Communications Department -- Fall 2000
What constitutes college-level writing on 100, 200, and 300 levels?
How do we improve over-all standards in the department, making sure courses are adequately rigorous?
What is the best way to integrate some writing instruction within a typical Communications course syllabus?
1) What do you expect from college-level writing on 100, 200, and 300 levels, and how does that differ from what students initially expect?
Some typical stages in student identification of "writing quality"—
100-level students: quality = length (books are better than articles as sources; long papers are better than short ones (results, +willing to revise, given opportunity -needless block quotations, summary instead of analysis, format rigging at margins, fonts and spacing).
200-level students: quality = formulaic content (papers that look/sound like their most successful 100-level papers are good; papers that look/sound like the scholarship they're reading are good (results, +creative imitation -plagiarism).
300-level students: quality = what the paper is trying to do at all points and how well it succeeds in doing it. (results, +gradual mastery of a wide range of possible tasks -immature audience assumptions lead to teacher-driven rather than author-driven strategies, regurgitated opinions)
2) How can we tell students what we want in a paper?
Incorporate writing instruction into the logistics of assigning writing.
Assign all writing tasks in written handouts.
Provide style sheets, “tip sheets,” research guides, and evaluation criteria.
Send the assignment handout and copies of all support material to the Writing Center.
Ask one or more Writing Center tutors to visit the class for a short workshop early in the process when students are picking topics, focusing theses, and deciding on research strategies.
3) Ungraded writing assignments as a way to integrate more writing overall into the syllabus.
“Ungraded” writing doesn't have to be "un-evaluated" writing. It offers easy chances to encourage good behaviors and to alert them to bad ones they need to change. Most importantly, ungraded writing takes far less of the instructor's time. What kinds of informal writing do you do as a professional?
Examples of ungraded student writing—
journals: read by instructor at weekly or monthly intervals; instructor responses usually best on a separate document and presented in "general-observation-to-specific-examples" format.
public folder postings, memos, emails: read by instructor daily, sometimes read and responded to by other students; instructor responses either daily or every few days and presented in a direct, brief, encourage-correct-guide pattern that always directs them to new angles, resources, etc.
hand-written notes, annotated sketches or diagrams: spontaneous in-class products read as submitted and responded to orally, sometimes w/reproduction of all or part as handout or overhead projection, in the encourage-correct-guide pattern but look for chances to redirect discussion to follow the contribution.
4) Chains of assignments that move from simple to complex tasks over the semester.
These are sequences of take-home and in-class assignments involving writing that develops over three or more class meetings, perhaps with gaps to allow outside tasks to be completed. These can take all or part of one class per stage, and can be interwoven with classes introducing more "content" as the sequence progresses out of class. If you know for certain what generic types of professional writing students are learning in pursuit of WPM, those genres should be directly connected to the chain.
1) Read/view and prepare to discuss an example in class (alone or as a small-group project); imitate or describe an imitation of the example using your own topic and explain what you were trying to do; explain how the example works as a member of its class of thing.
2) Find three recent mentions of this topic in the popular media and summarize what issues are being reported about it; find three recent scholarly publications on this topic and explain what differences of opinion scholars have about this topic; take your own position on this topic.
3) Look at the midterm (or other early) paper you wrote and find three places where additional information or expert opinion might have improved the paper; seek the missing information in the library and on the Internet, taking care to rely only on scholarly (or popular-scholarly?) sources; describe your problem to the class in a five-minute presentation, and give productive feedback to other students describing their research projects, including focus, use of the information, possible sources or research strategies, etc.; present the results in a short (c. 3 page) research paper containing a statement of the problem, a description of the research strategy (including endnotes on errors made and remedies learned), and a summary of the results with an appropriate Works Cited or Bibliography page. (Alternate final stage: revise the prior paper, improving the argument with the research and putting the whole paper through a thorough stylistic revision to correct errors and to improve the quality of its prose.)
4) Supplement the course's readings with annotated bibliography entries for four scholarly articles on an aspect of the course you think would be interesting to cover in depth; share the entries with the class at each due date, and talk about how they relate to the assigned readings; for a final project, combine a set of resources from the class bibliography and a core set of course readings to create a final paper or research project designed to answer some precisely focused question on the specialized topic of your interest (can be collaborative if collaborative practices are defined, taught and modeled in class assignments).
5) Instructor markup and comments on student papers--a signal-to-noise problem for the students.
When reading, what do you do, when and where do you do it (on the physical paper and in the reading process), and to what sorts of student writing does it apply?
