Framing Self-Directed Writing
James Britton et al.’s theory of writing development is a useful framework for understanding the role of self-directed writing in composition instruction. Britton’s notion of “expressive” writing is often misunderstood to mean only writing about the self, but it is much more than that. In Britton’s model, expressive writing is the basis for the three principal functions of writing: Poetic, Expressive, and Transactional (see fig. 1).
Expressive is the most important term in this model. Britton describes it as “an utterance that ‘stays close to the speaker’. … It is a verbalization of the speaker’s immediate preoccupations and his mood of the moment.” He goes on to say: “it is an utterance at its most relaxed and intimate, as free as possible Tight Jeans from outside demands, whether those of a task or of an audience.” According to Britton, the expressive mode is the way we relate to each other in speech and the way we frame the first drafts of new ideas (Britton et al. 82).
Britton makes an important point about the development of writing ability in that not everyone’s first attempts at writing are expressive. However, he reminds us that it is a key element in writing instruction: “it must be true that until a [student] does write expressively he is failing to feed into the writing process the fullness of his linguistic resources—the knowledge of words and structures he has built up in speech—and that it will take him longer to arrive at the point where writing can serve a range of his purposes as broad and diverse as the purposes for which he uses speech” (Britton et al. 82).
I suspect many teachers interpret “expressive” to mean writing about or for the self, that is, on topics obviously close to the writer’s experience and therefore easier (i.e., not as much cognitive load; more time for students to deal with other aspects of writing). I don’t think many teachers even consider language itself as a variable in this respect. They don’t associate “expressive” with home language or natural language; rather, they expect students to write in Standard English or in their best approximation of school writing. Students, too, because they learn writing in the schools, are not likely to use their home language or even feel comfortable using it in school. In working with her Creole-speaking students, for example, Eileen Kennedy invited them to write in Creole, but she wasn’t successful at first because they had never done it and some didn’t know how (there were no orthographic standards). However, when she began to share her experiences with language prejudice and gained their trust, they began to experiment with their language. Kennedy reports that enabling her students to write in their home language was instrumental in helping them acquire the conventions of Standard English. Britton et al.’s description of expressive writing includes the student’s home and community language and supports the legitimacy and instructional power of language differences in the classroom.
When students write expressively, they should be encouraged to draw on the resources of their language as they write about the ideas that matter to them the most. In Britton’s theory, students begin their exploration in the expressive mode, and as their writing progresses, it moves into “the three different kinds of mature writing.” In the “mature” expressive mode, the writing is Cheap Jeans intended for some audience other than the writer, but the presence of the writer remains a focal point in the text. If the writing moves toward the transactional mode, it becomes more explicit, more context-independent, more tightly organized, and less personal. If it moves toward the poetic mode, it becomes a “verbal object,” with emphasis on the internal structure of the piece—the form becomes the focus of attention.
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