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Teaching and Researching Writing

The new edition of Ken Hyland’s text provides an authoritative guide to


writing theory, research, and teaching. Emphasising the dynamic relation-
ship between scholarship and pedagogy, it shows how research feeds into
teaching practice. Teaching and Researching Writing introduces readers to
key conceptual issues in the field today and reinforces their understanding
with detailed cases, then offers tools for further investigating areas of
interest. This is the essential resource for students of applied linguistics
and language education to acquire and operationalise writing research
theories, methods, findings, and practices––as well as for scholars and
practitioners looking to learn more about writing and literacy.
New to the fourth edition:

 Added or expanded coverage of important topics such as translingual-


ism, digital literacies and technologies, multimodal and social media
writing, action research, teacher reflection, curriculum design, teaching
young learners, and discipline-specific and profession-specific writing.
 Updated throughout––including revision to case studies and class-
room practices––and discussion of rhetorical genre studies, inter-
cultural rhetoric, and expertise.
 Reorganised References and Resources section for ease of use for stu-
dents, researchers, and teachers.

Ken Hyland is Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the Uni-


versity of East Anglia, UK.
Applied Linguistics in Action
Series Editor: Christopher N. Candlin

Christopher N. Candlin (1940-2015) was Senior Research Professor in the


Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia and Professor
of Applied Linguistics at the Open University, UK. At Macquarie, he was
Chair of the Department of Linguistics; established and was Executive
Director of the National Centre for English Language Teaching & Research
(NCELTR); and was first Director of the Centre for Language in Social Life
(CLSL). He wrote and edited over 150 publications and co-edited the Journal
of Applied Linguistics. From 1996 to 2002 he was President of the Interna-
tional Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA). He acted as a consultant
in more than 35 countries and as external faculty assessor in 36 universities
worldwide.
Applied Linguistics in Action is a series which focuses on the issues and
challenges to teachers and researchers in a range of fields in Applied Lin-
guistics and provides readers and users with the tools they need to carry out
their own practice-based research.

Teaching and Researching Reading


3rd Edition
William Peter Grabe and Fredricka L. Stoller

Teaching and Researching Motivation


3rd Edition
Zoltán Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda

Teaching and Researching Writing


4th Edition
Ken Hyland

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.


com/Applied-Linguistics-in-Action/book-series/PEAALIA
Teaching and Researching
Writing

Fourth Edition

Ken Hyland
Fourth edition published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2022 Ken Hyland
The right of Ken Hyland to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Pearson Education 2002
Third edition published by Routledge 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hyland, Ken, author.
Title: Teaching and researching writing / Ken Hyland.
Description: Fourth edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2022.
Series: Applied linguistics in action | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021014892 (print) | LCCN 2021014893 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Written communication--Study and teaching. |
Written communication--Research.
Classification: LCC P211 .H95 2022 (print) | LCC P211 (ebook) |
DDC 808/.04207--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014892
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021014893

ISBN: 978-1-032-05577-0 (hbk)


ISBN: 978-1-032-05619-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19845-1 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198451

Typeset in Times New Roman


by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

Series Editors’ Preface ix


Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Abbreviations xv

SECTION I
Understanding Writing 1
1 An Overview of Writing 3
1.1 Text-Oriented Understandings 4
1.2 Writer-Oriented Understandings 12
1.3 Reader-Oriented Understandings 25
1.4 Conclusion 34
Further Reading 35

2 Key Issues in Writing 36


2.1 Writing and Context 36
2.2 Literacy and Expertise 39
2.3 Academic and Disciplinary Writing 43
2.4 Writing, Technology and Digital Literacy 47
2.5 Multimodal Writing 51
2.6 Writing and Identity 54
2.7 English, Dominance and Writing 57
2.8 Conclusion 61
Further Reading 61

3 Quandaries and Possibilities 63


3.1 Writing Instruction and Culture 63
3.2 Information Technology and Social Networks 67
vi Contents
3.3 Writing, Wikis and Blogs 70
3.4 Multimodal Writing Instruction 73
3.5 Writing Instruction and Plagiarism 77
3.6 Writing Instruction and Written Corrective Feedback 79
3.7 Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) 84
3.8 Conclusion 87
Further Reading 87

SECTION II
Researching Writing 89

4 Research Practices and Issues 91


4.1 Reflective Practice 91
4.2 Practitioner Research 93
4.3 Research Design 95
4.4 Research Methods 99
4.5 Research Methodologies 105
4.6 Research Topics 110
4.7 Conclusion 119
Further Reading 119

5 Research Cases: Observing and Reporting 121


5.1 Questionnaire Research on Teachers Writing Book
Reviews 121
5.2 Experimental Research on Peer-Response 126
5.3 Interview Research on Academic Blogs 130
5.4 Protocol Research on Primary Students’ Writing
Strategies 134
5.5 Diary Blogs Research on Drafting a Research Paper 138
5.6 Keystroke Logging Research on Writing Strategies 141
5.7 Conclusion 145
Further Reading 145

6 Research Cases: Texts and Contexts 147


6.1 Genre Analysis Research on Grant Proposal Abstracts 147
6.2 Corpus Research on Learner Uses of Lexical Bundles 151
6.3 Case Study Research of a Chinese Doctor Writing for
Publication 154
Contents vii
6.4 Ethnographic Research on Student Peer Review of
Writing 158
6.5 Multimodal Research of Elementary Students’ Maths
Writing 162
6.6 Synthesis Research on the Effectiveness of Peer
Feedback 166
6.7 Conclusion 169
Further Reading 169

SECTION III
Teaching Writing 171

7 Approaches to Teaching Writing 173


7.1 Text-Oriented Approaches to Teaching 174
7.2 Writer-Oriented Approaches to Teaching 183
7.3 Reader-Oriented Approaches to Teaching 189
7.4 Conclusion 199
Further Reading 199

8 Teaching Writing: Materials and Practices 200


8.1 Research Writing: A Series of Advanced Writing
Guides 200
8.2 Corpora in Writing Instruction 204
8.3 Learner Blogs 209
8.4 Writing Teaching and Academic Word Lists 213
8.5 Scaffolding School Literacy: Writing Frames 217
8.6 Wikis in the Writing Class 221
8.7 Writing Portfolios: Pedagogy and Assessment 226
Further Reading 231

9 Teaching Writing: Classes and Courses 233


9.1 Writ 101: A Modified Process Approach 234
9.2 Genre in Australian Schools 239
9.3 English for Clinical Pharmacy: A Specific EAP
Course 246
9.4 Go for Gold: Writing for a Reason 249
9.5 Data Driven Learning for Research Postgraduates 255
Further Reading 261
viii Contents
SECTION IV
Exploring Writing 263

10 Significant Areas and Key Texts 265


10.1 Literacy and Writing 265
10.2 Rhetoric 266
10.3 Scientific and Technical Writing 268
10.4 Professional and Business Writing 269
10.5 Academic Writing 270
10.6 Journalism and Print Media 272
10.7 First-Language Writing 273
10.8 Second-Language Writing Instruction 275
10.9 Pragmatics and Writing 276
10.10 Translation Studies 278
10.11 Literary Studies 279
10.12 Writing Using Digital Technologies 281
10.13 Writing and Multimodal Texts 283
10.14 Writing and Forensic Linguistics 284
10.15 Writing and Young Learners 286
10.16 Creative Writing 287

11 Key Sources on Writing 289


11.1 Research Sources: For Analysis and the Study of
Writing 289
11.2 Teaching Sources: For Practitioners and Learners 302

Glossary 314
References 322
Index 352
Series Editors’ Preface

Note from Routledge: Christopher Candlin and David Hall were founding
editors of the Applied Linguistics in Action series when Pearson Education
Limited was the series’ publisher. After David passed away in February
2014, Christopher continued as general editor of the series for Routledge
until his passing away in May 2015. To honor their invaluable work for and
involvement in books that they commissioned for the series, we are retaining
their original series preface for this volume.
Applied Linguistics in Action, as its name suggests, is a series which
focuses on the issues and challenges to teachers and researchers in a range
of fields in Applied Linguistics and provides readers and users with the
tools they need to carry out their own practice-related research.
The books in the series provide the reader with clear, up-to-date, accessible
and authoritative accounts of their chosen field within applied linguistics.
Starting from a map of the landscape of the field, each book provides infor-
mation on its main ideas and concepts, competing issues and unsolved ques-
tions. From there, readers can explore a range of practical applications of
research into those issues and questions, and then take up the challenge of
undertaking their own research, guided by the detailed and explicit research
guides provided. Finally, each book has a section which provides a rich array
of resources, information sources and further reading, as well as a key to the
principal concepts of the field.
Questions the books in this innovative series ask are those familiar to all
teachers and researchers, whether very experienced, or new to the field of
applied linguistics:

 What does research tell us, what doesn’t it tell us and what should it
tell us about the field? How is the field mapped and landscaped? What
is its geography?
 How has research been applied and what interesting research possibi-
lities does practice raise? What are the issues we need to explore and
explain?
 What are the key researchable topics that practitioners can undertake?
How can the research be turned into practical action?
x Series Editors’ Preface
 Where are the important resources that teachers and researchers need?
Who has the information? How can it be accessed?

Each book in the series has been carefully designed to be as accessible


as possible, with built-in features to enable readers to find what they want
quickly and to home in on the key issues and themes that concern them.
The structure is to move from practice to theory and back to practice in a
cycle of development of understanding of the field in question.
Each of the authors of books in the series is an acknowledged authority,
able to bring broad knowledge and experience to engage teachers and
researchers in following up their own ideas, working with them to build
further on their own experience.
The first editions of books in this series have attracted widespread praise
for their authorship, their design, and their content, and they have been
widely used to support practice and research. The success of the series,
and the realisation that it needs to stay relevant in a world where new
research is being conducted and published at a rapid rate, have prompted
the commissioning of this fourth edition. This new edition has been thor-
oughly updated, with accounts of research that has appeared since the
previous editions and with the addition of other relevant material. We
trust that students, teachers and researchers will continue to discover
inspiration in these pages to underpin their own investigations.

