What Do You Want?

In "A Critique of Pure Tutoring," Linda K. Shamoon and Deborah H. Burns echo the words many of us have heard from our students: "What do you want?" Although we say we want students to invent it or figure it out for themselves what they need to say, in reality, we do have certain expectations. This was also brought home to me in the reading for English 693, Richard McNabb's "Making the Gesture: Graduate Student Submissions and the Expectation of Journal Referees." If we, as graduate students, have difficulty entering the academic conversation because we are not aware of or don't pick up on the "rules," then how can we expect undergraduates to figure it out on their own? I think if we aren't explicit in some ways about what is expected, we increase resistance in students, who get frustrated with "trying to nail Jello to the wall." By the way, in my experience (oops, not scholarly enough), that was a common expression among those of us in collaborative work groups when we were asked to be "creative" without any substantial direction. The more open-mined the client claimed to be, the more that client had something specific in mind that he/she figured we would figure out through osmosis. We would spend a lot of wasted time spinning our wheels or reinventing wheels, when what we could have used was the template the client expected us to use all along, but kept hidden from us. Writing is difficult enough without throwing up those kinds of barriers. It's also insulting: You invite people to a garden party dinner, assure them that the other guests are friendly, tell them to be themselves, and then criticize their table manners and attempts at conversation. Give them the etiquette book before the event and warn them about the snakes in the grass!