The Economy of Explicit Instruction

<p>The risk posed by explicit instruction in composition is that the reduction of writing to stock moves and effective devices may diminish the writer's agency and guarantee reproduction of the teacher's. The advantage of explicit instruction is power: overt and recursive attention to selected strategies can help students imagine the public agency the instruction itself may temporarily suspend. This study argues that growth in student writing can follow from replacing problem-solving assignments (based on the problem-solving strategies found in Freakonomics) with rhetorical-analysis assignments. In this latter kind of assignment, the four features of explicit instruction that this study found empowering are (1) paying attention to how published writers frame problems; (2) labeling the framing move as a rhetorical design on readers; (3) weighing the effects of such designs on readers; and, in a rhetorical analysis of Freakonomics, (4) rewriting an already-framed problem. Such instruction is necessarily preliminary to, but also part of, reflective inquiry into the ethics of the conventions, practices, and aims of teaching and learning academic writing.</p>