Chris Candlin
David Hall
Preface

The original Teaching and Researching Writing first appeared early in


2002 in Longman’s ‘Applied Linguistics in Action’ series edited by Chris
Candlin and David Hall. This was 20 years ago, the same year that Brazil
last won the World Cup, ice deposits were discovered on Mars and people
could first spend euros. That was a long time ago and much has changed
in the interim, not least in writing. Most obviously the interconnectivity of
the internet has created new genres, styles of writing and ways of com-
posing while teachers make greater use of corpora, automated feedback
and online ‘Learning Management Systems’ in their classes. While sub-
sequent editions of this book have documented something of these changes
for teachers and researchers, the pace of change brings me back to another
thorough rewrite in this new edition. I am delighted that Routledge has invi-
ted me to update and revise the book.
Revising is a difficult task as, on one hand, you want to try and keep
what has made the book successful, while on the other to keep up with
moving times by introducing the different ideas, formats and practices that
have emerged since the last edition. Much of what is new in this book
relates to the changes that digital technologies and social practices have
brought to writing, and so readers familiar with the earlier work will
notice new sections on translingualism, multimodality, disciplinary writ-
ing, digital technologies, social networking genres, automated writing
evaluation, using wikis and blogs in the classroom, and learner corpora.
So, while what we know about writing and how we might best teach it
remain, in broad strokes, fairly similar to what we knew in 2002, the field
has certainly changed.
Despite this, writing continues to be a key metric in the life chances of
millions of people around the world: a measure of educational success,
academic competence, professional advancement and institutional recog-
nition. It is central to our personal experience and social identities, and we
are often evaluated by our control of it. Writing has also consolidated its
importance in how scholars understand the world, and the threats that
face it, and is ever more important in contemporary questions of politics,
gender, personal relationships, power, identity, culture and the creation
xii Preface
and dissemination of truth. The various purposes of writing, its myriad
contexts of use and the diverse backgrounds and needs of those wishing to
learn it, all push the study of writing into wider frameworks of analysis
and understanding.
Essentially though, and despite the fact that they increasingly interact in
very different ways, we are still concerned with writers, with readers and
with texts, and it is these components of writing which remain the core of
the book. Also unchanged in the book are the concept and quote boxes to
highlight key terms and ideas, an extensive glossary, and a resource section
pointing to websites, materials, conferences and organisations which sup-
port students, writers and teachers of writing. I hope that these features,
together with what I have tried to make an accessible style, will mean that
students, teachers and those who come to the topic without a specialised
knowledge of writing research, won’t be too daunted. All chapters, how-
ever, have been extensively rewritten and updated to include new thinking
on old topics and to take account of novel directions which have emerged
in writing studies.
The intention behind the book, however, remains the same as it was in
the first edition: to provide a clear and critical introduction to the field of
writing research and teaching. In Section I offer a conceptual overview of
the area and raise some of the key issues and questions currently occupy-
ing the field. Section II focuses on the main ways of approaching writing
research, including the design of studies, commonly used methodologies
and frequently explored topics, together with examples of these different
approaches taken from the literature with a summary and brief critical
evaluation. Section III provides a brief review of how the main theoretical
understandings of writing have emerged in classroom practices, outlining
the general orientations to teaching they involve and drawing on examples
of classroom syllabi, materials and practices from around the world.
Finally, Section IV is a compendium of resources, indicating the major
areas of writing research and practice and providing information on the
key sources and contacts.
Throughout the book, I hope the reader can see what the main under-
standings of writing are and how these relate to research and teaching,
and also see the strong cycle of practice–theory–practice which continues
to drive the field of writing. I also hope that the book will encourage
readers to engage with the topics discussed and be encouraged to explore
some of the issues the book raises.
Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my students and friends for their support and
advice and give a particular mention to Susan Dunsmore, my copy-
editor, who helped make the book more accessible and reader-friendly
than I could have managed on my own. I would also like to acknowl-
edge colleagues and fiends who have shared their research and materi-
als with me. Here I would particularly like to thank John Swales and
Chris Feak for extracts from their writing guides for graduate students;
Derek Wallace and Janet Holst of the Victoria University of Wellington
for the materials and comments on Writ 101. More formally, I would
like to thank the following for allowing me to use their material and
websites.
Laurence Anthony for permission to reprint screenshots of his AntConc
programme in Figures 8.1 and 8.2.
Mark Davies for permission to reprint a screenshot from the iWeb
corpus in Figure 8.3.
Dee Gardner and Mark Davies to reprint screenshots of their ‘Word
and Phrase’ site in Figures 8.4 and 8.5.
Academic Books for permission to reprint two figures: a writing frame
for planning a discussion and a writing frame for first draft of a discussion
as Figures 8.5 and 8.6 from Wray, D. & Lewis, M. (1997). Extending lit-
eracy: Children reading and writing non-fiction. London: Routledge.
Wikiversity for permission to reprint a screenshot of its main page in
Figure 8.8, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
(CC-BY-SA).
West Texas A&M University for permission to reprint a student wiki
page from its website in Figure 8.9.
George Cusack and Carleton College for permission to reprint ‘Portfo-
lio guidelines’ and ‘holistic scoring guide’ from the Carleton Writing Pro-
gram webpage in Concepts 8.10 and 8.12.
Derek Wallace of the Victoria University of Wellington for permis-
sion to reprint pages from Writ 101: Becoming an Effective Writer in
Table 9.1.
xiv Acknowledgements
Jane Stokes and Laura Wakeland of the Centre for Applied English
Studies (CAES) at Hong Kong University for their English for Clinical
Pharmacy materials reproduced in Chapter 9. Lillian Wong for permis-
sion to reproduce screenshots and materials from The Hong Kong
Graduate Corpus and Thesis Writing for Graduate Students in Chapter 9,
Section 9.5.
Abbreviations

AIDCA Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction, Action


ANOVA analysis of variance
AWE automated writing evaluation
AWL academic word list
BAWE British Academic Written English
CAES Centre for Applied English Studies
CALL computer-assisted language learning
CARS create a research space
CAT computer-assisted translation
CDA critical discourse analysis
CDL critical digital literacies
CDS critical discourse studies
CMC computer-mediated communication
COCA Corpus of Contemporary American English
DCF direct corrective feedback
DDL data driven learning
EAL English as an Additional Language
EAP English for Academic Purposes
EATAW European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing
ELF English as a lingua franca
ELT English Language Teaching
ERPP English for Research and Publication Purposes
ESL English as a Second Language
ESP English for Specific Purposes
EST English for Science and Technology
GDP gross domestic product
GfG Go for Gold
GRE Graduate Record Examinations
GWSI general writing skills instruction
xvi Abbreviations
IELTS International English Language Testing System
IR intercultural rhetoric
IWCA International Writing Centers Association
L1 first language
L2 second language
LEO Literacy Education Online
LW Learning-to-Write
MALL mobile-assisted language learning
MANOVA multivariate analysis of variance
ME metalinguistic explanation
MOOCs massive online open courses
MT machine translation
NES native English speaker
OWLs online writing labs
PSLE Primary School Leaving Examination
RAFT role and purpose, audience, focus, tone
RGS rhetorical genre studies
SATS standard attainment tests
SCI Science Citation Index
SFL systemic functional linguistics
SLA second-language acquisition
SSCI Social Science Citation Index
SWOT strength, weakness, opportunity and threat
TAP think-aloud protocol
TOEFL Test of English as a Foreign Language
UWL university word list
VLEs virtual learning environments
WCF written corrective feedback
WL Writing-to-Learn
Section I
Understanding Writing
1 An Overview of Writing

This chapter will …

 offer a guiding summary of the main approaches to understanding


writing;
 explore research into main dimensions of writing: the code, the enco-
der and the decoder;
 examine the principal ideas, key figures, significant findings and major
weaknesses of each view.

In this chapter I want to provide an overview of the different ways of


understanding writing. Rather than a comprehensive treatment of what we
know, I intend this to be more a map of the territory which picks out the
main landmarks and offers a direction of travel. To do this, I discuss three
broad approaches to researching and teaching writing, focusing in turn on
theories that are mainly concerned with texts, with writers and with read-
ers. The classification implies no rigid divisions, but I hope it highlights
something of what we know about writing and what each approach offers
to our understanding of this complex area. The implications of these views
for classroom practice are discussed in Section III of this book.

Concept 1.1 Approaches to Writing


 The first approach focuses on the products of writing by exam-
ining texts, either through their formal surface elements, the
vocabulary and grammar, or their discourse structure.
 The second approach, divided into expressivist, cognitivist, situ-
ated and translingual strands, focuses on the writer and discusses
the processes used to create texts.
 The third approach emphasises the role that readers play in
writing, adding an interactional dimension by elaborating how
writers engage with an audience in creating texts.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003198451-2
4 Understanding Writing
1.1 Text-Oriented Understandings
The study of the tangible, analysable aspects of writing has a long history
and perhaps informs most research into writing around the world today.
By looking at surface forms, these approaches share an interest in the lin-
guistic or rhetorical resources available to writers for producing texts, and
so reduce the complexities of communication to words on a page or
screen. Text-focused theories come in many guises, but I will describe the
two main ones here.

1.1.1 Texts as Objects


The dominant model of writing for many years saw it as a textual product,
a coherent arrangement of elements structured according to a system of
rules. Writing was an outcome. It was a finished product that could be
studied for what it told us about language, rather than about making
meanings.

Concept 1.2 Texts as Objects


Based on ideas inherited from structuralism and implicit in the Trans-
formational Grammar of Noam Chomsky (1965), a basic premise of
this approach is that texts are autonomous objects which can be ana-
lysed and described independently of particular contexts, writers or
readers. Texts have a structure, they are orderly arrangements of words,
clauses and sentences, and by following grammatical rules, writers can
encode a full semantic representation of their intended meanings.

The idea that texts can function independently of a context carries


important ideological implications, and one of the most serious is the
mechanistic view that human communication works by transferring ideas
from one mind to another via language (Shannon & Weaver, 1963). Writ-
ing is disembodied. It is removed from any context and from the personal
experiences of writers and readers, because meanings can be fully encoded
in texts and recovered by anyone with the right decoding skills. Meaning
lies in the words, not in the minds of text users, and writers are passive in
following the rules of grammar.
Such a focus on form has led to considerable research into the regula-
rities we find in texts. In recent years, for example, computer analyses of
large corpora have been used to identify how features such as evaluative
adjectives like nice, good, great (De Cock, 2011) are typically used, and to
determine the significance of regular high-frequency bundles such as at the
same time as and on the other hand (Hyland, 2012) in creating texts. An
orientation to formal features of texts has also underpinned a great deal of
An Overview of Writing 5
research into students’ writing development. From this perspective, writing
improvement can be measured by counting increases in features such as
relative clauses, modality and passives through successive pieces of writ-
ing. White (2007), for instance, sought to assess language improvement in
student writing by measuring increases in the number of morphemes,
words and clauses in student essays. Alternatively, learner corpora can be
studied to see the effect of L1 (first language) transfer to writing in the
learner’s L2 (second language) (e.g. Osborne, 2015).
From a perspective that regards texts as autonomous objects, then, lear-
ners’ compositions are seen as langue—that is, a demonstration of the wri-
ter’s knowledge of forms and his or her awareness of the system of rules to
create texts. Good writing is accurate and conveys the writer’s meaning
explicitly. But the claim that good writing is fully explicit and needs no
context for its sense draws on the old-fashioned conduit metaphor: that we
transfer ideas from one mind to another through language. In this view, a
text has a single watertight sense, as meanings can be written down and
understood by others in exactly the way they were intended. There can be
no conflicts of interpretations, no reader positions, no different under-
standings, because we all see things in the same way. Meanings correspond
with words, and writing is transparent in reflecting meanings rather than
constructing them.

Quote 1.1 On ‘Explicitness’


A text is explicit not because it says everything all by itself but rather
because it strikes a careful balance between what needs to be said and
what may be assumed. The writer’s problem is not just being explicit; the
writer’s problem is knowing what to be explicit about.
(Nystrand et al., 1986: 81)

However, focusing exclusively on formal features of texts as a measure of


writing competence ignores how texts are the writer’s response to a particular
communicative setting. Written texts cannot be autonomous precisely
because they respond to a particular situation, including a relationship
between the writer and reader, and display that situation in their pages.

Quote 1.2 Brandt on Autonomous Texts


Identifying the mode of a text or enumerating its T-unit length or the
density and range of its cohesive devices may lend insights into the
structure of written texts, however, it can describe only one or another
static outcome of the writer’s dynamic and complex effort to make
meaning. Yet the finished text need not be abandoned in our pursuit to
6 Understanding Writing

understand the composing act—not, that is, if we shift our focus from
the formal features of an isolated text toward the whole text as an
instance of language functioning in a context of human activity.
(Brandt ,1986: 93)

Modem perspectives, then, point out that an autonomous view of texts fails
to take account of the beliefs and knowledge writers assume readers will draw
on in reading their texts. Even legal contracts, which are the most explicit of
genres, are open to multiple interpretations and endless disputes by lawyers.
Similarly, the apparently unambiguous and impersonal surface of academic
articles draws on readers’ presumed background knowledge. Through techni-
cal jargon, references to other research and assumed familiarity with particular
ways of constructing arguments, writers work to establish a coherent context
which will persuade a particular community of readers (e.g. Bazerman, 1988;
Hyland, 2004a). In sum, inferences are always involved in recovering mean-
ings: no text can be both coherent and context-free.

1.1.2 Texts as Discourse


While an autonomous model views texts as forms which can be analysed
independently of any real-life uses, another way of seeing writing as a
physical thing looks beyond surface structures to see texts as discourse—
the way we use language to communicate, to achieve purposes in parti-
cular situations. Here the writer is seen as having certain goals and inten-
tions, and the ways we write are resources to accomplish these. So instead
of forms being disembodied, independent of contexts, a discourse
approach sees them as located in social actions. Teachers following this
line therefore aim to identify the ways that texts actually work as com-
munication by linking language forms to purposes and contexts.

Concept 1.3 Discourse


Discourse refers to language in action, and to the purposes and functions
linguistic forms serve in communication. Here the patterns of language
in a text point to contexts beyond the page, indicating a range of social
constraints and options which influence writers in any context. The
writer has certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his or her
readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms selected in a
text are the ways the writer believes can best accomplish these. Thinking
about these factors draws the analyst into a wider perspective which
considers the context: locating texts in a world of communicative pur-
poses and social action to understand how texts work as communication.
An Overview of Writing 7
A variety of approaches have considered texts as discourse, but all have
tried to discover how writers organise language to produce coherent,
purposeful prose. An early contribution was the ‘functional sentence
perspective’ of the Prague School, which sought to describe how we
structure text to represent our assumptions about what is known (given)
or new to the reader (e.g. Firbas, 1986). This was taken up and developed
in the work of Halliday (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) in the con-
cept of theme–rheme structure. Roughly, theme is what the writer is
talking about and rheme is what he or she is saying about it: the part of
the message that the writer considers important. Theme and rheme help
writers organise clauses into information units that push the commu-
nication forward through a text and make it easy for readers to follow.
This is because we expect old information to come first as a context for
the new information that follows, so breaking this pattern can be con-
fusing. Like here:

(1) Non-verbal communication is traditionally divided into para-


language, proxemics, body language and haptics. Paralanguage refers
to the nonverbal vocal signs that accompany speech. Proxemics con-
cerns physical distance and orientation. Body language describes
expression, posture and gesture. The study of touch is called haptics.

