I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers

I Cannot Prepare Students to Write Their (History, Philosophy, Sociology, Poly Sci., etc...) Papers

Occasionally, one hears grumbling from faculty who assign writing in their courses about the apparent lack of preparation of students to successfully execute those assignments. They wonder what’s happening in the general education writing courses when so many students seem to arrive in without the skills necessary to succeed at college-level writing, particularly research-based analytical work.

As an instructor of first-year writing it can be hard not to take these things personally.

I do my best to help students succeed for the future writing occasions they’ll confront in college and beyond, but the truth is, I cannot properly prepare them for what’s coming.

Semester’s end causes me to consider why this is the case.

So, some thoughts on why I cannot effectively prepare students to write their (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) papers.[1]

1. First-year writing is only one semester long.[2]

2. The students are young or inexperienced or both, and writing is a skill that develops over our lifetimes, not a semester. We are all works in progress. The notion that a first-year writing course is a kind of vaccine that prevents bad writing going forward is a fantasy. (We do not expect this expertise of students in other types of writing courses. Having taken a single creative writing course, students are not expected to become published authors.)

3. Many students arrive in the college classroom with writing processes stunted by a near-exclusive diet writing in the context of standardized assessment. They are armed with the 5-paragraph essay and an ability to parrot existing information. The shift to writing analysis and argument is very very difficult, and a semester (or even a year) is not enough time for this to happen.

4. One of the biggest reasons students have a hard time writing analysis and argument is because they often don’t have sufficient subject and domain expertise about what is being argued. They can describe what someone else says, but don’t yet have the knowledge to build upon that information. I see this time and again in the analytical research papers I assign as students struggle to insert their ideas into debates they’re not yet prepared to join. If your (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) course is the first time they’ve encountered your field, they will struggle.

5. If I am successful, students exit my course armed with a flexible and adaptable writing process rooted in an analysis of the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, genre), but when they encounter a new genre they often regress, often in every dimension, even down to the sentence level.

6. It’s possible, maybe even likely, that students do not understand the genre you are asking them to write within. Inside of our own fields, we usually have thoroughly internalized genre conventions to the point that we don’t even think about them.

7. But to students, the genre of a (history, philosophy, sociology, economics, political science, whatever) paper is entirely new.

8. Actually, it’s worse. It’s not entirely new, but somewhat familiar, which means they will trot out the closest template with which they’re comfortable and try to use that. Rather than making choices rooted in a rhetorical situation, they fall back to “rules” that may or may not apply.

9. When faculty in other disciplines complain that students “can’t even write a decent sentence,” (likely true when looking at the actual assignments), the problem is not that students don’t know grammar and syntax, but because they are struggling badly with making meaning, and because they have no idea what they’re trying to say, why they’re trying to say it, or to whom, flailing commences.

I don’t mean this list as an excuse for unprepared or underperforming students. No one wants student writing to be better than the first-year writing instructor, but my time in the trenches tells me that we could be doing more to help students achieve success.

Occasionally I get asked for advice on assigning writing in non-English courses. I say the following.

1. Help students understand the genre they are writing in. They should know not only the genre’s conventions, but the source/rationale behind those conventions. For example, rather than commanding students use a particular citation style, help them see that a citation style is rooted in a specific audience need, that we cite sources so other scholars can come in afterward and check and respond to the work.

2. Rather than listing these conventions as rules, ask students to build them through a process of observation, inference, and analysis through examining examples of the genre. Make them confront all the dimensions of the rhetorical situation (including audience), so that when it is time for them to write, they know who they’re writing to and why.

These are not guarantees of success – as my own struggles teaching first-year writing attest – but they give us a fighting shot.

We can bridge some of the disconnect between what we want students to do and what they think we want them to do, but it’s up to us to build that bridge. And let's not forget that having students struggle is actually an excellent educational outcome.

But that struggle must be meaningful to students, and so even if they are defeated, they are better armed for the next battle.

Faculty Development and Student Learning Assessing the Connections

Faculty Development and Student Learning Assessing the Connections

William Condon, Ellen R. Iverson, Cathryn A. Manduca, Carol Rutz, and Gudrun Gillett
Foreword by Mary Taylor Huber
Afterword by Richard Haskell

Colleges and universities across the US have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students' learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess how students’ learning is affected by faculty members’ efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.

Source for Writing Assessment Best Practices

Dear Colleagues,

Can anyone point me to an easy-to-engage print or web source they've had success using to introduce people from outside R&C to best practices for writing assessment? I'm currently working with our Core Curriculum Director, a chemist, on a writing assessment plan, and this work so far has taken the form of catching her up on assessment practices in our field and how writing assessment differs from other assessments. I've shared chapters from important texts in our field (*A Guide to College Writing Assessment; Assigning, Responding, Evaluating*; etc.). Now I've come to the conclusion that a nuts and bolts article would really center our conversations. What's the best source (that's not a full book) for talking writing assessment to those who don't have a background in writing pedagogy?

