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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Embracing WRITING Embracing Writing responds to the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in a way that enables educators to integrate writing into their courses not just painlessly, but productively, instead of simply increasing their workloads with writing assignments that students dislike. Embracing Writing elucidates the principles of academic writing and shows instructors how to integrate writing with course content, blending them to enhance and deepen the higher education learning process. Scholarly writing is a central part of the academic experience and, when used effectively, can be an outstanding pedagogical tool. The creative approach in Embracing Writing will have you looking at writing in a whole new way. Not only will your students appreciate the honest, nurturing, and fun writing assignments, but your own writing will improve as well. This is not a rulebook for writers, but a guided approach to viewing writing and content as one indivisible whole. Embracing Writing will help you: * Engage students in writing assignments that actually help them develop their writing ability * Understand what makes good collegiate writing and how it can aid in content discovery * Discover new pathways for your own writing so writing for publication and the classroom is enjoyable again * Develop a writing pedagogy that doesn't detract from core course content delivery There often is a disconnect between administrative demands for in-course writing and the inadequate training resources available to faculty members. Because most of us aren't trained as writers, we need a meaningful way to connect writing to our areas of expertise. Embracing Writing provides that connection.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Purpose
Shared Understandings
Audience
The Story of an Approach
Brief Overview of Contents
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1: Write from the Beginning
What Is the Writing Problem?
My Journey Back to Writing
What This Book Will Do For You
Structure of the Book
A Way Forward
An Exercise to Get Us Started
The Freewriting Habit and Quality
What About You?
Chapter 2: Plan with the Syllabus
Start Writing at the Beginning of Thinking
The Focused Freewriting in the Middle
The Structured Rewriting at the End
The Welcome
Nature of How Writing Functions in This Course
Grading
Assignment Design
Portfolio
Offering Work
Absences
Outcomes
How to Use the Syllabus
Chapter 3: Open That First Class with Writing
The First Minutes of the First Class
What You Can Expect
After the First Week
Making Two Copies
Moving on to More Focused Freewriting
First Things Freewriting
Beginning Again
Chapter 4: Daily Writing: Practice Before Polish
The Same Problem?
The Benefits of Daily Writing
How to Start It
Inventing Metaphors to Help Writers
Misapprehensions and Daily Writing Outside Class
The Subjective and Daily Writing
After Beginning
Chapter 5: Make Long Assignments Manageable for Everyone
Writing the Long High-Stakes Assignment
One Way to Plan for Brief Assignments
The Checksheet
Conclusions About Management
Chapter 6: Prepare for Rewriting
Why Distinguish?
Revising and the Classroom
Rewriting in the Classroom
How to Start Your Rewriting
How to Start the Class Rewriting
Building More Examples in Class
More on How to Deal with Error
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Offer Feedback for Classwork
Responding to Low-Stakes Writing: The Postwrite
Managing the Workload with Freewrites
Tactile Learning and Responding
Feedback in Mini-Workshops
Reading Out Loud
Working Group Workshops
Preparing Writers and Readers
A Structure for Learning Rewriting
Chapter 8: Giving Feedback During Short Conferences
Writing Conference and Workload
The Necessity of the Short Conference
Preparing Students for the Conference
How to Do Scheduling
“I Don't Have the Time for Individual Conferences!”
How to Arrange Your Office for Conferences
Conference Routine for First Drafts
Conference Patterns
Supporting Student Writers
Alternatives to Conferencing
Chapter 9: The Finals: Portfolio and Conference
The Finals Defined
Self-Assessments
The Contract and Writing Quality
Final Conference and Contract for B
Trial-Run Conference
Back from Exile
Typical Problems and What's Humanely Possible
Table of Contents in the Final Portfolio
The Reflective Introduction in the Final Portfolio
The Body in the Final Portfolio
Proofreading and Copyediting
Chapter 10: Offer But Two Cheers for Grading Writing
Bad Things Happen When Grading Is Applied to Course Writing
Grading as Contronym
The First Day and Grading
Communicating About Writing Anxieties
Grading Decenters Writing
Inductive Teaching and The-Best-We-Can-Come-Up-With Grading
Assessing Is the Better Option
Contract for B Final Grade
Assessment Recordkeeping
Fine Print in the Contract
Responses Appropriate to the Assignment
The Final Response to Grading
Ending to Begin Again
References
Appendix
Chapter 2: Plan with the Syllabus
Chapter 3: Open That First Class with Writing
Chapter 4. Write Daily: Practice Before Polish
Chapter 5. Make Long Assignments Manageable for Everyone
Chapter 6. Prepare for Rewriting
Chapter 7. Offer Feedback for Classwork
Chapter 8. Give Feedback During Short Conferences
Chapter 9. Finish What You Started: Portfolio and Conference
Chapter 10. Offer But Two Cheers for Grading Writing
Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Figure 3.1
List of Tables
Table 2.1
Table 5.1
Table 8.1
Table A.1
Embracing Writing
Ways to Teach Reluctant Writers in Any College Course
Gary R. Hafer
Foreword by Maryellen Weimer
Cover design by Adrian Morgan
Cover image : © Red Sky | Getty
Consulting editor : Maryellen Weimer
Copyright © 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-118-58291-6 (cloth);
ISBN 978-1-118-58378-4 (ebk.);
ISBN 978-1-118-58369-2 (ebk.)