We can see that the writer sets up a pattern in which the rheme of the first
sentence becomes the themes of the next three, clearly signposting the
progression. We feel comfortable about reading this until we reach the last
sentence where the theme breaks the sequence, surprising us and disturb-
ing our processing of the text.
A different strand of research has tried to identify how writers organise
stretches of texts to help readers see the unfolding purpose of their mes-
sage. What are pieces of text trying to do and how do they fit into a larger
structure? Winter (1977) and Hoey (1983), for example, distinguish several
text patterns which they label problem-solution, hypothetical-real and gen-
eral-particular. They show that even without explicit signalling, readers
can draw on their knowledge of familiar text patterns to infer the connec-
tions between clauses, sentences or longer passages of text. For example,
we all have a strong expectation of how a story will proceed; we anticipate
a problem-solution pattern where, following a context introducing the
participants and situation (Cinderella is a downtrodden girl bullied by her
sisters), we anticipate a problem will arise for the participants to solve (she
can’t go to the ball), then we look for a response to the problem (the fairy
godmother works some magic) and finally an evaluation whether the
response worked (she goes to the ball and marries the prince). This pro-
blem-solution pattern is found in other genres too, such as the conference
abstract in Concept 1.4.
8 Understanding Writing

Concept 1.4 Problem-Solution Pattern


1 Situation: We now accept that grammar is not restricted to
writing but is present in speech.
2 Problem: This can lead to assumptions that there is one kind of
grammar for writing and one for speech.
3 Response: A large-scale corpus survey of English has been
undertaken.
4 Evaluation of response: Results show the same system is valid for
both writing and speech.
(Example based on a conference abstract)

These descriptions lead us to the idea that we probably draw on shared


assumptions to account for what we recognise as connected text. That is to
say, part of what makes writing coherent lies in our background knowl-
edge and interpretive abilities rather than in the text. One model of how
we do this suggests that readers call on their conventionalised knowledge
to impose a coherent frame on a message. We interpret discourse by
comparison with our earlier experiences, which are organised in our heads
as scripts or schemata (e.g. Schank & Abelson, 1977). Thus, we carry
around stereotypical understandings which we use as scaffolding to inter-
pret the texts we encounter every day, allowing us to read texts as diverse
as detective thrillers and tweets.
A second approach to how we are able to follow texts is based on
philosophical pragmatics rather than cognitive psychology. This pro-
poses that writers try to create texts which are as relevant to readers as
possible, and that readers anticipate this when trying to recover mean-
ing. This approach originates with Grice’s (1975) principles of con-
versational inference, which explain successful communication in terms
of interactants’ mutual assumptions of rationality and cooperation.
Building on this idea, Sperber and Wilson (1986) argue that readers
construct meanings by comparing the information they find in a text
with what they already know about the context. This helps them
to establish meanings that are relevant. In other words, when we read,
we assume that the writer is being cooperative by thinking of what we
need to fully understand what is going on, and so we look for ways
of interpreting what we read as relevant to the ongoing discourse in
some way.
In these theories, interpretation depends on the ability of readers to
supply the needed assumptions from memory, but the construction of
meaning from texts is a rhetorical and not just a cognitive process, as
suggested by Kramsch (1997) in Quote 1.3.
An Overview of Writing 9

Quote 1.3 A Rhetorical Approach to Text Interpretation


1 Texts both refer to a reality beyond themselves and a relationship to
their readers.
2 The meaning of texts is inseparable from surrounding texts, whether
footnotes, diagrams or conversations. Intertextuality refers to the
extent our texts echo other texts.
3 Texts attempt to position readers in specific ways by evoking
assumed shared schemata.
4 Schemata are created by relating one text or fact to another through
logical links.
5 Schemata reflect the ways of thinking of particular communities or
cultures.
6 Schemata are co-constructed by the writer in dialogue with others.
7 Schemata are rhetorical constructions, representing the choices
from other potential meanings.
(Kramsch, 1997: 51–2)

Forms express functions and these vary according to context. This is a


central notion of discourse analysis and underpins the key notion of genre
(Concept 1.5).

Concept 1.5 Genre


Genres are abstract, socially recognised ways of using language. It is a
term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use
language to respond to recurring situations. Every genre has a number
of features which make it different to other genres: each has a specific
purpose, an overall structure, specific linguistic features, and is shared
by members of a culture. For many people it is an intuitively attractive
concept which helps to organise the common-sense labels we use to
categorise texts and the situations in which they occur.

The concept of genre is based on the idea that members of a community


usually have little difficulty in recognising similarities in the texts they use fre-
quently and can draw on these repeated experiences with such texts to read,
understand and perhaps write them relatively easily. This is, in part, because
writing is a practice based on expectations: the reader’s chances of interpreting
the writer’s meanings and purpose are increased if the writer takes the trouble
to anticipate what the reader might be expecting based on previous texts he or
she has read of the same kind. We know immediately, for example, whether a
text is a recipe, a joke or a love letter, and we can respond to it and perhaps
write a similar one if we need to. We all have a repertoire of these responses we
10 Understanding Writing
can call on to communicate in familiar situations, and we learn new ones as we
need them. Thus, teachers, for example, come to develop expertise in writing
lesson plans, class tests and student reports.
Genres encourage us to look for organisational patterns, such as the pro-
blem-solution structure I mentioned above. These patterns show how texts are
written to achieve a particular purpose, and we find such patterns in even the
most apparently personal kinds of writing, such as the acknowledgements in
the opening pages of a student dissertation. The acknowledgements in 240
dissertations written by PhD and MA students in Hong Kong, for example,
showed a three-move structure consisting of a main Thanking Move sand-
wiched between optional Reflecting and Announcing Moves (Hyland, 2004b).
As shown in Concept 1.6, the writer typically begins with a brief intro-
spection on his or her research experience, and this is followed by the main
Thanking Move, where credit is given to individuals and institutions for
help with the dissertation, and this can consist of up to four steps. The first
step is a sentence introducing those to be thanked, followed by thanks for
academic help. This was the only step that occurred in every single text,
and supervisors were always mentioned and always before anyone else.
Next there is thanks for providing resources such as clerical, technical and
financial help, and then thanks for moral support from family and friends
for encouragement, friendship, etc. The final Announcing Move is rare,
but here writers take responsibility and ownership of the thesis to claim it
is theirs and not that of those they have thanked.

Concept 1.6 Dissertation Acknowledgements

Move Example
1 Reflecting Move The most rewarding achievement in my life, as I
approach middle age, is the completion of my doctoral
dissertation.
2 Thanking Move
2.1 Presenting During the time of writing I received support and help
participants from many people.
2.2 Thanks for I am profoundly indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Robert
academic help Chau who assisted me in each step to complete the
thesis.
2.3 Thanks for I am grateful to The Epsom Foundation whose research
resources travel grant made the field work possible and to the
library staff who tracked down elusive texts for me.
2.4 Thanks for Finally, thanks go to my wife who has been an impor-
moral support tant source of emotional support.
3 Announcing Move However, despite all this help, I am the only person
responsible for errors in the thesis.
An Overview of Writing 11
The analysis showed this structure was common in almost all the
acknowledgements, and that where steps occurred, they did so in this
sequence. It also showed that, of the many ways of expressing thanks (I
am grateful to, I appreciate, I want to thank, etc.), the noun thanks was
used in over half of all cases, and this was modified by only three adjec-
tives: special, sincere and deep, with special comprising over two-thirds of
all cases. Writers also always stated the reason for thanking the person, as
in these examples:

(2) First of all, special thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Franco Lin, for
his consistent and never-failing encouragement, support and help.
My special gratitude goes to my family who made it possible for me
to embark on writing a PhD thesis at all.
I should also thank my wife, Su Meng, who spent days and nights
alone with our daughter taking care of all the tasks that should have
been shared with me.

This suggests that writers address not only the people they acknowledge,
who obviously know the help they give, but a wider audience which
sometimes includes examiners. In this way they are able to represent
themselves as good researchers and real human beings deserving of the
degree. Examining specific genres by studying patterns and recurring fea-
tures, therefore, tells us a lot about what writers are trying to achieve and
the language they are using to do it.
We cannot, however, assume that a particular text will always rigidly
observe a given genre structure. Often analyses show that moves overlap or
occur out of sequence, and there is frequently less uniformity than might
be expected. This is partly because writers make different choices about
what to include and partly because local communities may have specific
uses that override common structures. Moreover, the same genre can look
very different in different communities or when written in different lan-
guages, while a report in chemistry will look very different from one in
economics or engineering.
There is also the danger that our genre descriptions might oversimplify
a more complex reality, particularly if we ignore that writers may have
indirect purposes, or what Bhatia (2004) calls ‘private intentions’, in
addition to ‘socially recognised’ ones. Analysts also need to be cautious
about imposing their intuitions on the structure of the text. To avoid this,
our studies need to say how moves are linguistically signalled or ask text
users for their ideas. Analysts have therefore attempted to show how par-
ticular language features cluster together in texts, or parts of texts. Thus
research shows how lexical bundles like as a result of, it should be noted
that and as can be seen help identify a text as belonging to an academic
genre, while with regard to, in pursuance of and in accordance with are
likely to mark out a legal text (Hyland, 2008a).
12 Understanding Writing
Other genre variations are the result of interdiscursivity, or importing
conventions from other genres into a text. We can see this in the increasing
intrusion of promotional or advertising elements into genres often con-
sidered ‘neutral’, such as job announcements which advertise the hiring
company and the ‘synthetic personalisation’ of formal public genres, such
as business letters which address us as close friends (Fairclough, 1995).
Mixing genres in this way blurs clear distinctions between genres, thus
creating blends such as infotainment, advertorial and docudrama. Ulti-
mately, however, genres are the ways that we engage in, and make sense of,
our social worlds, and our competence to use them does not lie in our
ability to identify monolithic uses of language, but to modify our choices
according to the contexts in which we write.

1.2 Writer-Oriented Understandings


The second broad approach takes the writer, rather than the text, as the
point of departure. The opening theories in this section contribute to the
hugely influential process movement and ask what it is that good writers
do when composing so they can help learners acquire these skills. The
third takes the immediate social context of the writing more seriously and
the fourth, a more recent development, encourages L2 learners to see their
L1 as a strategic and creative choice in writing. These writer-centred
understandings focus on:

1 the personal creativity of the individual writer;


2 the cognitive processes of writing;
3 the writer’s immediate context;
4 the writer’s translingual repertoire.

1.2.1 Writing as Personal Expression

Concept 1.7 The Expressivist View of Writing


Originating with the work of Elbow (1998), Murray (1985) and
others, this view encourages writers to find their own voices to pro-
duce writing that is fresh and spontaneous. There is an underlying
assumption that thinking precedes writing, and that the free expres-
sion of ideas can encourage self-discovery and cognitive maturation.
Writing development and personal development are seen as symbio-
tically interwoven to the extent that “good therapy and composition
aim at clear thinking, effective relating, and satisfying self-expres-
sion” (Moffett, 1982: 235).
An Overview of Writing 13
The Expressivist view strongly resists a narrow definition of writing based
on notions of correct grammar and usage. Instead, it sees writing as a
creative act of discovery in which the process is as important as the pro-
duct to the writer. Writing is learnt, not taught, and the teacher’s role is to
be non-directive and enabling, providing writers with the space to make
their own meanings through an encouraging, positive and cooperative
environment with minimal interference. Because writing is a develop-
mental process, teachers are encouraged not to impose their views, give
models or suggest responses to topics beforehand. On the contrary, they
are urged to stimulate the writer’s thinking through pre-writing tasks, such
as journal-writing and analogies (Elbow, 1998), and to respond to the
ideas that the writer produces. This, then, is writing as self-discovery.

Quote 1.4 Rohman on ‘Good Writing’


‘Good writing’ is that discovered combination of words which allows a
person the integrity to dominate his subject with a pattern both fresh and
original. ‘Bad writing’, then, is an echo of someone else’s combination
which we have merely taken over for the occasion of our writing …‘Good
writing’ must be the discovery by a responsible person of his uniqueness
within his subject.
(Rohman, 1965: 107–8)

Unfortunately, as North (1987) points out, this ‘hands-off’ approach


offers no clear theoretical principles from which to evaluate ‘good writing’
nor does it furnish advice that can help accomplish it. This is because
good writing, for Expressivists, does not reflect the application of rules but
flows from the writer’s free imagination.
The Expressivist manifesto, as Faigley (1986) observes, is essentially a
Romantic one. It promotes vague goals of ‘self-actualisation’ and even vaguer
definitions of good writing which depend on subjective, hazy and culturally
variable concepts such as originality, integrity and spontaneity. This, then, is
the extreme learner-centred stance. The writer is the centre of attention, and
his or her creative expression is the principal goal. Unfortunately, the basic
assumption is naïve: not all writers have similar innate intellectual and crea-
tive potential and just need the right conditions to express themselves effec-
tively. Essentially the approach is seriously under-theorised and leans heavily
on an asocial view of the writer, operating in a context where there are no
cultural differences in the value of ‘self-expression’, no variations in personal
inhibition, few distinctions in the writing processes of mature and novice
writers, and no social consequences of writing.
While Expressivism has helped to move writing teaching and research
away from a restricted attention to form, it ignores communication in the
14 Understanding Writing
real-world contexts where writing matters. But despite its limitations, the
Expressivist approach is still influential in many U.S. first-language class-
rooms and underpins courses in creative writing. It has also helped inspire
research to support a cognitive view of writing.

