by Richard Milligan

In the iconic Cold War American military drama Top Gun, the most renowned pilot in an elite flight training school, Cougar, played by John Stockwell, remarks: “I’m holding on too tight, I’ve lost the edge.”

In my experience as a Writing Intensive Program (WIP) coach, I have had a welcome opportunity to reflect on my experiences as a writing instructor over the past decade. My experience with WIP has me thinking that, like Cougar, instead of focusing most on helping students to become better writers, I have sometimes been holding on too tight, with more focus on helping them produce the best documents. It is as if the stacks and stacks of essays over the years have turned me into composition border collie, desperately trying to herd errors that I find in writing, sometimes at the expense of creating a dialogue with students fostering an exchange in which they can learn to see and revise these errors themselves.

Teaching writing sometimes feels like the pedagogical equivalent of the Cold War: a wasteful, unending expenditure of resources, a bitter terrifying stalemate. Like the Cold War, we imagine teaching writing as an epic contest between two powerful figures—the English teacher with her or his refined literary tastes and a touch of the connoisseur’s smugness about good writing on the one hand; the bewildered and undisciplined initiates of the classic liberal arts education on the other.

The reality of the Cold War was a diffuse but no less transformative phenomena affecting most people in most places on earth. The Cold War was hot exactly everywhere marginal to the competing world systems of that era. The relationships between writing and teaching and learning are similarly global and diffuse, affecting all disciplines, and perhaps flaring up the hottest as far from the English department as you can get in the world of the university. Yet, writing instruction is supposedly just that thing that happens over in the English department in introductory literature and composition courses.

Off and on, I’ve spent over a decade as a combatant in the Cold War between English teachers and students who, for the most part, are not English majors. I am proud of and inspired by the thousands of conversations about writing that I have conducted in this campaign, but I now realize that a tremendous amount of time and effort expended by my students and myself has been squandered from the perspective of helping them to be better writers in their global lives, both inside and across the university, but also in the wider world.

While I have learned an immense amount over these years about how to diagnose and describe problems with writing, how to give lessons on sentence structure and paragraph organization, how to workshop with students on what does or does not amount to an adequate thesis statement, I have never been taught myself about what kinds of writing instruction are really the most effective.

Unlike professional development seminars and collaborative pedagogy workshops I’ve previously had at colleges and universities across North America, WIP has afforded me the opportunity to read current research on writing instruction, which demonstrates that frantically policing error with the obsessive, watchful energy of a border collie is actually detrimental to our cause. Desperately herding our students’ writing by spilling gallons of ink all over their work not only burns up all of our time and energy as instructors but it also detracts from the core of what can actually help a student improve her or his writing.

Finding the edge as a writing teacher is, in large part, about letting go of our obsessive editorial eye for error. Overwhelming students with marginalia flagging every error hinders rather than helps what should be one of our primary goals as writing teachers: getting students to take ownership of their writing and experience their own texts as plastic and malleable entities, unfixed and always in flux.

In short, rather than taking up the seemingly noble cause of finding all the errors for our students and directing them to produce the most error-free final drafts possible, as writing teachers we can achieve much more by coaching our students to see the writing process for what it actually is. Writing is not about just getting out a draft and then fixing the errors; it is an iterative process requiring returns and rethinking and revision. To help our students become better writers, above all, we need to guide them to a capacity to see and understand their own errors; when we simply show them all of these errors, we take away the opportunity for them to learn to find them on their own.

This semester, as a WIP coach in an introduction to meteorology course, I have worked hard at letting go, laying down my pen as I read my students’ drafts. Instead of trying to mark-up every mistake, I have restrained myself and written up an explanation of the two or three most important areas to consider for revision. I must confess that it is very hard to ignore my zealous tendency to zero in on every grammatical or stylistic stray that catches my attention. Years of writing instruction have really sharpened this reflex. I can’t say that I don’t still feel a strong impulse to chase down every bogey, to rein in every wayward element of a text that a student submits.

But our discussions of pedagogy have given me the tools to discipline my own practice as a teacher. Policing the grammar and style of every draft will not help students learn to better shepherd their own ideas into the world through writing, even if it might make me feel more comfortable with the number of errors I can detect in my stack of final drafts. But the point isn’t to have the most highly edited stack of drafts at the end; the point is to help students develop their own capacity to revise and see this revision as an essential part of the writing process. Finding and maintaining this edge as a writing instructor, for me, means learning how to let go sometimes, even as my ears prick and eyes narrow.