Students, Reading and Writing

Facilitating good student writing when the course’s main focus isn’t writing skills can be challenging, especially if there’s large enrollment. There are ways you can try to cover it — by pushing yourself to provide detailed marginal comments on papers, or by assigning students to write short, 1/2 page paragraphs that effectively answer a single question — but there are huge variables, depending on whether the enrollment is primarily majors or non-majors.

I think the best writing I saw from students, however, without teaching it — in other words, the writing that tapped into the skills that many had learned, but weren’t using — was from an exercise where I had them develop short answer questions (3-5 sentences) for mid-term and final exams in a class on Literature of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Students had to prepare three questions, and then refine them in peer review, having classmates sign off on at least two questions as acceptable, and rating their difficulty as easy, medium, or challenging.

I know that writing short answer questions isn’t something that’s conventionally associated with argumentative writing, but I was impressed with how clear and concise they were, and how the students displayed a really fine-tuned understanding of what made a question relevant, and what made it irrelevant. If I get a chance to teach such a class again, I’ll almost certainly try to use some of the questions that aren’t used on the test for short writing assignments, to see whether the results are different than what I guess I’d call traditional argumentative essay questions. In the test itself, the students gave answers that were direct and perceptive. I’m curious about whether they would approach a short essay of 2-3 pages differently if they knew that it was based on a question that they themselves had developed.

I suppose that this is an answer in the spirit of Barbara Fister’s response to 4Cs, titled “Why the research paper isn’t working”. I’ve been thinking about it and the Berrett piece all week, and they’re certainly affecting the sequence of assignments that I’m creating for my current class (a writing course linked with an introduction to political theory) for later this quarter.

My other strategy in this regard is to actively teach students that many of the writing skills I encourage them to adopt are useful outside of the discipline of English. Defining abstract terms can be a quick path to finding an arguable claim in many humanities subjects. Signposting, and writing directly about what a paragraph, or essay, is supposed to accomplish can make it easier for them to articulate what they’re trying to say. Writing a descriptive outline is a great way to check organization. Enough students stay in touch with me after classes end that I know that this works for at least some.

But I think that at heart, it’s also a space/technology issue. Undergrads aren’t encouraged, as far as I know, to develop any sort of archive for useful auxiliary materials. Though I think some schools are having students assemble a portfolio that contains work they completed across multiple years, that doesn’t usually involve keeping track of handouts that instructors provided that helped them grasp various writing practices — not coincidentally, the same ones that they seem to forget between our classes, and other classes. And dorm rooms are tiny, and feh! who wants to hang onto a single sheet of paper, even if it *did* provide a really useful set of instructions/examples for using the known/new contract effectively?

I know that we’d like students to internalize the writing skills that we teach them, but I can’t bring myself to be surprised that they don’t — not when our methods of transmission (in-class modelling, paper handouts that aren’t available online) are often fragile at best. I know that there are really useful handbooks for argument, style, organization, etc. — but I’m not sure that they’re effective vehicles of transmission — partly because they’re often expensive (I’m thinking of Joseph Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace); partly because there are so many of them floating around. And often, they’re assigned, but never actually used or referenced in class — just listed as supplementary reading, and as a resource. From what I’ve seen, students are much more likely to go back to a useful handout, one that was taught in class, and which had a specific purpose — than to consult a style handbook from two quarters earlier.

I would LOVE to teach an early fall start class that included a component on practices for archiving/organizing useful materials as an undergraduate student. Don’t know if it’d work, but I think there’s a good chance it’d help.

the thing i’ve always wondered: why does anybody think students can learn the skill of college-level writing in just two terms? (ignoring for the moment what ‘college-level writing’ actually means) where does this idea come from? and how does it persist in spite of constant, constant evidence that it can’t be true? seems to me we’re often making our jobs harder because we conflate our actual students with a form of imaginary student, who *of course* just ought to be able to pick up writing in two quick terms.

more on the imaginary student: http://tejackso.wordpress.com/

tony e. jackson

When teaching writing, I repeatedly address the misconception of course material as disposable knowledge. Even if the whole class agrees with my perspective one day, weeks later one or more of those same students will discuss “English papers” as a separate category that somehow doesn’t translate to other forms of writing.

But when I read passages from their accounting and biology textbooks, I recognize what those students tell me. Although many of the features I teach do translate, many students lack the highly trained eye to see past stylistic differences that come from disciplinary and even sub-disciplinary conventions. Some of those conventions are collectively reinforced bad habits, but others are necessary to those fields. And many students misinterpret those writing conventions as proof that what they learn in an English writing course has no bearing on the writing they execute for non-English courses.

So they learn what they need to learn in order to pass my course, and then they pack it away until they reach a certain level of understanding that gets them past that misconception — from what students tell me, usually by the end of the junior year. And then they start unpacking. And unpacking can take time.