1.2.2 Writing as a Cognitive Process


Interest in writers’ composing processes has been extended beyond notions
of creativity and self-expression to focus on the cognitivist view of writing.
This is a very different view of process, as it draws on the techniques and
theories of cognitive psychology and not literary creativity. Essentially it
sees writing as a problem-solving activity: how writers approach a writing
task as a problem and bring intellectual resources to solving it. This view
of writing has developed a range of sophisticated investigative methods,
generated an enormous body of research and was, until recently, the
dominant approach to teaching writing in the United States.

Concept 1.8 The Writing Process


At the heart of this model is the view that writing is a ‘non-linear,
exploratory and generative process whereby writers discover and
reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning’
(Zamel, 1983: 165). Following Emig’s (1983) description of compos-
ing as ‘recursive’ rather than as an uninterrupted, Pre-writing-
>Writing->Post-writing activity, a great deal of research has revealed
the complexity of planning and editing activities, the influence of
different writing tasks and the value of examining what writers do
through a series of writing drafts. Investigating case studies and
analysing think-aloud protocols, rather than just texts themselves, are
widely used as research methods to get at these processes.

Flower and Hayes’ (1981) model was extremely influential. It suggested


that the process of writing is influenced by the task and the writer’s
memory. Its main assumptions are that:

 Writers have goals.


 Writers plan extensively.
 Planning involves defining a rhetorical problem, placing it in a con-
text, then exploring its parts, arriving at solutions and finally trans-
lating ideas onto the page.
 All work can be reviewed, evaluated and revised even before any text
has been produced.
 Planning, drafting, revising and editing are recursive, interactive and
potentially simultaneous.
An Overview of Writing 15
 Plans and text are constantly evaluated in a feedback loop.
 The whole process is overseen by an executive control called a
monitor.

This, then, is a computer model typical of theorising in cognitive psy-


chology and Artificial Intelligence, giving priority to mechanisms such as
memory, Central Processing Unit, problem-solving programmes and flow-
charts. A well-known version of such a flow-chart is shown in Figure 1.1.
Faigley (1986) points out that the Flower and Hayes model helped to
promote a ‘science-consciousness’ among writing teachers which promised
a ‘deep-structure’ theory of how writing could be taught. The beauty of
the model is its simplicity, as the wide range of mental activities which
may occur during composing can be explained by a fairly small number of
sub-processes. The model also purports to account for individual differ-
ences in writing strategies, so immature writers can be represented as using
a composing model that is a reduced version of that used by experts and
so guided towards greater competence by instruction in expert strategies.

Figure 1.1 A (simplified) model of process writing instruction


16 Understanding Writing
The process approach to teaching writing was assisted by the increasing
availability and affordability of personal computers in the early 1980s.
Word processing was not just a new form of typing but a different way of
manipulating texts, making it easier to re-draft, revise and edit. Teachers
were quick to see the pedagogical possibilities of this, encouraging stu-
dents away from a fixation on local editing and towards block text cut and
paste and split screen functions which encourage more global editing. In
discussing this approach to teaching, Bloch (2008: 52) observed: ‘The ease
with which one could make changes or incorporate new ideas made it
clear how all of these aspects of the writing process were now integrated.’
The impact on research and teaching has been enormous, and we now
know much more about composing processes. Process approaches also
extended research techniques beyond experimental methods and text ana-
lyses to the qualitative methods of the social sciences, often seeking to
describe writing from an emic perspective by taking account of the views
of writers and readers themselves through retrospective interviews (e.g.
Ha, 2017) and writers’ verbal reports while composing (e.g. Yang, 2016).
These techniques have been supplemented in recent years with technolo-
gical advances and the use of keystroke logging (e.g. Lindgren & Sullivan,
2019) and eye tracking (e.g. Conklin et al., 2018) during writing. Often
research is longitudinal, following a few students over an extended period
of their writing development (e.g. Zhang & Hyland, 2018) and uses mul-
tiple techniques which may include recall protocols and product analyses
of several drafts.
Overall, however, the extension of this research into studies of L2 wri-
ters has been disappointing. Many teachers will find little that is surprising
in the findings of process writing studies summarised in Concept 1.9, and
the research generally supports our intuitions about the practices of skilled
and unskilled writers. Even less encouraging for teachers is the fact that
different studies often produce contradictory findings, often because they
are limited to small samples of writers in a particular context and so lack
generalisability to wider populations of writers. Moreover, despite the
massive output of this research, serious doubts have been raised about the
methods used to reveal the cognitive processes of writing.

Concept 1.9 Process Findings of L2 Writing


Silva (1993) summarises the main results of research into composing
practices as:

 General composing process patterns seem to be similar in L1


and L2.
 Skilled writers compose differently from novices.
 Skilled writers use more effective planning and revising strategies.
An Overview of Writing 17

 Skilled writers revise more at the global level while L2 writers


focus on revisions at word and sentence levels.
 L1 strategies may or may not be transferred to L2 contexts.
 L2 writers tend to plan less than L1 writers.
 L2 writers have more difficulty setting goals and generating
material.
 L2 writers revise more but reflect less on their writing.

One serious problem is that these results often rely on concurrent think-
aloud protocols, a method where researchers ask writers to report their
thoughts and actions while writing. Thus, Li (2006) and Leighton and Gierl
(2007), for example, argue that protocols provide a detailed record of what
a writer attends to when he or she is writing. But the method has been cri-
ticised as offering an incomplete picture of the complex cognitive activities
involved in writing, many of which are unconscious and not available to
verbal description. In addition, asking subjects to simultaneously write and
verbalise what they are doing slows down task performance by overloading
short-term memory or what Afflerbach and Johnson (1984: 311) call
‘crowding the cognitive workbench’. Things may even be worse than this as
the act of reporting itself may be just a story that participants construct to
explain, rather than reflect, what they do, potentially distorting the thought
processes they are reporting on.
Reservations have also been expressed about the writing models them-
selves. Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986), for example, argue that such
models do not represent fully worked-out theories and fail to either explain
or generate writing behaviour. The models do not tell us why writers make
certain choices and therefore cannot help us to advise students on how to
write better. In fact, Flower and Hayes’ original model was too imprecise to
predict the behaviour of real writers or to carry the weight of the research
claims based on it. In subsequent work they have emphasised the impor-
tance of appropriate goal-setting and rhetorical strategies far more (Flower
et al., 1990). But such refinements cannot obscure the weaknesses of a
model which seeks to describe cognitive processes common to all writers,
both novice and expert, and all learners in between these poles.
Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) suggest that because skilled and novice
practices differ so radically, we need two models to account for the
research findings (see Concept 1.10).

Concept 1.10 Knowledge Telling and Knowledge Transforming


A knowledge telling model addresses the fact that novice writers plan
less often than experts, revise less often and less extensively, and are
primarily concerned with generating content from their internal
18 Understanding Writing

resources. Their main goal is simply to tell what they can remember
based on the assignment, the topic, or the genre.
Acknowledge transforming model, in contrast, suggests how skilled
writers use the writing task to analyse problems and set goals. These
writers are able to reflect on the complexities of the task and resolve
problems of content, form, audience, style, organisation, and so on
within a content space and a rhetorical space, so that there is con-
tinuous interaction between developing knowledge and text. Knowl-
edge transforming thus involves actively reworking thoughts so that
in the process not only text, but also ideas, may be changed.
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987)

Bereiter and Scardamalia’s model certainly adds psychological insight to


writing activity and helps explain the difficulties often experienced by
unskilled writers because of the complexity of the writing task and their
lack of topic knowledge. It also helps account for reflective thought in
writing, and therefore suggests that students should participate in a variety
of writing tasks and genres to develop their skills. It also draws attention
to the importance of feedback and revision in the process of developing
both content and expression. It remains unclear, however, how writers
actually make the cognitive transition to a knowledge-transforming model,
nor is it spelt out what occurs in the intervening stages and whether the
process is the same for all learners. Many students, for example, continue
to have considerable difficulty with their writing despite years of intensive
teaching in expert strategies.

Concept 1.11 Main Pros and Cons of Process Approaches

Pros
 Major impact on the theory and methodology of teaching writ-
ing to L1 and L2 students.
 A useful corrective to preoccupations with ‘product’ and student
accuracy.
 Important in raising teachers’ awareness of what writing
involves—contributing to a professionalisation of writing teaching.
 Gives greater respect for individual differences among student
writers.
 Stimulates considerable research into the ways students write in
different contexts.
 Raises many new research questions which remain to be answered.
An Overview of Writing 19

Cons
 Overemphasises psychological factors in writing.
 Focuses on the writer as a solitary individual and fails to recog-
nise social aspects of writing.
 Based on individualistic ideologies which may hamper the
development of English as a Second Language (ESL) students.
 Ignores important influences of context, especially differences of
class, gender and ethnicity.
 Downplays the varied conventions of professional and academic
communities.
 Uncertain whether this approach greatly improves student writing.

The impact of process ideas on writing instruction has been enormous, in


both L1 and L2 classrooms, with the adoption of a range of brainstorming, pre-
writing, drafting and feedback practices (see Chapter 7, Section 7.2). But while
there is a great deal of case-study and anecdotal support for this model, there is
actually little hard evidence that process-writing techniques lead to significantly
better writing. Writers, situations and tasks differ, and no single description can
capture all writing contexts or be applied universally with the same results.
In sum, the process-writing perspective allows us to understand writing
in a way that was not possible when it was seen only as a finished product.
It does, however, overemphasise psychological factors and fails to consider
the forces outside the individual which help guide problem-definition,
frame solutions and ultimately shape writing.

1.2.3 Writing as a Situated Act


A third writer-oriented perspective goes some way to addressing the criti-
cisms levelled at cognitive modelling by giving greater emphasis to the
actual performance of writing.

Concept 1.12 Writing as a Situated Act


Writing is a social act that occurs within a particular situation. It is
therefore influenced both by the personal attitudes and prior experiences
that the writer brings to writing and the impact of the specific political
and institutional contexts in which it takes place. By using the situationist
view, i.e. detailed observations of acts of writing, participant interviews,
analyses of surrounding practices and other techniques, researchers have
developed interesting accounts of local writing contexts. These descrip-
tions give significant attention to the experiences of writers and to their
understandings of the demands of the immediate context as they write.
20 Understanding Writing
Less a single theory than several lines of enquiry, this research incor-
porates the writer’s prior experiences and the impact of the immediate,
local context on writing, and it has had an important influence both on
the ways we see writing and on how it might be studied. This perspective
takes us beyond the possible workings of writers’ minds and into the phy-
sical and experiential contexts in which writing occurs to describe how
‘context cues cognition’ (Flower, 1989). Of crucial importance is the
emphasis placed on a notion of context as the ‘situation of expression’
(Nystrand, 1987). Flower (1989: 288) describes this as the effects of prior
knowledge, assumptions and expectations, together with features of the
writing environment, which selectively tap knowledge and trigger specific
processes. The goal is to describe the influence of this context on the ways
writers represent their purposes and so studies seek to analyse, often in
considerable detail, how writing is created as a feature of local situations.

Quote 1.5 Prior on Situated Writing


Actually, writing happens in moments that are richly equipped with tools
(material and semiotic) and populated with others (past, present and
future). When seen as situated activity, writing does not stand alone as
the discrete act of a writer, but emerges as a confluence of many
streams of activity: reading, talking, observing, acting, making, thinking
and feeling as well as transcribing words on paper.
(Prior, 1998: xi)

To accomplish such exhaustive or ‘thick’ descriptions (Geertz, 1973) of


writing contexts, researchers have relied heavily on ethnographic methods.
The term ‘ethnography’ remains somewhat fuzzy and contested, but it
essentially refers to research which is highly situated and minutely
detailed, attempting to give an holistic explanation of behaviour using a
variety of methods and drawing on the understandings of insiders them-
selves to minimise the assumptions brought to the event by the researcher
(Watson-Gegeo, 1988; Ramanathan & Atkinson, 1999b). Applying this
method to an understanding of how and why people write involves
detailed observations of the setting, such as a classroom, and the writing
that occurs within it over a period of time, without interfering with either
the writers or the writing context.

