Fluent Essays

See attached and utilize this link: https://twu.instructure.com/courses/2919801/files/169850884?verifier=TPzCqmwb7DbjKna6mPU3Mez1bCXZg8L6wPqb837U&wrap=1 M Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review ADVICE Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong? Students understand why Barbie is sexist, but they can’t make their case in a coherent essay By Joseph R. Teller OCTOBER 03, 2016 y students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives, and I’ve had it. In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work — you name it — all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want to read. And as anyone who keeps up with trends in higher education knows, such efforts largely fail. For a while now, compositionists have been enamored of a pedagogical orthodoxy that assumes the following: Composition courses must focus on process, not just product. Students should compose essays that tackle complex issues rather than imitate rhetorical modes (as in the much-maligned "current-traditional" pedagogy of years https://www-chronicle-com.ezp.twu.edu/ https://www-chronicle-com.ezp.twu.edu/section/Advice/66 past). Writing and reading instruction should be combined in the same course. After years of experimenting with those three principles, here’s what I’ve learned: They rarely work. First, a simple truth: Students do not revise. This cuts to the very heart of how most of us teach composition. It is an a priori assumption that a composition course must emphasize revision: Writers learn to make rhetorical decisions based on their audience, and that means the arduous process of "substantial revision." But substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses. I have tried requiring students to write only three essays developed over several drafts, each of which I comment on without a grade. I have used peer workshops to help students respond to each other’s writing. I have used portfolio systems and deferred-grading schemes. I have cajoled; I have encouraged; I have experimented with more rubrics than I can count. The invariable result? Weak drafts remain weak; stronger drafts get slightly stronger, but not by much. In peer workshops, while students get more confident in sharing feedback on each other’s work, they generally ignore their classmates’ suggestions. And more often than not, when they do revise based on peer feedback, it’s often unhelpful and inexperienced advice — for example, telling a student that the paper has a clear thesis when it has no coherent argument at all. Yes, some professors assert that workshops allow students to find blind spots in each other’s essays. But, as their teacher, I can do that more succinctly and quickly, and it wouldn’t require the loss of another hour of class time. A second observation: Even when students engage complex issues from readings in their papers, they do not use the basic argumentative structures they need in order to give their ideas voice, cohesion, and support. In a recent course, I gave students a set of readings on liberal education and its role in a democratic society. Now, class discussion had been interesting, and students had struggled productively to understand Seneca, John Henry Newman, Mike Rose, and Rabindranath Tagore; they had even produced essays with some refreshing insights. But few of their essays contained a clear and unifying argument, and many students seemed unable to focus on one point for more than a paragraph. Let me put it another way: How can students make effective rhetorical choices if they do not know what choices exist? If a student’s essay on mass shootings could benefit from a broader discussion of the causes of violence, but the student does not know what it means to argue by causation, then in what sense is an effective rhetorical choice available to her? Writing well involves making rhetorical decisions, but it’s clear that you can’t choose from what you don’t know. Finally, it’s a mistake to insist that "critical reading" should be as integral to a writing course as the teaching of argumentation, structure, paragraphs, and sentences. First, study after study shows that reading comprehension is tied to background knowledge and context. So while we can teach general strategies for "reading actively" in our composition courses, there is no such thing as a universal approach to reading aside from a few basic principles: Read slowly and deliberately, annotate as you read, make summary notes, connect to the knowledge you already have. That’s why most composition instructors thematize their courses. We realize that we cannot talk about "reading" very long before we have to talk about reading about something. Second, because "reading strategies" are context-bound, many composition instructors make their courses about their themes, which leads to two problems: (1) The course becomes more about the content than about writing at the nuts-and-bolts level, and (2) a number of composition instructors, for reasons stemming from the structures of higher education, are not academically qualified to be teaching disciplinary content (e.g., sociology, cultural history, gender criticism) with any semblance of expertise. That is why students in a composition course can talk about, say, the role of sexism in children’s toys, but can’t write a clear sentence about it. In short, the more time a course focuses on "critical reading" and content, the less time it spends on structure, argument, evidence, logical reasoning, and concise, clear prose — the tools a composition class should give undergraduates. So how can I help my students write better? Some of the following injunctions might reek of the "current-traditional." But they have been my interior manifesto as I move forward with this fall’s set of 100 students: Students need to write an actual essay and receive feedback on it from me very early in the course. Whether I use neo-Aristotelian rhetoric or process pedagogy, by Week 2 of the semester, students need to have written a short argumentative essay and received feedback on their thesis, use of evidence, and integration of sources. There is no excuse for