Reading for Content?

I think that perhaps I was unclear when I mentioned my problems with lower-order concerns/sentence-level errors/grammar mistakes. My problem with these things is not that they "irritate" me. There are plenty of things that irritate me about student writing that I am perfectly able to look past when reviewing a student's paper (e.g. the title in bold, the text in Arial font, 1.5 spacing). When lower-order concerns become a problem is when they prevent me from reading the student's paper not because they are irritating and therefore distracting, but when they prevent the paper from expressing coherent thoughts. The idea that I should "read for content" idea implies that I can read it in the first place. If the student isn't expressing his ideas in proper English, how am I to know that he's expressing ideas at all? Isn't that like a student turning in a paper in Spanish and saying that he deserves an A because his ideas are there even though he hasn't expressed them in a language I can understand?

I think we should teach students that grammar is important because it's a contract with your audience: an agreement to transact communication with a standard set of symbols and sounds. When you use bad grammar, you break that contract with your audience, and so betray their trust in you as a speaker. Your audience has no reason to listen to you, respect you, or assume you to be an intelligent person. This may sound harsh, but haven't we all judged people who slipped the wrong "their" into an email, or raised our eyebrows when someone said "irregardless" in conversation? I know I have. I know that even one slip-up has altered my perception of a person, and I think it's wrong for us as teachers to send our students out into the world thinking that everyone will be so benevolent as to "read for content."

Thus, Ergo, Clearly, and Furthermore

So, I changed my font last time because I was feeling the urge to go against the grain, but now I realize that I threw the entire blog aesthetic out of whack. My bad.

Okay. Two sections today: transitions and the 5-paragraph essay. I honestly feel that transitions can make or break a paper, and I also think that writing good transitions is one of the most difficult parts of writing a paper. I know that I never worry about transitions when I'm struggling to write a first draft; I simply attempt to get my ideas down on paper, no matter how rough or inarticulate they are -- and that's usually what I tell my students to do, too, when they're writing a first draft. However, in my teaching experience, students' first drafts were often eerily similar to or exactly the same as their final copies, despite my best efforts, and then I would kick myself for not encouraging the students to use transitions right away. I ran across a diagram a few months ago that depicts the paper-writing process, and I love it -- it's strangely simple but made me say "Whoa! I like this!" I think many students would respond well to it, too, so I'll have to draw it on the chalkboard in class or something -- I can't reproduce it here, sorry. But I think it helps to show the need to write a paper that continually reminds the reader of the thesis, which in turn should help with understanding the need for precise transitions (operative word: "should").

When I think about the 5-paragraph essay, I feel exhausted. I know the arguments against teaching it and for teaching it, why it's bad and why it can be useful, how it works with certain learning styles, etc. It is irritating, I admit, when a student feels "stuck" in the 5-paragraph form because that's all he or she knows. At the same time, I've worked with such low-level writers that I was ecstatic to receive a paper that had paragraphs at all, much less five whole paragraphs. I've also spent time grading district writing proficiency tests that were prompt-based and graded according to a detailed yet problematic rubric, and I have to admit that some of the most refreshing essays during those long 8-hour days were the 5-paragraphs essays that weren't all that original but did exactly what the rubric wanted. We cannot forget that the original purpose of the 5-paragraph essay is to teach beginning writers the importance of organization in their writing, but I do think Amy's idea of a writing survey early in the year would help us discern student perceptions of the 5-paragraph essay.

Of course, now I realize that I sometimes see paper assignments in the Writing Center in which the instructor has laid out a very specific outline for what each paragraph of the paper should accomplish -- isn't that even more prescriptive and perhaps even more damaging than a 5-paragraph essay? I'd tend to think so.

FYI: I've deliberately not transitioned between my paragraphs in this post, and I have to tell you, I feel a bit out of sorts. I'm fighting the urge to go back and increase my cohesiveness (as Murphy would refer to it), but I'm going to resist in order to make a point. Or something.

Is anyone else tired?