Concept 1.13 Ethnographic Research


Ethnography is a type of research which attempts to make sense of
events in terms of the meanings people bring to them. The key features
include studying people’s behaviour in everyday rather than experimental
An Overview of Writing 21

settings and gathering data from a range of sources, mainly observation


and relatively informal interviews, that are not based on pre-set cate-
gories or hypotheses but which arise out of an interest in an issue.
Research is typically small in scale, focused on a single setting or group
and involves prolonged engagement by the researcher.

In addition to close examination of interactions, data are also typically


collected through interviews with participants about their writing and
relevant biographical issues, together with analyses of diaries and other
written texts (e.g. Pigg et al., 2014). Course books, handouts, course out-
lines, and so on are also often studied, as are student writing itself and
teachers’ responses to this. Sometimes the researcher participates in the
class and follows students around to observe their daily activities and gain
insights into the contexts and practices which might illuminate the writing
process (Lillis, 2008; Starfield, 2015).
Ethnography, however, is not a term that everyone feels comfortable
with. Its origins in anthropology carry connotations of the researcher’s
total immersion in another culture rather than simply an attitude towards
research. The fact it involves multiple methods and sustained engagement
with a context means it is labour-intensive and time-consuming, demand-
ing considerable know-how and resources (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006). As
a result, it is not a methodology much used by teachers. Because of this,
John Swales’ (2018) coining of the term textography in his case studies of
particular writing contexts and discipline-specific texts in a university
building has offered a more manageable way of exploring the richness of
writing contexts while avoiding a full cultural description (see also Star-
field et al., 2014).

Quote 1.6 Swales on Textography


As textographer of the second floor I have tried to do justice to a number
of themes that have emerged over a three-year involvement with its
practices, rhythms, texts and personalities. One is a sense of locale, a
sense of autonomous place … Juxtaposed to that, I have tried to capture
a feeling of the academic personalities, and especially the scriptural
personalities, of those I have chosen for inclusion … And juxtaposed to
the partial accounts of careers that a textography engenders, the use of
close, but nontechnical, analysis of particular stretches of text, illumi-
nated on occasion by text-based interview data, shows how the lan-
guage of normal science can … reveal the individual humanities of the
authors.
(Swales, 2018: 141–2)
22 Understanding Writing
The features of local setting that have particularly interested ‘situated’
researchers have been the roles individual writers perform and how wri-
ters’ interactions with others feed into the writing task, especially in col-
laborative contexts. Contexts are sites for interactions. They are places
where relationships, and the conventions which organise them, can both
assist and constrain writing. The social routines surrounding acts of writ-
ing have therefore been studied in detail (e.g. Storch, 2005) and attention
given to certain tangible features of the local environment which have
meaning for writers. Thus, Chin (1994) has shown how students on a
journalism course saw the use of physical space in their department as
barriers which excluded them and restricted access to the material resour-
ces they needed for writing. Similarly, (Handuleh, 2013) discusses how he,
as a scholar in Somalia, struggles to publish academic papers in the
absence of resources like libraries and computers and grant funding.
There is little doubt that this research has produced rich, detailed descrip-
tions of particular contexts of writing, greatly expanding our understanding
of the personal, social and institutional factors which can impinge on writing.
One problem, of course, is that while these methods might illuminate what
goes on in a particular act of writing, they cannot describe everything in
either the writer’s consciousness or the context which might influence com-
position, so we can never be certain that all critical factors have been
accounted for. More importantly, this approach runs the risk of emphasising
writers’ perceptions and the possible impact of the local situation to the det-
riment of the rhetorical problems to which writing responds. In other words,
by focusing on the context of production, we might be neglecting the effects
of the wider social and institutional orders of discourse which influence wri-
ters’ intentions and plans for writing.
One potential impact of such wider social worlds is the experiences writers
might bring to the classroom as a consequence of prior negative evaluation of
their writing. Social inequalities of power, educational and home back-
grounds, and so on can result in what has been called writing apprehension
(Faigley et al., 1981), where individuals experience high degrees of anxiety
when asked to write. This apprehensiveness about oneself as a writer, one’s
writing situation, or one’s writing task can seriously disrupt the writing pro-
cess and educational success. The term is used to describe writers who are
intellectually capable of the task at hand, but who nevertheless have difficulty
with it (e.g. Sanders-Reio et al., 2014), feeling their writing isn’t sufficiently
creative, interesting, sophisticated or well expressed. This can result in stu-
dents avoiding courses or careers which involve writing, feelings of low self-
esteem and confidence, or the production of poor texts.

1.2.4 Writing as a Translingual Activity


A final writer-oriented perspective regards L2 writers as agents with the
resources to use their language(s) successfully across diverse norms in
An Overview of Writing 23
response to specific contexts. It is a view which sees writing as fluid and
not bound by the conventions of a single language, encouraging the
writer to bring his or her various languages to the act of writing
(Canagarajah, 2013a). Translingualism, then, is a theoretical perspec-
tive on writing which respects linguistic variations that reflect a writer’s
multiple identities.

Concept 1.14 Translingualism


Translingualism rejects a monolingual orientation to writing which
assumes that effective communication requires the use of a common
language with shared norms. Instead it advocates that in mono-
lingual settings writers should ‘use strategies that go beyond com-
municative competence in any given language’ (Canagarajah, 2013a)
by drawing on the repertoire of the languages they can use.

Translingual writing is therefore a particular view of how language, and


writing, are conceptualised, studied and taught, emphasising writer agency
and privileging multiple languages as resources in negotiating meaning
and identity. Writers are encouraged to attempt to embrace the diverse
world in which we live by combining their native language with standard
English to communicate with a broad audience. Supporters celebrate the
creative and strategic ways in which individuals can draw on what they
know of different languages as they write. Strategies such as repurposing
English sound–symbol correspondences in spelling and composing using
strings of non-Roman symbols are seen as ways of expressing individuality
and identity. Essentially, then, this is a political position which advocates
that writers have a right to their own language and should be allowed to
use different varieties of English, rejecting the view that use of a non-
standard English is defective.
Translingualism is therefore a highly individualistic model, embedded
in ideals of inclusivity and celebrating an ideology of American indivi-
dualism where linguistic standardisation risks discriminating against
minorities. It is, however, a position, largely confined to scholars in
North America and has failed to find its way beyond those borders.
Second language writing teachers and theorists in the United States are
confronted by considerable linguistic diversity among their students and
translingual theories have emerged as a means of understanding and
assisting these students to express themselves with pride and respect for
their identities. Ebonics, i.e. black English regarded as a language in its
own right rather than as a dialect of standard English, is widely spoken
in urban America and has made its way into student writing in schools,
despite controversy.
24 Understanding Writing

Quote 1.7 Horner et al. on Translingual Writing


We call for a new paradigm: a translingual approach. This approach sees
difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to
manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking,
reading, and listening. When faced with difference in language, this
approach asks: What might this difference do? How might it function
expressively, rhetorically, communicatively? For whom, under what con-
ditions, and how? The possibility of writer error is reserved as an inter-
pretation of last resort.
(Horner et al., 2011)

There are doubtless numerous reasons why this model has not generated
similar enthusiasm among teachers elsewhere, but having taught in EFL
situations in both schools and universities for 40 years, I cannot remember
ever having met a student who did not want to write with as much control
over a standard English as they could achieve. Students in these contexts
are often learning English for instrumental reasons, to pass the exams that
will admit them to universities or professions and to further their careers.
They are not generally seeking to reach a broad audience or communicate
an identity, which they can perfectly well express in their L1. So, for them,
what Canagarajah (2011) calls ‘code-meshing’, or combining local, verna-
cular and colloquial languages with standard English, is less important in
formal assignments than trying to reach and convince a scholarly audi-
ence. The inclusion of multiple literacies in the classroom can certainly
help create a positive learning environment, but writing in this way does
not promote ‘agency’ or change the dominant social structure. It serves to
restrict access to opportunity and perpetuate inequalities, marking such
writers as failing to master the means of communication most valued in
academia and society (e.g. Miller, 2005).
There also seems to be a serious misapprehension about the nature of
L2 writing by many translingual theorists. A number of leading L2 writing
specialists in the United States, for example, are alarmed at a growing
‘tendency to conflate L2 writing and translingual writing and view the
latter as a replacement for or improved version of L2 writing’ (Atkinson et
al., 2015). One serious problem is that translingual theorists position
second language writing instruction as discriminatory and its classrooms
as sites of forced linguistic homogenisation where grammar and genre are
taught with little tolerance of linguistic variation. While many second
language writing classrooms expose students to valued genres and the
ways these are typically realised, this is often done recognising that these
are plans not moulds and the sensitivity to acknowledge that form and
An Overview of Writing 25
genre varies across contexts (e.g. Tardy, 2009; Halliday & Matthiessen,
2014). Williams and Condon (2016), however, see possibilities for a fruitful
alliance between translingualism and second language writing if these
negative views could be ironed out.
The agenda of translingualism proponents is clearly a noble one. their
desire to pluralise writing assignments clearly values students’ own lan-
guages, and code meshing the students’ preferred local dialect with Stan-
dard Written English may eventually reform society’s expectations of how
formal assignments can be written. However, this is an experiment which
risks students’ life chances as the ability to express personal identity and
merge multiple literacies is not likely to be the most direct way to achieve
upward mobility. So while translingualism is an apparently ‘writer-centred’
orientation to instruction, teachers might ask themselves if this is the best
way they can serve their students’ interests.
Overall, then, all these perspectives which focus on writers lack a
developed theory of the ways experience is created and interpreted in
social communities, underplaying the workings of wider factors by
ignoring audience response. As a result, they fail to move beyond the
local context to take full account of how an evolving text might be a
writer’s response to a reader’s expectations. This neglect of the social
dimension of writing encourages serious consideration of more socially
situated approaches.

1.3 Reader-Oriented Understandings


A final broad approach expands the notion of context beyond features of
the composing situation to the purposes, goals and uses that the com-
pleted text may eventually fulfil. The perspectives discussed in this sec-
tion share the view that writers select their words to engage with others
and to present their ideas in ways that make the most sense to their
readers. This involves what Halliday and Mathieson (2014) refer to as the
interpersonal function of language, and it is encoded in every sentence we
write. Our ability as writers to draw readers in, influence or persuade
them depends on making language choices which are not only gramma-
tical, but which are organised in ways familiar to readers and which
show we are taking their processing needs, background understandings
and possible objections into account. Thus, writing is an interactive, as
well as cognitive, activity which employs accepted resources for the pur-
pose of sharing meanings in that context. I will discuss this social view
under three headings:

 writing as social interaction


 writing as social construction
 writing as power and ideology.
26 Understanding Writing
1.3.1 Writing as Social Interaction
‘Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversa-
tion.’ This was written some 250 years ago by Laurence Stern in The Life
and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1883). The idea that writing
is an interaction between writers and readers moves away from our ste-
reotype of an isolated writer hunched over a quill or keyboard to explain
composing decisions in terms of the writer’s projection of an audience.
Who am I writing for? What are their interests, understandings, and
needs? This view was elaborated by Martin Nystrand, who argued that the
success of any text is the writer’s ability to satisfy the rhetorical demands
of readers, which means embedding our writing in a discourse world
which is not restricted to the local situation, i.e. social interactionism.

Quote 1.8 Nystrand on Writing as Social Interaction


The process of writing is a matter of elaborating text in accord with what
the writer can reasonably assume that the reader knows and expects,
and the process of reading is a matter of predicting text in accord with
what the reader assumes about the writer’s purpose. More fundamen-
tally, each presupposes the sense-making capabilities of the other. As a
result, written communication is predicated on what the writer/reader
each assumes the other will do/has done.
(Nystrand, 1989: 75)

In a social interactive model, meaning is created via ‘a unique configura-


tion and interaction of what both reader and writer bring to the text’
(Nystrand et al., 1993: 299). This means writers shape a text by attempting to
balance their purposes with the expectations of readers through a process of
negotiation. For Nystrand, a text has ‘semantic potential’, or a variety of
possible meanings, all but a few of which are closed down by a combination
of the writer’s intention, the reader’s cognition and the language of the text
itself. In other words, meaning is not transmitted from mind to mind as in the
model of autonomous texts, nor does it reside in the writer’s mind as in pro-
cess models. Instead, it is created between the participants themselves.
These writer–reader interactions are essential to achieving coherence
and understanding. Hoey (2001), in fact, suggests they are like ballroom
dancers following each other’s steps, each building sense from a text by
anticipating what the other is likely to do. Skilled writers are able to create
a mutual frame of reference and anticipate when their purposes will be
retrieved by their audiences, providing greater elaboration where they
expect that there may be misunderstanding, and being succinct when they
feel readers will get the point. The drafting process thus becomes a way of
An Overview of Writing 27
responding to an inner dialogue with readers, part of how the writer
monitors the evolving text for potential trouble-spots. Writing, then, is not
an act of an isolated individual but a joint endeavour between writers and
readers, co-constructed through the active understanding of rhetorical
situations and the likely responses of readers.
Audience can be a difficult concept for writers, and especially for stu-
dents or those new to a genre. Clearly, a writer who understands some-
thing of the needs and interests of his or her audience possesses important
rhetorical knowledge about appropriate genre, content, stance and style.
The ability to analyse an audience, however, obviously becomes more
problematic the larger and less immediately familiar the audience gets. It
becomes even more complex where texts are addressed to several audi-
ences simultaneously. As I write this book, for example, I am picturing
you, the reader, as someone with more than a passing interest in writing,
but I cannot predict your cultural background, your knowledge of the
subject, or what you want from this book. Perhaps you are a teacher, a
student, a trainer; maybe someone supervising a thesis or a casual browser
scanning a few free pages on Amazon. In other words, I am aware that my
book could be read by specialists, novices, practitioners and lay people,
and while I try to make the subject as explicit as I can, I know that not all
readers will recover every intended meaning.
The notion of audience is a contentious area of debate in literary studies
(e.g. Lecercle, 2000), has been much discussed in rhetoric (Park, 1982),
and has become more complex in the era of social media posting (e.g. Litt
& Hargittai, 2016) and blogging (Zou & Hyland, 2019). Audience is, in
fact, rarely a concrete reality, particularly in academic and professional
contexts, and must be seen as something imagined by the writer and cre-
ated in the linguistic choices he or she makes while writing.