FIRST EDITION
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
To my wife, Marjorie, from whom I've learned much, and still love much.
Foreword
How do I know when a book is really good? It changes what I do. A good book makes me think. It makes me want to share its content with colleagues. It makes me want to read more on the subject. But after reading a really good book I'm doing some things differently, and that's what happened with this book.
Like many faculty I've always thought that freewriting was kind of a waste of my time. How can you start writing when you don't yet have the ideas? What's the point of taking the mess and muddle in your mind and putting it on paper? How can this writing free-for-all contribute anything toward the polished prose of academic scholarship? And writing it by hand when I can key text three times as fast? How sensible is that?
I wasn't even sure it was a good use of student time. So many of them don't write well, and I'm suppose to encourage the writing equivalent of “Just Do It.” All those errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure they get to make freely and without consequence. And that's supposed to improve their writing?
Gary's book is big on freewriting. His arguments are well constructed and persuasive, but I still wasn't convinced—or at least I didn't think I was. Then one day in Staples I found myself buying three bright, spiral notebooks for 99 cents each. I slid mechanical pencils into their spines and put one in my purse, one in the car, and one next to my favorite chair. Without much conscious consideration, I started writing in them—here and there, now and then—mostly on current projects, a blog post, a book chapter, ideas for a presentation, feedback on a colleague's paper. The writing was as awful as I expected, although I was surprised by how quickly the ideas came when I didn't think I had any. I was also taken aback by how easy it was to clean up the muddle once I had it down. Even when I didn't look at the freewriting in the notebook, writing the real first draft was a breeze. Normally I experience first drafts as hard-fought battles against strong headwinds. Before too long I was back in Staples buying more notebooks.
Embracing Writing is a book that offers fresh versions of various ideas. Freewriting isn't a new idea, but how Gary recommends you use it in class and in your own writing is. He doesn't preach or hype about how well it and the other strategies he recommends work. He doesn't tell you to try them. But when you do, you discover that he's right, and you learn new things about approaches you thought you understood. I so appreciate books that get beyond rehashing the ideas of others, books that build new structures out of familiar ideas, and books that challenge conventional thinking about the way things are or the way we think they have to be.
The Writing Across Curriculum (or WAC) movement is a relevant example here, too. Its proponents have managed to convince most faculty that students need to be writing in every course—not just in their English and composition courses. It didn't take a lot to persuade most of us; we see how students write. But to many teachers adding writing assignments seems like one more thing “good” teachers are supposed to do. The WAC movement has helped, generating a plethora of writing activities and assignments that teachers can use. But to get students to take them seriously, most of them have to be graded. Teachers new to teaching writing have discovered that grading written work is a time-consuming struggle with disappointing results. It's hard to see much improvement in student writing, or there's no change in how fervently they disdain the activity. It feels like WAC and the rest of us are doing some wheel spinning.
Gary's observations about all this are provocative. He thinks the teachers now trying to improve student writing are often not all that in love with writing themselves. They have chosen fields where they can advance knowledge in labs, by solving problems or with other kinds of hands-on work. However, writing is used to advance knowledge in every field. Faculty who don't like to write still have to. Professional advancement often depends on it: publish or perish. Could they too be reluctant writers? Do they have trouble getting their papers started? Do they wait until the last minute before they begin writing, sometimes missing deadlines? Do they struggle with rewrites, find criticism painful, and handle it poorly? Could the solutions that Gary has discovered work well with reluctant writers in the classroom also work for their reluctant writer teachers?
Embracing Writing is about teaching students who don't like to write and don't do it well—that's the book's main focus. It proposes a variety of interesting ways teachers can improve student writing and their attitudes about it—ways that involve the role of writing in the classroom, approaches to rewriting (not revising, because Gary makes important distinctions between the two), ways of providing feedback, and a whole different orientation to grading. This isn't the way writing is usually taught, in composition courses or any other courses for that matter. But it's an approach that makes sense and one that offers options to teachers who are regularly or occasionally frustrated by their attempts to teach writing. They are options they may not have considered or perhaps should reconsider.
