A PRIMER FOR TEACHING FRESHMAN WRITING AT BSU

1998-1999 Academic Year By Bruce Ballenger, Director of Writing

Most experienced writing instructors agree that college composition is the most rewarding--and the most challenging--course to teach in the undergraduate curriculum. Why is that?

Imagine, for a moment, what you are about to do: You will teach one or more sections of E-101 or E 102, the two required composition courses at BSU. Many students, perhaps most, have had a negative experience with school writing. These students typically believe that writing is mostly about following rules--producing an acceptable imitation of a form of writing supplied by the teacher and making sure that everything is grammatically correct. They believe that the act of writing is only useful after they've thought of something to write about, and that language is merely a vehicle for recording what they've already found out. They believe that their only important reader is the teacher, whose job is primarily to correct their papers to make sure they've followed the rules. And they believe that what they honestly think about the topic on which they're writing may not be relevant to what they say and how they say it.

You're about to challenge all of these assumptions in your writing courses; for the students who see no relation between writing and their lives, these courses can be a revelation.They will certainly be unlike most other courses they take as undergraduates, because in a writing course the subject matter is created by the students themselves. Writing cannot be taught by lecture. While the instructor in a successful writing course is inescapably in a position of authority, she is able to develop a collaborative relationship with her students. They learn to trust her reading of their work, but they also honor the varied readings of fellow students. For one semester, often for the first time in their lives, many students experience what it's like to be in a community of writers who are thinking about things that matter and sharing their discoveries.

Who wouldn't want to teach a course like that?

Goals of E101 and E102

Tell someone you're teaching college writing and you will likely get this response: "Oh, I hear that most students can't even put together a coherent sentence by the time they get to college." You should know two things: this statement is inaccurate, and it is a complaint that has been voiced by critics of composition for 125 years, despite the range of pedagogies used to teach writing during that time. Even some faculty from other departments view the mission of the required composition course as a disinfecting operation: just clean up student grammar and make their writing more orderly before we get them in our classes.

There is even no complete consensus, and probably never will be, between English faculty about the goals of E101 and E102. Fortunately, however, BSU's English Department endorsed new mission statements for both E 101 and E 102, as well as a program philosophy. These should provide you with importance guidance in teaching both courses.

In the composition field there are two broad pedagogical trends. One encourages the composition course to be a place where students learn the conventions and rhetorical methods of academic discourse. Advocates of this approach believe that if our students are going to succeed as academic writers, and participate effectively in the production of knowledge, then they must learn to be like us, to know the moves a political scientist, or historian, or literary critic, or ecologist might make in an effective piece of writing in that discipline. How does one structure an argument in political science, for example, and what counts for evidence? In the past few years, BSU's freshman writing program has embraced this approach.

The other broad approach--and the one we currently embrace at BSU-- is that the composition course should prepare students for a lifetime of writing, which will certainly include academic writing, but may also include memos, poems, diaries, reports, stories, and letters. Such a course might focus on helping students to see how the act of writing can have an integral relationship to their own lives. For example, how can the pen and the page be used to explore one's observations of racism and one's ideas about it? How can a writer arrive, through writing, with an opinion about something, and how can that be communicated to a range of readers? What such a course hopes to do is cultivate in student writers the critical habits of mind that will help them in school and out of it, and encourage them to see writing as a mode of thinking that invites discovery.

Assumptions

Most of us who teach composition here are working from a number of assumptions, some of which are listed in the program philosophy statement. Here are some additional premises to consider:

  1. First, the affective dimension of writing is often underrated. That is, when writers develop positive feelings about writing and their ability to use it well, their writing often improves. Not right away, perhaps. But a growing sense of identity as a competent writer frequently encourages a student to write more, and write with greater commitment and purpose.
  2. The best way to learn to write is to write. This nicely follows from assumption #1. Like any skill, continual practice with putting down words increases a writer's ability to form them.
  3. Writing is a process. The fundamental paradigm shift in composition came when instructors moved from an exclusive focus on the product of writing to a focus on helping students reflect on how they might produce strong writing. Composing is an often complex, recursive process, and if students have a semester to attend to the many ways to get writing done, they can learn to do it better. This also means that teacher comments during the process become central, and often much more useful than comments on the finished product.
  4. Writing is a mode of thinking. It is not only a product of thought, but a means of thinking about things. "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" said E.M. Forster, and for many students this is a revelation. Suddenly students can see writing as a means of exploring ideas and topics, not simply a vehicle for getting down what they already know. This opens up more subject matter for writing and increases students' willingness to take risks.
  5. Writing and reading are integrally related. Reading beautiful or engaging or challenging prose not only provides a model for writers, but the experience of making meaning out of something we read is the same as the experience of making meaning out of something we write. Writing, since it is a mode of thinking, can also help writers discover meaning in what they read.
  6. Writers write with more commitment about things that seem to have a real purpose and audience. Sadly, many school writing assignments seem like "dummy runs" to students, or empty rituals, performed solely for the teacher with little connection to the writer's own interests and points-of-view and for no real audience. It is no surprise that this situation encourages dishonest writing and dull prose. A writer is more motivated to write well if he is convinced of the value and meaning of the work. Writers ought to have the experience of writing with authority about a subject, and for many inexperienced writers, that means beginning with topics that grow out of their own experience.
  7. All writing is personal. It is in fashion these days to discount "personal" writing as irrelevant to academic writing. This kind of binary thinking is not only unfortunate, but misleading. Unless one takes the most narrow view of "personal" writing--that it is exclusively confessional--it's not hard to see that even the most formal academic writing is personal in the sense that it is motivated by the writer's curiosity, informed by her sensibilities, and shaped by her lived experience, even if that experience is not detailed in the essay. A good writer always exerts her presence, and to suggest otherwise is to fall into a positivist trap, one that the critics of personal writing set in the first place. If we want honest writing, we are asking writers to be personal, even when they don't talk about themselves in their essays.
  8. Writing is both private and social. Writers often work things out alone, but they cannot escape the other voices and social forces that shape their way of seeing. In the writing class, the social dimension of writing--trying to make things clear to others and listening to their response, which then helps clarify things for the writer even further--is made tangible through writing workshops and other peer responses.

But What About Grammar?

I haven't said much about grammar and mechanics so far, except to point out that lots of people think they're important. They are important. And we have a responsibility to help our students recognize and address persistent patterns of error in their writing. But there is an overwhelming body of research which suggests that formal grammar instruction, divorced from a writer's struggle to say something meaningful to someone else, does not improve writing. Grammar conventions, then, must be taught strategically, during moments when writers are receptive to learning them. As a rule, a heavy editorial hand may be unproductive until the end of the writing process, and instructors must always be wary about too heavy a hand at any time, or we risk subverting the collaborative relationship we hope to cultivate with our students. Students seem to learn to recognize and correct grammatical and mechanical problems better when instructors focus on one problem at a time and address it at the right time.

Perhaps most important is to reconceive what we mean by grammar instruction. Though we normally consider it to be the teaching of "rules" or conventions, the teaching of grammar can also be an issue of style. What words we use and how we use them create certain affects on a reader. A recent Word Works, "Punctuation as a System," wonderfully illustrates this. Another way to re-see the role of grammar instruction is to make it a part of editing, a process that is concerned with not only mechanics, but style and organization. The key is to teach grammar in context, usually a situation in which a writer is trying to say something meaningful to someone else. You will find that if the writer cares about what she is saying, she will want to say it well.

Coach or Hanging Judge?

There is an inescapable tension in a writing class between the teacher's desire to be a coach to student writers, playing what Peter Elbow calls "the believing game" with their evolving drafts, and the teacher's mandate to evaluate students' writing. This tension is greatest in two situations: when commenting on student drafts and grading them.

Most of us have memories of school writing assignments that were covered with red marks--"awks" in the margins, circled words, and brittle comments about style or form. One of the hardest things to learn as a writing teacher is what kinds of comments--and when--are most helpful to student writers. As a general principle, avoid covering a student paper with your own comments, or you risk appropriating the student's essay. In early drafts, try to play Elbow's believing game, not the doubting game. Look for opportunities to comment on what seems to be working, what might be strengths to build on, rather than adopting an exclusively critical stance, hunting down weaknesses and errors. Comment whenever you can on the ideas in your students' drafts. What do they seem to be saying? What interesting questions do they raise that they might consider? Try to work from the premise that no writing advice-- including the instructor's--is always valid.

Remember, comments during the writing process are almost always more helpful than those on the final product.

Grading is always problematic in a writing course. Whenever you attach a grade to a piece of writing, your relationship to the student shifts from coach to judge. Ultimately, this is inescapable. But learn to grade strategically. Avoid grading evolving drafts, since this subverts the student's willingness to take risks and may assert the teacher's control and authority before the writer has addressed the draft's problems on her own. If you like, consider "process" grades for works-in-progress. These assess how well a student has completed the tasks that lead to a final draft (e.g. prewrites, journal work, summaries, participation in workshops and conferences, etc.) In some situations, avoid a letter grade altogether by using something like a check plus and minus system. When you do grade, make sure the criteria you're using are clear. What do you consider the qualities of an "A" paper, "B" paper, and so on. Use model papers if you have them. Consider devoting some of the class to developing these criteria collectively.