Following

I’m being followed. In each course I take, in the course I teach, in my other reading and research projects, it is there. That silly five-paragraph form just won’t go away. I am currently revising a rather lengthy piece about formulaic writing. Thus I particularly notice when one of our readings deals with the issue of form. As I read Murphy (in Roen) I wondered what most college students think about the five-paragraph essay form. It is common for students to be “drilled” on this form because teachers want to prepare students for high-stakes tests and to prepare students for college writing.

Would it help early on in a semester of English 1000 to survey students on their experiences and views of five-paragraph/formulaic writing? As I study middle-high school teacher comments about the five-paragraph essay, some of them see this as very prescriptive. They do not want to break the rules, and so students may enter college with various notions about the purpose of the form, and to some students the form may be what writing is all about. Murphy brings up two concerns on p. 281 to describe prescribed forms of writing: “a mechanical, stifling, intellectually empty formalism” and a belief “to impressionable student writers that all effective discourse follows certain generic and universal principles of coherence.” On the other hand, Murphy argues for teaching form as a way to be aware of patterns and organization, just not as a prescribed one-size-fits-all approach. In Murphy’s example of Kiera’s paper – she used five-paragraphs. I noticed this recently when I was reading college student applications for a fellows program. The ones I read included five paragraphs. Granted, it is a handy form and good to know for writing-on-demand, but the writer needs choose to write in five paragraphs because that is what makes sense…”the trick is to avoid being either narrow or prescriptive about them.”

If one idea is to find out what students think of form, the other is what Murphy recommends at the end of the article --- Get students reading samples of essays, look at the forms the writers use, and then look at their own writing: “I ask students to identify at least two significant moments of transition in their own papers. What ideas are they moving between? What are the relationships between those ideas? What language do they use to name or signal those relationships to readers?” If Murphy had tried this with the student essay on guilt, what would the student have discovered not just about her writing, but about what she was thinking?

is this title supposed to act like a transition?

If it is, I think mine just failed. Anyway, I have to say that I was really excited about some of the ideas that Murphy presented in his “Teaching ‘Organization’” essay. In particular, I was struck by the idea that transitions are the “connective tissue” or “the moments when ideas are named and when the often complicated relationships between those ideas, still submerged for many writers working on early drafts, finally require articulation” (275). Thus, transitions become so much more than helping your reader along while they are reading your paper; they are the key moments when you take a broader perspective to articulate the general shape of your argument. It helped remind me how central organization is to writing—great ideas can look really bad without the necessary structure, and certainly when making an argument, the way in which ideas are presented can be very persuasive. But, what I wanted to ask Murphy was how we get students to see the importance of connecting and understanding their ideas through transitions. I did like that he talked about using the word “moments” instead of “sentences.” I know that in the Writing Lab some people get stuck thinking they can only have one transition/topic sentence when sometimes their ideas are more complex and therefore need more than one sentence to articulate. When I am tying to get students to think about organization and transitions in the Writing Lab, I usually tell them that my method is to look at the two paragraphs and ask themselves how are they the same and how they are different. For example, does the second paragraph contrast with the previous one, offer another example, offer a deeper perspective, etc. But, I guess this essay made me question if even that is enough. I’d like to open up discussion to hear how others talk about transitions and get students to think about them because as of now, I think my use of them is still too limited and perfunctory.

Some more on the personal question

I just happened (via John Lovas's blog) onto a discussion from last fall on the issue of personal writing. I think you all have been discussing it in very interesting and complicated ways, so I'm pointing you to this discussion only to show that it's something that often raises a lot of discussion and also in case you want to find yet more ideas.

Making the Transition

I often find myself brushing aside the transition, which is the topic of this week's reading. I find that most transition sentences are put in merely because the student thinks she needs them to get an A, as opposed to the role that the comp teacher sees for them -- a little flag to say, "Hey! This thing is kind of like this other thing I was talking about!"