Concept 1.15 Audience


Two main models of audience have traditionally been influential in writ-
ing theory. Ede and Lunsford (1984) refer to these as audience addressed,
the actual or intended readers who exist independently of the text, and
audience invoked, a created fiction of the writer rhetorically implied in the
text and which can be persuaded to respond to it in certain ways. For Ede
and Lunsford, audience invoked refers to the audience called up or ima-
gined by the writer distinguished from audience addressed, which refers
to the real-life people who read a text. Park’s (1982) more sophisticated
conception focuses less on people and more on the writer’s awareness of
the external circumstances which define a rhetorical context and requires
the text to have certain characteristics in response. Audience therefore
exists in the writer’s mind and shapes a text as ‘a complex set of conven-
tions, estimations, implied responses and attitudes’ (Park, 1982: 251).
28 Understanding Writing
A key idea here is that texts display how authors understand an audi-
ence because they exploit readers’ abilities to recognise intertextuality
between texts. The notion of intertextuality originates in Bakhtin’s (1986)
view that language is dialogic: a conversation between writer and reader in
an ongoing activity. Writing builds on and anticipates other texts because
when we write, we respond to what others have said and how they have
said it. In this way the choices a writer makes about a new text are influ-
enced by an awareness of what earlier, similar texts were like, so that
genres can be seen as parts of repeated and typified social situations rather
than particular forms. The text, then, is the place where readers and wri-
ters meet to jointly create meanings.

Concept 1.16 Intertextuality


Intertextuality is a relationship between a given text and one or more
earlier texts which have influenced it. Because texts are not produced in a
social vacuum, intertextuality is a feature of all texts, but it varies in terms
of how directly visible the influences of the earlier texts are. Fairclough
(1992) distinguishes between manifest intertextuality, or ways of incor-
porating or responding to other texts through quotation, paraphrase,
irony, and so on, and interdiscursivity, which is the writer’s use of sets of
conventions drawn from a recognisable genre. This connects text-users
into a network of prior texts and so provides a system of options for
making meanings which can be recognised by other texts-users.

1.3.2 Writing as Social Construction


The idea of interdiscursivity encourages us to step back and see interac-
tion as a collection of rhetorical choices rather than as specific encounters
with real readers. Here the writer is neither a creator working through a
set of cognitive processes nor an interactant engaging with a reader, but a
member of a community. The communicating dyad is replaced by the dis-
courses of socially and rhetorically constituted groups of readers and
writers.

Concept 1.17 Social Construction


Social construction is based on the idea that the ways we think, and
the categories and concepts we use to understand the world, are ‘all
language constructs generated by knowledge communities and used
by them to maintain coherence’ (Bruffee, 1986: 777). The everyday
interactions that occur between people produce the world that we
take for granted. Language is not just a means of self-expression, it
Another random document with
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wrote on slips of paper the names of all boys who had reached the
age of twenty, and putting these into a receptacle, drew them out one
by one and called every fifth man for military service. So hateful was
this forced duty to the Filipino youths that many of them would run
away into the mountains and hide, become outlaws in order to
escape it. But the civil guard would go after them and when they
were captured they would be put in jail and watched until they could
be sent to their capital.
The monastic orders had behind them a powerful church
organisation the heads of which took an active and official part in the
administration of government. The Archbishop and the Bishops
formed part of what was known in Manila as the Board of
Authorities; and they, with the Provincials of the orders, belonged to
the Council of Administration, a body analogous to the Council of
State in Spain or France, charged with advising the Governor-
General on matters of urgent moment, or in times of crises. The
Friars, Priests and Bishops constituted a solid, permanent and well-
organised political force which dominated all insular policies, and
the stay in the islands of the civil or military officer who attempted to
pursue a course at variance with that deemed wise by the orders, was
invariably shortened by monastic influence. Each order had in
Madrid a representative through whom the Court of Spain easily
could be reached without the intervention of any authority.
Upon the morals of the Friars I can only touch. That some of them
brought up families of sons and daughters is beyond question. Such
were guilty of violating their vows of celibacy rather than of
debauchery. On this point the moral standard of the Filipino people
was not rigid, and women were rather proud than otherwise of the
parentage of their Friar-fathered children who were often brighter,
better looking and more successful than the average Filipino. The
truth is that this charge was urged with more eagerness and
emphasis after the Filipinos began to appeal to the American
government than during Spanish times, and when the standard of
morality in the Filipino priesthood of the period was considered, it
seemed as if the accusers thought the charge would have more
weight with those they sought to influence than it did with
themselves.
The three great orders of St. Francis, St. Augustine and St.
Dominic owned, in different parts of the Islands, more than 400,000
acres of the best agricultural land, and this they rented out in small
parcels to the people. Their income from these immense holdings
was not what a prudent and energetic landlord would have realised,
but they paid no taxes, while the Filipino was taxed in every possible
way.
In the province of Cavite alone the Friar estates amounted to
131,747 acres, and it was in the province of Cavite, which is just
across the bay from Manila, that the two insurrections against Spain,
or rather against Friar domination, began.
When we arrived in Manila all but 472 of the 1,124 Friars had
either been killed or had fled the country. In each of the uprisings
many of them lost their lives, and many more were taken prisoners.
Indeed, the last of them were not released until the rapid advance of
the American troops in our own encounter with the insurrectos
made it necessary for the insurgent army to abandon all unnecessary
impedimenta. All the Friars remaining in the Islands had taken
refuge in Manila.
Strange to say, this resentment against the Friars interfered in no
way with the Filipino’s love for the Church. With a strong and real
emotion he loves the religion which has been given him; and the
elaborate and beautiful forms of the Roman Catholic Church are
calculated, especially, to make a powerful appeal to his mind. It is
really an astonishing commentary on the character of these people
that they should be able to rise against the men who administered
the sacraments which they so deeply loved and revered. Or, is it more
of a commentary on the conditions which caused the uprisings?
Without exception the Spanish Friars had been driven from their
parishes, and the most burning of all the burning political questions
which the Commission met and had to settle, was whether or not
they should be permitted to return. It was impossible to make the
people understand that the government of the United States and the
government of Spain were two different matters, and that if the
Friars were returned to their parishes they would exercise no secular
functions of any kind. The people had the proverbial dread of the
“burnt child” and no amount or kind of reasoning could move them
from the position they had taken, nor could any of them, from the
highest to the lowest, talk calmly and rationally about the subject.
The one point upon which the Filipinos were united was that the
Friars should never be reinstated.
Universal agitation, uneasiness, fear, hatred, a memory of wrongs
too recently resented and resented at too great a cost; these were the
factors which made necessary the stand which the Commission
finally adopted. The question with the Friars became one, largely, of
getting value for their property, their title to which was never
seriously disputed, and it was decided that on condition of their
leaving the Islands, the insular government would undertake the
purchase of their vast estates. The intention was then to make some
arrangement whereby the lands might be sold back to the people in
homestead tracts, and on terms which the poorest man might be
able, in time, to meet.
It was to negotiate this transaction, involving the expenditure of
$7,000,000 that my husband was sent to Rome the following year as
an emissary of the United States government to the Vatican. This was
in the time of Pope Leo, and it made a most interesting experience
which I shall detail in another chapter.
The first thing, really, that the Commission undertook when they
arrived in Manila, was the settlement of a definite dispute between
the Church and the People as to which had the right to administer
the affairs of the Medical College of San José. Their manner of
procedure in this case instituted in the Islands a new and never-
before-thought-of system of evenly balanced justice, and made a
tremendous sensation.
The case was called: “T. H. Pardo de Tavera, and others, for
themselves and other inhabitants of the Philippine Islands—against
—The Rector of the University of Santo Tomas, a Dominican monk,
and the Holy Roman Apostolic Catholic Church, represented by the
Most Reverend, the Archbishop of Manila, and the Most Reverend,
the Archbishop of New Orleans, Apostolic Delegate.” Its importance,
under the conditions then existing, can hardly be exaggerated.
San José was one of the oldest institutions in the Islands; it was
founded, as a matter of fact, in 1601, by virtue of a legacy left by a
Spanish Provincial Governor named Figueroa who provided that it
should always be managed by the head of the Jesuits in the Islands.
It was originally a college for the education of Spanish boys, but
through various vicissitudes, including the expulsion of the Jesuits in
1766, it had changed from one thing to another until, finally, it had
become a college of physicians and pharmacists and was made a
department of the University of Santo Tomas, the Rector of which
was a Dominican Friar. One of the Philips had granted to the college
a Royal charter, and within the last hundred years the Crown had
asserted its right of control. So when the American government took
over all the public property in the Philippines, General Otis closed
San José, but he did not issue an order as to its management. The
Church was petitioning for a restitution of what it regarded as its
rights in the property, and the Commission was called upon to settle
the controversy.
They conducted their examinations in open meetings so that all
might see the full and free workings of a wholly equitable system,
and the Filipinos were enabled to behold, for the first time, the, to
them, astonishing spectacle of high ecclesiastics presenting in open
court the arguments upon which they based their claims.
The first hearing Mr. Taft describes as “an historic scene.”
“There were the two Archbishops in their archiepiscopal cassocks,”
he writes, “with purple girdles and diamond crosses, accompanied by
a Secretary of the Dominican order robed in white; while opposed
was a Filipino lawyer, Don Felipe Calderón, who derived his
education in the University of Santo Tomas. Accompanying him were
a lot of young Filipino students and others of the Medical Association
interested in wresting San José from the University. The Archbishop
of Manila made a speech in which he was unable to restrain the
feeling of evident pain that he had in finding the rights of the Church
challenged in this Catholic country. He made a very dignified
appearance.”
And at the second hearing:
“Both Archbishops were again present, and the same scene was re-
enacted except that we had rather more of a formal hearing. We had
them seated on opposite sides of a table, just as we do in court at
home, and had seats for the spectators.
“Señor Don Felipe Calderón, who represents the Philippine people,
was given an opportunity to make the first speech. He had printed
his argument and read it, having given us translated copies with
which we followed him. His argument was a very strong one, lawyer-
like and well-conceived, but he weakened it by some vicious remarks
about the Dominican order. The Archbishop of Manila, once or
twice, felt so much outraged at what he said that he attempted to
rise, but Archbishop Chapelle prevented him from doing so. At the
close of the argument Monsignor Chapelle asked for ten days in
which to prepare an answer and we granted him two weeks. The
scene was one I shall always carry with me as marking an interesting
period in my Philippine experience.”
The Commission did not settle the question. After careful
consideration and many hearings, they left the property in the hands
of the Dominicans, but appointed a Board of Trustees to prepare and
present an appeal to the Supreme Court of the Islands, appropriating
at the same time, five thousand dollars to pay the expenses of the
litigation.
Archbishop Chapelle did not like this decision and telegraphed to
Secretary Root asking him to withhold his approval. Then he asked
the Commission to modify the law and give him an opportunity, in
case the decision in the Supreme Court should go against the Church,
to appeal to the Congress of the United States. This the Commission
refused to do on good and sufficient grounds, whereupon the
Archbishop cabled to the President, declaring that the decision as it
stood would retard pacification. Although he had always been
strongly opposed to the continuation of military government, we
were much amused to learn that in his cable to the President he took
occasion to remark, significantly, that “General MacArthur is doing
splendidly.”
But if Archbishop Chapelle was displeased with the action of the
Commission, the Filipino press was delighted, and the editorial
encomiums heaped upon them can only be described as brilliant. The
Diario de Manila, the next morning, was absolutely unable to
express itself, and it concluded a more or less incoherently eulogistic
editorial with the words: “The decision satisfies everybody; it raises a
question which threatened to drag itself over the hot sands we tread,
cleanses it of all impurities, and makes it the beginning and the end
of a most transcendental principle of sovereignty and law.” The
Filipino or Spanish editor is nothing if he is not hyperbolic.
When we arrived in Manila it was a source of great worry to us that
we could not send our children, eight and ten years old, to school.
The Jesuits had a school for boys in the Walled City, and Mr. Taft
considered for awhile the possibility of sending Robert there, where
he might, at least, learn Spanish; but so strong was the feeling
against the Friars that this would have been taken by the people as a
certain indication that the President of the Commission was leaning
toward the Church in his deliberations on the vital subject. As I have
said, they could not look upon this question, in any of its bearings, in
a reasonable light.
We eventually settled Helen in a convent where she made an effort
to learn Spanish, and Robert we turned over to Mrs. LeRoy, the wife
of Mr. Worcester’s Secretary, who was a graduate from the
University of Michigan and a most excellent teacher.
Mr. and Mrs. LeRoy went to the Philippines as bride and groom.
They were classmates, graduated together, and this was their first big
venture into the world. They were a valued part of our little pioneer
circle, and it was with the greatest dismay that we learned, after
about two years in the Islands, that Mr. LeRoy had developed
tuberculosis. He had either brought the germs with him from the
United States or had contracted the disease there, where, indeed, it is
most prevalent. He continued to act as Secretary for Mr. Worcester
beyond the time when he should have gone to another climate to
devote himself to a cure, but finally, when he realised that the
sentence was upon him, he decided to leave the Islands, and my
husband was able to secure for him, because of his splendid
efficiency, a position in the Consular service under Mr. Hay, at
Durango, Mexico. This post was chosen because it is in a dry,
mountainous region where the ravages of tuberculosis are supposed
to be checked.
Mr. LeRoy was an exceedingly well-informed and studious man.
He was a natural linguist, spoke Spanish with ease, and soon was
able to acquire enough Tagalog to enable him to go among the people
and get their point of view at first-hand. He immediately became
interested in writing a history of the Islands and wanted much to go
to Spain to examine Spanish-Philippine documents at Seville and
other places, but he was never able to do so.
In the days when death faced him in New Mexico, whither he had
gone after leaving Durango, he wrote, as Grant wrote, on a book
which he hoped might furnish some means to his wife after his
death. He died before he was able to complete what Mr. Taft says is a
very accurate, comprehensive and interesting history of the
Archipelago from the beginning down to, and including, Dewey’s
victory, the taking of Manila and the work of the first Commission.
He had planned to give a full account of the work of the second
Commission, with which he was so intimately connected, but his pen
dropped before his purpose was fulfilled. His history has been only
recently published.
Mrs. LeRoy later went to Washington, and Mr. Taft appointed her
to one of the few clerical positions not covered by the Civil Service
law. This is in the Land Office where she signs the President’s name
to land patents. She is the only person in the government who has
the right and power, given by special act of Congress, to sign the
President’s name to a document.
Throughout the autumn of 1900 the insurrection dragged itself
along; behind any bush the American soldiers were likely to find a
lurking “patriot”; and the uncensored reports of the “brave stand” of
the Filipinos were being sent out daily by Democratic reporters, to
help along the anti-expansionist cause, represented by Mr. Bryan, in
the United States.
The insurrectos were being assured by their incitants to violence
that the eyes of the world were upon them. They were being told that
they were winning undying renown throughout the civilised
universe; and they believed it. They read with avidity all the anti-
imperialistic newspapers which came out to the Islands and accepted
as a true estimate of themselves the laudations therein contained.
Besides, the promoters of the insurrection pretended to translate
from other languages still more extravagant praises, and they
certainly were enjoying a most exalted opinion of themselves.
We understood that Aguinaldo was trying to concentrate for one
spectacular move shortly before election, in order to add to the
chances of a Democratic victory; and there was some cause for alarm.
The Filipinos are born politicians and many of them knew much
more about the campaign between Bryan and McKinley than the
Americans in the Islands knew.
Apropos of this: Archbishop Chapelle told Mr. Taft that Aguinaldo
had, through Archbishop Nozaleda, requested an interview with him.
Monsignor Chapelle went to General MacArthur and asked that
Aguinaldo be allowed to enter Manila. The General readily gave his
consent, and even offered the revolutionary Dictator the hospitality
of his own roof. Aguinaldo, in due military form, acknowledged this
courtesy and fixed the time for his arrival in Manila. He clearly
indicated that he was discouraged and had decided to solicit
permission, through Archbishop Chapelle, to leave the Islands. But
just then the news of Bryan’s plan for calling an extra session of
Congress to settle Philippine independence came out, so the
insurgent general sent word that he had decided not to come. No
American knew just where he was, but he probably got the papers
and telegrams just as soon as any of us.
I remember the sixth of November as a very nervous day. We had
received all manner of reports from home; we were so far away that
mail and newspapers were a month old when they reached us; and
the cable reports had been contradictory in the extreme. We really
were on our tiptoes with excitement. And the worst of it was that
because of the thirteen hours’ difference in time between
Washington and Manila, we lived through the day knowing that the
United States was asleep, and went to bed just about the time voters
began to go to the polls. We kept getting all manner of doubtful
telegrams throughout the next morning—when it was night in the
United States and the votes were being counted—but just at one
o’clock, as we went to lunch, Mr. Taft received a despatch from
General Corbin in accordance with his previous agreement. It read:
“Taft Manila McKinley Corbin.” It had been sent from the War
Department in Washington at eleven o’clock the night of the election
and had taken just forty-five minutes in transmission. This was
record time for a cablegram then between Washington and Manila,
despatches having to be sent by numerous relays.
CHAPTER VII
“DAYS OF THE EMPIRE”