And this returns us to the intriguing subtext that runs through the book. Could these approaches help teachers who don't like to write or help any writer struggling with a writing task? For example, Gary recommends that students write in every class (beyond their customary note taking), and he encourages faculty to write along with students as he does in every class. His classes begin with everybody writing—maybe they're working on a thesis statement, maybe they're rewriting a sentence or paragraph, maybe they're jotting notes on the assigned reading, maybe they're answering a question or writing questions. And there is the teacher writing along with students—crossing things out, writing sentence fragments, occasionally misspelling. Whatever happens the rest of the period builds on or grows out of this first writing. Often class ends with writing as well. This shared writing experience makes the class literally and figuratively a community of writers who work together to support each other's writing endeavors. Being in that kind of community changes attitudes, gets students writing more, and ultimately improves their writing.
The content of this book rings with authenticity. It is a well-written story of one teacher's twenty-year journey to a new and quite remarkable way of teaching, a way that does encourage reluctant writers to embrace writing. There are memorable stories, like the book Gary wrote in fifth grade and conversations with students where he makes points that help them and us see familiar attitudes and writing practices from different perspectives. It is a book you'll enjoy reading and that will make you think, and it could very well change how you teach and write.
And yes, I did start this foreword with a freewrite—in the Detroit airport while waiting (none too patiently) for a delayed flight. Freewriting, as Gary proposes one practice it, is open to digression. Among the first-pass expression of possible ideas are tirades against winter travel and airline incompetence. The tirades took care of the tension; the first pass at ideas whacked out the underbrush and gave the better ideas room to grow. Thank you, Gary.
Maryellen Weimer
Preface
I welcome you to Embracing Writing: Ways to Teach Reluctant Writers in Any College Course, my response to a growing dilemma that many teaching faculty face as they exercise writing for learning in their college courses.
On one hand, I find that the faculty with whom I talk recognize writing as essential to their scholarly and professional responsibilities. They are the first to acknowledge that disciplinary knowledge is closely tied to rhetorical knowledge; that is, they appreciate that they must be able to write prolifically and competently about their discipline in ways that speak clearly to their colleagues and other audiences, such as their students. They know it isn't enough to dump information in the laps of their readers: They must also commune with them in interesting and profound ways. Making a professional finding takes on added significance when such scholarly work culminates in a journal article or a book, bringing its own reward in tenure, promotion, and professional recognition. In short, faculty value not only that they must speak with authority in their discipline but also that they must possess the requisite skills so that their writing accomplishes something. In other words, their writing must invoke readers to effect some change in them: agreements, disagreements, confrontations, denials, connections. Integrating writing and disciplinary knowledge are notions that faculty implicitly acknowledge.
On the other hand, that understanding—as genuine and as real to the discipline as it may be—can seem unreachable when professors try to integrate writing into their courses. In fact, college courses may be the worst place to learn how to do that kind of writing. At those sites, students interpret first efforts as finished products that deserve a grade, no matter how persistently their professors emphasize process. As faculty can testify, writers go through countless drafts, revisions, dumps, and rewrites—let alone feedback of varying helpfulness from colleagues and editors—that all work toward crafting their final products. This context is removed from most student encounters with writing. In its place is what students believe really matters: the transaction that brings about good high-stakes writing, they being unreceptive to final writing as a pastiche assembled from messy processes. Who can blame them for being reluctant to move into the full writing process when the grade is synonymous with the polished final version? Given the exigencies of the modern classroom, it's hard for faculty to create the incentive—let alone supply the time, circumstances, and feedback necessary—for a rich and integrated writing environment in their courses.
That teaching professors feel daunted as they face these intricate problems is understandable. Most teach content courses, not skills-based courses like writing. They don't have the time or the resources to design writing to carry that content. As one professor on a writing-across-the-curriculum committee confessed, “I'll tell you right now: I haven't the foggiest idea of how to teach writing. I know it's important, but I don't feel confident in teaching it.”
It is that dissonance I wish to span with Embracing Writing. Won't you join me in making writing a more meaningful bridge for learning in your classes?
Purpose
I wrote Embracing Writing not only to give teaching faculty the tools to make their students more effective learners and better writers but also to make those tools accessible and manageable to faculty. No matter their successes in using writing in the classroom or at their own writing desk, all instructors can become more compelling when they use writing for learning. To appropriate these tools, readers must recognize several things. First, they need to recognize the significant resources inside the actual writing process that, when embraced, will resolve problems students have with writing. I understand how circular this pronouncement sounds, but writing is powerful enough to solve its own problems when integrated fully into courses. Second, as much as learning is involved in this enterprise, there is an even greater amount of unlearning required. The negative outcomes of much school-sponsored writing—summarized in what I call the Writing Problem—jeopardize students' future success unless they are countered, and countered demonstratively, by an approach rather than just a series of unrelated techniques. Third, faculty who want to honor writing in their courses need to be shown ways to circumvent teaching writing as a second subject. This point may seem counterintuitive until faculty come to know the important (though neglected) epistemic qualities—those qualities that direct writing as learning—within writing itself that facilitate teaching course content to students. Last, faculty themselves can and should practice this approach to writing both in their responses to student writing and in their scholarship.