Thanks, Matt

---

Barbara Walvoord's Assessment Clear and Simple is a good book for introducing non R&C folks to writing assessment best practices. Walvoord has a newer book, Assessing and Improving Student Writing in College, that would also be good for your purposes. I just did a review of this book and one of the books that's already been mentioned, Very Like a Whale, and I recommend them both.

 Cheers, Dan

Two WAC Books to Consider

Schön, Donald A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Schön, Donald A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc.

National Census of Writing

http://writingcensus.swarthmore.edu

Mr. D On Grading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fn_vAhu_Lw

On Writing, by John McPhee

Excerpt from Omission:

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

Except from Draft No 4:

First drafts are slow and develop clumsily, because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of a long piece on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly, and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.

One word to describe these two...meandering.

Free and Easy: A Rubric for Evaluating Everyday Technology

Free and Easy: A Rubric for Evaluating Everyday Technology

Before a recent school year, one of my oldest friends—who now teaches special education courses at a middle school outside of Detroit—shared his excitement of being granted a SMART Board interactive whiteboard in his classroom. The SMART board allows users to write in “digital ink,” mark-up electronic texts (such as Word documents and websites), and save the results for future reference or sharing. The company who produces the boards boasts claims of students’ increased engagement and motivation as a result of using the product ("SMART Technologies"), which undoubtedly translates into why educators like my friend and his school district were so enthusiastic to incorporate them into their classrooms.

 Though my friend had every reason to be excited (he’s an excellent teacher in one of the most underappreciated divisions of education) his news was barely off his lips before I began my protestation against SMART Boards. I provided every counter-argument I could imagine: SMART Boards cost more money than most school districts are willing to spend. They can be a teacher-driven technology, often too protected to be widely used by students in a consistently democratic fashion. They, like most new technology, may cause immediate excitement, but once the novelty wears off they’re likely to be used as glorified dry erase boards. As I continued, though, I realized the futility of my arguments; I realized, in fact, that I didn’t have any legitimate reason to offer why this technology couldn’t be used smartly and effectively in the classroom. Of course, there has been considerable research and discussion into the value (or not) of these boards (such as Stephanie McCrummen’s piece in a 2010 Washington Post article), but my kneejerk reaction came from one small detail my fellow teacher mentioned that is likely repeated dozens—if not hundreds—of times in writing classrooms across the country each year: through no fault of his own, he had no idea how he was going to use the technology to enhance his classroom. This small detail, it turns out, is not so small.

Eli Review's Lessons for Students on Feedback and Revision

Eli Review's Lessons for Students on Feedback and Revision

When Shift Happens: Teaching Adaptive, Reflective, and Confident Writers

When Shift Happens: Teaching Adaptive, Reflective, and Confident Writers

Did You Know? Shift Happens, 2014 remix

Summary or Paraphrase

Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 18:05:41 +0000
From:    "Nelms, Jerry" <jerry.nelms@WRIGHT.EDU>
Subject: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

Ran across a short description of the difference between summary and paraphrase that, once again, got me worrying over how to define these two actions in a way that is clear. The description is by John Manshire and can be found at Synonym.com, http://classroom.synonym.com/difference-between-paraphrase-summary-4704.html.<http://classroom.synonym.com/difference-between-paraphrase-summary-4704.html>

Manshire defines summary as "the process of providing an abridged version of an argument, narrative, or concept.  When one summarizes a text or other medium, the objective is to condense the whole of the text's content into a space that is more quickly digested while still presenting the object's central ideas or concepts in a clear and effective fashion." In short, it functions to condense/digest a "text" into its central ideas/concepts. But that begs the question, what ideas/concepts are "central." To me, the purpose of the text and the information/evidence used to support that purpose are central, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a definition that states that.

Manshire defines paraphrase as "recounting a source's primary material in words that are different than the original. It is essential, in paraphrasing," he continues, "to still communicate the central idea of the words, passage or text in question." For me, that definition just confuses matters. After all, summary, too, should be (would have to be) in words different from the original and also should communicate the central idea of the "text."

But Manshire does try to clarify the distinction:  While paraphrasing and summarizing are very similar actions, consisting of similar processes, they differ, he contends, in "their objectives." A summary, he says, is intended to be "a shorter form" of the the source material.  "Paraphrasing," he claims, "is not centrally concerned with length." This, by the way, contradicts what I learned paraphrasing to be. I was told a paraphrase should be about the same length as the original and should include all the major ideas/information in the original--a definition, by the way, that never made any operational sense to me. Under what conditions would I ever write such a paraphrase?  Manshire goes on to say that "paraphrasing is concerned primarily with the restatement of source material in a form that is different than the original." But so is summary, isn't it?