There was a trying period of unrest and uncertainty in our early


experience in the Philippines, during which we lived in a state of
suspense which can hardly be described; a state of suspense which
included among its various elements the excitement of an
intermittent guerilla warfare and frequent threats of native uprisings
in Manila. Established order and a fixed governmental policy, so
necessary to the tranquillity of the normal citizen, were non-existent,
and one experienced a sense of complete detachment which made
plans for even the immediate future seem entirely futile. To unpack
all one’s things; to establish a satisfactory home and give one’s
attention to its ornamentation; to supply one’s self with the
necessities of a long residence in the tropics; in other words, to settle
down to the pursuit of a usual mode of existence; all these things had
to be done, but, needless to say, they were not done with the
enthusiasm incident to a feeling of permanence, nor did such
enthusiasm begin to manifest itself in the local atmosphere until
after the re-election of Mr. McKinley in 1900 when it became certain
that the American flag was in the islands to stay as long as its
presence there should be deemed requisite to the peaceful
development of the country and the fitting of the people for self
government.
There were those who saw long years ahead,—not all Americans,
by any means,—and soon the American spirit began to make itself
felt in business, in schemes of civic progress, in social life, in
everything. We were there for a purpose which was at last defined, so
we cheerfully confronted chaos and went to work.
We were sorry to note that the election of Mr. McKinley and the
consequent establishment of the American status in the Philippines
did not change the military attitude toward the manner of solving the
governmental problems. The Commission was definitely pledged to
the rapid adjustment of affairs on a civil and generally representative
basis, but the military authorities still maintained that military rule
would continue to be a necessity for an indefinite period.
However, the Civil Commission went on its way mapping out a
programme of peaceful pacification and carrying it into effect as
promptly as possible, while its activities engaged universal attention
and formed the chief topic of conversation wherever two or more
people were met together. Society became frivolous enough, but
nobody ever got very far away from the questions of absorbing
interest with which many of us were so closely associated.
Our first Christmas surely would have saddened us in our peculiar
exile had we been able to realise its approach, but this was not
possible. The “Christmas spirit” does not thrive in a temperature of
eighty-odd degrees, and I think I would have taken little interest in
preparations for the holidays had not my children been there to
remind me that Christmas is Christmas no matter what the
thermometer may say about it. It was still the most important day in
the year for them and it was almost pathetic to see them trying to
defeat the climate through sheer force of their imaginations. It was a
“green Christmas” with a vengeance, and very hot.
Our friends at home had not forgotten that we were more than a
month’s journey away and letters began to arrive as early as
November in each of which some mention was made of a box which
would be sent from Cincinnati in time to reach us before Christmas
and, naturally, we began at once to imagine its contents. For weeks
our children’s favourite amusement was exchanging guesses as to
what sort of gifts their affectionate relatives had sent them. Nor were
their Aunt Maria and I any less excited. There were transports every
two weeks in those days and we were not at all disappointed not to
receive our box on the early December ship. There would be another
one in on Christmas day and it would be much nicer, we thought, to
get it then, and never a doubt did we have that it would come. Mr.
Taft had a messenger ready to get it and bring it to the house as soon
as it could be landed.
From our balcony we watched the transport steam up the bay; we
felt the interest that only a Christmas box from home, ten thousand
miles away, could excite; we forgot that it was eighty in the shade; it
was really Christmas. We waited as patiently as we could for our
messenger, but when he arrived he had only sympathy to offer us.
The box had not come. It was a most depressing disappointment,
and the children were inconsolable. However, everybody cheered up
about dinner time. I had done what I could with red ribbons and
greenery, with cotton wool and diamond dust to create the proper
atmosphere; then we had invited a number of homeless young
secretaries and others to take Christmas cheer with us, and though
the cold storage turkey was tough and the cranberry sauce and plum-
pudding were from Commissary cans, we managed a near approach
to a Yuletide air, and little Charlie went to bed with his Escolta toys
quite as happy as he would have been had he been at home in his
own country. I assured the three children that the box from home
would come in on the next transport and promised that we would
then have Christmas all over again. But I reckoned without
knowledge of the shipping methods of the transport service.
Transports came and transports went; our hopes were dashed to
earth any number of times and it was endless weeks before our
carefully prepared and holly-decked presents finally arrived.
On New Year’s morning General MacArthur gave a reception at
Malacañan Palace. It was such an affair as is spoken of in social
circles everywhere as “the event of the season.” It was a very special
event to all the members of the Commission and their families,
because not one of us had ever been invited to the Palace before.
There was much discussion of the serious subject as to what the
civil government officials should wear at the New Year’s reception
and, if gossip can be relied upon, it came very near causing several
family riots. The men naturally inclined toward the comfort of their
white linens, but they were overcome by argument and it was
eventually decreed that they should present themselves in frock coats
and silk hats. This may sound reasonable, but it wasn’t. It was
intensely funny, however, and that helped some. A silk hat which has
reposed in a box throughout a rainy season in the Philippines is a
curious object. It is not the glossy, well turned and dignified article
which a silk hat should be. Its rim is warped, its nap is dulled and
roughed beyond repair; it is very sticky, and it has an odour all its
own. In Judge Ide’s hat some mice had made a nest and had eaten a
small hole through its one-time shiny crown, but it was the only one
he had and, as silk hats are not carried in Philippine shops, he had,
perforce, to wear it.
My husband communed with himself during the process of getting
into his heavy frock coat with all its stiff and its woollen accessories,
—for the first time in seven months and in the bright white heat of a
tropic morning,—but we were finally ready and on the way, in our
diminutive Victoria behind the prancing black stallion ponies of
uncertain disposition.
When we arrived at Malacañan, quite early as we thought, we
found ourselves in a long block of carriages which moved up slowly
and, one by one, discharged their occupants under the porte-cochère
of the Palace. Considerations of rank and precedence had escaped
our minds for the moment and this was evidently a very important
matter. However, we found a capable staff of military aides who
knew just where everybody belonged, and they adopted the method
of marshalling the crowds into a room on the first floor and letting
them out in the proper order of precedence. In consequence we
found a more or less annoyed throng awaiting our arrival. We had
plenty of rank, my husband being the ranking civil officer in the
Islands, but as everybody in Manila had been invited, the process of
forming the line was a long and laborious one and many were the
caustic comments of the delayed and rankless multitude. It reminded
one forcibly of similar receptions at the White House, except that in
Washington everybody knows the rules of precedence governing
diplomatic circles and recognises the necessity for following them,
while in Manila it was a departure which did not meet with full and
general approval.
General MacArthur and his staff were receiving at the head of the
grand staircase on the second floor, and, as the spacious rooms
became filled with military men in dress uniforms, with gaily attired
women and black-coated civilians, the scene was sufficiently
dignified to make one feel that a brilliant local society was an
established fact. But there was no denying that it was hot and that
the Army officers in trim white duck had the frock-coated, camphor-
ball-scented and profusely perspiring civil government officials at a
disadvantage.
Nowadays—and always after that first experiment—the man in a
temperate-zone costume is a sadly conspicuous figure at a social
gathering in Manila. The accepted formal evening dress is white
linen with either a short mess jacket or a dinner coat of the usual
pattern, while for morning or afternoon affairs a man may wear
anything his laundryman can turn out for him. As a matter of fact, in
the early days in Manila women, as well as men, enjoyed
emancipation from the tyranny of clothes. It was a case of
discovering how unnecessary many supposed necessities are. There
were no fashionable gowns to be had, therefore simplicity, or a more
or less rundownedness of one-time respectability, became the
fashion. There were no hat shops, so women ceased to wear hats. We
went shopping on the Escolta in the early morning hatless; we went
to luncheon parties hatless, and in the later afternoon we made our
calls and drove on the Luneta minus the millinery which is
considered so dear to a woman’s heart. I do not say that the women
liked it; there were many plaintive protests; but it was one of the
crosses of their environment which saved them numerous jealous
pangs as well as much expense. It is different now. The importer of
fashionable millinery and sumptuous garments has invaded the field
and the women in Manila to-day are about as finely gowned and
hatted as they are anywhere, but I doubt if they are as care-free and
comfortable as we were in “the days of the Empire.”
It was expected that the New Year’s reception at Malacañan was
intended to inaugurate a gay season of hospitality at the Palace, as
General MacArthur announced a dinner and reception to follow early
in January. But they were unquiet times; for various reasons there
were many postponements; then came the death of Queen Victoria,
whereupon the British community went into mourning, and, as it
was deemed courteous to observe a period of social inactivity, it was
many weeks before we again went to Malacañan.
The campaign of pacification, due to the election of McKinley, the
activity of the army, and the actual legislation and organisation work
of the Commission, was making great progress throughout the
Islands and hardly a day passed that did not bring news of the
capture or surrender of insurgent officers and forces in the
provinces, while in Manila they were being arrested and imprisoned
by the hundreds. They were given an opportunity to take the oath of
allegiance and those who persisted in their refusal to do so were
banished to Guam. This vigorous policy was having a marked effect
upon the spirit of the insurrection and it was rapidly approaching
total collapse.
The peace movement was greatly assisted, too, by the activities of
the Federal party, a strong political organisation, pledged to the
acceptance of American control and American principles, which
numbered among its leaders and adherents many of the best men in
the Philippines. In its directory were Chief Justice Arellano, Don
Benito Legarda, Dr. Pardo de Tavera and General Ambrosio Flores, a
one-time leader of the insurrection.
Perhaps the most extraordinary demonstration any of us ever saw
in Manila took place on Washington’s birthday in 1901. The
Commission had already begun its long task of instituting provincial
and municipal governments and its members had just returned from
a trip into the country north of Manila where they had been received
with great enthusiasm, and where the people had shown every
indication of a glad determination to stop all hostilities and settle
down to peaceful pursuits under the representative and democratic
system which the Commission was inaugurating.
On the evening of February 20, General MacArthur gave a
splendid reception at Malacañan, where Americans and Filipinos
mingled together in perfect amity, the Filipinos being in the majority.
They seemed greatly pleased with the spirit of the occasion which
served to demonstrate in a particular manner the fact that America
was in the Philippines as a friend rather than as an arbitrary ruler;
that there was to be none of the familiar colour or race prejudice, so
far as we were concerned, in the association of the two peoples; that
the best thing to do was to acknowledge a mutual aspiration and
strive for its fulfilment in friendly co-operation; and there was a
heart-lift for us all, Americans and Filipinos alike, in the whole tone
of the evening. On the night of the 21st, the Partido Federal gave a
famous dinner at a new hotel where a French chef prepared the
menu. Before this my husband had jokingly written to Secretary Root
that he thought some sort of pension should be provided for the
widows and orphans of the men who fell in action before the fearful
onslaughts of native hospitality, but at the banquet of the Federal
party there were none of those mysterious viands to which the
Commissioners had been trying to accustom themselves in the
provinces, and in consequence the quality of mutual enjoyment was
not strained, the Filipino, unlike the Japanese, being as fond of
foreign cookery as he is of his own. The speeches were all of the
friendliest character and the “dove of peace,” verily, seemed to be
hovering near.