students to be halfway through the semester without having received this kind of clear response. Students need to spend less time on difficult texts and more time writing arguments. The more time one spends on content, the less time one has for structure and form. Even if I require only three major essays developed through several drafts, more homework assignments should be short essays that receive clear feedback. Alternatively, I might structure a course around many short argumentative essays that emphasize rhetorical structure, building up to larger essays. Either way, the point is frequent essays, frequent feedback. Not every essay requires multiple drafts or peer response. I have foolishly assumed that students cannot submit an essay before having spent at least one class period hashing over a draft with their peers. That should change. Yes, students should be encouraged to read each other’s writing and learn to respond to it. But let’s face it: Unless one believes a writing teacher’s feedback carries no more weight than anyone else’s, this is unnecessary for every essay. (Some academics do claim that a writing teacher’s comments are no more authoritative than any other reader’s, but I doubt such instructors tell their own editors anything like that.) The writing process is a means to an end. Of course the writing process is important: It can be therapeutic, formative, an aid to figuring out what we believe, the record of a mental life, an endless imaginative resource. But in a freshman composition course, process serves product. Let me put it this way: If a bright student sits down the night before a paper is due and hammers out an excellent essay in one draft, do I fail that paper? If I do, then I am not ultimately interested in helping students write effective essays, but in something else. Sometimes it’s better to ditch an essay and move forward. Even professional writers admit that, at some point, you throw out a project and start over, or you put a project away to work on later (or never). Substantial revision is part of writing, but not for every project. After all, a number of writing contexts do not require, and might even be hampered by, overwrought attempts at revision. Sometimes writing has to come out adequate the first time. And "process" does not have to be restricted to a single piece. Being a writer is a process, too, a process of moving from one project to another, of learning from what worked the last time and what didn’t, of knowing when to revise and when to hit the delete key. My job is not to save my students from cultural impoverishment. It is to teach them how to express themselves effectively in writing. The development of cogent, clear prose is at the heart of freshman composition. For too long, I have deluded myself into thinking that my job in a composition course was to introduce students to a rich academic topic, make them read difficult texts, make up for years of barely- more-than-functional literacy and book aversion, teach them to be critical thinkers, and help them understand the oppressive structures of late capitalism — all while helping them write focused arguments, revise, polish paragraphs, and edit sentences. Should college students be expected to read difficult texts? Sure. Should students develop a love of reading? Absolutely. Should students learn to express their views and persuade others in cogent, clear prose? Without question. But that last one is the only unique provenance of a composition course. So as much as I want to teach my students to love justice, be passionate about politics, and think deeply about the future of humanity, they are not legitimate outcomes of a writing course. Neither are fostering a fetishistic love of the writing process or trying to Writing About Sexism in Academia Hurts By Kelly J. Baker I’ve always researched depressing topics without being a�ected. So why does this one unsettle me so much more? teach "critical reading of difficult texts." My guess is that by the end of the semester, my students will hate my course because it is "boring," "hard," and "a lot of work." They probably won’t have life-changing epiphanies about oppressive political structures. And I won’t swear to make them read esoteric academic articles. But if they show up, do the work, and turn off their phones, they just might leave my class able to write a sentence. Joseph R. Teller is a professor of English at the College of the Sequoias. READ MORE © 2019 The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 23 Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 rd https://chroniclevitae.com/news/750-writing-about-sexism-in-academia-hurts?cid=articlepromo https://chroniclevitae.com/news/750-writing-about-sexism-in-academia-hurts?cid=articlepromo W Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review ADVICE We Know What Works in Teaching Composition By Doug Hesse JANUARY 03, 2017 hen I came to the University of Denver to start a campus writing program in 2006, I heard many faculty members say, "A lot of my students can’t even write a decent sentence." So when I read Joseph Teller making much the same assertion in an essay last fall, "Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?" I recognized hyperbole when I saw it. My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the sentences coded clear and error free. Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those things, we could work on. Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: "Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders https://www.chronicle.com/ https://www.chronicle.com/section/Advice/66 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-We-Teaching-Composition/237969 which would disgrace a boy twelve years old." Hill and others devised pedagogies grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common sense was another man’s folly. Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing — and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, "Research in Written Composition." Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer- reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of books and well-established journals — including College Composition and Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few. A 2005 article, "The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing," analyzed why formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates — remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence that they were significantly less effective than other methods. The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory, and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a 1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching "lore." Lore consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience ("what worked for me") and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and generalizable, but more often it is not. Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his approach compares with the most effective national practices. http://www.ncte.org/cccc http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED265552 http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/RTE/0402-nov05/RT0402Last.pdf http://www.heinemann.com/products/0151.aspx For example, his assertion, "Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses," might speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of other professors. Consider his claim that students "do not use the basic argumentative structures they need." Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the wider literature in the field. Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that "pedagogical orthodoxy" assumes that "composition courses must focus on product, not process." He could hardly be more wrong. The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts, novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods make significant use of model readings and examples. One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal functions. But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces ("Chopsticks" is not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a pianist. So, too, with writing. Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research: Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort. Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on students’ existing abilities and experiences. Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and critique, formative and summative assessments. Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and expectations. Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded, why, and to what effect. Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance (see Bullet No. 1). Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves those ends. Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the experience of individual teachers like Teller. However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way "we" are "wrongly" teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore, the field they would aspire to correct. Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference 9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher By Daveena Tauber Help for faculty members who aren’t composition instructors yet are still expected to teach writing. on College Composition and Communication. READ MORE © 2019 The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 23 Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 rd https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=articlepromo https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=articlepromo W Adam Niklewicz for The Chronicle Review ADVICE We Know What Works in Teaching Composition By Doug Hesse JANUARY 03, 2017 hen I came to the University of Denver to start a campus writing program in 2006, I heard many faculty members say, "A lot of my students can’t even write a decent sentence." So when I read Joseph Teller making much the same assertion in an essay last fall, "Are We Teaching Composition All Wrong?" I recognized hyperbole when I saw it. My response to that sort of exaggeration 10 years ago — joined by my 20 new colleagues in the writing program — was to gather and analyze a corpus of 500,000 words of student writing from classes across the campus. We found that, in fact, well over 90 percent of the sentences coded clear and error free. Faculty members wanted to see better student writing (and I surely acknowledged and valued that desire), but it was clear that merely fixing sentences wasn’t going to achieve that end. There were larger issues: Students needed help developing and deploying their ideas and matching their writing with the expectations of various disciplines. Those things, we could work on. Complaints about the state of student writing have a long lineage. In 1878, Adams Sherman Hill, a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, famously protested: "Everyone who has had much to do with the graduating classes of our best colleges has known men who could not write a letter describing their own commencements without making blunders https://www.chronicle.com/ https://www.chronicle.com/section/Advice/66 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-We-Teaching-Composition/237969 which would disgrace a boy twelve years old." Hill and others devised pedagogies grounded in their own experiences and in common sense — though one man’s common sense was another man’s folly. Teaching grounded in actual research took a scholarly turn in 1950, marked by the founding of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Its journal is now the leading one in the field. By 1963, research on what worked in teaching writing — and what didn’t — had accumulated to a point that a synthesis was published, "Research in Written Composition." Roughly 25 years later, George Hillocks conducted a new analysis (Research on Written Composition), using studies published in the intervening years. Since then, peer- reviewed research on the best ways to teach college writing has accumulated in dozens of books and well-established journals — including College Composition and Communication, Written Communication, College English, the Journal of Teaching Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Composition