Reading Manshire's short description got me wondering if there is any real--that is, actually operational / functional--distinction between paraphrasing and summarizing.

I tend to fall back on Rick Wormeli's combination of the two in Summarization in Any Subject: 50 Techniques to Improve Student Learning (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005).  Summarization, he states, involves "restating the essence of a text or an experience in as few words as possible or in a new, yet efficient manner" (p. 2). Of course, this definition begs the question of what "the essence of a text or an experience" consists of," but I do like the allowance that length might not matter, if the summarization is "efficient." I think Wormeli captures what he means by "efficient" when he writes that summarizing is the ability "to read or perceive something [and] then make sense of it by manipulating the information, regrouping it, and applying it to a new situation" (pp. 5-6).

I assign students to write summaries and responses a lot--and I mean a lot.  As Wormeli says, summarizing is considered one of the most highly valued skills in today's workplace (p. 5)--and in the academy, too, I would add. So, being able to clearly define summary--and define it in a way that will transfer to other academic and professional writing situations--is really important to me. But I keep stumbling into a dilemma. I end up wanting my students to produce something in-between paraphrase and summary. I want them to articulate the purpose of the "text" they are summarizing / paraphrasing and to "outline" / "list" / identify the support the author of the "text" provides--and I don't want them to care about the length. I want them to care about producing a clear description of the purpose and support / most important information and ideas of the source. I've toyed with the idea of using "synopsis" instead of summary or paraphrase, but that label comes with some problematic connotations these days (i.e., brevity and associations with narrative plot).

I wonder if others of you grapple with this distinction--or, should I say, lack of clear distinction. Is there a really good description of the distinction between summary and paraphrase? Or is there a better label that captures that in-between form that has nothing to do with length and everything to do with capturing content?

Jerry

Gerald Nelms
Academic Director of Developmental Writing
Wright State University


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Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 18:20:21 +0000
From:    "Seifert, Eileen" <ESEIFERT@DEPAUL.EDU>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

The distinction that makes sense to my students has to do with the purpose of summaries and paraphrases. Summaries provide major ideas in condensed form; paraphrases restate the original in language that may be more approachable or comprehensible to a given audience or more suitable to the context in which the paraphrase appears. I don't think any definition can settle what ideas are central. So often that judgment depends on the needs and point of view of the writer and audience.

Eileen B. Seifert
Associate Director of First Year Writing
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, & Discourse
DePaul University

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Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 14:38:05 -0400
From:    UGAWritingCenter Park Hall <ugawritingcenter@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

Hmm... the way I've always understood the difference dealt more with
context. A summary is a summation of an idea or set of ideas. If I were
explaining Butler's idea of gender performativity to someone who was
clueless about it, I would summarize the concept by condensing the entire
belief into digestible points.

However, let's say I wanted to emphasize a key idea from Butler in that
gender is the sytlized repetition of acts, a paraphrase would be concerned
with illustrating that sentence with a mind for maintaining specific
choices the original author had. Basically, that sentence becomes the focus
of a reconstruction.

Essentially, we don't ask people to paraphrase movies or books for a reason
whereas we do asks for summaries of them. Summary is for condensing, often
of longer work, and paraphrasing is a reframing of a short piece. Hope that
makes sense.

Warmly,
Robby Nadler
Associate Director of First-Year Composition
University of Georgia

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Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 18:50:45 +0000
From:    "Maria L. Plochocki" <bastet801@ATT.NET>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

I always explain the difference in terms of the length of the source text: you paraphrase a short passage, usually up to a paragraph, but you'd summarise something much longer, even an entire book. But I do find that students often have these confused initially (that is, when I ask, for ex., in the context of using sources appropriately, they seem to think of them in synonymous terms).

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Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 14:39:30 -0500
From:    Galen Leonhardy <leonhardyg@ICLOUD.COM>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

Humm... I was once asked to write a short book on summary writing for Jr. high school students. Figuring out how that might be done outlasted the offer, but, eventually, I did write something up for the students in my college classes.

In a nutshell...

Seems like a summary is a recounting of content.  Paraphrasing is a restating of content.  Both use reorganizing. The summary, however, is reliant on paraphrasing, reliant on the process of restating. The opposite does not seem to hold true.  That is paraphrasing is not reliant on having the skills to summarize. Is that overly simplified or incorrect?

Thinking of uses and teaching the skills...

Summary is used in daily conversation all the time.  Take the recounting of a movie, for example. And it is a process.

Summary can be a complicated theoretical topic, too. For example, the connective range (similarity and difference) between summarizing and narration is mushy (more mushy than, say, the contact area between summary and paraphrase). Morality is established in the narrative summary of daily events: "so and so did such and such," for example.  And summary writing can be explained as a variation of narrative strategy (beginning, middle, end--plot and theme).