A TYPICAL FILIPINO MENU AND


PLACE CARD

The next morning, the 22nd of February, the Federal party, many
thousands strong, marched through a flag-decked city to the Luneta
where a speakers’ stand had been erected for the celebration of the
day. There were scores of bands, each, as usual, playing its own tune
in its own way regardless of what the others were doing; the
populace, in its gayest attire, crowded in the wake of the procession;
the spirit of festivity was rampant; and altogether it was a most
interesting scene.
As close as ten thousand people could get to a speakers’ stand ten
thousand people massed themselves, and they listened in respectful
silence to the words of both the American and Filipino speakers, each
one of whom made a spirited appeal for peaceful co-operation in the
solution of the problem which America had acquired through no
fault or desire of her own and which she could not, in honour,
abandon. General Wright was the American speaker of the day and
the frank friendliness of his speech was translated, paragraph by
paragraph as he delivered it, by Mr. Arthur Fergusson, the Secretary-
interpreter for the Commission, whose extraordinary command of
Spanish made it possible for him not only to translate the words
themselves, but to infuse into them the poetic fervour of the Spanish
tongue. Never was Washington’s birthday so celebrated, and it
marked a new era of mutual toleration which was to grow into
sympathetic understanding disturbed only by the agitation of the few
whose aspirations were in no way in those days shared or condoned
by the many.
The method adopted by the Commission for organising provincial
governments was extremely simple. The people were instructed to
send delegates from all the towns in a province to meet the
Commission on a given date at the provincial capital. Having
gathered this popular assembly in the largest available hall Mr. Taft,
or some other member of the Commission, would proceed to read
and explain the new Provincial Code which covered every
governmental function and which provided for the appointment by
the Commission of a provincial governor, a treasurer and a secretary.
It was the intention of the Commission to name a Filipino for
governor in each province, thereby giving them an immediate
opportunity for the exercise of self-government, but in several
instances they were almost unanimously petitioned by the people to
appoint to this office the American Army officer who had been in
command in the district. Considering the attitude of the Filipinos
toward military rule and their eagerness to substitute a purely civil
form of government, it was really astonishing that they should have
wished to retain any representative of the hated régime, but
personality counts for a great deal with the Filipinos, and the Army
officer who displayed tact and kindly justice in his dealings with
them was sure to win for himself a peculiar popularity.
For treasurer an American was almost invariably chosen. During
Spanish times the Filipinos had not learned much about the proper
use of public funds and they have had to be very painstakingly taught
that government money is for government purposes only. To our
poignant and everlasting shame object lessons had to be given them
by the drastic punishment meted out to certain American treasurers
who were unable to resist temptation. The penalty prescribed in
Philippine law for the misuse of public funds or the falsification of a
public document is terribly severe, and there is a little band of white
men in Bilibid prison in Manila to-day because of their venality and
breach of trust. Our mission in the Philippines is based upon the
highest principles and we have always striven to maintain a high
moral tone in the government personnel, so it is particularly painful
to the small American community when, as happened too often at
first, an American went wrong.
Though the Commission proceeded with the establishment of civil
government in a conspicuously simple manner as much cannot be
said of the Filipinos. They were bent upon making the most of a rare
opportunity for the enjoyment of great and ceremonious festivity.
On the 23d of February, following the extraordinary celebration of
Washington’s birthday, the Commission, accompanied by a
considerable number of prominent Filipinos and by several of the
ladies, took a government launch and steamed across the Bay to the
town of Balanga, the capital of the province of Bataan which lies
directly opposite Manila where the sun goes down in tropic
splendour behind the Meriveles Mountains. This trip was a new
experience for me and was the beginning of my long acquaintance
with Filipino hospitality.
As we approached the Bataan shore there were splashes of brilliant
colour all over the surface of the Bay, which, on nearer view, turned
out to be the decorations of a great fleet of bancas coming out to
meet us. There must have been a hundred or more and, while they
were of all sizes, some of them were large enough to hold twenty and
thirty rowers. The banca is a long, narrow dugout which usually
looks as if it were just about to sink. Some of these had outriggers,
some had not, but each and every one of them was loaded to
capacity, and each was covered with the most gorgeous decorations.
Bunting and paper flowers of every hue were mixed with long palm
leaves and branches of bamboo and everything in the nature of an
ornament that could possibly be used, while from every angle and at
every point fluttered small American flags, some of them homemade
and only approximately correct. Then there were two huge flat affairs
with decorated awnings over them which we found were nothing less
than rafts prepared for our own use, the water in the little harbour
being too shallow for our big steam launch. These rafts were made of
split bamboo flooring lashed to the tops of large bancas and, though
they looked exceedingly unsafe, we found they would hold as many
as could stand upon them without being pushed over the edge.
In ten minutes this gay and unusual fleet had surrounded us; the
rafts came alongside and over our rails clambered the reception
committee, a half dozen Filipinos in more or less nondescript, heavy
black clothes with silk hats! Where these garments came from I have
no idea. Most of the hats looked like heirlooms, just as the silk hats
of our own husbands looked, but the chief concern of their owners
seemed to be their protection. Never have I seen silk hats so
cautiously handled.
Having got safely aboard the launch each man went through a
deliberate process of straightening himself out and carefully
adjusting his attire before he advanced to the stern of the launch
where we waited to receive him. Then there were some set speeches
of welcome in which the chief sentiment seemed to be that never had
the province of Bataan been so highly honoured and that, therefore,
it and all it contained was, with feelings inexpressible, laid at the feet
of the honourable Commission. Mr. Fergusson translated the flowers
and figures of oratory and all the soaring flights of sentimental
generosity into literal English, then, with equal solemnity and
impressiveness, he rendered Mr. Taft’s matter of fact, though cordial,
replies into a marvellous flow of Spanish eloquence.
TRIUMPHAL ARCH AT BATAAN

This formality disposed of, the reception committee invited us to


step upon the pavilioned raft and be wafted ashore. It sounds like a
dignified proceeding, but of course it was not. We had to climb over
the rails of the launch and, more or less, slide to a secure footing on
the frail floor of the curious craft. Contrary to my secret expectations
it kept afloat and we were soon landed at a little fishing village down
on the beach, where Army ambulances waited to take us to the town
of Balanga, a mile inland. Just outside of Balanga we passed under a
great bamboo arch, the sort of thing the Filipinos erect and ornament
with great skill and ingenuity. This one was so thickly decorated,
however, with small American flags that little of its intricate frame-
work was visible. A piece of white bunting stretched across the top of
it bore, in large letters, the inscription: “Glory Honor to the
Commission.”
We drove into the town and found the place en fete. I never saw so
many American flags in one place in my life. Four thousand of them
had been bought in Manila for the occasion; and four thousand flags
go a long way in decorating a small provincial town. There was not
much of the town left uncovered.
When we got to the provincial building where the meeting was to
be held, we found all the delegates gathered from the different
villages a-tiptoe in an atmosphere of intense excitement. Bataan had
never been a rich province and we discovered that few of the
Filipinos understood Spanish. They spoke only Tagalog. This was
due to the fact that the province had been for generations under the
control of the Dominican Friars who did not believe in encouraging
the natives to learn Spanish. In consequence, all the speeches had to
be translated from English to Spanish, from Spanish to Tagalog, and
vice versa. Felipe Calderón, the Manila lawyer who handled the San
José College case for the People, acted as Tagalog interpreter, and I
have often wondered just how much of the familiar Spanish
hyperbole was convertible into the phrases of that primitive
language. It made the proceedings very long and tedious, but we sat
through them and they finally came to an end with much cheering
for the newly appointed officials.
The Filipinos were greatly pleased at having the Commissioners
bring their wives and daughters along. It was new to them and they
were not slow to grasp its significance. Much to the disgust of the
military authorities present, we all shook hands with everybody and
assumed the friendliest kind of attitude. That the Army officers did
not approve of our cordiality toward the Filipinos can hardly be
wondered at. They had been subjected to the risks of a campaign of
ambush and assassination for many months, and even then they
were trying to bring in a band of about one hundred and fifty
insurrectos, with as many rifles, who were hiding in the Meriveles
Mountains and preying upon the people; so, it was natural for them
to think that a policy of disdain and severity was the only one suited
to the apparent unreliability and deceitfulness of the native.
However, these same officers very shortly admitted to us, though
rather unwillingly, that our mode of dealing with the people had had
an extraordinary effect on the general tone in Bataan.
It was about this time that President McKinley communicated
through Secretary Root the intention of the Administration to
abolish the military governorship and to install a civil Governor
under the power of the President as Commander-in-Chief, and to
create civil departments also. When Mr. Taft received a cable from
Secretary Root advising him of this fact, he went to see General
MacArthur for the purpose of discussing with him the mode of
procedure and to get his ideas as to how and when the transfer of
power should be made.

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