A contribution from Vic Penuel, Texas A&M at Galveston

Vic Penuel, a lecturer in Technical Writing and a resource for W courses on the Galveston campus, is developing a brief series of approximately ten of these tips from a writing instructor. They will be completed as the spring 2008 semester starts.  Any instructor on either campus can request the series by emailing Vic at penuelv@tamug.edu.

Use a scorecard

One of the easiest ways to lighten your grading load is to use a scorecard. As a developmental exercise leading to writing an academic paper, I like to hand out an article from a peer reviewed journal or a periodical and ask students to write an abstract for it.

The abstract will tell me whether they can summarize effectively, selecting key points and presenting them in their own words. My assignment description requires a reference style citation and a clear simple title. The reference must be in APA, CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style) or something appropriate for the course.

This is the first of a series of entries called Write Idea, an exchange of ideas about teaching writing. This entry is contributed by Barbara Gastel, Associate Professor of Integrative Biosciences/Medical Humanities.

Any instructor can configure Turnitin so that student papers are NOT stored in our search database, and will never be accessible in searches by any institution (including your own).

Our subscription content has over 60 Million articles from over 10,000 sources, and almost all of this material is not available via Google yet is likely to be available through the subscription databases that are maintained by your library.

Turnitin is definitely not a replacement for proper instruction, and nothing will replace the guidance of a motivated instructor−we simply try to provide an electronic tool that can provide a level of data access that cannot be performed without the use of technology. I agree that an instructor may be very familiar with the writing style of a student, and that they may also be familiar with much of the text that exists within a given area of interest, but it is clear that a single human being could not perform an exhaustive search that spans over 8 Billion pages of Internet content and over 60 mllion articles.

I wholeheartedly agree that Turnitin should be used as a learning tool, used by students prior to the submission of a final draft and used to ensure that the student will not have issues with improper citation rather than being used as a post-submission detection tool−we cannot control the instructional methods used by our customers, but I/we are very happy to see that the general move within our customer base (and academia in general) is to use tools such as Turnitin in a proactive, student-facing fashion.

Michael J. Bruton

Senior Account Manager

iParadigms, LLC - The Creators of Turnitin

We were informed this past summer by Instructional Technology Services that students should not include identifying information on work submitted to Turnitin.com. ITS is concerned about reservations expressed by the U.S. Department of Education regarding student privacy and FERPA regulations. However, some professionals within the field of composition instruction have other concerns: plagiarism detection software like Turnitin does more damage, many of us fear, than violating privacy. One of the most influential professional organizations in composition, the Conference on College Communication and Composition (CCCC), for example, suggests that plagiarism detection software “undermines students’ authority over the uses of their own writing” (http://ccccip.org/files/CCCC-IP-PDS-Statement-final.pdf).

Why, you might ask, should we care? After all, student writing is just practice writing, and it doesn’t really count for anything. It’s not like our writing, by which we make our bread and butter. But when we treat student writing as inconsequential, so do students, and the result is the careless, poorly written drivel that we have been trying to obliterate with W courses. Students who do not feel pride of ownership and control over their work will not give it the time and attention it needs to be excellent.

by Eric Blodgett, Graduate Student in English

(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning, by Brian Huot

Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2002. 216 pp.

Huot makes a number of interesting and revealing observations in this book, probably the most fundamental of these being his sense that too much thought about assessment remains tied to the idea of writing as something generalizable that can be assessed accurately and reliably independent of the writer, the context, the intended audience, and all of the other variables that composition theorists insist must be considered when attempting to teach writing to students.  This particular strain of thought about assessment seems to have been left behind by English and composition instructors, but it still claims a significant number of adherents within what Huot calls the education and measurement communities. 

Given the fact that composition theory has moved so far away from so-called "standardized" writing, I can't help but wonder how or why this way of thinking about writing maintains such a significant place in the current educational environment.  As Huot points out, such standardized testing and assessment of writing wields significant power in the world of education—admission to colleges and programs within colleges depends heavily on standardized forms of measurement, not to mention the huge role such testing and assessment plays in K-12 education.  The methods and underlying assumptions informing writing assessment in the education and measurement communities differ greatly from those of the composition and writing instruction community, so what Huot is suggesting to me is that even if English departments are on the right track, this issue is an important one.

By Douglas Perret Starr

Professor of Agricultural Communications and Journalism

d-starr@tamu.edu

Re: Writing Matters, Vol. 4, Issue 6, Fall 2006, pp. 2, 3.

I agree, and I disagree, with Professor Jon Olson and with Dr. Valerie Balester.

I agree with Dr. Olson’s support of professors who pay attention to writing in a discipline other than English because “it shows that writing belongs to everybody.”

I agree with Dr. Balester’s objection to reading “error-free, but otherwise mundane and critically naïve prose.” I like the error-free part, but abhor the mundane and the naïve, critical or otherwise.

I disagree with Dr. Olson’s so-called warning against being an English teacher outside the English department. I believe that every professor should challenge students to explain their work in proper English, else what is college for?

I don’t accept his statement: “If the content is really challenging, you can’t -pay attention to sentences.” My students have completed at least K-12 and two years of college. If they cannot write a clear sentence by now, regardless of the subject matter, perhaps they do not belong in college.

The best research is worthless if the researcher cannot write it in a clear, concise, terse, correct, understandable manner.

I disagree with Dr. Balester’s implication that K-12 strongly emphasized grammar, mechanics, and punctuation. Almost any student from almost any Texas high school will say that grammar pretty much stopped being taught after junior high school, sometimes not at all taught after the sixth grade.

Why is it that students never seem to learn the basic rules of grammar and punctuation, even though they take classes like English 104 and spend years in middle and high school learning about them? Although the answer may be different for every student, I will venture a few explanations that would cover many. The classic answers are lack of practice in writing and the difficulties of transferring knowledge from a specific but decontextualized skill like grammar to contextualized writing situations. These are powerful reasons, and I think they are exacerbated by a few others:

1. Outside of English class, “writing,” by which I here mean grammar, punctuation, format, and other elements besides content, does not seem to matter. When writing is devalued or doesn’t contribute tangibly toward a reward, students may not even bother to revise, much less proofread.
2. Students get inconsistent feedback from teachers. Some teachers aren’t worried by a missing comma but get very annoyed by a misspelling; others insist a comma splice is the highest sign of illiteracy. To complicate the fact, teachers (and readers) may have widely varied knowledge of the conventions of edited American English, depending on how well they write, when and where they learned to write, and the typical form their writing takes. After so much ambiguity and inconsistency, some students believe there are no conventions, at least none worth knowing.
3. Some students, like a student I spoke with recently who plans to be a vet, believe fairly firmly that they will never have to write again once they graduate. Writing is a hoop one jumps through, a scholarly activity designed for academics and maybe researchers. You don’t learn what you don’t value.
4. In a similar vein, our students may not think of much of their writing as, well, writing. They see Instant Messaging, email, signs, posters, and other things they write outside school as informal and thus not subject to the same “rules.” In some ways, they are correct—we don’t expect perfect paragraphs or impeccable punctuation in many of these documents, but I think we still consider them writing and expect good spelling and usage. (I am not disparaging IM talk at all—that’s a different sort of talk, but it still follows the basic rules of English syntax and grammar.)