Second language writing in literary and academic contexts: exploring the interface

Dr. Gerard Paul Sharpling

CELTE, University of Warwick, United Kingdom.

CELTEUniversity of Warwick

CoventryCV47AL

United KingdomTel: +44 2476 572885Fax: +44 2476 524318

Email address: gerard.sharpling@btinternet.com

Dr. Gerard Sharpling has worked at the universities of Nantes and Birmingham(UK), and currently lectures in English for Academic Purposes at the University ofWarwick, UK. He has published a number of articles in the fields of literary andcultural studies and language teaching methodology. His book The Role of the Imagein the Prose Writing of Erasmus. Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre and Montaignewas published in 2004. He has particular interests in language assessment practices,the teaching of writing skills to non-native speakers of English and issues of equalopportunities in language teaching and academic/critical discourse.

Abstract

This paper considers how the individual experiences of published creative writers, composing in asecond language, can help us to understand second language students’ approaches to academicwriting at university level. Writers such as Conrad and Cixous chart both the pleasures and anxietiesinvolved in composing texts, emotions that are also experienced by student writers. By reporting oninterviews with students and considering successive drafts of their writing, the importance of the‘human’ dimension of writing is highlighted as an experiential narrative. Students, like publishedcreative writers, are confronted with many stylistic choices, and must grapple with these in order toprovide a sense of balance in their text. The exploratory, tentative process which results reflects theexperiences of famous essay writers such as Michel de Montaigne, and even admired prose writerssuch as Flaubert and Proust.

Interface between academic and creative writing – composition – coming writing – second languagewriting - drafting

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I have crossed an oceanI have lost my tonguefrom the root of the old onea new one has sprung

(Nichols, 2002, p. 332)

*

Second language writers in print: finding an idiom

This chapter begins on a personal note. Some years ago, I was asked to present a paper on

Montaigne in French at an international conference. The procedure was illuminating, even if the

same could not be said of the modest offering eventually delivered. In agonizing over what

Montaigne’s intentions were in writing the essays, and (more pertinently), how to articulate these

findings into acceptable academic French, the result was not so much a privileged insight into

Renaissance literature, but into the limitations of my own French expression. At times in the paper’s

composition, it was tempting to opt for a cut-and-paste effect, drawing eloquent words and phrases

from existing, seemingly superior models of academic writing. Ultimately, though, this approach

had to be shunned in favor of a strategy of drafting and redrafting, with the paper eventually being

submitted to a native French speaker for correction. If writing this paper seemed daunting, I took

heart from Montaigne’s own, self-deprecating view of his own expression, which he considered as

disjointed and ill-arranged, a mere shadow of the great poets he so admired. Even more

encouragingly, Montaigne uses the term ‘essay’ to mean not only an object or artifact, but an action,

meaning ‘to try’ or ‘to attempt’. Thus, writing can, at least, be seen as an adventure, rather than a

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dull relic of conformity.

Second language writing brings with it specific challenges which cannot be adequately be

explained through applied linguistic theory alone. Joseph Conrad (1899) famously recorded the

frustrations he experienced in using English. A patriotic Pole who became a British citizen, Conrad

referred to himself as ‘homo duplex’, a man of two equal, yet distinct parts. He viewed writing a

novel as deceptively simple, though one of the most elusive of the creative arts, and difficult to

execute with skill. In a letter to Edward Sanderson dated 12 October 1899, he lamented: ‘I am at it

day after day and I want all day, every minute of a day, to produce a beggarly tale of words, or

perhaps produce nothing at all’ Conrad went further, to suggest that writing in a second language

was akin to a bodily experience, capable even of instilling a sense of unreality in the individual. This

unreality, he feared, would ‘enter his real life, penetrate into the bones, and make the very heart

beats pulsate illusions through the arteries.’ One’s will, Conrad claimed, became a virtual slave to

hallucinations when composing texts. (1982).