The Writing Portfolio

A growing number of faculty in the writing program use portfolio assessment to determine a student's grade in the course. If you use this method, there are generally two key times during the semester to grade: midterm and end of term. You may require a midterm essay that will be submitted and graded and figured into a course grade. But the largest portion of the course grade (anywhere from 50% to 75%) will be a final portfolio of the student's best work. This portfolio may be about 20 pages of manuscript in E 101, and 25 pages in E 102. If your course has specific writing assignments--say, a research-based essay, or an argument--you might require the portfolio to include a product of one or more of those assignments. Or you may simply require that students submit 20 or 25 pages of essays (usually four five-page pieces) with no requirements about form. Develop clear criteria about how you'll evaluate the portfolio and give it to students early. Will you grade each essay or evaluate the portfolio as a body of work? Should students work towards submitting a range of essays, and what do you mean by range? What specifically are the features of a strong essay?

One of the advantages of the portfolio over other methods of assessment is that they encourage students to reflect on their own development during the course, and how they believe that is represented in the final portfolio. Consequently, instructors often require their students to include reflective essays in their portfolios that describe, narrate, or explain what the student has come to understand about their work and the writing process.

Figuring a Final Grade

Your criteria for grading student work will inevitably be largely product-oriented, focusing on the collection of writing submitted in the final portfolio. As you develop your criteria, consider the minimum competencies described in the mission statements for the course. As a bottom line, does this portfolio demonstrate those minimum competencies? You will also develop (perhaps in collaboration with your students) additional criteria for determining the grade level of the work. Because "good" writing is always a matter of context, some of these criteria may be unique to the particular course you're teaching. But consider some of the following features of "good" writing:

While the final grade will largely be based on the products of the course, there are other important outcomes that should figure into our evaluation of a student's success. They include the following:

  1. Affective: Students' attitudes about writing and their sense of themselves as writers have changed. They recognize the generative power of language, and they believe they can--in many circumstances--write with authority.
  2. Process: Students are aware of their own writing process--what approaches seem to work best for a given writing task--and can adjust them accordingly. They can describe the rhetorical choices they have made. They know how to discover topics, collect information from a range of sources, focus on some of that information, and build a draft around a clear purpose that would interest someone else. They can revise and edit, making their writing clearer, more coherent, and more interesting to readers.
  3. Epistemological: Students begin to have a critical attitude towards what authorities say and have ways to evaluate evidence to make a judgement about the truth of claims. They recognize that their own claims should be supported by evidence. On at least some subjects outside their own experience, they can write authoritatively.

Several more tangible things will factor in your grading scheme for E101 and E102, including attendance and class participation . In most successful composition classes there's lots of talk--students engaging each other about drafts and readings, reading writing aloud, responding to the instructor's questions, etc. Lecture is rarely a useful strategy in a writing course. Make it clear that a requirement of the course is active participation in class discussion, workshops, and conferences. Attendance is part of this. Because so many BSU students are nontraditional and live off-campus, attendance in class can be spotty. The BSU Writing Program has recently established an attendance policy that may help you formulate an attendance requirement for your class.

Other elements of a final grade might include class presentations, reading responses, the midterm paper, or a special project. Exams are usually not appropriate in a composition course, unless they are exercises in taking essay exams.

Conferences

Writing teachers evaluate student writing in many more ways than grading, and feedback during the writing process is often the most helpful to students. In the traditional writing course, students submit drafts to the instructor, who then returns them with written comments. You will undoubtedly do this throughout the semester, but, in many ways, a far more useful method of feedback is the one-on-one, or group, conference.

Instructors can schedule periodic meetings with each student--say, fifteen minutes long--to discuss his or her work in progress. These conferences, when handled effectively, are often far more productive teaching opportunities than the full-class meeting. Because of the teaching load at BSU, instructors have used conferences in only a limited way, usually meeting with students at the midterm. To encourage instructors to use conferences more often, the Writing Program permits you to substitute conference conference time for class time. Consider scheduling four or more conferences with each student during the semester, and cancel as many full-class sessions as you need to handle the conference time and workload.

Alternatively, consider group conferences, during which you meet with three, four, or five students at a time in your office or classroom to discuss drafts. Again, this is a good substitute for full-class time.