This book presents writing as the entry point to demonstrate that writers—professors and students—can teach and learn course content effectively and with an insight that gives shape to their learning. Both faculty and students know writing is not only something they must do but also something they must do well. This book gives faculty a method to effect that learning and to produce more self-conscious writers.
Writing Practices
Instead of beginning with sets of rules and regulations that appoint hit-or-miss outcomes, this book starts with typical writing practices. In themselves, these practices are empowering, teaching creative options that open pathways to more powerful writing. For example, this book positions low-stakes writing opportunities for students to give them scaffolded practice with the kinds of writing they will need to produce when the stakes grow higher. It also allows for better teacher intervention while students are shaping their writing rather than professors delaying feedback until the process is completed and the final grade assigned.
Taken individually, these writing practices are not new, since writers instinctively pursue writing as craft. At the same time, writers secure a process that faculty typically ignore or are discouraged from integrating into their courses because they fear the workload involved. This book's approach gathers writerly practices together with what good faculty are already doing expertly: teaching course content.
Shared Understandings
What is available when both you and students write are better opportunities for writing together, ones that you can embrace because this book's approach centers on four understandings.
First, students and faculty must share a similar attitude toward writing. That is, they must be convinced that writing is a uniquely effective way of learning. I remain convinced that the kinds of writing activities I advocate in this book bring about better writing because students are encouraged to take great risks to bring about greater learning. For example, the checksheets in this book emphasize effort in writing, summarizing tasks for students to explore so they can distribute the cognitive workload over several drafts.
A second understanding calls attention to how writing works by encouraging faculty to participate together with their students in its processes and products. For instance, the kind of low-stakes responses I encourage them to make opens up writing as a way to help students and themselves with writing dilemmas.
This book collects writerly habits for cultivation, encouraging faculty to build a routine for writing in their professional life and in classroom routine. The chapter on daily writing, for example, profiles one way to energize the writing of teachers and their students.
Finally, this book investigates a number of writerly practices for the college curriculum by developing a repertoire of strategies that help students gain mastery over their writing. These practices have the added benefit of uniting faculty's professional life with their pedagogy.
Workload
I am particularly aware of many faculty members' reticence about teaching writing, compounded by the prospect of ever-increasing teaching workloads. At teaching workshops I've attended and in others I've led, the most frequently requested workshops all centered on writing in disciplines outside the English department: how to require, grade, and survive it. Within those same workshops are the zealous participants who need to make their sponsorship of classroom writing practical and easily implementable.
I address many of these concerns because they were mine when I began teaching writing twenty-five years ago. For instance, in the first chapter I show what writing activities faculty should privilege in apportioning their time and which ones they should demote. I'm giving fair warning now that I am a huge fan of conferencing and copious feedback. But I'm an even bigger fan of integrating those activities into a course without increasing workload. Such integration makes writing as a tool for learning manageable and enjoyable.
Audience
My primary audience is higher education faculty in any discipline where reluctant writers are among their students, including those
committed to developing students' writing skills but who may hesitate because of the increased workload.
who are trying to use writing in their courses but do not possess specialized training.
who do not embrace writing and recognize a similar attitude in their students.
who rate their own writing skills as weaker than they should be.
who are unsure of ways to teach content through writing.
who have been using writing in their courses, perhaps even for years, and would like an integrated and more manageable approach.
already teaching writing-intensive courses as part of a program, such as writing across the curriculum.
In addition, this book reaches across divisions that historically mark those with tenure and those without, who teach part-time, who teach composition, and who teach beginning students in first-year seminars. They are all writers whom I speak to and support in this book.
Another audience includes writing program administrators who are responding to the growing trend among colleges and universities to assign first-year writing courses to new hires, regardless to what academic department they owe allegiance. For example, a new faculty member in anthropology may be required to teach a first-year writing course within her field. I count this community among my audience.
Perhaps more than ever before, faculty are responsible for advanced disciplinary courses or capstone courses that include high expectations for written work. They feel pressured to design writing assignments even though they may lack the knowledge and experience to place these assignments within a larger writing pedagogy. Welcome aboard!
I recognize that my descriptions may be unusual, but then again, so is this book: an approach that capitalizes on writing as an instructional tool that also benefits faculty's own writing. My intent is to make writing much more embraceable!