No less dramatic are the feelings charted by Hélène Cixous, a French Jewess originally

living in Algeria. Founder of the Centre d’Etudes Feminines at Paris VIII, Cixous maintains a tense

physical relationship with writing. This is partly because the (male) preoccupation with teleology

and classification provides an unsuitably logical, ordered medium through which to express her

experience. However, it is also because of her triple marginalization in terms of nationality,

language and culture. In La venue a l’ecriture (Coming to Writing, 1991), Cixous charts the

alternately pleasurable and painful bodily experiences of recording her thoughts through words. In a

manner reminiscent of Penelope’s stitching and unpicking of the tapestry as she awaited Odysseus’s

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return from the Trojan war, Cixous sees writing as a way of procrastinating. Writing ultimately

cheats death and undermines complacency. Striking in Cixous’ writing is the way that she

challenges fossilized idioms of expression, so prized by academia, through an apparently marginal

position. From these presumed margins, she gains a renewed vigor in drawing up a new linguistic

medium, an ‘écriture féminine’, able to question and dismantle conventional academic discourse.

Writers such as Conrad and Cixous illuminate some of the thought processes that

characterize second language writers. Central to this experience is a feeling of compromise and

betrayal that in turn leads to a sense of resentment in using a language not one’s own. Such feelings

have become intensified through prolific challenges to the pre-eminence of ‘imperial’ languages

such as English. Part of the challenge of writing in English, it seems, is that this process is

considered to be a matriculation process, a painful, obstacle-ridden path towards gradual insertion

into a cultured discourse community. This process, and the absurdity of many language teaching

materials that bolster it and allow its continuance, is satirized, amongst others, by the Rumanian

emigré Eugène Ionesco in his play La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Primadonna).

Nowhere are the feelings of compromise, of ‘trade-off’, stronger than within second

language communities, where writers may have potently divided linguistic (as well as cultural and

religious) loyalties. In his poem ‘Brick Lane 6th March ‘98’, Nasrul Islam Naz, a Bangladeshi poet

residing in England since 1971, evocatively outlines the uneasy sense of approximation and

tentativity with which he charts experience:

4

Since we do not

Have that chance

All too often

I thought, on our behalf,

To keep a record

By way of, say, a simple poem

Where I will not labor

Over rhyme or meter etc

But will gather a few

Short

Simple

Sentences -

Just like the meeting we had.

No big deal, no big subject

Some laughter, a few reflections

here and there

Now and then

Just as they came, quite naturally. (pp. 223-224).

Naz’s poem eloquently embodies the need for compromise, most notably by rejecting

complex argumentation in favor of short, simple sentences. The subject matter, after all, is ‘no big

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deal’, the poem merely a simple means of recording complex thought patterns. The poet needs to

tell things as they are. It is significant that Naz’s poem is translated by the poet. All second language

writing may be viewed, in a sense, as a self-translation of thought processes into a suitable (though

ever elusive) idiom. It is through this very productive, generative nature of translation, of finding the

words that remain elusive, that renewed vigor and expressive possibilities may be attained. Writing

becomes, in effect, the meeting point of minds and cultures within one writer.

Second language student writers: confronting the academic straight-jacket

Second language student writers differ from published writers in terms of the context in

which the writing occurs, and perhaps an absence of a sense of fun, or verbal ‘play’ in the writing.

Yet, like published writers, students need to enter into ‘socializing’ relationships with texts, to

change the way in which the audience is configured and the language used to address the (absent)

hypothetical ‘academic reader’. The length and complexity of the text, sentence by sentence, needs

to be balanced and weighed up amidst a backdrop of prescription and regulation, as does

grammatical construction and the choice of words used. A sentence, the student finds, can be more

or less personal, and more or less refined in terms of its constituent elements. These choices are

circumscribed by social considerations, by notions of literacy and acceptability, and become more

problematic when writing in a language that is not one’s own.

Like Conrad, many second language student writers are high achievers, and develop a

degree of assertiveness in shaping the genre in which they are writing. Reassuringly, an experienced

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student writer might, for instance, choose to write using a longer, information-dense sentence

pattern. Such iconoclastic measures are refreshing, if not universally acceptable. The following is a

random example of a non-native English speaker’s long sentence, drawn from a thesis in business

studies:

As was explained in the introductory chapter, a cross-national comparative study is carried

out with reference to the degree to which environmental issues in French companies may be

implemented and analyzed, and regarding a range of institutional factors that are likely to

have an impact on this process.1

When challenged to shorten this sentence, the student argued strongly in favor of retaining the

original configuration. Typically, he said, in a business studies doctoral thesis, information

accumulates within sentences, allowing each sentence to swell to the size of a thought group.