Doing good conferences with student writers is an art. Frequently, faculty development meetings focus on conference techniques, and if you're a new TA, the fall seminar will discuss them, too. But it is generally wise in conferences to find ways to encourage students to talk about their drafts: about what they think is working, and what needs work, what problems they encountered in the process of writing the draft, what they think might be the most important thing they're trying to say. Finding the right questions that will drive a student back into a draft with new energy and vision is the key. A conference in which the instructor does all the talking is not a successful conference.

Workshops

If a goal of a composition course is to create a community of readers and writers, then the instructor should not be the only evaluator of student writing. Peer workshops, in which students work in groups of five or so to share drafts and invite comment on a revision, are now a central part of most composition courses. In a beginning course like E101, these workshops can be disappointing. Students have little experience with constructive feedback on a draft and can seem to give "bad" advice to each other. Some of this can be remedied by modeling a good workshop with the full class, providing handouts that give students specific questions to consider as they read a classmate's draft, and showing our new video on workshop technique, filmed at BSU. This video is available in the Writing Program office, LA256. But even if the workshop doesn't seem to be offering writers much concrete help with their revisions, the experience of having living, attentive readers of their work can make the workshop a success.

Schedule workshops early and often and establish them as a regular feature of the course.

Structuring the Course

As you develop your syllabi and design your assignments, work from a conceptual structure that makes sense to you. Is there a sequence of learning that you believe will best promote your students' development as writers? Consider these possibilities, some of which are particularly suited to E 101 or E 102 :

Progression 1: The Writing Process (E101 or E 102)

Prewriting-----------Drafting-----------Revising--------Editing

In this sequence, the course would take students chronologically through each major stage in the writing process. This could be the sequence for the entire course, or one repeated several times with different assignments.

Progression 2: Movement Towards Analytic Writing (E 101)

Chronological narrative-------Descriptive Essay--------Expository Essay--------Thesis/Support Essay or Argument

This assumes, of course, that certain forms of writing are inherently more demanding, an arguable premise. The assignments or progression of forms can vary from what you see here.

Progression 3: Sources of Information (E101)

Internal (memory and observation)---------External (interview and reading)

In this sequence students would move from drawing on the most available sources of information for their writing, to those that exist outside the self. The course would end ideally with students able to draw on multiple sources of information to explore a writing topic. The notion here is that writing abilities develop from the self outward, and that moving from limited sources of information to multiple sources of information helps student writers progressively deal with the increased cognitive demands of more sophisticated writing.

Progression 4: Class Activities (E101 or E 102)

Invention/In-class Writing (Mon.)----Workshop (Wed.)----Discussion of Readings (Fri.)

Rather than structuring the class around certain ideas about how writers develop, the course can be organized around certain repeatable and predictable classroom activities, such as workshops, conferences, in-class writing, readings, etc. With this structure, students always know--and can anticipate--what is happening in class on Monday or Friday.

Progression 5: Academic Skills (E 102)

Defining---Summarizing--Classifying--Comparing--Analyzing--Synthesizing

This structure--often termed the "critical strategies approach"--works from the assumption that discrete academic thinking and writing skills can be identified and taught separately. Each is taught in turn, and presumably by the end of the course students are able to use the skills as needed. A downside of such an approach is that it often isolates particular skills for academic writing from a meaningful context; like teaching the modes of discourse in current-traditional rhetoric, critical strategies can encourage students to simply recreate the forms or approaches rather than use them to explore meaningful questions or ideas.

Progresssion 5: Project Approach (E 102)

Informal research essay---ethnography---collaborative research---formal research essay

Students work through three or more research projects that move progressively from subjective to more "objective" treatments, from working alone to working with others, from less "conventional" to more conventional, from library based research to field research to collaborative research to research that draws on multiple sources and methods. Any one or more of these sequences provide a logic for the E 102 course. Projects obviously may vary from those listed above.

Assignments

A few instructors don't even use them, particularly in E 101. Instead, they structure their course around the writing of essays--with no particular requirements about form or genre--and ask students to do a range of exercises that will help them generate material for these essays. The exercises are often open-ended, and may not be handed in. A course like this relies more on deadlines for drafts, rather than particular assignments. While such an approach gives students plenty of room to choose topics and treatments it does not free them from writing purposeful essays. Students are challenged to discover a purpose for a particular draft rather than being provided a purpose through an assignment.

