Goucher College Writing Workshop 23 January 2009

Suggested Teaching Strategies and Tools

Teaching writing is also/really teaching reading.  Get to know your students as products of their cultures, and engage them as they are, rather than as you wish or believe they should be.  What kinds of readers are coming to our classes now as opposed to 1990 or 1980 or 1900 (or 1400)?  How has their childhood and adolescent culture shaped them to read and write differently from the way our childhood and adolescent cultures shaped us? 

            The technologies of writing and reading changed since we learned those skills.  Try this experiment.  In the decades when you learned to write (K-12, undergraduate, and graduate school), what equipment was considered “normal” for composing a first draft?  Share that with someone twenty or more years younger than you.

Grammar strategies:

            Remember the difference between copy-editing the paper and helping students notice errors.  Urge students to read out loud [to themselves, to tutors, to you].  Students’ oral/aural grammar usually is far more sophisticated and certain in its grasp of the language than visual/written grammar.  Look not for individual errors, but for patterns of error (Mina Shaughnessy’s clusters of errors related to a single misunderstanding [e.g., what’s a sentence vs. what is not a sentence, what is punctuation for—eyes or ears?].

            Rather than correcting or even identifying grammatical errors, consider just putting a check in the margin for each one you detect and have students complete an “error log” to identify and correct the errors.  Each mistake that goes uncorrected can reduce the grade to a level that motivates students to pay attention.  Discovering errors requires them to work with Writing Center tutors and their writing handbooks to learn to spot errors.  The first papers will be rough.  But students improve rapidly.  For a full description of the “error log” assignment, see Susan Garrett’s page on the Writing Program Assignment Bank: http://faculty.goucher.edu/writingprogram/error_log_assignment_sheet.htm.

Punctuation strategies:

            Teach them to punctuate for the eye, not for the ear.  Lighten your load, and the students’ by  ignoring technical “errors” that are unlikely to cause you to misread the sentence.  Marking “errors” that do not cause misreading distracts students from their worst problems and makes you seem merely intolerant.  See this web page to put “correct” punctuation in historical perspective (i.e., Shakespeare did not punctuate “correctly” according to modern handbooks but nobody misread him):

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng221/Punctuation_History.htm

            Send students with serious grammar and punctuation problems to the Writing Center with specific guidance about where you see errors (either identify them by type or just put checks in the margins—see above).  You also can direct the students these grammar and punctuation web sites, both with interactive quizzes: University of Calgary’s “The Basic Elements of English” at http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/eduweb/grammar/ or Kellee Weinhold’s University of Oregon site, “The Tongue Untied: A Guide to Grammar, Punctuation and Style” at http://www.grammaruntied.com/index.html

Research strategies: 

        Paraphrase Plagiarism Risk Quiz: Multiple passages in four disciplines are presented in a variety of paraphrases, some legal and some plagiarized, to enable students to test whether they can detect paraphrase-plagiarism and distinguish good from bad paraphrase.  Students who lack confidence in their ability to translate sources’ vocabulary into their own are more prone to copy-and-paste the source, with or without attribution and quotation marks.  Quiz results estimate the likelihood the quiz-takers need further instruction in how to paraphrase legally, and direct them to where to get it. 

Research question and strategy critique:  At least for the first assignment requiring research, ask students to email you research questions, rationales for why they ask them, sources they have found and the methods by which they found them.  That will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of their searches and source handling.  Choose examples  for class discussion to demonstrate the difference between questions and source-finding strategies that are focused and those which are too vague or disorganized to yield good results: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng104sanders/Research_Project_Question-Method_Examples_F06.htm

        Library Research Consultation: Students can go to the library's home page or this permanent link, http://www.goucher.edu/x20362.xmls, to request a personal consultation with a librarian on their research topic.  Note the scheduling options.  The shortest time to an appointment is two days, and the longest is fourteen.  Just like everything else we can recommend, using this extremely valuable service requires students to wean themselves from the "point-click-answer" mentality that assumes the fastest result is the best result.  You can help them change those expectations by forcing them to slow down and think before they write, and before they research.

            Also see “Arnie’s 105 Research Project” and the Kruger assignment sequence example (below) for other ways to teach integration of research into the writing process.

Assignment strategies:

Generalized advice from the National Survey of Student Engagement:  Whenever possible, create assignments that don’t ask students to tell you what you already know [i.e., “tests”], but rather design assignments which will force writers to pursue lines of inquiry they have found for themselves (even if you already knew they were there) and are genuinely curious about.  Teach them genuine inquiry into the unknown is preferable to “safe” writing that merely summarizes what sources tell them.  Even if they cannot arrive at an absolute answer, they can acknowledge the complexity of problems while weighing possible or probable answers. 

