27.2097, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; General Ling: Huck (2015)

Fri May 6 17:10:37 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2097. Fri May 06 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2097, Review: Applied Ling; Cog Sci; General Ling: Huck (2015)

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Date: Fri, 06 May 2016 13:10:21
From: Donna Bain Butler [dbainbutler at yahoo.com]
Subject: What Is Good Writing?

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4764.html

AUTHOR: Geoffrey  Huck
TITLE: What Is Good Writing?
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Donna Patricia Bain Butler, American University

Reviews Editor: Robert Arthur Cote

SUMMARY

Geoffrey J. Huck’s book, “What Is Good Writing”, explains why reading is key
to good writing and questions whether standard composition programs really
teach students to become better writers. The researcher claims that without a
definition of good writing, we cannot know how to teach or assess writing in
school or at university. Part I offers an historical background and cognitive
approach to good writing. Part II focuses on why good writing can be defined
as fluent writing, fluency being a matter of competence rather than
performance. Huck shows that everyone in education―composition-studies and
rhetoric communities in particular―has a great deal to learn from cognitive
scientists about what competence in writing is and how it is achieved. Part
III deals with the relation between form and content and how the cognitive
approach, “... in particular Relevance theory, is applicable to artistic as
well as to the more functional genres of writing” (p. xv).

In Chapters 1 and 2, “Historical Background and A Cognitive Approach to Good
Writing” respectively, Huck points out that “good writing has shifted over the
years from the work of the classic authors to rule-following to scores on
indirect tests to categorization via rubric... accompanied by the deliberate
walling off of school and university students from professional writers” (p.
19). The author suggests that “evaluating fluency in writing should not be
much different from evaluating fluency in speaking,” and that “gaining
facility with patterns that occur in written language through avid independent
reading” makes a difference for developing writers (p. 31). Key factors are
exposure and motivation.

In Chapter 3, “Constructional Fluency”, Huck introduces Construction Grammar,
a construction being “learned pairing of a particular linguistic pattern with
its meaning and function in discourse” (p. 48). He refers to writing
conventions as constructional combinations that cannot be learned as
prescriptivist rules or taught without awareness of how language is a system
with “massively interconnected” parts (p. 52). He says a person becomes fluent
by learning how “various constructions combine through exposure to their usage
in various contexts” (p. 61). With more exposure and more contexts, not
conscious rule-following, a person’s understanding of the construction deepens
and the writer develops. 

Chapters 4-6 are entitled “Pragmatic, Narrative, and Graphemic Fluency”
respectively. Here Huck presents aspects of Relevance Theory consistent with
Constructionist Theory, the former being “an inferential model [that] does not
assume that communication is simply a process of encoding and decoding” but
rather “a complex of intention and inference” (p. 97). Developing writers need
to be aware of literary conversations and motivated enough “to join a
discourse that a person learns (intuitively) how to participate in” (p. 98).
Therefore, in addition to competence in handling grammatical constructions, or
what he calls “constructional fluency”, Huck says developing writers need
principles governing use of structural patterns in writing or “pragmatic
fluency”. For Huck, storytelling is a kind of pragmatic fluency he calls
“narrative fluency”, one that presents a threefold narrative problem for
writers once they have a topic dealing with relevant information, a plan for
presentation, and sustained focus. In addition to aforementioned pragmatic and
constructional aspects of language competence, consistency with graphemic
conventions such as spelling and punctuation are important, according to Huck,
because they aid the reader in processing the material read. This competence
he labels graphemic fluency. Huck closes the section by using the term
language teacher instead of  writing teacher, underscoring why we all need to
be clear about what is systemic and what is arbitrary with and for students.
The difference between British and American spelling and punctuation, he
warns, cannot be taken as “proxies for overall literacy and fluency in
language” (p. 130). Students, teachers, and policy makers at all levels need
to consider student writer fluency.

In Chapters 7-9, more aspects of good writing are presented. Chapter names are
“Figurative Language; Surprise, Repetition, and Complexity; and Verbal Art and
Craft” respectively. Manipulation of figures like metaphor, for example,
constitutes a feature of good writing “where fluency requires sensitivity to
relevance in context” (p. 139). Through close reading of literary text and
application of Relevance Theory, Huck explains quality in writing by fluent
writers with acknowledgement that literary art, or literature, is more than
superfluency.  “To become fluent,” he says, “one only has to exploit that
natural capacity” to communicate and participate in discourse (p. 156). Huck’s
prescription is to read more widely.

EVALUATION

This book offers an accessible, coherent theory of written language that
demands more than cursory reading for the average reader. The author’s
conception of good writing as a display of fluency emerges from Relevance
Theory which, for Huck, is explanatory, not descriptive or taxonomic. The
author uses empirical research to answer a very broad question relevant to
those with a strong interest in writing and how it is learned.The author
succeeds in answering the question in his title by identifying aspects of
language relevant to writing competence, or fluency. He uses these terms
synonymously, intending to suggest a level of mental development and display
of written language typical of other fluent writers.

The source of many of our students’ writing problems, Huck argues, is “lack of
appropriate input through reading and the motivation and curiosity to acquire
it” (p. xiii). Like Krashen, Huck believes that self-motivated reading, or
learning from (comprehensible) input, “is the key to the development of skill
in writing and language achievement in general” (p. xiv). Similar to Krashen,
however, Huck does not account for automatization of consciously learned
(declarative) knowledge as procedural knowledge. Although Huck agrees that
highly accomplished teachers can use effective strategies (or conscious, goal
directed actions) to improve students’ writing, he seems to be on the other
side of the fence when it comes to the value of informed, explicit instruction
and information awareness for students. 

>From an applied linguistics perspective, Huck’s conventional use of terms like
literacy, general fluency (competence) in writing, and culture of writing may
raise red flags for trained professionals working intensively with
heterogeneous groups of people operating in more than one language and for
whom the native speaker is not idealized. When Huck suggests a concept of
native writer similar to native speaker, for example, he may be reinforcing
the native speaker fallacy that already exists in the minds of many students,
teachers and others in U.S. universities and law schools where mandatory
writing courses are typically taught by untrained native speakers and where
non-native speakers may be seen as remedial or in need of academic support.

In sum, the author might reconsider his linguist conception of native speaker
status for fluent writers if he expects to positively influence the fields of
composition, rhetoric, and legal writing in the United States. Accuracy may be
just as important as fluency for some developing writers and even more
important for some working professionals. Although we probably all agree that
fluency in writing “can never be achieved by taking a few courses in writing
at the secondary, university, and postgraduate level”, there is no question
that we all can gain declarative linguistic knowledge by carefully considering
what Huck says about writing competence, or fluency, in this book.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Donna Bain Butler is a Fulbright Specialist in Applied Linguistics/TEFL. She
was appointed to American University’s Washington College of Law after working
in the AU English Language Institute and assessing oral language proficiency
with the U.S. Dept. of Justice (FBI). Donna holds a Ph.D. in Second Language
Education and Culture from the University of Maryland College Park. She
co-authors writing strategies research and has recently published a monograph
(2015), Developing International EFL/ESL Scholarly Writers. Berlin:  De
Gruyter Mouton.

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