The Story of an Approach
My student days prepared me for the opening years of my professional life as a professor and reluctant writer. I took on any writing project with trepidation whenever I had to use writing in my teaching or as the capstone to my scholarly projects. I knew I was not alone. Some of my fellows described the feeling as inertia, a shrinking from the commitment that writing commands. For them and for me, writing became an infinitely complex process, and teaching with writing, an intolerable complication. Both impeded my own writing process. I just couldn't write: my encounter with the writing problem.
Yet I now use writing in all my teaching, and I write every day, with and apart from my students. What happened? That is the story of this book.
Brief Overview of Contents
In Chapter 1, I tell how a simultaneous crisis in my teaching and in my writing found aid only after I worked my way back into the life of a writer. In Chapter 2, I focus on writing a syllabus that invokes a student audience since it is the first encounter students have with a professor's writing. In Chapter 3, I take faculty through the first day of class with a series of discrete, brief activities that in Chapter 4 become the basis for the writerly habits in the course. Those activities, when strung together, become the basis for the longer assignments I discuss in Chapter 5, making rewriting, as opposed to revising, possible, the subject of Chapter 6.
Different modes of feedback comprise Chapters 7 and 8, particularly how to make such effective for students and manageable for professors. Chapter 9 addresses the last things in a course that privilege writing: final portfolios and conferences. Finally, Chapter 10 focuses on how to grade the writing processes and products of the course. The spirit of this book doesn't end with its final chapter, however. The approach I share can still be written as professors practice a method rather than a series of unrelated canned techniques.
When I look back now, the approach I advocate looks obvious. Yet my experience and those of my colleagues convince me that the obvious in teaching is not nearly so obvious after all but is the core of inductive teaching, which unites writing with course content. In these pages, I'm happy to share the not-so-obvious, not as an unrealistic wrap-up with every loose end tied tight but as a continuing thread that revisits where it started: with an embrace.
Embracing Writing: Ways to Teach Reluctant Writers in Any College Course shows learning and writing are longitudinal, lifelong processes, made feasible—and enjoyable!—by integrating them with the content faculty already teach.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful for the invaluable assistance of two wonderful writers. Maryellen Weimer, who initially encouraged me with this project, gave me a nuanced reading to a very early draft. I could not have completed the book without her. Equally encouraging and insightful was my wife, Marjorie Maddox Hafer, a writer whose giftedness in writing and every other subject I can think of overshadows my own.
I belong to a community of great writers at Lycoming College, and I want to acknowledge Sascha Feinstein in particular for the practical advice he offered to me as a fellow writer. David Rife provided me early feedback that helped shape important sections later in the process. I am always amazed at the writing abilities of my colleagues.
Of course, I am indebted over many decades to my many teachers and students who taught me so much about the patience necessary for good writing and learning, but especially for this advice: practice what you preach.
Any shortcomings in this book, however, are exclusively my own.
About the Author
Gary R. Hafer is the John P. Graham Teaching Professor at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where he teaches writing to students from all disciplines. His short studies on writing instruction have appeared in College English, Journal of Developmental Education, Teaching Professor, and Computers and Composition. Hafer is also production design editor for Brilliant Corners, a journal of jazz and literature. He lives in Williamsport with his wife and two children, Anna Lee and Will.
Chapter 1Write from the Beginning
As professors, we love learning. It is something we enjoy doing, and we do it well. When we share our learning with colleagues, we explore anew much of what we have investigated, through writing, in professional journals, and conference papers. Slowly, over a long period of time, we acquired writing skills valued in our disciplines, not by listing precepts to be slavishly followed but by example: practicing our own craft as writers, building from examples to those precepts. We have observed how other writers we admire in our profession do their writing, and if we were lucky we may even have seen how these writers went about fashioning their writing—how they invent ideas, where they write, which technologies they use, and the like. In such situations, we learn much because it is always instructive to see how mentors produce writing rather than to speculate on their composing process when we have only final forms: essays, articles, books.
But do our students share in those same learning experiences? Are they euphoric with their writing in the disciplines, seizing writing as a way to discover, to ask deeper questions, to study through problems, to find out what they don't know? In my thirty years' experience as a writing teacher, and as much of the professional literature demonstrates, only a few students come to a general education class eager to write.
Nevertheless, how can we improve on their experiences? We may justly feel ambivalent adding value to their encounters with disciplinary writing: What kind of commitment will such a workload require of us? Does it mean more grading? What kind of assignment design will it demand? How can a writing assignment be designed so it is enjoyable for students and us? At the same time, as lovers of learning we cannot help but be concerned with the weak writing we see pass our desks every day and the great gulf that spans our experiences with powerful writing and theirs.