Coherence in such sentences lies in the way connected information is unified within the basic

sentence. Moreover, a student might deliberately choose to take a more personal view of the

methodology, in contrast to the normative, objective approach often advocated by academic writing

tutors. The word ‘I’ continually seems to appear and disappear in academic writing in a game of

1 This short extract of student writing, along with other extracts in this paper, is drawn from the writing of a studentattending writing surgeries for advice on their academic writing. It is slightly adapted. In order to preserve anonymity,the names of students have been omitted from each extract used. The extracts in this paper do not belong to a designatedcorpus of student writing. Since the writing of this paper, however, the Warwick Writing Programme (together with theCentre for English Language Teacher Education) has assembled a corpus of over five hundred student assignments fromall years and disciplines at the university, and as a result, examples of student writing across the disciplines are muchmore widely available.

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hide and seek. The following sentence comes from a Masters dissertation on education, again

written by a student attending a writing surgery:

As I got more experience from the first few interviews and gained more insight from further

reading, I learned to make notes recording my impressions of the themes the interviewees

raised, their body language and any ‘revelation’ from their comments.

Personal and reflective comments like these are typical of papers on education, where the content is

practical, and reflects not only the writer’s personal agenda, but also the objective sample being

observed. In considering writing across the disciplines within a university setting, multiple

variations can be seen in the writing requirements and the stylistic choices made by students. In

some departments, for instance, the personal pronoun is acceptable, while in others, it is actually

forbidden. There is no real answer, perhaps, to the question of whether a particular approach is

permissible, but the very process of reflecting on this is instructive, and assists in personal

development.

Writing practice, whether the writer is willing to try something new or feels the need to play

safe, is deeply embedded in previous learning experience, positive or negative. At primary school, I

remember being asked during creative writing periods to ‘write a story’ or ‘write whatever comes

into my head’. I usually coped well with this procedure until one primary school creative writing

exam where the ideas dried up, leading to about six lines of rather unintelligible scrawl about a

cricket match. Recently I looked at the degree of confidence felt by second language writers by

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emulating my rather unexceptional primary school experience. This involved setting the following

task to a group of multi-national postgraduate students from different disciplines during a multi-

national, in-sessional writing support class:

1. You have submitted the draft of your dissertation to your supervisor and are

currently waiting for it to be returned, with feedback. Your submission date is

getting closer and you are starting to get concerned. Write the first sentence

of the email that you would send your tutor.

2. You are going to start the first draft of your next essay. Write the first

sentence.

In asking them to engage in speed writing, students’ confidence fluctuated considerably.

The first task, involving addressing a tutor, was felt to be more complicated inter-personally, but

was in many respects easier than the second, because the students were more familiar with the

conventions and genre of email. In writing an email, one is often better able to visualize the

audience, even if that audience is rather distant and academic. In the second activity, students felt

extreme variations of exhilaration and stress, with students reluctant to show or reveal their

sentences. Some were dissatisfied with them. Some students took considerably longer than

anticipated to write a sentence, while others, in ensuring that their sentences were well constructed,

visibly revised their work as a separate activity, or did so while composing. Apprehension and

9

negative self-talk were readily observable. That is, at each sentence, a student might be perceived to

say to themselves ‘Who would want to read this anyway?’ or ‘It’s not working out’. Such negative

evaluations, Sharples (1999) notes, can waste valuable time and increase self-doubt, but this is the

very nature of essay.

Second language student experiences of coming to writing may be compared with those of

the well-known sixteenth century French essayists Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne labeled

himself as a mere dabbler in books, a leisure time academic and a dilettante in literary matters. He

was famously self-critical about his own writing. His intention in writing his essays was to know

himself better, and to achieve a better understanding of the harmony which lay beyond the

fragments of human experience. As Alain de Botton (2000) notes, Montaigne is famous for his

many hilarious observations about the human condition. He famously found sex noisy and messy

and enjoyed peace and quiet when sitting on the toilet. However, he also commented prolifically

about the writing process. In his essay ‘On presumption’, for instance, Montaigne comments on the

lack of fluency and polish of his own style of expression. It is, he says, rough and disdainful, with

rhetorical arrangements that are free and undisciplined. Montaigne goes on to state his preference

for writing which goes against the grain, and which challenges accepted hierarchies:

And I like it that way, by inclination, if not by judgment. But I fully realize that I sometimes

let myself go too far in that direction, striving to avoid artificiality and affectation only to

fall into them at the other extreme. (1991, p. 725).