However, most instructors do use assignments, and these are often oriented towards asking students to produce a particular kind of writing: an argument, a "synthesis" essay, a reading response, a "reflective" essay, a description, a summary, etc. In some cases, these assignments involve writing on prescribed topics as well as modeling particular forms. Thematic courses (e.g. exploring concepts of literacy, environmental issues, homelessness, etc.) provide a focus for student writing and discussion often throughout the semester. In E 102, assignments or "projects" are much more common than in E 101 (see above). For example, an E 102 course might require an ethnographic essay, a research essay, or a researched argument.

When designing writing assignments consider two things: what exactly is the purpose of the assignment, and what might be the students' commitment to doing it? The latter question is much more difficult. To some extent student resistance to assignments is inescapable, particularly if they're challenging. Frequently, it is only after the fact that students see the value of an assignment. But it is generally true that students have a stronger commitment to an assignment if it invites self-reflection and self-expression, provides practice with a skill they agree is valuable, or will produce writing in which they discover meaningful things to say to a meaningful audience. For more ideas about designing effective assignments, see the Word Works publication on the topic.

Using Reading

With all there is to do with writing in this course, there seems to be little time for discussion of reading. In fact, student texts will likely constitute the bulk of the reading in this course. But students should also be challenged to read the work of professional writers. First, these readings will provide useful models for essential writing skills like handling beginnings, transitions, comparisons, organizing paragraphs, using specifics, handling outside sources, etc, as well as models of form--narrative, argument, analysis, description, etc. Second, readings can be a source of information for the students' own writing. Provocative published essays on topics that interest students become opportunities for writing, both in-class and out. Design reading response assignments that first encourage students to explore their personal reactions to a reading in an open-ended way, and then move them towards shaping those responses into more coherent, developed compositions. One sequence might be to ask students to keep a double-entry journal, using opposing pages in their notebooks. On the left hand page they take notes as they read, jotting down what they think are key lines or quotes, or summarizing key points. On the right side, they freewrite some of their reactions to what they noted on the left. This may be the basis for a short one-page response students bring to class for discussion. It may also be exchanged for peer response, and then revised for submission to the instructor. Essentially this assignment sequence asks students to follow the writing process, but to use reading as an initial source of material for their essay.

It is usually not a good idea to assign a reading without a related writing assignment; this insures that students have not only read the assigned reading, but thought about it.

E101 students should get some practice with basic interpretive skills, including the ability to compare two texts, summarize the main point of an essay, and abstract from a paragraph or section a key idea. They should also learn the need to not only make their own assertions about a text in their writing, but to support those assertions with evidence from the text. E102 students should learn how to evaluate an author's arguments based on the evidence she provides, as well as learn how to read effectively for information to support their research.

What About Using Literature?

Some instructors ocassionally assign short stories or poems in the E 101 or E 102 class, and a few ask students to write a critical analysis of a story or poem. But by and large the readings in BSU composition course should focus on nonfiction prose. Why? Several reasons:

  1. Most high school English classes, particularly college prep courses, focus on the study of literature. Students rarely have had the chance to explore nonfiction works. This is particularly important since E 101 and E 102 require that students write nonfiction prose.
  2. Literary texts are a specialized kind of discourse. Students also need exposure to texts that are explicit as well as implicit, texts that can be used as well as experienced by readers, and texts that can have a wide range of purposes from persuasion to inquiry. Nonfiction prose can have literary purposes as well as instrumental purposes, making it particularly useful in the composition class.
  3. Students have a strong tendency to reify works of literature, viewing them as beyond challenge and with pre-determined meanings that are "hidden" by the author. The English instructor, of course, already knows these meanings, therefore the student often feels that the task of writing about literature is to guess the "right" answer.
  4. While some of our freshman composition students may become English majors, most will not. Because E 101 and E 102 are not courses where students will be taught disciplinary writing (something most of us are not equipped to teach), it's difficult to justify a strong emphasis on learning to write literary criticism or learn literary terms and concepts.
  5. Should the literary author be the model writer in the composition class? Will most students identify with such a model?

Teaching From Your Strengths

Each of you brings a particular gift to your teaching. You may have a background in poetry and a love of carefully chosen words and images. You may love reading, and revel in the many ways a text can be made and remade by an attentive reader. You may have a business background and practical experience in writing for specific audiences. You may be a wonderful and perceptive listener, able to help people re-see their own experience in fruitful ways. Bring these gifts to your teaching. Even build your course around them. While it is often dangerous for a writing teacher to generalize from her own experience, to suggest to students that the instructor's approach to writing is the only or best way, it is also true that you will be a more effective teacher if you teach from your strengths, whatever they are.

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