Paraphrase and summary are always have an antecedent.  They are both reliant on their antecedent and, therefore, don't exist without the antecedent. I suppose we could debate if that is true for all of rhetoric. The requirement of an antecedent is certainly an obvious characteristic of both summary and paraphrase, just as it is for pronoun use.

Summary is a method of development, a topos of sorts. It is also a tool. That is, Summary can be an aspect of support, for example. Summary can be identified and culled. It is a structural pattern. And a process-oriented approach can be used to promote increased versatility with the construction and integration of the structure.

Topics associated with Summary I enjoy contemplating...

Metameaning expressed in summary is quite interesting.  So is looking at audience considerations (register and the dialectic between overtly opinionated and objective/factual/academic). Thinking about summary might point toward both cognitive condition/capability as well as cultural expectation. And, accordingly, maybe talking about what we don't summarize could tell us much about what we fear.

Teaching summary and paraphrasing is interesting to think about, too.  In terms of constructing a Bruner-ish scaffolding, paraphrase can begin with sentence combining and restating a sentence shared in a group. Summary can begin with the recounting of a movie plot and move to an NPR article.

Thank you for mentioning summary and paraphrase.  As always, I have thumb typed to much about the topic and revealed too much about my inability to spot errors on my cell phone screen as well as the limitations of my scholarship.  Still, it was a fun topic.

With respect,

Galen Leonhardy

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Date:    Wed, 12 Aug 2015 16:17:35 -0400
From:    Scott O'Callaghan <scottjocallaghan@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else?

Jerry (and the List)--

A former colleague of mine in History used to tell me that he expected
students to be able to describe an event or a historian's argument in a
sentence or a paragraph within a larger work or as a full essay, delving
into detail.  For this professor, the ability to zoom in or zoom out was
important to his concept of discussing history and was reflected in how he
assigned writing in History.  I would tell him that I could see much the
same thing happening in quotes and summaries: that one could take pieces to
quote, that one could summarize smaller chunks of argument or summarize
entire books or whatnot.

A summary provides a more focused version than the original.  This could be
seen as more 'purely' descriptive or representative or as more interpretive
and argumentative (even while some would argue whether there is a
distinction between those approaches).

The paraphrase, I tell students, takes a certain kind of passage and makes
it accessible to a more general audience.  Think when a teacher
"translates" a passage from Shakespeare or a poem, rendering the historic
and figurative language into something more direct and more
understandable.  Paraphrases seem important when you don't want to leave
details out: contracts or legal language, medical language (think the fine
print on the TV advertisements for any medication), historical language, or
sacred language.

To my mind, too, the paraphrase is a select subset of the summary, used for
certain types of texts with certain types of purposes in mind.  In the
wild, we need to paraphrase less frequently than we are called upon to
quote or summarize.

Paraphrases also allow us to reorder long and complicated passages,
especially when we want to highlight key ideas. When I teach this idea, I
often hand out the opening sentence of the Preamble of the Constitution and
ask students to 1) identify the number of key ideas contained there, 2)
move ideas around into a new sequence that makes more sense, and 3) find
new language that is more accessible, and 4) count up the number of words
in the new version.  Then, we can compare what folks did, allowing students
to argue for what they thought seemed important or what needed to be
stressed.  I point out that in the middle of that sentence, one could focus
on defense and peace just as one could focus on liberty and justice.  The
order of those ideas can be moved around in a paraphrase, depending on what
one wants to do with that passage.


I hope this is useful.

Scott O'Callaghan, PhD
Columbus State Community College

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Date:    Thu, 13 Aug 2015 18:29:55 +0000
From:    "Nelms, Jerry" <jerry.nelms@WRIGHT.EDU>
Subject: Re: Summary or Paraphrase or something else

Virginia,

I guess I'm wondering if all this energy that we as teachers expend distinguishing between summary and paraphrase and teaching the distinction between summary and paraphrase is unnecessary, wasted effort? After all, how many successful writers actually consciously question themselves as they are writing, "Should I summarize here or paraphrase?"

In a resource I've written for my students, I point out 3 common reasons for summarizing: (1) as a learning strategy, a way of deepening understanding of a source; (2) as a form of note-taking that, hopefully, will take the place of having to return to the text to recapture what the summarized text says; and (3) as a written assignment, addressing readers, in order to inform them of the purpose and main points of a source--and demonstrate to the teacher an understanding of that source. There are, of course, other reasons from summarizing, one of the most important being to provide annotations for sources in an annotated bibliography. I prefer to hold off on introducing that genre until that assignment is given. By then, students will have had plenty of practice summarizing and we can, then, talk about how to condense even more.