10

Importantly, too, Montaigne is fully aware of the limitations of human perception. De Botton

observes, for instance, the inscription from Pliny on the beam of Montaigne’s library, which read:

‘There is nothing certain but uncertainty, nothing more miserable and more proud than man.’ Aware

of this lack of certainty, Montaigne frequently discusses the representation of experience in terms of

contrary movements such as a set of scales or a see-saw. Truth, Montaigne argues, needs to be

juggled with and closely evaluated, with each side of the argument being fully investigated.

The ‘balancing act’, as outlined here by Montaigne, seems to arise constantly among student

writers. Typically, academic conventions do not allow students to be fully true to themselves and to

state their convictions forcefully. Yet the problem of commitment and strength of opinion is more

intense for international students, since they have not yet penetrated into the cultural specificity of

British academic life, and seem even less aware of what is ‘acceptable’. As Eagleton (1983)

remarks, academic discourse is not so much an act of eliciting content as a straightforward matter of

‘policing language’, of establishing social control and channeling students’ thoughts into accepted

linguistic paths:

Becoming certificated by the state as proficient in literary studies is a matter of being able to

talk and write in certain ways. It is this which is being taught, examined and certificated, not

what you personally think and believe, though what is thinkable will of course be

constrained by the language itself ... nobody is especially concerned about what you say,

with what extreme, moderate, radical or conservative positions you adopt, provided that they

are compatible with, and can be articulated within a specific form of discourse. (p. 201).

11

Second language student writers, for example, commonly ask whether the conclusion is ‘where I put

down what I think’ Persuaded subsequently by their subject tutors that they must remain objective,

their writing becomes at once colder and more clinical, and perhaps less pleasurable too, though it

will surely see them safely through their courses and lead to a respectable degree classification.

Student writer experiences (i): coming to writing

The next part of this study involves two personal stories of struggle, resolution and

resourceful adaptation. The first was told by a student from China studying for a degree in Cultural

Policy in a UK university. The second was recounted by a student from Japan following a diploma

in cultural studies. Their comments and observations, in many ways, reveal the specific, multi-

layered challenges which second language students face when composing and revising texts. Both

students know innately that there are ‘rules’ to be obeyed when approaching academic writing. Both

also see concision in style as essential, as is the requirement for greater variety and overall, the need

to work on sentence structure in order to enhance the message of the piece. Thought for the ‘choice’

word, it seems, is important to the two students, confirming the recognition that good writing has a

more experimental structure in terms of sentence construction. Meanwhile, many points raised in

the interviews remain more specific to second language writers: in particular, the sense of linguistic

anxiety and the presence of negative self-talk.

The second student comments, for example, that she has learned some useful techniques

from study skills sessions:

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When I start writing I try to write mind map, a sort of mind map on paper, as you know, I

put main subject what I’m going to research in the middle, I then I put some words and

related subjects around that. [Interview, Student 2].

However, the positive aspect of this comment, the sense that academic writing might be a ‘learned

skill’, is soon undermined by the student’s perception that planning is only the start of her problems,

and that writing up the ideas is another matter entirely:

...but the problem is er, how to organise each sentence, how to connect each sentence.

[Interview, Student 2].

For the first student, meanwhile, the subject of sentence structure is raised towards the end of the

discussion. She phrases the problem thus:

I like to write sentences economically, in an exact way, because the essays are only 4,000

words essay and it’s not proper to do casual and general discussion. It seems that it requires

some more thorough clear and very concise ideas within each sentences, I mean, for each

sentence, you really need something, it’s not just description. So that’s what I did in my

third essay. In my first draft for the introduction it was about 1,500 words and then, when I

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look back at according to my, my value experience for the first essay, then I concise it into

around 500, so that’s one third, you know. [Interview, Student 1].

