Teaching writing is an oddity. The body of knowledge one needs to convey seems at first blush either painfully transparent—make your audience understand, be clear, be honest—or painfully picayune—make those subjects and verbs agree, know that some people don't like sentences that end with prepositions, use a semicolon between independent clauses. The real body of knowledge writing teachers want to pass on to their students is something else entirely—it is a whole world of communicating that is vital, I believe, for social and spiritual survival. The rules and guidelines and warnings and suggestions are probably akin to the formulas for perihelions and event horizons in astronomy: they're necessary and they help you get where you're going. But they are not the goal; they're not the big picture, not the moon and stars.

To write adequately, one must develop a decent ear for words and sentences; to write well, one must enjoy the process of combining ideas and words with clarity and precision—whether in an essay, a short story, or an office memo. The ways to cultivate these abilities in students are legion. In the years I have been teaching writing, the pedagogic pendulum has swung widely, from the grammar rules/rote memorization school to the no-grammar-just-expression school and now to what I consider most sensible—talking about grammar in the context of readings or the students' own work, and getting students to bring much of their own experience to all their writing. We look at many samples of various kinds of good writing and try to determine what makes them good; my students revise until they're blue in the face; and we do spend quite a bit of time looking at (as opposed to memorizing) grammar, since it is the structure on which we hang our ideas. Finally, one of my main goals as I comment on their papers is to get them to develop some distance, a little thickening of the skin, so that we can talk about their work. With that distance, they can see every comment not as a threat, but as a road sign, pointing them in the right direction.

Students often want the formula, the way to organize a paper, the "right" way to do this or that. And I want to give them that formula, that secret. But of course it is the one thing I can't give them. There is no key; there is only fumbling in our pockets for keys—and it's the fumbling that is the process we want to teach them.

The problem in teaching, then, and in teaching writing in particular, lies in the fact that we can teach only so much, and then students have to learn the rest on their own. For me the fear is constant: that I will end up teaching students all about writing—but not teaching them how to write. But the bottom line is that to teach them how to write, we must teach them all about writing. Then they go on to teach themselves the rest: they learn how to write. Perhaps my best students (not best writers, but best students) get little out of my class—they get it out of themselves. In my finest moments, I am a catalyst, but nothing more. For those students who resist—actively or passively—I don't think I have failed as a teacher, because some small things, some minor improvements, will probably stick to them whether they wish it or not.

For those who don't resist, or who come along willingly, the ride is wonderful for both of us. I often find myself smiling when I read some papers near the end of the term—smiling and forcing any innocent party nearby to listen to wonderful sentences, engaging ideas, thoughtful approaches. That's when I think I might be a teacher.