            Also see Arnie’s 104 web page on possible, probable, and certain theses: http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng105sanders/strength_of_claims_in_academic_prose.htm.

1)  “Assignment sequencing”  Sequencing assignments divides a single writing assignment into cognitive stages, modeled on our academic peer-review process for publication. Using short, ungraded, staged writing episodes teaches “writing from research” as a holistic and continuing process.  Staging the assignment encourages students to slow down the research and composing processes, avoiding the "night before the due date" paper problem.

Example:  “Steven F. Kruger's chapter, ‘A Series of Linked Assignments for the Undergraduate Course on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,’ outlines a chain of projects designed to assist students in producing rigorous critical analysis. Such a skill is too often assumed to be possessed by our students before entering our classrooms, one which they may need to hone but not one which they need to be taught, but this assumption, at least from my experience, is increasingly unfounded. Kruger prepares his students for a terminal essay project with four preliminary assignments-translating Middle English, researching a historical question related to the Canterbury Tales, expanding the research on the historical question, and incorporating scholarship into the developing analysis. Such a step-by-step process, Kruger argues, encourages students to see research as a multi-faceted endeavor, as well as one that can be broken down into more easily manageable portions.”  From Tison Pugh, “Review of Ashton, Gail and Louise Sylvester, eds., Teaching Chaucer, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),” in The Medieval Review, 2/21/08  Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.baj9928.0802.021

            The above example for a Chaucer course is more generally adaptable in a four-stage sequence of tasks producing different kinds of documents:

1)  mastering basic evidence handlingàa translation of raw evidence into a form the student can begin to analyze, which you respond to briefly without grading

2)  researching the historical context of evidenceàa summary of historical or other contextual background, which you respond to briefly without grading

3)  finding issues in historical context of that evidenceàa literature search on the type of evidence, historical situation, and issues which you respond briefly to without grading

4)  a formal academic paper; or, a draft leading to the formal paper which you grade.

            If you grade all four stages, you will vastly increase your workload, but simpler rubrics can quickly communicate the early stages’ relative quality with a few added comments to guide revision.  The following two rubrics are offered as examples of highly structured and loosely structured non-graded response:

• Check, Plus, Minus—long used as a synonym for “adequate, good, inadequate” work, the system is fast and low-load for the instructor, but can seem opaque to students who are getting only the ü or – scores.  For each assignment, if you set up a short rubric, perhaps in a grid form with a short note, you can specify quickly the strengths and weaknesses that led to the score and direct the student’s next attempt—a slight addition to the load with a large potential reward in clarity.  Example for the translation stage in Kruger’s sequence (above):

Comment: Work on modifiers.  The “false friends” like “pitous” need more than one word to clarify what they used to mean.

• Peter Elbow’s “Hot, Cold, Sweet, Sour, Stuffy, Breezy” responses:

            Invented to help non-experts communicate with each other about overall prose quality, this style of response is inherently aesthetic.  Everything depends on how the keywords are explained.  This takes more time but students can feel that the professor is more emotionally engaged with their work.

2)  Arnie’s sequenced 105 RP assignment:

            At the end of my English 105 semester, after I have taught them how to use research in primary and secondary sources on literature and film to develop independent theses, I let them pick their own disciplines in which to work.  I do not ask them to develop the whole paper, but rather to establish what could be considered the “review of previous research” and a proposal for the new project.  Beyond that, I consider the writing to be too specialized in another discipline for me to teach.

            This is the portion of the assignment that sets up the process which will produce the research project, itself, and the document describing its results and conclusions:      “For Thursday, interview a member of the department in whose discipline you are going to conduct your research, following the instructions on the web page attached to this link.  Then, using your informant's help, prepare a list of at least two topics suitable for academic research by a student with your level of expertise.  For each topic, prepare a list of scholarly journals suitable for research, and two issues which currently are debated concerning it.   If you run into trouble, remember you can ask me for help, and the library's bibliographic instruction staff have experience assisting student researchers.  You also should read this advice for how to locate sources for difficult topics.  Make sure you have done all that a prudent researcher should do before you declare the topic impossible to research, but also remember that prudent researchers always have a back-up topic that is nearly certain to work if the one they want most turns out to be impossible.  In conference, we will work with your sources on what has been published recently on your topic, looking for directions in which new research is likely to turn.  That will become the thesis of your paper, based on those sources, introduced by the context provided by your faculty interview, and documented in the appropriate disciplinary format (e.g., MLA for Humanities, APA for Psychology).”

3)  Engage students in discussions about writing quality in and outside the class, and engage them as a department or college, not as “the one who cares about writing”:

• Share students’ papers openly so that they can learn from each other’s work (public folders, web sites)—examples: English 221 and 330 annotated bibliographies

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/annotated_chaucer_bibliographies.htm

and http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng221/previous_english_221_seminars_annotated_bibliographies.htm.