The striking element in this comment is the fact that the student is concerned to reduce the

‘wordiness’ of the sentences she uses, in the interests of economy of expression. The student gives

the impression of being instrumentally motivated, such that the word count of the essay remains

uppermost in the student’s mind. Meanwhile, the second student discusses the issue of sentence

structure more in terms of the need for cohesion and coherence:

The problem is er, how to organise each sentence, how to connect each sentence, and, er,

another problem is, I don’t have, I don’t have so many connecting words, so that’s why I use

sometimes use the similar or same expressions. And it’s, yeah, I feel its quite poor of

expression. [Interview, Student 2].

One may easily recall here Montaigne’s own words, namely that his essays are assembled from a

variety of parts having no definite order or shape. Seeing sentence formulation primarily as

linguistic manipulation, the student does not yet comment on aesthetic considerations, but these are

brought quickly to the fore in terms of the need to find a richer and more varied style:

Interviewer: And so you’re trying to introduce a little bit more variety into English. Do you

find that you tend to rewrite your sentences? When you write your sentences, do you find

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that you change your ideas and you change the words in the sentences? Or are you happy

with what you write the first time?

Student: You mean it’s a kind of paraphrasing....(er) yes I should do that, I know, but, er, the

unfortunately I didn’t, I couldn’t, can’t command many expressions, so paraphrasing is a

problem, it, it happens when I try to do it from books in my essay and from the first

sentence. [Interview, Student 2].

The idea of reshaping sentences here becomes equal to the paraphrase of sources, rather than the

revision (paraphrase) of her own sentences. Meanwhile, the student comments on the difference

between the use of long and short sentences:

Er, in general, as for comparison between Japanese and English, people write many short

sentences, but in academic writing in English we should write, er, long sentence maybe, by

using which or that, but er at the moment, I can’t use it so effectively. [Interview, Student 2].

This comment reflects the commonly held view that academic writing is necessarily long and

complex. As for the first student, though, the problem of effective reshaping of sentences can be

remedied by careful revising , after allowing two or three days break:

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OK, if I write it for the first time, I might be spent sentences to discuss one thing, that’s in

the first stage, and perhaps a couple of days later when I look back I think actually I can

spend only one sentence to make it very clear and very concise, and then I did the correction

for that, this happens in my in my third essay. [Interview, Student 1].

The feeling in both students’ comments is that there is a kind of ‘ideal’ sentence, perhaps, which lies

beyond the reach of the student. As this ideal remains intangible, student writers identify specific

language features which, when improved, will enable them to better articulate their viewpoint.

In terms of sentence construction and style, second language student writers can take heart

from published writers of literature who themselves experience this same anxiety. Gustave Flaubert

famously wrote and re-wrote sentences in his native language, sometimes as often as one hundred

times, before he felt he had got them ‘right’. Admiring the choice sentences of other great writers

such as Victor Hugo, he lamented his own poverty of expression, coupled with his inability to

balance sentences correctly. In the Correspondances, he comments frequently on the complexity of

stylistic choices open to him, all of which leave him feeling drained of emotion:

Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a

single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed,

bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride

that makes me pant after a chimera. (1980, p. 158).

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Elsewhere, Flaubert comments on the recursive nature of the writing process and the constant need

to re-edit one’s work:

I am going to put everything down quickly, proceeding by a series of sketches of the

ensemble. By repeated revision I can perhaps pull it together. The language itself is a great

stumbling block. (1980, p. 170).

Flaubert advocates a plainness of style, which might enable him to write a maximally unobtrusive

novel, ‘un livre sur rien’ (a book about nothing). Yet style, when correctly manipulated is also

compared by Flaubert to a passionate heart beat, and even resembles the wall of Acropolis. Writing

with style, for Flaubert, is in effect the achieving of the unattainable: a language ever out of reach,

‘rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped

with flame.’ (1980, p.159).