Studies, Writing Program Administration, and the Journal of Writing Assessment, to name but a few. A 2005 article, "The Focus on Form vs. Content in Teaching Writing," analyzed why formalist approaches — like the back-to-basics kind that Professor Teller advocates — remained so popular in teaching composition, despite overwhelming empirical evidence that they were significantly less effective than other methods. The teaching of writing happens — or should — within a deep field of practice, theory, and research. It’s also an enterprise marked by a fair amount of what Steve North, in a 1987 book, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, called teaching "lore." Lore consists of ideas and assumptions that are grounded in local experience ("what worked for me") and then passed along informally, for the most part, from one faculty member to the next. Lore is sometimes informed by research, and thus transmutable and generalizable, but more often it is not. Teller’s essay participates in the tradition of lore. Not having been in his classes or having read his students’ work, I can’t judge his local experience, but I can judge how well his approach compares with the most effective national practices. http://www.ncte.org/cccc http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED265552 http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/RTE/0402-nov05/RT0402Last.pdf http://www.heinemann.com/products/0151.aspx For example, his assertion, "Substantial revision doesn’t happen in our courses," might speak for his own classroom, but it surely doesn’t speak for mine or those of thousands of other professors. Consider his claim that students "do not use the basic argumentative structures they need." Again, while perhaps true of students in Teller’s own classes, that broad claim is unsubstantiated by my experience, by research on my campus, or by the wider literature in the field. Where Teller departs most from actual scholarship in the discipline is his claim that "pedagogical orthodoxy" assumes that "composition courses must focus on product, not process." He could hardly be more wrong. The two most dominant pedagogies today in college composition each focus on product as well as process. Genre approaches have students learn features that readers expect in specific kinds of writing (lab reports, op-eds, business proposals, magazine feature articles, movie reviews, and so on). Rhetorical approaches have students analyze the kinds of evidence, structure, and style that will be effective for particular purposes (for example, to persuade, inform, or entertain), for particular groups of readers (experts, novices, or people of particular viewpoints), and in particular situations. Both methods make significant use of model readings and examples. One key to both approaches is sustained, guided practice. On that point, Teller and I surely agree. Students learn to write by writing, by getting advice and feedback on their writing, and then writing some more. What can be told to college students about writing can probably be encapsulated in a lecture of two or three hours. It parallels what meaningfully can be told about playing piano — the music notation, the relationship between notation and keyboard, the hand and finger placement, the posture, the pedal functions. But without sustained practice on systematically more complex pieces ("Chopsticks" is not a Rachmaninoff concerto), the world’s best lectures will not — cannot — make a pianist. So, too, with writing. Here is what this looks like in the best writing courses, informed by decades of research: Students have ample opportunities to write. Professors expect them to write frequently and extensively, and we demand and reward serious effort. Professors carefully sequence writing tasks. The idea is progressively to expand on students’ existing abilities and experiences. Professors coach the process. We offer strategies and advice, encouragement and critique, formative and summative assessments. Courses provide instruction and practice on all aspects of writing. Attend to the form and conventions of specific genres? Yes. Talk about creativity, invention (how to generate ideas), grammar, and style? Certainly, but also discuss things like logic and accuracy in writing, and how to fit a piece to various audience needs and expectations. Courses use readings not only as context and source materials (which is vital in the academic and civic spheres) but also as models — and not only static models of form but also as maps to be decoded as to how their writers might have proceeded, why, and to what effect. Professors teach key concepts about writing in order to help students consolidate and transfer skills from one writing occasion to the next. But we recognize that declarative knowledge is made significant only through practice and performance (see Bullet No. 1). Student writing and student writers are the course’s focus. Everything else serves those ends. Lore is a form of knowledge in every field. In pointing to the best practices of teaching writing — indicated by extensive research in composition studies — I don’t ignore the experience of individual teachers like Teller. However, I can’t let pass unchallenged general claims about the way "we" are "wrongly" teaching composition, especially when they so dramatically misrepresent, even ignore, the field they would aspire to correct. Doug Hesse is president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a professor and the executive director of writing at the University of Denver. He previously served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators and chair of the Conference 9 Tools for the Accidental Writing Teacher By Daveena Tauber Help for faculty members who aren’t composition instructors yet are still expected to teach writing. on College Composition and Communication. READ MORE © 2019 The Chronicle of Higher Education 1255 23 Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 rd https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=articlepromo https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1460-9-tools-for-the-accidental-writing-teacher?cid=articlepromo