I also point out that for the 3 common reasons for summarizing, given above, do not really have any length requirements or audience expectations of length requirements--unless a teacher gives those requirements. The first two reasons are self-motivated, and there is no reason to make such requirements. And so, in fact, I write, "It's important to remember that simply being concise is not what's important! Being thorough in your selection of what to include in your summary IS what's important!" And of course, I go on to add that in addition to "selection," the other primary feature of a summary is the use of one's own words--although, even here, I introduce flexibility. It is, of course, absolutely okay to quote from the source, especially when introducing key concepts used in the source. But quoting entire sentences can be okay, especially if the sentences are particularly memorable and/or might be sentences that you will want to quote in your own writing.

So, I'm becoming more and more convinced that the distinction between summary and paraphrase is not well defined, even by experts, that the distinction is unnecessarily confusing, and that we teachers waste our time teaching the distinction. Better to just call it all "summary" or "summarization" or whatever and focus on how it functions for writers and the process of how to do it.

Jerry

Gerald Nelms
Academic Director of Developmental Writing
Wright State University

Transcribing!!!

https://transcribe.wreally.com

bell hooks' teaching trilogy

Teaching to Transgress
Teaching Community
Teaching Critical Thinking

What on Earth Has Happened to Freshman English? (Ed White)

If you haven't been paying much attention, you may have missed a quiet academic revolution in one of the most conservative of disciplines: English—particularly, in the introductory writing course that almost all entering students were, and still are, required to take. When I taught my first freshman English course in 1958, we knew pretty well what it was all about: ask students to read literature and write on something related to it, mark with more or less severity any and all errors they committed, flunk those who didn't write well enough by our own definition, and complain—endlessly complain—about how terribly the students wrote. At the time, there was only one PhD program in what we now call rhetoric and composition, at Bowling Green State University, and there were a couple of journals published by the National Council of Teachers of English, focusing mostly on narratives of "what I do in class" and "how does it succeed." Along with the expressed goal of the course (to improve student writing), the freshman English course had several covert goals: to recruit English majors, to bar from advanced study those not comfortable with the college dialect, and to provide a minimal income to graduate students studying literature. Those teaching the courses were mostly graduate students in literature, and the program directors were literature specialists using the assigned administration time to write books and articles in their specialties. Anyone who took a professional interest in these courses was generally mocked and pitied.

Fast forward to 2015. The most recent survey—in Rhetoric Review, one of the twenty or more journals now flourishing in the field—shows sixty-five PhD programs producing well-trained teachers and scholars in the field who now fill positions as writing program administrators (WPAs—WPA is also the name of an important professional organization with its own journal) in higher education institutions of all kinds. The first-year course, no longer freshman English and more and more removed from English literature (in some institutions, from the English department as well), is now first-year composition (FYC) and often only one part of an extensive writing program extending from placement testing of entering students and a range of required first-year writing courses to upper-division writing requirements—often under the purview of a writing across the curriculum or a writing in the disciplines program and supported by a university writing center—and senior capstone courses usually involving writing in the major. The teaching of writing has recognized that most writing in this century is done in a technological environment and many classes submit work online, where peer review of early drafts is common, revision is routine, and e-portfolios determine final grades. And that first-year writing course, now well correlated with student success in college, is much more concerned with helping all students succeed than with getting rid of the unprepared.

Instead of drifting more and more to the periphery of undergraduate education, as some predicted fifty years ago, the writing program has moved more and more to the center. With writing recognized by teachers throughout the university as a student's chief means of learning and with students looking for more writing courses in schools of business, engineering, nursing, and the sciences, writing has come out of the shadows. The new scholars in rhetoric and composition now trace the roots of the discipline to Aristotle and Quintilian, with links to linguistics, educational measurement, developmental psychology, neurological studies, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as the more traditional connections with literature and the writing of poetry and fiction. International research has shown the varieties of dialects and language cultures that exist, with their different ways of developing arguments, citing research, and expressing ideas—concepts that are changing the teaching of English as a second (or other) language as well as FYC. Writing—thinking made visible—is now everyone's concern.

As I sit at my computer in retirement, I sometimes am overcome with wonder that the field I entered has—in one lifetime—so changed its content, its goals, its importance. Mrs. Grundy, that harsh figure of prim correctness, still exists, though in sharply diminished numbers, as do a few old-fashioned English departments, clinging to the requirements in force when I entered graduate school and based on the works of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton. But when we look at modern documents such as the WPA's Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (version 3.0, 2014) or the National Council of Teachers of English's 21st Century Literacies (2008), we realize that we have witnessed a startling change, comparable to the movement from astrology to astronomy or from alchemy to chemistry. Who would have imagined such a revolution when I started teaching?

http://www.upcolorado.com/about-us/blog/item/2816-freshman-english

WAC/WID Notes at RIC (Summer 2015)

Money

Why and what we want to get out of it?

First-year writing staffing

Utilizing writing center effectively

Incoherence of WAC program (and lack of accountability)

Is the writing board working?