• Verge: The Goucher College Undergraduate Journal-- Show students examples of excellent writing from your discipline published in Verge ().  If you do not see examples of that kind of writing published in Verge, make a concerted effort to submit examples of it for the next edition.  (The home page can be found at: www.goucher.edu/verge.)

• The Writing Center:  Spring 2009 Tutors--Geoff Adelsberg; Ivy Anderson; Jen Babich; Ben Bernard; Sarah Brand; Jamie Brockway; Katie Callahan (co-manager); Susan Dobinick; Emeri Fetzer; Kelly Graves; Ashley Haavik; Eric Haney; Lindsay Hill; Tim King; Courtney Levine; Casey Lichtman; Chris McGrath; Jane Peppey; Matthew Phillips; Margaret Samuels (co-manager); Lily Smith; Rachel Stark; Julie Steinbacher; Adam Tucker; Gina Wisotsky

      Encourage (rather than require) students to use the Writing Center: http://faculty.goucher.edu/writingcenter.  Tutors can do their best work when writers see them as their allies, not agents of the instructor.  Help students to understand how to use the Center.   Tell them to show the tutor copies of the assignment as well as paper drafts and research materials.  If you have given them sample papers or other guidance, they should bring those things, too.  Email assignment materials to the Center’s co-managers (see web site) and they will make them available to all tutors even if your students forget.  Well informed tutors do a better job than those working in the dark. 

      When students tell you they had bad experiences with a tutor, ask them whether they have tried any of the other tutors.  They are not all the same.   All tutors have the same training, but each one has a different personality and tutoring style.  No tutor can or should guarantee that any specific paper will succeed or get a specific grade.  That is not their job.  They do provide positive feedback as well as helping students learn to detect errors, but some writers misinterpret that as a positive judgment of the grade the paper will get.  Inexperienced writers usually have a hard time processing feedback.  For that reason, regular contact with a compatible tutor will gradually improve a writer’s skills and knowledge over time, while making whatever incremental improvements are possible on papers.  Tutors cannot “cure bad writing.”

• Encourage your department to become a “WAC department” rather than going it alone.  Talk to your colleagues about writing quality in ways that go beyond lamenting students’ inabilities.  Start your own "Assignment Bank" to share the best ways to encourage good writing.  Share examples of good work with each other and share strategies that helped students to produce it, like well-formed assignments, rubrics, and other materials.  Think about creating a departmental “assignment bank” to use when training newly hired faculty.  Ask the Writing Program to help you organize a departmental workshop on ways to improve writing quality in your discipline.  An example of questions used and tips in a 2000 workshop for the Communications Department can be found here:  http://faculty.goucher.edu/writingprogram/WAC_Workshop_Communications__Fall_2000.htm

• Conference more often: Conferences enable students to communicate in their most well-developed form of language (spoken/aural) and help you establish the social norms of the kind of writing they are trying to produce.  Even short (5-10 minute) conferences will help students achieve the types of excellence you seek and that would economically use your time.  Beware the urge to copy-edit your students’ work as if you were preparing it for publication.  Students almost never read that level of comment.

Background articles:

“Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research”

Author(s): Robert J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsford

Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Dec., 1988), pp. 395-409.  Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357695

Conclusions: Since the early 1900s, college teachers have claimed students were making more formal (vs. content) errors in writing than previous generations of students, but studies of papers written in 1917, 1930, and 1988 revealed that although the average length of papers had gone up (from 162 to 231 to 422 words), the number of errors marked per hundred words remained nearly the same (2.11 to 2.24 to 2.26).

Annotated Bibliography of WAC Research (Indiana University, Bloomington):

http://www.iub.edu/~cwp/lib/wacgen.shtml

“The Idea of a Writing Center”

Author(s): Stephen M. North

Source: College English, Vol. 46, No. 5 (Sep., 1984), pp. 433-446

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377047

            Students and teachers often misunderstand what writing tutor conferences are designed to do.  North specifically opposed the “fix-it shop” metaphor which assumes only “damaged” writers with multiple kinds of mechanical errors need to talk to a tutor.  Tutoring takes time, but no writing instruction is “quick.”  Global writing habits must be reorganized, and frequent tutoring sessions are the best way to accomplish this.  Tutors help writers translate their native idiom of English into that required for academic prose, and they help writers understand teachers’ needs and intentions as readers.

            For more on Writing Across the Curriculum as a methodology of instruction, see the Indiana University (Bloomington) web page containing an annotated bibliography of articles, many of which are available using the JSTOR and Ebsco search engines:

http://www.iub.edu/~cwp/lib/wacgen.shtml