I think that Murphy's comparison of the two essays about psychology illuminates the problem with transitions: real life doesn't have them. On August 15 of last year, I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. On August 16, I was living in Columbia, Missouri. On October 16, I was 21, and on October 17, I was 22. Although there there was continuity in my life, there was no sentence using the word "furthermore" in between these phases. The choppiness of David Coffey's "Untitled" reflects this. He's not stringing these stories together with transitions because he's talking about real people, and to imply that they are linked together simply because he's chosen to write about all of them in the same essay would make it seem like he didn't understand their similarites outside of their common presence in the essay. But at the same time, his choosing to write about all of them shows that he understands that there is a commonality among them and through them and within them, which is more expertly articulated by his paragraphs of analysis.

The point here is that transitions seem inherently inorganic to the real world, and yet it's significant that writers make connections between information they encounter. So what's the balance? How do you make a transition a connection? How do you make it mean something besides just having it sit on a page as a rhetorical slight of hand?

Teach me.

Hi.

So, first, I want to know Kristina's great strategies for writing personal statements. I can help other people write theirs, but when I have to write one for myself, I really struggle. Honestly, my personal statement for graduate school was fine, but I don't think it was what most graduate school were looking for -- and I didn't even like it all that much.

Anyway, I'm going to jump into this discussion about personal writing. I don't think I'm one of the ones who recoils or blanches whenever Faith brings up the idea, but I do have a few concerns. I would teach personal writing all the dang time if I knew how to REALLY teach it well. I mean, I need a foolproof plan that will work for the majority of students. I have to tell you that I worked my butt off teaching and explaining how to write memoirs and short stories to the junior/senior class when I taught high school, and I really only got a handful of decent stories. And I gave handouts, modeled bad and good examples, did small group work, etc., all en route to the finished product...and they still struggled with it. True, some didn't really try very hard, but some did, and they still couldn't produce a story that wasn't boring or pointless or trite.

I am a big fan of ethnography, though. I made my AP students do family ethnographies over Christmas break; the assignment was based on an assignment I had done during my senior year of college, and I produced one of the best pieces of writing I've ever done. I'm still really proud of it. In the family ethnography, the students have to observe their families (extended, nuclear, whatever -- the holidays force them to be with some segment of their familial unit) for at least 3 hours and taking meticukous field notes. Then, they have to write an ethnography in which they describe their observed "culture" and discuss some sort of discovery or revelation that they made. That having to have a "discovery" frustrated many of them, but in the end, I received some of the most candid, poignant, and moving pieces of student writing that I have ever read -- and to me, that's writing worth reading.

So, basically, I don't know how to teach personal writing well unless it's a family ethnography. So I am intrigued by these different invention activities that people are coming up with that do use personal experience as a "point of entry," because I would like to teach personal writing better and make it really relevant to my students. However, I do think that there are many benefits to making students do a great deal of straight-up academic writing, because honestly, very few of their classes are going to allow them to write from personal experience. I'm just trying to be practical. Creating critical arguments and analyzing texts will be what most of their classes require, so I do see the benefits of an academic writing focus (and I know I keep saying "academic writing" as sort of the opposite of "personal writing," but I'm not implying that writing from personal experience can't be academic -- I just can't think of a better phrase right now. So don't get your shorts in a bunch, anyone.)

an ah-ha! moment

Technically, I think I’m supposed to comment on someone else’s post, but I am still excited from working at the Writing Lab this morning, so I want to write about that instead. I had a student who was working on a paper about the effects of technology on society; specifically, she was working on the development and expansion of the railroad in the 1800s. The paper was a good first draft, although she needed some more specifics, but she wanted me to help her with the organization and development of her argument. As she was reading the paper to me, I noticed that the flow between her paragraphs was somewhat awkward, and I realized that she had organized them chronologically. I pointed out this fact to her, and suggested that she consider arranging them by topic instead (because her first and third paragraphs dealt with similar topics, despite being separated by some decades). As soon as I suggested this, she realized both how she had limited her organization and how changing her organization could help her writing. For me, it was a perfect example of Flower’s theory of writer/reader based prose at work. Although I don’t know for sure, I’m guessing she received her information chronologically, which was how she in turn presented it. For her argument and the reader, however, it made more sense to arrange it by subject. Now, I would have loved to have sat there with her and discussed the finer points of Flower’s article and how she was a wonderful illustration of it, but, I refrained. Nevertheless, it was helpful for me to have Flower’s ideas in my own mind as I was trying to work with her.

