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Faculty Spotlight: Kurt Ritter |
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Fall 2005
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Ritter rethinks revision when grading papers
When it comes to teaching writing, there’s one thing Professor Kurt
Ritter has long believed: The best assignments give students a stake in
what they’re writing about.
That insight has been brought home to Ritter, a professor in the
Department of Communication, many times during his research interviews
with presidential speechwriters—one of his areas of academic interest.
He finds that speechwriters’ greatest works are usually those to which
they feel personally connected. The same is true for student writers.
“One of the things I’ve come to believe is that if you want to get
students to do really good writing,” says Ritter, “you need to find a
way for them to have a chance to write something they care about.
Because then it’s not just ‘I’m doing this for a grade,’ but rather ‘I
really want this to be good.’”
Professor
Kurt Ritter of the Department of Communication tells a story about a
recent lecture on presidential rhetoric. This semester Ritter is
teaching COMM 480, Religious Communication, his second W course.
This summer, Ritter taught his first official W course, a class in
political communication. Although he’s often taught classes with a
strong writing component, he wasn’t sure how best to shift the focus of
this course from speaking to writing. Urged by Brady Creel, a doctoral
student in the Department of Communication who was assisting him in the
course—and who also serves as the UWC’s communications
coordinator—Ritter added several low-stakes writing assignments to his
syllabus. He was pleasantly surprised by the results of these brief and
ungraded group tasks.
“The students worked really hard on those things and took them very
seriously, even though we were never going to grade any of them. In the
end that didn’t really matter,” Ritter says with something approaching
amazement.
Ritter also experimented with peer responses in his first W course.
“My biggest surprise was the skill with which the criticism was made,”
Ritter recalls, noting that students often commented on whether the
writing was appropriate for the intended audience. “Students would say,
‘You could say it differently and be much more likely to get this
audience to agree with you.’”
That’s just the sort of observation Ritter feels is “vitally important in order to produce a document that will work.”
Students benefited from the peer response technique, Ritter believes,
because “it was being done instantly. Right then the students were
getting feedback. It was easier for them to accept it, too, because it
was a group-written project.”
Ritter also has begun to rethink the comments he puts on student papers
after noting that Creel’s comments tended to be far less directive than
his.
“I would tell students ‘This is how you should fix this,’” Ritter
explains, as opposed to simply noting that the writing was confusing or
asking questions to get the students to rethink their choices.
Reflecting on that, Ritter has come to see that giving students less
information might be more helpful. In “correcting” things, Ritter fears
he runs the risk of misconstruing his students’ intended message.
Besides, leaving the revision up to the students is another way of
giving them ownership of the assignment.
Ritter, who admits he was “deeply suspicious” of pedagogical techniques
such as journal writing and group assignments before teaching a W
course, now feels that such practices help students to find their voice
and become more personally invested in their words. And for Ritter
that’s the heart of good writing—and good teaching. |
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Tidbits
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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
– Joan Didion
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Fall 2005 