Introduction

In his 1993 essay “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out the Three Forms of Judgment,” Peter Elbow makes a provocative point about the value of “liking” in the assessment of writing. While he acknowledges that the concepts of liking and disliking may seem like “unpromising topics” seeming “to represent the worst kind of subjectivity,” he argues that an orientation toward liking student writing, on the part of both teacher and student alike, is vital to the project of developing student writers (199). Elbow offers this comparison to illustrate his point:

The old story goes like this: We write something. We read it over and we say, ‘This is terrible. I hate it. I’ve got to work on it again and improve it.’ And we go, and it gets better, and this happens again and again, and before long we have become a wonderful writer. But that’s not really what happens. Yes, we vow to work on it—but we don’t. And the next time we have the impulse to write, we’re just a bit less likely to start.

 

What really happens when people learn to write better is more like this. We write something. We read it over and we say, ‘This is terrible… but I like it. Damn it, I’m going to get it good enough so that others will like it too.’ And this time we don’t just put it in a drawer, we actually work hard on it. (Elbow 199)

Liking, in this formulation, is not uncritical—to like one’s work doesn’t mean to rest on one’s laurels, or to assume that it is perfect, or even good. Rather, for Elbow, liking is a kind of affective orientation, one that is enabling rather than paralyzing. It is important, he argues, not just for the writer, but for the teacher as well; “good teachers,” he argues, “like student writing… [They] see what is only potentially good, they get a kick out of the mere possibility—and they encourage it” (Elbow 200).

This is an essay inspired by the power of liking. When I first came to Elbow’s now thirty-year-old essay a couple of years ago, it was something of a revelation. Perhaps it hit particularly hard given the timing: it was the fall of 2021; we were in the depths of COVID, and the students in my literary studies courses at Bard College at Simon’s Rock were, like students around the world, struggling with anxiety and isolation. A pedagogy infused with positivity felt liberating, and I tried to embrace it as a mindset when framing the writing process for students and in responding to their work. In 2022, I began a new teaching position, this time at The Loomis Chaffee School, a boarding preparatory school in New England. In some ways, I was teaching a student population with whom I was familiar: Simon’s Rock was a pioneer of the “early college” model, and students there matriculate after 10th, or sometimes 11th grade, moving directly into college coursework. My juniors and seniors at Loomis Chaffee were the same ages as my incoming Simon’s Rock students had been, and as students in upper-level “College Level” (CL) courses, they were likewise transitioning to a more advanced level of literary scholarship.

In other ways, however, I was teaching a radically different group of students. Almost by definition, Simon’s Rock students are outside-the-box thinkers, having opted to leave high school early, and they come from a range of high school contexts, so there was considerable range in their writing styles and orientations to writing. While my Simon’s Rock students were beset by various types of pressures and challenges that could impact learning, by and large, they did not tend to be overly grade motivated. This reflects one of the arguments school founder Betty Hall made in support of the early college model: by leaving two years early, the student could be “free of the invidious comparisons which beset the student in competition with his fellow in a ‘preparatory track’” (Hall 2). Loomis students, in contrast, are squarely on the “preparatory track,” and with college looming large in their minds, my 11th graders in particular expressed tremendous anxiety about their grades. There was a significant curricular difference as well: the Loomis English curriculum has traditionally been quite formula-focused in its approach, with an emphasis, particularly in the freshmen and sophomore years, on students mastering specific templates for structuring sentences and paragraphs as the building blocks for analysis. These factors led to students who were more focused on their writing products, and my ranking of those products on a 100-point scale, than on their process. While the 11th grade year is meant to be one in which the students take the tools and structures of academic writing that they have learned in their first two years and apply them in more sophisticated ways, I felt that for my students to be able make that shift, they needed first to develop a deeper sense of agency in and awareness of their own writing.

And so, with Elbow’s affective framework in mind, I turned my attention to process writing, building it into every major writing assignment over the course of 5 months in a year-long CL Junior English class. I had a few interconnected goals in mind. First, I was curious to see whether, and in what ways, sustained engagement in process writing would enhance students’ metacognition around analytical writing. More specifically, though, I was interested in whether and in what ways student participation in process writing (often referred to as metacognitive writing) might affect students’ affective relationships toward their own writing and the writing process. My students are all smart, talented, and high-performing academically, but their self-esteem as writers was hindered by their fixation on grades and sense that academic writing was a formula over which they had no control, and as bell hooks has argued, poor self-esteem is a “wound” that acts as a “serious obstacle to learning” (122). My hope was that exploring this mode of writing in a sustained way would help the students cultivate a sense of ownership over their own language and deepen their understanding of the way they use language to connect with their reading audience. In what follows, I will first explore the concept of process writing more broadly, then I will explain my specific intervention and general outcomes. Finally, I will offer some key takeaways that I gleaned from the experience.