Faculty Spotlight
Assistant Professor Ginger Carney shares her insights about writing
When Assistant Professor Ginger Carney tells her biology students that writing will be important in their future careers, she’s speaking from experience. Carney became a biologist because she loved science, but she soon found she was spending more than half of her time writing. That’s why, when she came to the biology department at Texas A&M four and a half years ago, she agreed to teach the department’s first W course, “Critical Writing in Biology.”
It would seem she’s doing something right: this past fall Carney received the Center for Teaching Excellence 25th Anniversary W Course Award for teaching. The award, presented at a ceremony in her department, included a $1,500 prize.
Carney spends so much time writing that grammar reference books occupy a prime place on her bookshelf: “When I’m writing a new proposal or a paper, I almost always have one of them open on my desk, so I can check those little things we all forget.”
She tries to be careful and deliberate in everything she writes, even emails, because she believes her writing plays a crucial role in how others perceive her work. As Carney puts it, “Who is going to fund my research if I can’t motivate someone to be interested in it or explain why it’s important?”
One of Carney’s first goals for the undergraduates in her W classes is to get them to start writing like scientists, and that means teaching them to be direct and concise.
“Students produce a lot of ‘fluffy’ writing for the first assignment, whereas scientists prefer to just say it. Scientists get the information out there without elaborating,” says Carney. To help her students recognize that flowery language can be distracting, Carney uses a Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) assignment that asks them to read and respond to three essays, one of which, Carney says, “sounds really smart, but doesn’t make a lick of sense.” In discussing the essays, her students begin to appreciate simple, straightforward prose.
Another of Carney’s goals is teaching students to write within a set word limit, an important skill for budding scientists who might someday need to write grant proposals. She gives them a list of deadwood phrases to avoid and encourages them to weed out repetitions.
Carney assigns the class three graded CPR assignments, but before each of those her students produce a related journal entry. The students then take that through a peer review process, which begins with reading their work aloud to a partner. With as many as 80 students in a section, that’s a noisy proposition, but Carney is determined to stick with it. Her students, though, tend to be skeptical: “They feel strange about reading out loud and look at me like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’” Their reluctance fades quickly, though, when they see how useful reading aloud can be in helping them find their own surface errors.
Of course, there are often far more errors than Carney would like. One of her frustrations with teaching a W course is that it isn’t possible to provide all the writing instruction some students may need, but, as she sees it, “I’m not here to teach composition. I’m not going to teach them when to use a semicolon. But I will direct them to places where they can get help with that if they need it.”
Even if Carney can’t teach her students everything she’d like about writing, she’s committed to the process. Not only does she see writing as important to her students’ careers; she also thinks it’s vital to their thinking.
“Writing crystallizes things,” she says. “You read a research paper and think, ‘Yeah, I understand that.’ But if you actually have to write about what you’ve read, you sometimes realize that you don’t understand it after all.”
As a way to encourage students to think critically, Carney asks students to read and respond to two articles that reach different conclusions about the same topic.
“The question for my students is ‘How can two research groups of talented people at good universities come up with different answers to the same problem?’ A lot of students think when they see something that’s been published that it must be the answer. But it’s hardly ever the complete answer,” says Carney, adding, “Just because it’s been published doesn’t mean the answer is correct.”
If Carney has her way, her students will be astute enough to question everything they read and skilled enough to write compellingly about their own conclusions.