Pieces:

Writing Retreats (faculty writing)

WAC

FYW (staffing)

Writing Center

Writing Board

1-2 pages (opening coffee hour)

·      What’s working, what’s not working?

·      Would could improve your unit?

·      What are your areas of concerns?

2472

969

3441

10875

WAC Resources

Pittsburgh State WAC/WID Best Practices

Writing Across the CurriculumA Guide to Developing Programs

Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers

Great Comp Quotes

Comp Quotes to Live By: What are we finding out? One point is becoming clear is that writing is an act of discovery for both skilled and unskilled writers; most writers have only a partial notion of what they want to say when they begin to write, and their ideas develop in the process of writing…. Another truth is that usually the writing process is not linear, moving smoothly in one direction from start to finish. It is messy, recursive, convoluted, and uneven. Writers write, plan, revise, anticipate, and review throughout the writing process, moving back and forth among the different operations involved in writing without any apparent plan. No practicing writer will be surprised at these findings: nevertheless, they seriously contradict the traditional paradigm that has dominated textbooks for years... (Maxine Hairston, p. 12, "Winds of Change")

To sum up: Writing is a complex act, integrally related to learning and knowing, and performs a variety of functions. It is not a discrete clearly definable skill learned once and for all; moreover, both in school and at work, writing is seldom the product of isolated individuals but rather and seldom obviously, the outcome of continuing collaboration, of interactions that involve other people and other texts. Writing practices are closely linked to their sociocultural contexts, and writing strategies vary with individual and situation. (Worlds Apart, Dias et al. p. 10)

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self confidence." -- Robert Frost --

The most valuable political act any teacher can perform is not to impose particular political views but to teach students to see the words that society tries to inject into them unseen. (Wayne Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher, p. 154)

"The teacher of writing, first of all, must be a person for whom the student wants to write." (Donald Murray)

George Cambell: rhetoric is the attempt to "to enlighten the understanding, to please the imagination, to move the passions, or to influence the will."

In the end, however, the underlying philosophical assumptions still seem less significant to me than the way in which a writing teacher answers this question: should a writing course be organized around production or consumption? It is around this very basic question that (at least) two paths diverge, and how a teacher chooses usually makes all the difference. (Lad Tobin, "Process Pedagogy", p 15 in A Guide to Composition Pedagogy)

Everyone teaches the process of writing, but everyone does not teach the same process. The test of one's competence as a composition instructor [...] resides in being able to recognize and justify the version of the process being taught. (James Berlin, "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories", p. 777 in College English, Dec. 1982)

Resources for Planning an FYW Curriculum

Resources for Planning an FYW Curriculum:

Melzer (book)
Beaufort (college writing and beyond)
Driscoll (transfer article)
Yancey et al (transfer book)
Wardle

Genre Analysis: The College Essay

See: Students and Money,in Their Own Words

Summer Reading (2015)

The following essays/articles were taken from the WPA thread, "Best essays in our field for new writing instructors"

• Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" 
• Don Daiker's "Learning to Praise" 
• Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries" (and the aforementioned "Ranking, Liking") 
• Michelle Tremmel's "What to Make of the Five-Paragraph Theme" TETYC 39.1 
• Margrethe Ahlschwede's "Writing to Save the World," from Moore & O'Neill's Practice in Context 
• Wendy Bishop's "Steal this Assignment: The Radical Revision" from the same volume 
• Kathi Yancey's "Reflection and the Writing Course" from Reflection in the Writing Classroom 
• Robert Brooke's "Underlife in the Writing Classroom" 
• Dawn Skorczewski's “From Playing the Role to Being Yourself” 
• Barbara Fister's "Why the Research Paper isn't Working" 
• Ferris & Roberts' "Error Feedback in L2 Writing Classes"
• Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University"
• Nancy Welch's "Sideshadowing Teacher Response"
• Peggy O'Neill: "From the Writing Process to the Responding Sequence." 
• "Nobody Mean More to Me than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan" by June Jordan, here
• Villanueva, Victor "Memoria Is a Friend of Ours: On the Discourse of Color"
• Brannon and Knoblauch"s "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response."
• Min Lu's "Professing Multiculturalism"
• The New London Group's "Pedagogy of Multiliteracies"
• Joseph Harris's "Revision as a Critical Practice" here
• The introduction to Corbett and Connors, *Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student.
• "From a High-Tech to a Low-Tech Writing Classroom: You Can't Go Home Again" here
• Audience addressed/Audience invoked (Lunsford/Ede)
• Dana Lynn Driscoll and Jennifer Wells, "Beyond Knowledge and Skills: Writing Transfer and the Role of Student Dispositions"
• Heilker’s “Twenty Years in: An Essay in Two Parts” paired with Adam Banks’s 2015 CCCC address, “Funk, Flight, and Freedom.”
• Jerry Farber’s “Teaching and Presence” (2008)

Teach in China

Date:    Mon, 27 Apr 2015 12:37:51 -0400
From:    Marcy Bauman <marcybee@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Teach in China this summer

Hi, everyone,

Are you interested in a short-term teaching experience in China?  For the
past 7 years, I've led a group of teachers to the Harbin Institute of
Technology (recently ranked #20 in the world on US News and World Report's
top engineering colleges), where we teach a three-week intensive English
conversation program to the school's Honors students.

