By Rick Branscomb
English Department

In his essay “Some Remarks on Humor,” noted New Yorker writer E. B. White wrote, “to young writers who want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don’t write about Man, write about a man.”

Courtesy UNH Magazine

When I was in graduate school at the University of New Hampshire in the early 70s, there was a man who had become extraordinarily influential in the teaching of composition. Don Murray was a huge, bearded man who had attended college on a football scholarship. After graduation he went to write for the Boston Herald where he proceeded to earn a Pulitzer Prize in 1954 at a very young age (“too young,” he once told me. Don was, and remains, the youngest ever winner of a Pulitzer.) After a stint at Time Magazine, he returned to education, to teaching at his alma mater, UNH.

I came to UNH out of a good high school, out of a B.A in English, out of an M.A. in English, into a Ph.D. in English steeped in unexamined but apparently a priori principles of writing. I was a terrible writer but hadn’t yet discovered it. In a course with Murray on how to teach writing, we had to write every week. (Imagine that! Teachers doing what they were going to be teaching.) Murray saw I was terrible, and sat behind his desk every week telling me to rewrite the paper. Every week. I was desperate. In frustration I blurted out one day, “What do you want me to do?” Looking for all the world like Hemingway behind a desk, he calmly said, “Surprise me.” Not much in the way of imparted knowledge there. But I did; in fact, I surprised both of us.

Revolution from the Ground Up

By this time Murray had written perhaps the most important single book in the field of composition, A Writer Teaches Writing. This seemingly innocuous, almost obvious, title revolutionized the profession, for never before had a real writer, i.e., someone who knows whereof he speaks, presumed to write about how to teach the art and craft of writing. It ended with a long appendix of quotes from practicing writers, which in their cumulative power and complex internal contradictions remind me of the near-poetry of Melville’s “Whiteness of the Whale” section of Moby Dick.

For example, the standard principles for composing a paragraph were promulgated by one Alexander Bain, a nineteenth-century professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow, who set forth some rules on the ideal paragraph without ever asking a practicing writer or researching a single paragraph. The overarching logic of his precepts appealed to his mathematician’s brain, and something about this abstract theory of “unity, development, and coherence” has appealed to nearly every textbook writer since. In the world of writing teachers, this was The Truth. But practicing writers knew better.

Writing teachers had been, for the most part, academics and other theoreticians who wrote not at all, or if they did, wrote badly. A Writer Teaches Writing essentially said, wait a minute. Let’s look at what really works. Let’s examine reality, inductively. I’m a writer, Murray implied, and I know that what kids are being taught in high school and college is not what successful writers know and do. What worked for writers, he reported, was a process, a messy swirl of gathering, shaping, reshaping, reshaping again, and polishing words and ideas, a process that privileged individual discovery of intellectual depth over adherence to a set of a priori forms.

You can’t start with models of good writing (written products) and send young writers out with the command, go thou forth and do likewise. “The process of making meaning with written language,” Murray wrote in 1980, “can not be understood by looking backward from a finished page. Process can not be inferred from product any more than a pig can be inferred from a sausage.” A prolific writer, Murray deluged professional journals in the early 70s with articles like “Teach Writing as Process, Not Product” (1972) (reprinted in Villanueva, Cross-Talk ). And the so-called “writing process movement” was born.

And, much to Murray’s dismay, it was reified soon after. Latched onto by a hungry cadre of writing teachers starved for guidance and, in all likelihood, seduced by the power of Murray’s remarkable writing. Reduced to simply another set of mindless rules to follow in writing. Writing teachers exchanged their “unity, development, and coherence” for “prewriting, writing, and rewriting,” Bain for Murray. You can almost smell the syllogism at work in twenty or thirty years of teaching writing post-Murray.

• All good writing utilizes prewriting, writing, and rewriting
• this piece of writing does (or does not) utilize prewriting, writing, and rewriting
• ergo, this piece of writing is (or is not) good writing.

This became for many teachers a set of rules to be followed slavishly. Murray had become a major premise.

The Truth

As I read it, “don’t write about Man, write about a man” is White’s re-telling of the age-old story of “show, don’t tell.” For writers, in other words, particular details (“a man”) work better than abstract or general pronouncements (“Man”). I could paraphrase this for educators by saying, “don’t teach Students, teach a student.” Don’t presume to teach The Truth; teach individual truths. Don’t teach The Meaning of Life; teach a meaning, rich and various and evolving. Read Randy Pausch; read Hamlet and Moby Dick and The Sound and the Fury and Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. Learn from Pausch and Hamlet and Ahab and Benjy and Huck and Jim and Jay and Nick. Let your students surprise you.

This article is part of ASpect’s November 2008 issue, Teaching the Big Issues.