On the other hand, can those experiences be much different from ours, especially their school experiences? My colleagues regularly observe that it is so easy to become buried in the busyness our professional life demands that inventing new and invigorating writing assignments is too burdensome. And the burden didn't just appear. When we entered the teaching profession we were thrust into writing committee reports, institutional assessments, and scholarly papers. Not long thereafter, we were probably asked to teach a course in our discipline that requires a good deal of writing. The pressure builds. The enormity of those competing tasks at hand can quickly diminish our joy in writing. If we step farther back, we can even see ourselves joined with our students in their experiences with writing. We can even feel like students in these circumstances when—if you're anything like me—your history with school-sponsored writing as a student has been mixed.
But perhaps you lack confidence about your own writing skills. You may feel like a decent writer, but teaching writing in your discipline seems daunting and even frightening. You may value writing in the classroom but ask, as one of my colleagues does, “Who am I to teach writing? I just don't feel qualified. And even if I did, I don't have time to teach a second subject.”
If the difficulties seem insurmountable, the benefits of using writing in a content course seem miniscule. What can you expect if you bring a fuller-bodied writing into your classroom and into your professional life? Specifically, what can you anticipate, as a professor in a content course, from reading this book and participating in the approach I advocate both for your own and your students' writing? Very little, unless you covet a passion and energy for writing itself.
If you have that exuberance already, let me invite you into ways that can sustain or even increase that love for your own and your students' writing. If you lost that passion in the busyness of your professional life, let me help you recapture that first love. If you have never known that deep passion for writing—or know it only as an acquaintance—let's move together through this book to secure that closeness to writing in the same way you have for learning. In short, wherever you are in your journey with writing in your profession and in your pedagogy, this book is written for you.
How can I be so sure? Because like you, I share in the Writing Problem.
What Is the Writing Problem?
Even though I savor the times I reserve for writing and often find composing joyful, I haven't always enjoyed the pathways to writing that my elementary school teachers taught me to tread. Straightjacket outlines. “Correct” prose. “Think carefully before writing.” Those high-stakes goals always eluded my grasp. Even now, I still have to untangle long arguments, work hard to synthesize a committee report so that the document sounds like it ascended into one voice, or pause over starting a single e-mail. But now these occasions are less frequent and more readily repairable. Part of that is because of greater experience. But experience doesn't explain everything. I like to walk to the college and have been for a good deal of my tenure there, but I don't think I'm a better walker to school than I was ten years ago. Something else entered into my stride.
With that greater experience—that is, the longer I teach and the more I write—I identify more closely with the struggles of many of my colleagues who do not find writing enthralling. Moreover, I have found another community that writes and grapples with the same writing difficulties: my students. Though we may vary in magnitude—whether we agonize or are blocked or hesitate—we unite in the same dissonance: the need to produce effective writing yet the failure to attain it by willpower alone.
This puzzlement is what I call the Writing Problem, and it has four components.
1. Through schooling, students conclude that good writing equals an absence of error, an inference they base on feedback from their previous experiences with school-sponsored writing.
In Vernacular Eloquence, Peter Elbow observes that most students learn to read from hearing their parents or guardians—or someone who loves them—read to them regularly. They learn to write, however, within the sterile environment of school and from someone outside their family (Elbow, 2012). I would add that during those early encounters with writing in school students learn—and they learn it well—that their school-sponsored writing is incomplete without teachers marking up their papers. In such environments, students initiate writing only when they deem it is worth doing, when it is available as a receptacle for correction—marginal notes, special symbols, and terminal comments. Good writing, in such a view, occurs when something is absent: teacher corrections. But such absences are rare. One conscientious colleague I know carries mountains of student papers home every weekend to “correct.” As she reports, “I see so much bad writing. I feel guilty if I don't mark everything I see.”
I discovered that uneasy status of school writing firsthand in fifth grade when I sponsored my own writing project, for which I reluctantly recruited my English teacher into my audience. Since my parents were not avid readers, she was the only adult reader I knew. My novel, The Great Alaska Mystery—the product of a full year of drafting on a Royal manual typewriter with persistently stuck keys and overinked o's—was enthusiastically received by Mrs. Ruttenburg. After I tentatively offered my unsolicited book to her, she asked her colleague in the art department to construct a hard cover and bind the pages of my manuscript to make a “proper book.” Every week or so I would ask Mrs. Ruttenburg if I could be excused to travel down the long hallway to the elusive art room to check on the status of the book binding. I could hear my heart beating heavily as I struggled to produce my question to The Artist. And then finally, after weeks of silence, there it was, mystically appearing on Mrs. Ruttenburg's desk: a beautiful hand-bound volume, black stitching on the spine. The art teacher had drawn a green outline of Alaska with magic marker, along with parallel interior lines.
“Very art-like,” I thought, overjoyed. “A proper book.”
And it was beautiful. When I opened it, however, I immediately saw the splash of color: the teacher's red pen branded its pages. The burning marks pointed to punctuation mistakes marked for dialogue, rules I didn't even know that suddenly appeared and were quickly applied. The sweetness and bitterness I experienced was hard for a fifth grader to process. It's still hard.
