"Transactional Theory" Response

First of all, I find the whole notion of transactional theory (that is, meaning lies in the person and not a dictionary) quite compelling. However, I found its application in this article to the teaching of writing flawed. The article calls for a teacher to “not penalize students whose patterns [of writing] are different from [the teacher’s] own.” How can a teacher avoid this? The text itself states that “the goal of objectivity” is illusory, fraudulent, and even dangerous. If objectivity is impossible, downgrading a student for not submitting to our subjective notions of good writing is inevitable. The teacher teaches writing, and she teaches it in light of her own knowledge, experience, and expectations of good writing. If a student cannot subscribe to that, he is failing in his ability to satisfy his audience. Therefore, his paper should be downgraded. I do agree with the earlier articles’ ideas of making the student explain his purposes so that a teacher can help him improve in reaching those goals, but again the “help” given by the teacher is unavoidably subjective. A student may try to become a Gertrude Stein and write in a method that cannot resonate with the teacher’s expectations of good writing, and he will receive poor grades. This, I believe, cannot be avoided. If a teacher allowed for such a style, she would have to allow for any style and be overruled by the less experienced writing students. Her entire education and studies are dismantled at the hands of inexperienced writers who cannot communicate through written language successfully. But at least she allowed for the students’ limited experiences to control the readability of their works.

I have one other issue, and this is not really directed at this article in particular. It is directed at the coinage “re-see.” I hate coinages in the first place, so I am predisposed to argue with them. Moreover, I disagree with the whole idea of having a student “re-see” her piece so that she can recognize the inadequacies. If a piece is so poorly constructed that it warrants “re-seeing,” I argue that the student never saw the piece in the first place. If she creates a text that is incoherent to its specified audience, she has never seen the text from the audience’s point of view, even if she considered the audience while writing. If a student has written a successful piece, why should she “re-see” it? She has already seen it correctly as she wrote it and it successfully achieves its function. Re-seeing simply wastes the student’s time and throws her work back in her face as something that could be successfully written in a different way. To sound as facetious as Lucille Vaughan Payne, I think that we need to “re-see” this whole term of “re-see” and drop it from the pedagogical dictionary.