual action which many language minority students have not had. To the extent that teachers can recognize what it is they might explicate - or lead students to explicate - about the covert rules of oral and written language uses, they can allow students to become experts over their own knowledge. The task of understanding language is too great for one person to take charge of as transmitter. Teachers, scholars, and students must transmit and transmute for each other. A learning community is not only more efficient, but it is also much more thorough, effective, and encompassing than a teaching community.

Finally, for those teachers reading this essay, what might guide their decisions about whether or not they should bother to remember the four thought-starters offered here? Each teacher must answer this question on the basis of personal style, philosophy of teaching, degree of tolerance for unpredictability, and ability to obtain self-direction in the classroom. Some may teach in situations in which someone else dictates the curriculum, and some teachers may even be watched by superiors to ensure that a fixed format is followed. The goal here has been to raise the possibility that perhaps one class, two classes, or even one group within one class can work with teacher as learning partner. The spirit of exploration is sometimes easier for the young and for those who already feel disenfranchised than it is for those who feel "fixed" in a system. Any decision is, ultimately, however, a decision only when we can explore alternatives and feel the possibilities of those alternatives for ourselves.

In Williams' words, "ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centers of stillness (1970, p. 323)." So is the learning of writing: it must be filled with multiplicity, infinite opportunities to categorize, label, re-categorize, combine, and associate knowledge. It must engage the learner in the intercrossing of opposed forces, leaving always the opportunity for the centripetal or inward turning forces which motivate learners, and the centrifugal or sharing forces which lead us to want to spread, expand, and create knowledge - to realize the essential humanness of not only the essay as a literary form, but the trying, the trial which pushes us toward clarity through change.

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