I struggle to this day with what the teacher actually taught me about my writing: perhaps that it's not worthy of a book but let's make it into a book anyway? My embarrassment at having made so many errors overshadowed my joy at having my loose pages bound as a book. The teacher told me later that my yearlong effort had inspired many in the classroom to write their own books.
“Jonathan started one today,” she beamed.
The other students never finished, however. And we never returned to the subject of writing in that classroom again. My writing produced no lasting, edible fruit. However, the red stains remained.
Is it any surprise, then, that our students come to us with a developed avoidance strategy concerning writing? Even some of the brightest students, such as the entering class from Stanford University, arrive as “pretty confident writers” but find that confidence “considerably shaken” after their first year when college exposes them to a broad range of assignments and genres (Haven, 2009).
Students communicate effectively every day in acts they don't think twice about initiating—sketching, painting, doodling, talking, blogging, messaging—without teachers assigning subjects or composing prompts, in and out of school. Unlike their school-sponsored writing, these acts are prolific, are part of their lives, and do not require a teacher-audience. This writing accomplishes something for them: it has legs and brings about some change, no matter how great. Students participate in all sorts of self-sponsored writing, even though they and their teachers may not acknowledge it as real writing.
What if we could harness that inventiveness for school-sponsored writing?
2. As a rule, school-sponsored writing equals high-stakes writing.
Teaching writing, especially in a content course, is difficult. Seldom are there pay rewards. There are workload incentives to avoid writing too, such as its heavy grading demands. Then there is the issue of training. I've heard some faculty declare quite openly, even among writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) committee members, that they have no business teaching writing. They confess that they serve on writing committees and teach WAC courses because they feel administrative and departmental pressures to do so. They meet their professional obligations, but they can avoid the compartmentalized writing course when they can. Who can blame them?
Writing in school settings seems to invite resistance. Very early in my career, I remember discussing our students' collective hatred of writing with a colleague. I lamented how students confessed their horror stories of school-sponsored writing. Yet, one had really shocked me that day: A freshman reported that one of his teachers never returned his major research paper because, the teacher admitted at the end of the year, he had written “unkind messages on it” and crumbled the student's paper in anger. How could I possibly reach this student now with how writing could be joyful? I told my colleague I was frustrated to teach those courses where writing was the cornerstone, a foundation students worked eagerly all semester to dislodge, no matter if the whole building would topple.
In that struggle, I told him, I was exhausted: “Why can't I just teach a few English courses?” I laughed.
He laughed too, but for another reason. “I hate writing too,” he blurted out. “I do it, yes, because I have to as a scholar, but I certainly don't like it very much.” And this confession came from a literature professor!
I think he overstated his case. I know many, many colleagues throughout our profession who enjoy writing. But my friend's comment made me think of all the ways I avoid a particular kind of writing: where the stakes are high, the cost is great, and achieving success is rare. When I first started teaching, I concocted excuses for why I didn't write. For example, I reasoned I couldn't write in my office because it was too noisy; the library, on the other hand, was too quiet. How could I possibly work on a long project when I had no extended block of uncommitted time or on small ones since my days were fragmented? Of course, if I would get a topic, I promised myself, I would be in a position to write; however, I didn't have an immediate subject, so any writing done now would be premature, even wasteful. After all, my first job to my students was as a teaching professor and the second as a writer who writes. This scaffolding served me many years.
I persisted in that view too because I knew I was not alone: I was in the company of a population who do not write readily and enthusiastically and by choice in school: our students.
Many faculty wrestle with writing in the same ways their students do. Yes, they write—as our students write—but are equally compelled to write for high stakes. For faculty, high-stakes writing means promotion, scholarship, and other professional gains—if they succeed. For students, essay examinations and research papers mean better grades and even better jobs—if they succeed.
Even for faculty who do write regularly and do it well, they still face, at times, internal resistance, a critic that voices doubts throughout their writing. It can stop them from finding meaning or starting from a blank sheet. It can occur anytime, too, unpredictably, and even when faculty writers want desperately to generate it.
As a result, both students and faculty have plentiful incentives to avoid it, procrastinate over it, and sometimes grow into a stance where they hate writing.
3. The pressures inherent in high-stakes writing alone persuade faculty and students that low-stakes writing is not worthwhile.
Students are incentivized to see only writing that's graded as worthwhile and, even then, only writing that supposedly records what is already mentally planned. Academic culture encourages professors to think that only work that has passed the grading of referees and editors in a disciplinary field is worthwhile. Thus, student and faculty writing communities face the same attitudes that high-stakes-only work affords—anxieties, impatience, fear, and even hatred of writing. In many ways, we are knotted together as one community in the Writing Problem.