This is a low-stress, high-impact teaching environment.  There are no exams
or grades; students have a relatively high degree of English speaking
proficiency, and so we spend most of our time engaging in cultural
dialogues. Harbin is a northern city with moderate (for China) summers -
temperatures are usually in the 80s.

Dates for 2015 have not yet been finalized, but the program will take place
during July (and possibly early August).

HIT provides:

* Round-trip airfare (reimbursed; you have to front the ticket)
* Lodging (with a/c and internet connectivity)
* A teaching stipend

Teachers provide:

* a valid passport with at least 6 months remaining on it.
* a visa (HIT provides necessary paperwork; visas cost about $150)
* 25-30 hours of instruction per week in a team-teaching environment.

If you have a Masters' degree, some experience with overseas travel, some
ESL experience, and a desire to have a truly AWESOME summer, then please
send me a letter of interest and a CV.

Thanks very much!

Best,
Marcy

Stats on RIC

Last Friday, Dr. Tom Schmeling and I testified in front of the RI House Finance Committee Sub-Committee on Education about how Rhode Island College students are suffering because of poor state funding for Higher Education.  Testimony from students about how difficult it is to pay for College, and how their lives have been impacted by working more than students at any New England peer institution, would be influential.  This factors strongly into Performance Based Funding, because the institutions of public higher education in the state will be evaluated by how many of our students graduate in 4 and 6 years, and yet in many cases work requirements (made necessary by difficulty paying tuition and making ends meet) limit students’ ability to complete 15 credits a semester (which is the norm required to graduate in 4 years.)

I quote here from Dr. Schmeling’s testimony last Friday:

"Since FY2008, Rhode Island’s educational appropriations per full-time equivalent student declined 24%, measured in constant dollars (SHEF p.32). 

In support for public higher education, Rhode Island ranks:

• 44th in the nation in educational appropriations per full time student 2014 (SHEF p.39).
• 46th in higher education funding per capita (SHEF p.46).
• 46th in higher education funding per $1000 personal income (SHEF p.46).
• 48th in the percentage of state revenue allocated to higher education.

As a result of declining state support, tuition at Rhode Island institutions of higher learning has risen 34.6% since 2008 .

• We are 45th in net tuition burden as a percent of total public higher education revenue. That is, we ask our students to bear more of the cost of their education than all but five states (p.33)
• Rhode Island is one of only six states where the student tuition burden is more than twice the amount of support provided by the state (p.33)
• In short, across multiple measures of state financial commitment to higher education, Rhode Island is consistently at the bottom of the heap. For those of us who believe that investment in public higher education is a key source of economic mobility for our citizens and of economic growth for the state, it is both disturbing and embarrassing to find that Rhode Island has sunk so low in state rankings on education funding.

These cuts have a clear impact on our students’ ability to complete a college education. For instance, significantly more RIC students have to work off campus to make tuition than at other New England Public Colleges. 31% of RIC seniors work thirty or more hours per week at off-campus jobs, a rate which is about 50% higher than for students at other New England Colleges . Students who must spend so much time working to pay for college cannot devote the time needed to achieve academic excellence. They have a harder time completing a degree in four, five or even six years, and they are more likely to drop out."

Dr. Schmeling is using the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association's State Higher Education Finance Report (SHEF).

Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. Its not there fault.

Stop shaming people on the Internet for grammar mistakes. Its not there fault.

I am a writer, which is why it’s particularly embarrassing that I sometimes type the word “right” when I mean to type “write.” Shouldn’t I know better? Just yesterday, I typed “there” when I meant “their.” And I’ll even admit that I’ve committed the most mocked grammar error on the Internet: “your” instead of “you’re” (and vice versa). And yet, I have stood by and watched on Twitter and in comment sections as people are pilloried for making these egregious blunders, knowing I’ve been just as guilty. I’ve even snickered when someone commits a grammar crime while writing a particularly objectionable opinion about politics or sports.

Calling out other people’s grammar mistakes has become such an Internet pastime that Weird Al Yankovic made a music video about it and a Twitter account called the Grammar Police has attracted more than 19,000 followers. The Grammar Police bot publicly shames people for making little language errors, such as using “hear” for “here,” and lets the world know exactly what grammar rule the offender broke.

But people don’t need to be corrected any more than they need to be ridiculed. I know the rules for how these words should be used and spelled, and I’m sure most who make these mistakes know them, too. What I really wanted to know is why we make these slip-ups anyway.