Marcel Proust, on the other hand, is noted for his pre-occupation with the delicate balancing

of the long sentence. The Proustian narrator famously shifts between multiple levels of past and

present experience, and this is seen in his delicate, calculating manipulation of syntax. The lengthy

sentence, Proust argues, is virtuous in that it reflects the meandering process of thought itself. The

‘accuracy’ of such sentences lies in their ability to emulate thought in its continual movement. The

ideal sentence, for Proust, is a ‘delicious’ phrase caught in mid flight: starting beautifully, soaring

high and finishing perfectly. Appealingly, Proust takes the view that grammatical mistakes do not

detract from the overall impression of the writing: ‘the absence of mistakes’, Proust argues, ‘is

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purely subaltern, by no means aesthetic’. Two examples taken from Proust’s Combray, translated

into English, confirm the meandering sentence structure, which expands sentence structure to the

full range of its possibilities, yet would appear to be proscribed in essay writing. The first describes

the narrator’s early experiences of insomnia:

At Combray, as every afternoon ended, long before the time when I should have gone to bed

and lie there, unsleeping, far from my mother and grandmother, my bedroom became the

fixed point on which my anxiety and melancholy thoughts were centred (1996, p. 8).

The sentence structure here, in which parenthetical clauses are embedded within the main clause,

captures the anxiety and restlessness of the narrator’s early experiences of going to bed at an old

country house. Long sentences are also used to convey the movement and commotion of a rainy

day, along with the narrator’s grandmother’s activities:

My grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and

Francoise had rushed the precious wicker armchair indoors so that they should not get

soaked, was to be seen pacing the deserted rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered

grey locks so that her forehead might be freer to absorb the health-giving draughts of wind

and rain. (1996, p. 10).

The accumulation of precise descriptive detail in these sentences creates an almost hypnotic effect

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within the reader which continues throughout the work. The difficulty of representation, for Proust,

lies in ordering aspects of consciousness within the sentence, so that it accurately represents (or

indeed, translates) the picture of his own mind and all the temporal and spatial possibilities of a

given moment. Their writing shows the need to grapple with sentence construction, and not to

accept the first sentence pattern that presents itself.

Student experiences (ii): exploring successive written drafts

If you draft, that process [finding out what you mean] never needs to be endured; and one

morning, after many minutely altered versions, it is suddenly there, a pile of paper on the

table, achieved without mud wrestling the word (Steedman, 1992, p. x)

When does a paper become a paper rather than a draft? Drafts of student writing seem to provide

illuminating insights into the organic growth of a series of ideas into a whole unit. Reduced to more

technical terms, it is possible to see in written drafts the concept of ‘working memory’, defined by

Mike Sharples (1999) as ‘“mental schemas and constraints’ which provide a context for creative

thinking through knowledge telling and knowledge transforming’. Working memory is necessary,

but may also have a negative side. Scanning back, Sharples contends, sets up a mental tension

between interpreting existing ideas and creating new ones. In second language writing, many extra

demands are placed on working memory, even at a sentence level. For example, students must have

a good knowledge of the written argument, the spelling and grammar, the conventions of the

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language, and must avoid external distractions. As can be seen with the struggles charted by first

language creative writers such as Flaubert and Proust, an attempt must be made to reduce the strain

on working memory so that constraints can give way to an active, generative writing practice. This

point is usually achieved when writers gain a distinctive style of their own, which occurs through a

long and often arduous process of mental development.

Sharples (1999) sees revising as a kind of pattern-matching process, in which an existing

text is matched with some ideal, or desired notion of textuality. As he indicates, expert writers revise

mainly for two reasons: to make their text more appropriate to the audience and to gain new

understanding for themselves. Thus, texts are not so much a ‘product’ but a process, involving

individuals in particular, pre-defined relationships. Following the interviews with the two students,

as detailed above, I considered briefly some extracts of their writing, to show options for dealing

with the editing process. In the extracts taken from the first student, the corrections tend to be minor

and superficial, as evidenced by the following revisions:

By Raymond Williams’s definition of ‘culture’, it is one of the most complicated words

mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct

intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible system of thought. [Writing

extract, Student 1].

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Raymond Williams’s definition of culture shows it to be a highly complex word,

‘…mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct

intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible system of thought’ [Writing

extract, Student 1].