The “I” in Critical Thinking

I spoke in class yesterday about how I felt that giving the students agency to be a critic is essential to critical thinking. I keep talking about personal writing as a way of giving the student agency, and that seems like a turn-off to some people.

But if you look at the ads we looked at today, you can see the way the personal plays into all the analysis we do. We were, in effect, using our own experience to analyze the ads. Our group’s ad, for example, appealed to the ethos of “Made in America.” To see the value of advertising in this way, we had to know (1) a “good” ethos is established when you refer to something as “American” (2) people like things that are “American” and are often suspicious of things that might be “un-American” or even “anti-American (3) the specific values set of “American” products (e.g. pride in hard work, high quality). We concluded that the ad would likely be most effective in a conservative magazine, because we know that conservatives are more likely to align with the ethos of America.

I feel like whenever I say “personal writing” people recoil because they think of confessional writing about crushes and heartbreak and the like. I would argue, by contrast, that all writing is personal in that it is somehow based on our own experiences. My group was able to do the above analysis because we have grown up in this country, and are familiar with the ad’s ethos. My point here is that critical thinking comes out of “knowing stuff about stuff,” and that personal writing can serve as a “point of entry” into a sophisticated argument.

Bazerman

Amy and I heard Bazerman speak at the composition conference we went to in Santa Barbara in February. He gave an uninspired and rambling speech. Later in the afternoon, I saw a woman get some coffee, and I asked her if the coffee was still hot. He was three feet away and said, "It doesn't matter if the coffee is hot. We have coffee. That is all that matters. You should be happy that there is still coffee." I disagree so much on this point that it caused me to lose respect for the man. He didn't realize how seriously I take the temperature of coffee and how seriously I take coffee in general. So when I read his article I turned up my nose a bit because I have serious reservations about anyone who would make a statement like that, regardless of the Ph.D. in Physics and English. He can't be that smart if he would say something like that.

But I read the article. I do agree with him that we need to teach students how to respond and argue with the text. He and Kantz both had some good things to say. There is also a chapter in Allyn and Bacon that outlines questions for analyzing and critiquing sources that would be very handy. They ask great questions. It's funny that I'm reading these chapters right now because I have been struggling to get the students to really questions their sources. I think this dialectic needs to be modeled by the teacher.

Here's an idea: Pass out the A&B questions on critiquing and analyzing sources. Have each student bring in a source--enough copies for each person in the class. If you don't want to have them make copies, you could have them write a section of the source on the board for everyone to see. The teacher can then interrogate the text. The teacher may also need to interrogate the student a little bit.

These articles made me think about a student who I talked to in class today. I was asking her to argue with a source. She said, "Well, it's really hard because it is all facts." I started questioning her about the rhetorical purpose. Although the source seems to be purely facts, I asked her the author's purpose behind writing about this. Kantz writes, "Like many people, Shirley believes that you can either agree or disagree with issues and opinions, but you can only accept the so-called facts. She believes that facts are what you learn from textbooks, opinions are what you have about clothes, and arguments are what you have with your mother . . . ." I think I am teaching them that critical eye. Now, teaching this thinking and modeling this thinking is very hard to do. This can be frustrating. You may find in your classes that few students have been asked to believe and doubt the text or as A&B says go with the grain and against the grain.

Conversations on a continuum.

I found myself wanting to develop a writer's checklist for myself and for my students after reading Bazerman's article, “A Relationship Between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model.” I find the information that Bazerman presents very compelling because I have a cousin who laments her high school students not knowing how to read. Also, as a blogger, I find that Bazerman’s “conversational model” makes a great deal of sense in that medium as well.

First, Bazerman doesn't assume that students know how to critically read a text. Sure, students will know how to read by the time they get to college, but he's saying they may not necessarily know how to critically read a text by annotating, questioning, reacting, and analyzing what an author says.