Many students do not care about writing because they don’t get care about reading. How many people still read for fun? Reading is losing out to video games, computers and tv. By reading great books, students both consciously and sub-consciously learn what great writing looks like. Then after that, as in all things, practice makes perfect.

I need to start with the perspective underlying my comments. I thave been teaching English to international students with all levels of ability in English, and with content knowlege ranging from high school through professional degrees. I have also edited translated material writtten in technical, legal, and medical English. I am a voracious reader. I apologize for the staccato comments; I should be evaluating some student work.
Undergraduate students majoring in such diverse subjects as engineering, counseling, physical therapy, and business all arrive in writing courses and writing labs and want to develop writing skills for at least two reasons – to survive writing courses required by their major and/or to learn to write well enough to earn the extra money that is promised to those who are good at their profession AND write well. The over-worked, probably adjunct and therefore underpaid teacher is expected to be superhuman and help each individual student make the connection between writing skills and the particular requirements of their disicipline, yet every discipline has style requirements beyond particular methods for formatting and citing of sources.
When this undergraduate student opens a textbook, how’s the writing there? I have yet to be able to teach someone the mental shortcuts to understanding poorly written material. It can be done, of course, but an undergraduate is facing hundreds of pages of texts per semester, and sustained reading for thinking not just finding information is fast becoming a lost skill.
Another comment here mentions the writing assignments which appear in a syllabus. Some teachers give few or no suggestions to their students on ways to find the focus they want to choose in their topiic. Other teachers, for whatever reason, give no rubric or example papers for the student to analyse and model their own work after. Of course the students go underground for help!
Undergraduates who are using English as their second (or other) language have that additional challenge of non-native knowledge of general English and academic English. The Chronicle posted an excellent description by a “ghost writer” of academic papers, but marginal comments like “vague,” “too little support,” and such are not nearly as helpful to an international writer as an example or note might be — and the international’s paper is only one of the 50 or more students the teaching assistant or teacher is evaluating.
Basically, the more good reading one reads, the higher the possibility that decent writing will occur. While nothing is better to my soul than a well-written novel, undergraduates need to be reading a lot more good non-fiction writing in their writing classes. No matter their major, the first two years of a college education should be broad enough to touch on the arts and the sciences, or is that an out-moded concept in the business model world?
Excuse my ramblings.

Amen! Just want to add that “good non-fiction writing” is pretty much nonexistent in their K-12 experience, and pretty much non-existent in their personal lives. I remember when studying for the SAT being a bit puzzled by some of the reading comprehension exercises – they seemed to be excerpts of some kind of long essay on a single topic, and it didn’t read like a textbook; I just hadn’t ever encountered anything like that. I wondered if such writing was only invented for SAT questions, or whether there was some world of writing out there I didn’t know about yet. You can guess that my parents never subscribed to any magazines like Atlantic, New Yorker, or the like, where a layperson might get exposed to the long non-fiction essay. If all you ever see of non-fiction before age 18 is newspaper articles, Time/Newsweek, and high school textbooks, scholarly writing comes as a huge shock.

The educational system, through at least sixteen years, teaches writing as the presentation of word content for a grade. If the content impresses (or at least pleases) the teacher, the grade is good. Sometimes the grade is good because the teacher doesn’t want the hassle that might ensue from a lower grade.
Often the students are at a loss as to just what the teacher is looking for. They give it a shot anyway, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Either way, they’re glad it’s over, and they move on.
Some students might even learn that writing has something to do with expressing thoughts or ideas and even do a fair job if they happen to have any thoughts or ideas on a subject. But rarely are students taught writing as a form of communication, a process that focuses on the reader, not the writer.
The great bulk of student writing has nothing to do with communicating–or even expressing–ideas; it’s filling paper with stuff to get a (hopefully good) grade. And in that enterprise, the particulars of grammar and punctuation are little more than the hidden explosives buried indiscriminately across the vast plain the students have to traverse to come up with something close to whatever unfathomable thing it is the teacher wants. Why are we surprised that they fear and hate writing?
Perhaps if we started teaching writing as a tool of communication, we might get some buy-in and make some progress. Students might begin to understand that the writing process is in fact part of the thinking process, not a mere reflection of it.

In this type of market this is what happens, organic growth becomes difficult thus market niche acquisition becomes much more attractive.

It will be interesting to see how much longer the higher education market resists products that look and feel like consumer based applications that serve many of the same purposes (records management and the like).

What you describe with Blackboard is precisely why things must change. The days of large data processing organizations are over. Distributive computing is about end users being able to figure things out quickly and cheaply. Any product that requires a college to have a IT department devoted solely to supporting the product (or even mainly supporting products) days are numbered.

Remember the Chrysler/ Daimler “merger of equals”?  This should be interesting to watch. I hope the Higher Education community benefits from this merger.

When Exxon and Mobil merged, anybody remember getting better gasoline as a result?  Or cheaper?

This is obviously an important development with some far reaching implications