The abrupt de-chartering of CCCC by NCTE has left Standing Groups like the LLW and the Progressive Grammar SIG without a clear home, in a time in which our insights and perspectives are more important than ever.
Nearly fifty years ago, Janet Emig argued in the pages of College Composition and Communication that writing is a “mode of learning.” Any teacher of writing knows that writing is more than just what you read. What we get is the end result of a train of thought. And some of that thought comes as a result of writing, too. Generative AI has made that distinction much harder to ignore. LLMs can produce fluent, structured, argumentative prose faster than people can write. It can rewrite a paragraph or adjust for register or offer alternative sentences. Our group more than others is in an important place to be able to show what is lost when you outsource this thinking. While this conversation seems to always veer towards academic integrity, it’s important that we emphasize that students are losing their ability to develop metalinguistic awareness. The less students are actually writing, the less they are looking at language.
One of the invaluable things the LLW group has done has been sharing our knowledge of language with each other and with the larger CCCCs community. In the William Vande Koppel Memorial issue of the Journal of Teaching Writing, many members of our group contributed articles describing how linguistic knowledge can inform classroom approaches to teaching writing. In past CCCCs workshops and panels and meetings, we’ve helped to demystify large language models, introduced corpus linguistics tools, and presented inclusive approaches to talking about grammar with students. We talk about how we can get our students to better see how actors, objects, causes, and consequences are constructed through linguistic forms. We share how we can teach students to notice the kinds of language patterns found in academic journals and in journalistic prose, not just so that they can emulate expert behavior, but so that they can think about how they are using language as they are writing. That’s because linguistic knowledge gives writers more things to notice and allows them to choose the forms that match the moves they want to make.
Moving forward, we need to emphasize the point that, if we believe writing is a mode of thinking, then knowledge of language gives us better control over how to structure that thinking. This is in essence what we offer each other and what we have offered the larger CCCC community. We believe in process, not product, because we want to help writers grow. Likewise, focusing on language helps us focus on our students’ metalinguistic awareness, their ability to see how language is producing an effect. This keeps the focus on humans, learning, and writing, and it uses language as a window into that. We are in a prime position to argue that developing writers in the age of the AI essay means developing writers’ knowledge of language.
We think that the work of the LLW and the Progressive Grammar SIG is too important to let our groups dissolve in this confusing mess. In our view, our groups have always had two (sometimes overlapping) goals: (1) to provide a hub for community, collaboration, and resource sharing amongst those of us who already do linguistically-focused work in writing studies, and (2) to share our perspectives more widely with others in the broader CCCCs community. We’re confident that we can continue to provide for community, collaboration, and resource sharing amongst ourselves; what’s less clear is how and where we will be able to continue sharing our perspectives more widely in the absence of the CCCCs. Our hope is that together, we can find ways to continue doing the important work that we do on both fronts.
Cameron Mozafari and Whitney Gegg-Harrison
Co-Chairs, LLW Standing Group
Joe Salvatore
Chair, Progressive Grammar SIG