To find out, I spoke with Maryellen MacDonald, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies how the brain processes language. She said that even though your brain knows the grammar rules, other forces override that knowledge. The brain doesn’t just store words like a dictionary does for easy retrieval, it’s more of a network. You start with a concept you want to express and then unconsciously consider several options from its associative grouping and quickly select one. For instance, if you’re explaining how you hit a ball, you might cycle through the concept of a stick, a pole and a bat. Next, your brain will use sound to aid its expression. Here’s where things can get tricky.

“Usually we pay a lot of attention to pronunciation while we’re typing because it’s usually a really good cue how to spell things,” MacDonald said. But homophones can trip this process up. “When someone types ‘Are dog is really cute’, it’s not that they don’t know the difference between ‘are’ and ‘our’; it’s that the pronunciation of ‘our’ in the mind activated the spelling ‘our’ but also ‘are.’” Even nearby “hour” might come out, she said.

The brain doesn’t always consult a word’s sound, but studies have shownthat it frequently falls back on it, and sound tells us nothing about the difference between “you’re” and “your.” Research on typing errors revealsthat sound creates even odder mistakes, such as people writing “28” when they mean to type “20A.” It’s no wonder that people who know better will routinely confound closer pairings such as “it’s” and “its” or “know” and “no.”

Tom Stafford, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Sheffield who is currently involved in a massive study of Wikipedia edits to see what they reveal about how the brain processes language, told me that we usually get these spellings right less because we apply a rule than because of our brains’ wiring. “When you first start typing, you don’t have any habits,” he said, “and then as you become fluid, that skill is based on the assemblage of routines that you don’t have to think about.” Over time, motor systems allow you to act without belabored thought. But there’s a cost to being able to type 60 words per minute: Sometimes those habits steer us wrong.

For instance, if a friend texts that she’s “going to a concert” and you want to tell her you’re also going, you might type, “I’m going, to,” instead of “I’m going, too.” Your brain is used to hearing the word “going” followed by the word “to” (as in going to work/school/etc.) and it just saw the phrase used that way in your friend’s text. Conversely, in sentences that should end with the preposition “to,” people often write “too,” because that word more frequently concludes a sentence. Habit, usually so helpful, sometimes leads us astray.

We’ve long known that habits have the power to overwhelm intentions. In the 1880s, psychologist William James described the man who goes to his room to change clothes and suddenly finds himself undressed and in bed. “He began the routine correctly,” Stafford said, but then lost focus and did the more high-frequency action. In extremely grave cases, this slip from conscious intention into repetition of habit has led people to forget their children in their cars. In extremely trivial ones, they type “then” when they mean “than.”

Regardless of what you intend to do, “there’s this tendency for these high-frequency things to assert themselves,” Stafford said, “and that’s particularly true when you’re not paying attention or you’re in a rush. And when we’re typing, we’re always in a rush.”

Slips of the brain also create less common mistakes. Consider all these people trying to make a joke about calling 911 and inadvertently typing “call 9/11.” You don’t say the two the same way, but somehow the constant invocation of 9/11 helps it supplant the phone number. Or consider my fairly uncommon last name, Heisel, which for my entire life has appeared on name tags and forms as “Heisler.” That surname is not all that common,either, but it’s familiar enough that the brain’s autopilot often chooses it over mine. Similarly, professor Maryellen MacDonald told me, “I’ve been Mary Anne all my life.”

If we can mistakenly deploy words we rarely see, it’s no wonder that the basic building blocks of the language, such as “to” and “too,” would continually intrude upon each other’s space. We can take care to make sure the right one comes out, but, MacDonald said, “cognitive control is hard work. … It’s putting the brakes on something you would typically do.” As studies of attention show, you only have so much to go around before your mind falters.

Of course, people can and should proofread (a practice the brain complicates as well), but we can never fully curtail these slips that rapid-fire media like Twitter bring to the fore. Mocking another person for making one of them is like mocking a heart for skipping a beat. Errors are a routine part of our cognitive systems, as likely to happen to you as to me, as to that guy with the terrible opinions ranting beneath an article. And people certainly don’t need reminders of the simple rules by a program such as  Grammar Police, either. The bot is really just a reminder of the difference between the tidy logic of a machine and the wonderfully messy mental architecture of humans.

But if to err is human, so, too, it seems, is wishing you weren’t. Maybe the pleasure in following that bot is that it allows you to pretend, 25 times a day, that you’re perfect and other people’s foibles are not your own. Even people who understand precisely how helpless we are to avoid these little missteps can fall prey to this desire. MacDonald said she still ends up chastising herself when she realizes she’s made them.

And though she and Stafford helped me feel less shameful about committing these errors, my focus on them did nothing to stop me from making them repeatedly while typing this article. Sometimes, knowledge is powerless.