The minimal changes in the above operate at a surface level, and are primarily associated with

connectors and linkers, and adding polish to the writing. Interestingly, the student also decides to

delete the inverted commas around the word culture. The revision also involves decisions as to

whether to attribute words to their source material with inverted commas or paraphrases. All these

decisions are relatively mechanical in nature. These changes seem to tie in with the student’s own

philosophy. She commented, in a prior conversation, that she tended to shun eloquent academic

discourse because she knew the reader would not recognize it as hers, and that she would prefer a

more straightforward piece which was more reflective of her own ability. Such a decision again

recalls Montaigne, who knew his writing could never match that of the great poets such as

Lucretius, though he saw no harm in seeking to do so.

Meanwhile, in the case of the second student, recursion in the writing process seems to be

primarily additive in nature. The purpose of the revisions here is to provide gradually increased

levels of information, thereby augmenting the complexity of thought patterns perceived by the

reader. The first series of sentences is restricted to a relatively straightforward delineation of the

content of the research:

21

I will consider some issues relating to ethnic diversity such as language, religion, education,

employment and citizenship, with particular reference to South Asians in Britain. After this,

I shall examine race relations in Leicester, a city well known for its great concentration of

ethnic minority groups. The data for this paper was largely obtained from National Statistics

and Leicester City Council. [Writing extract, Student 2].

In the second revision, however, the student goes on to amplify the importance of Leicester, and to

add details of the Salman Rushdie affair:

First of all, I will present the main concepts and terms which will be used in the next

chapter. Then, I will consider some issues relating to ethnic diversity suppressed from the

British society: the Salman Rushdie Affair. I would like to look at the event from the race

relation’s point of view. One possibility is to assume that there are some commonalities

between Bradford where the biggest Rushdie movement was seen and Leicester. The data

for this paper was largely obtained from National Statistics and Leicester City Council.

Following this, I shall examine aspects of diversity such as language, religion, education,

employment and citizenship, with particular reference to South Asians in Britain and

examine the factors in the difference between Indians and other South Asians. After this, I

shall examine race relations in Leicester, a city well known for its great concentration of

ethnic minority groups in order to explore some characteristic points in comparison with

22

national tendency which is shown in the previous chapter. In the last, I will take an example

as a manifestation of dissatisfaction caused by ethnic minorities. [Writing extract, Student

2].

The development of detail from its seeds in the first paragraph to its expansion in the second shows

that the writing student is engaged in an act of discovery, and gradually becomes aware of how

ideas interlink as the writing progresses. In short, writing constructs, rather than reflects thought.

Rather like Montaigne’s essays, the writing develops in a seemingly organic, epigenetic manner.

Furthermore, the second student clarifies her methodology, demonstrating that successive revisions

involve breaking down thought processes into their individual components. However, in doing so,

there is always a danger of overloading sentences to saturation point. Students find this

disconcerting. Writing, it seems, does not always say what one wants it to say, but creates elusive

meaning as the writer advances.

Conclusion: the values of experience

In university settings, much work on student writing remains at a rather mechanical level. The

construction of corpora of texts or minute analyses of academic genre are often central to they way

second language writing is considered, and the discipline of computational linguistics is rife.

However, applied linguistic approaches, taken alone, seem problematic and limited for several

reasons. They do not adequately take into consideration the importance of student experiences when

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writing, and what can be learned from them. Moreover, few writers teaching academic writing to

second language speakers actually have the experience of going through this process themselves,

although understanding (and empathizing with) the nature of the struggles and challenges faced by

second language writers surely enables tutors to better understand the students they are teaching. A

further problem generated by linguistic approaches to writing is the tendency to separate ‘creative’

and ‘academic’ writing as if they were two mutually exclusive styles of writing. In this paper, I hope

to have demonstrated what can be learned by considering parallels between student writer

experiences and those of published writers. My argument has been that writing instruction in a

second language is more than simply a technical process of correcting grammar and sentence

structure. Indeed, it necessitates an initiation into the very way in which writers write, without

which one can scarcely grasp the full import of the students’ experiences. I hope, also, that this

paper will show up the very point at which English for Academic Purposes programmes, in itself a

rather humorless, cheerless discipline, needs to be adapted to incorporate more vivid insights into

the human experience itself, and a greater emphasis on the human dimension of the writing process.

Only then can we enable a new tongue to spring from the roots of an old one, as Grace Nichols tells

us.

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