In school environments, it is common to hear both faculty and students talk similarly about writing. Next time, listen for the parallels in the way both describe missed deadlines, whether it be student papers or scholarly journal submissions. How do they explain their unedited final drafts, whether research papers or dense faculty committee reports? Or perhaps you will hear both discuss the declension of their “underwritten” essays, whether it is students who pull all-nighters or faculty who compose just-in-time journal articles. Maybe you have caught yourself sounding like your students when freely discussing your own writing with trusted colleagues. I know I have.
At the same time, I hear very little discussion about low-stakes writing within school settings. In serving many years on a WAC committee, I notice faculty have difficulty designing assignments in writing-intensive courses that are informal, or low stakes. Even then, there is the difficulty of how they fit into a high-stakes writing regiment where grading is the centerpiece. At the same time, I also have students wanting to show me the low-stakes writing they produce on their own—their fan fiction and blogs—but they lack their instructor's permission or the skills to bring that kind of writing into coursework. They are experimenting with low-stakes writing on their own.
How much better our pedagogy would be if we could transition students—and our own writing—from low-stakes to high-stakes writing.
4. For both faculty and students, writing often occupies an uneasy second-subject position in the content classroom.
Today, there are many associated communities trying to mimic WAC successes, such as initiatives for diversity and information and computational competencies. Yet the proliferation of these other skills and competencies prods WAC to move beyond labeling courses as writing intensive into more integrative roles, as some have argued (White, 1990).
I recall one faculty member in the sciences who confessed he “had to teach writing because the writing in his classes is so bad” but who nevertheless questioned how specific techniques could fit into a comprehensive whole. New and junior faculty typically have to teach the assigned WAC course. In some universities, new hires must teach freshman writing courses within the discipline of their fields. It is easy, though unfortunate, to conclude that teaching writing means teaching a second subject, one that competes with the primary focus. One chemistry professor once complained to me in a faculty writing seminar that he had so much material to cover that he didn't have time to teach writing. I find similarly busy professors in all disciplines conflicted over their responsibilities to teach what they refer to as two subjects.
Within writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines programs at various liberal arts and general education colleges, writing morphs into an appendix to regular catalog courses. It can become distracting to have committees and commissions to promote writing, like designating W-courses, which in turn becomes a code for additional workload for both faculty and students. That those same courses are often taught without a writing emphasis reinforces a stereotype: that writing is a supplemental, secondary subject, complete with an extra chapter of assignments. It is common to hear students complain that the PSYCH 350 offering this semester is a W-course that requires an “extra” research paper.
What we need, instead, is an approach to teaching course content through writing, a manner that both honors the fullness of writing and makes it likable. That conclusion I faced in my own bumpy ride back to writing.
My Journey Back to Writing
I have a long life history with the Writing Problem. When I look back on my experiences with school literacy, I never recall seeing my teachers write. I thought keeping writing private was connected to the job of the professional, something writers were expected to do. Only amateurs like my fellow students should expose their unfinished works to the teacher and others in peer groups. To me, it was an unfathomable mystery of how writers produced writing, let alone good writing, since I had never seen it performed live.
Even in college, I wondered if instructors started out as badly as I did and, through rewriting, persevered to the good. Certainly when I heard writing talked about in the classroom, I never saw my teachers performing it for us. The closest I came was an instructor who demonstrated freewriting on the board, but it wasn't real writing, in my mind, and he never repeated the exercise again and never expected us to imitate it.
When I began teaching, I didn't change perspectives since I saw that most of my professors assigned to teach writing in their content courses or who felt professionally obliged to include writing nevertheless expended much effort to avoid it. I felt their pressures too, those that began with despising the assigning, reading, and grading required for writing courses. Then there was the time commitment! In effect, I came to see that I was teaching my students what I could not achieve. I had become, in essence, a nonwriting writing teacher. Over time, I felt quite comfortable dispensing pious advice that none, including myself, could follow.
I came to this conclusion when I finished a graduate degree in rhetoric and began teaching freshman writing courses full time. When I taught those same courses as a graduate instructor, I was writing research and reaction papers for graduate classes, so I was doing writing. At my first job, however, I didn't have even those extrinsic assignments. I reasoned I could wait on writing new journal articles and the like since I had a backlog of pieces gathered from those school-sponsored assignments, ones I could easily send out for publication later. Besides, I reasoned, I was now at a teaching institution where scholarship was nice but not required. My writing abruptly ceased.
When I spoke before those initial college classes, I didn't recognize my voice; I sounded like a teacher and not like a writer or even a teacher of writers. I came to studying a skill that I myself had ceased to practice. In my pedagogy, I found myself substituting other things, like heuristics and composing diagrams and theories of writing, but whatever space they occupied in the classroom, they always came at the expense of my daily practice and outside of a community I was supposed to be creating with my student writers.