Editing--
Responding--
Grading—
General advice re: commenting on student papers—
Concentrate on the overall impression, taking care first to reward anything that was properly done. Students don’t like to read negative criticism, but they can be led to accept it as a way of improving something they’re doing well.
Put the comments where the students are likely to read them. Students tend to read comments most reliably at the head of the paper, somewhat less reliably at the end of the paper, relatively rarely in the margins of interior pages, and almost never between lines.
Limit the number of comments about mechanical errors by changing them to comments about error types (sentence boundary problems [run-ons, fragments, fused constructions]; confusion about punctuation signals; irregular formation of verbs; limited vocabulary). Give them general advice about how to fix those kinds of things, indicate by a coded marginal mark where they can find some examples, and advise them to seek help at the Writing Center.
Appendix: What do students encounter in a related discipline (English), and how can we take advantage of what they may infer from courses taken in that discipline?
For comparison, here are some sample types of graded writing assignments in literature courses, using the Pike-Becker-Young "tagmemic" heuristic of thinking about topics as points, waves, and fields. Until the 300-level, we assume students may be non-majors and/or may not yet have taken required historical surveys and methods course. Therefore, the topics tend to span a range of difficulty accessible to the lowest expected ability levels but challenging for the highest. This creates grading problems. By the 300-level, we can assume most students have had the survey and methods courses, but they don't remember and apply what they learned without specific "encouragement."
100-level literature course: Though free-topic assignments are possible, topics are more often given to students in a list keyed to course readings and to essential skills and terms, though advanced students can manipulate the given topics to produce a wide variety of papers.
point-focus topic--e.g., explain why a character does something and infer from that something of an author's view of human personality or the nature of life/fate/etc. Reference to the primary text is essential to this paper; secondary sources are not expected, or may be provided by the instructor. Superior work will distinguish clearly between character-construction and personality, and will discover some important truth about the author's intentions.
linear-focus topic--e.g., describe the rise and fall of readers' uncertainties in a plot and focus on one place where the author's manipulation of those uncertainties is particularly well-done. Reference to the primary text is essential to this paper; secondary sources are not expected, or may be provided by the instructor. Superior work will carefully demonstrate how reader responses can manipulated by the plot, and will distinguish between trivial and significant evidence of the author's intentions.
field-focus topic--e.g., describe the structure of the plot/character/issues in more than one work by a single author, and explain what we can conclude about the author's technique. Reference to the primary text is essential to this paper; secondary sources are not expected, or may be provided by the instructor. Superior work will define the terms of its primary focus carefully and demonstrate that the structural pattern is, in fact, evidence of the author's technique rather than something borrowed or merely historically accurate detail.
200-level literature course: topics almost always are chosen by students with instructors' guidance, but such guidance often takes the form of some heavy coaching via email and conferences, resulting in topics like the following.
point-focus topic--e.g., using a historical definition of a key word used thematically in a work of literature, explain the author's use of "overcoding" to make that word particularly meaningful re: his work's main themes. Reference to Umberto Eco's semiotics and to the OED (or a concordance) would be necessary to support this explanation. Superior work has achieved a true insight, and might take issue with Eco's assumptions that we can define cultural coding with such certainty (e.g., due to general cultural diversity, radical class/caste/estate segmentation in the culture, lack of evidence for all but one segment of a culture, etc.).
linear-focus topic--e.g., given three or more works of literature of the same genre in a historical sequence, describe and explain some significant difference that develops in their plots, characters, issues. The historical circumstances and/or contemporary aesthetic theory would have to be used to support this explanation. Superior work has achieved a true insight, might use both primary and secondary historical sources, and would use appropriate theoretical concepts with clarity.
field-focus topic--e.g., find a recurrent situation in more than one work of literature written in the same era or by the same author, and explain its reference to, exploitation or subversion of some social code or power relationship. References to modern literary theory and the history of the era would be essential to supporting this explanation. Superior work has achieved a true insight, would take advantage of biographical details of the author's life, would use both primary and secondary historical sources, and would use appropriate theoretical concepts with clarity..
300-level literature couse: Topic choice, theory and method, and sources of evidence almost always are the student's responsibility, however frequent email and conference exchanges are necessary to bring focus to the projects and to make sure essential issues or resources are not overlooked. In rare instances, with a "blocked" writer, the instructor may resort to offering a prepared topic. Superior work has achieved a true and publishable insight (if not necessarily never-before-published), clearly defines the limits of its scope, employs appropriate critical methods, cites primary text evidence always and only when needed (in appropriate quantities), cites secondary sources to oppose or to take advantage of aspects of their views, but rarely only to echo their views without adding substantively to them.