Second, Bazerman’s concept may need some unpacking for an audience of college students, for it would be easy for college students to automatically assume that they know how to read and yet fall short in understanding and, most importantly, evidencing this critical reading ability on their own.

To unpack Bazerman for students, I would explain the conversational model as:
1. Read first for understanding. (Ask yourself: what can I learn from this person? Annotate content.)
2. Read second for reaction. (Ask: What does this mean? Annotate response.)
3. Write a reaction statement and reconcile #1, #2, with what you know on the subject.
4. Write an evaluation where you use #3 in combination with additional research you do to "compare the claims and evidence of a number of different sources" and identify places for comparison and/or points of contention.
5. Identify an issue in #4 that you would like to develop further and write a description of the problem.
6. Consider what information your audience may have read and determine if additional explanation or analysis needs to be done.
7. Begin with #1 again with new sources.

From reading this article, I learned that we can teach students to enter academic conversations by teaching them to read critically, paraphrase, summarize, and analyze rhetorically. Two additional points of clarification I'd like to add are the need to teach students to think critically and quote judiciously. I believe thinking critically underlies Bazerman's 'conversational model,' and learning to quote judiciously is part of the process we will have to discuss and teach our students.

One of the ways we can very teach students how to quote properly is to teach them to integrate their quotes into their own writing and not let them get away with simply sandwiching a quotation between two sentences, especially like I did it in this sentence.

Note: What I did above by linking the action part of the sentence was a literate move as far as web writing, but for essays, I would be better off writing more formally. For example, Thanks...Zombie points out that one of the things he finds most frustrating about student writing is when students "simply plunk the quotation down between two sentences of [their] own composition" without integrating the quote within their own writing (link).

Oh! oh! -- stay with me here -- I've thought of a way to describe this on a practical and somewhat humorous level. Take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You can't just spread peanut butter (your own sentences) on both pieces of bread (paper) and put some jelly (quote) on top so that the jelly is sandwiched between the bread and peanut butter. You must mix the peanut butter and jelly together (integrate the quote) before you spread it on the bread. Even so, you must make sure to drink enough milk so that the peanut butter doesn't stick to the roof of your mouth or your reader's mouth. That is, you must prove why this idea is significant and answer the 'so what?' question (why do I want to eat PB&J when I could have a BLT?)".

I've just noticed that in my unpacking of Bazerman, I have also, partly, unpacked the "vessel model" that the English department has decided to adopt next semester. #3 above fits the write a paper that engages with one text criteria. #4 fits with the write a paper that engages with at least 2 texts criteria. And, #5, #6, and #7 could easily describe the third vessel in which students write a paper that engages with 3 or more texts. What this tells me is that I (and my students) may be better served if I design my syllabus so that one formal paper assignment builds on the next instead of having them write 3 distinct and different types of papers.

Additional Readings

Sorry for the delay in posting these, folks. Sometimes things slip one's mind, especially when the weather is so nice and beckons one away from work. So don't sweat these readings. But since they're really quite short, I hope you'll have a chance to at least glance at them a bit before class on Wednesday.

(1) Web Companion to Ulmer's Internet Invention (see especially his pedagogical statement, which includes not only the initial statement of goals but also all the links at the bottom of that page)

(2) Is Blogging Good for the Brain? (A blog post from an educational blogging enthusiast: all his other blog posts make good reading, too)

Study Skills

Check this link out for fresh study skills: Dealing with a legacy brain at Creating Passionate Users. The tone of the post would be well-suited for sharing with students. She sums up the issue nicely here:

For learning, one of the best things you can do is whatever it takes to convince your brain that what you're learning is life-threatening or life-saving. What does your brain think is important? Novelty. Surprise. Sex. Danger. Shocking things. Stories. Human faces. Pleasure. Things that make you emotional. Things that move you, and things that cause you to move. Things that cause you to think deeply. Solving puzzles. Stories.

(found CPU via Random Thoughts)