University Writing Center

by Valerie Balester, Executive Director

What’s the first thing you’d do if you were asked to write in a new form for an unfamiliar audience? Most of us would request a model, something to give us a start on the parameters of the form.  An experienced writer uses a model as a starter, examining its style, length, and vocabulary to get an idea of what is needed, then adjusting the writing to suit the particulars of the rhetorical situation, that is, the message, audience, style, and purpose of the document. But a novice uses it as a template. And writing by numbers, like painting by numbers, will result in mediocrity.

If you provide models for your students, you have given them a good start. But it’s only the first step in providing the writing support they need. Left to their own devices, most will follow the model exactly, perhaps by substituting synonyms for the words in the original, even risking plagiarism. A model must be the object of discussion and analysis, a way to inspire invention and creativity, a guide to the conventions of the form and the expectations of the audience.

The model you select should mirror your expectations of the finished product, and it should be at least capably written. It’s of little help to advise “avoid this” without also clarifying “but do that.” Start by making sure students have read the model. It can be a useful exercise to ask them to paraphrase it, or at least a section of it.  Teach them to read, then to paraphrase without looking at the original. Next, they should go back and be sure their version accurately represents the original.  Another way to achieve this is to ask them, in class, to take five minutes to write a reaction to the reading or to answer an open-ended question about it. Allow them to refer to the piece as they go, to refresh their memories. (Or, if they haven’t yet read it, to at least skim it.) Ask a few students to share what they wrote.

After students demonstrate comprehension of the model, they should consider audience.  With a little prompting from you, they can figure out who reads this sort of piece, why, and what readers expect. For example, the typical scholarly article makes a contribution to knowledge in a field, uses formal, complex language, and shows knowledge of the literature of the field. Often you will find they are already making incorrect assumptions about the audience. For example, many students think scientific prose never uses active voice, when in fact that would be impossible. Generally, they confuse active voice with first person pronouns.

Next, ask students to dissect the form of the piece. They should look at organization, paragraph length, word choice, sentence length and complexity, and the use of formatting elements such as headings, lists, labels for visuals and such. Examining the documentation style can provide a lesson on academic integrity. Select the most salient features to discuss and note. What is essential about this exercise is that students become sensitive to the way the writing is constructed, not so much that they analyze every single trait.  The model can be a means of getting them to look at writing as a craft.

Finally, students should form an opinion about how successfully the piece addresses the audience and gets its message across. It probably won’t be perfect, so you can talk about what else might have been done. In any case, it helps to show that even a successful piece could have been written in a different way.  The more you point out alternative approaches, the easier it will be for them to see that their own writing can follow a similar but still unique form. Encourage them to use their new mastery of the form and to take it in new directions.

by Nancy Vazquez, editor, Writing Matters, the newsletter of the University Writing Center at Texas A&M

Ah! The start of a new semester, a time when hope runs high and the academic world seems full of possibility. Your syllabus is ready to go, and you no doubt have some new tricks up your sleeve, ideas you’ve gleaned from colleagues or workshops, things you’re eager to implement this time around.

While some instructors can hold on to that shimmering sense of promise all semester, many of us find things go south quickly, often when we begin reading our students’ writing. What can you do if you read through a batch of papers and find the writing is, to put it mildly, not what you’d hoped?

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• Could this be a temporary setback? It’s not unusual for the quality of writing to slip as students adjust to more rigorous thinking or challenging material. If your course represents a significant cognitive leap for your students, their writing may lag behind.

• Is the writing poor across the board or are there specific areas of weakness? Is the thinking sloppy or are your students simply making too many surface errors? Maybe the students know how to summarize, but need help integrating quotations. Maybe they need help learning to refine a thesis statement. Use models to illustrate how to accomplish certain writing tasks.

• Do the students know what you expect? Some instructors will overlook basic errors; some won’t. Some expect fully fleshed-out introductions and conclusions; some want students to forego the formalities. Use a grading rubric to help clarify what you consider important and discuss the rubric with your class.

• Is the assignment itself part of the problem? If you were a student, how would you approach it? Would you know where to start? How hard would it be to find supporting evidence? Try writing out your own response.

• Could poor time management be the real culprit? You can encourage your students to develop good work habits by building up to major assignments with smaller tasks like journals, reading logs, or proposals for longer projects.

• Do students find the assignment relevant and engaging? If students feel you’ve just tacked an assignment onto a course, their writing will reflect it.

• Are your students’ first drafts their only drafts? They shouldn’t be. Even the best writers need time to rework and rethink their prose. (Don’t you?) Incorporate revision into your assignments. Most students can improve their work simply by taking a second look at it.

But what if you’ve done all the right things, and your students still aren’t producing the kind of writing you expect?

You may simply have to accept that—for whatever reason—your students aren’t prepared to write at the level you would like. At that point, all you can do is start from where they are—not where you think they should be and not where the system has assumed them to be. Go back to the basics and give them a chance to practice so they can develop their skills and their confidence.

In thinking about that, my mind keeps turning to another kind of teaching I’m doing: My husband and I are teaching our older son to drive.

It hasn’t been going well. My son’s driving could best be described as “lurching.” He slams on the brakes, maneuvers into turns too quickly or too slowly, runs over curbs, drifts out of his lane.

Not that my husband and I are doing much better. We’ve grabbed the steering wheel, accused him of not paying attention, and shouted our share of expletives.

Obviously, we forgot about the parent/child dynamic that can turn the simplest interaction into something fraught with emotion. But we also overlooked something else: our son’s complete lack of driving experience.

A lot of kids his age have already driven tractors, boats, or riding lawn mowers or have practiced driving the family car up and down the driveway.  Some have even been driving a pickup around the family farm since they were 12 or 13.

But our son has hardly ever ridden his bike, let alone driven something with a V-6 and 200 horsepower. No wonder he’s all over the place—literally all over the place—in learning to drive.

What he needs most is practice, preferably without a white-knuckled parent shouting at him.  So we’re going back to empty parking lots and driving the same route over and over to help him master the fundamentals: accelerating, braking, turning. Later, when he’s more accomplished and more confident, he can tackle things like turning left against traffic.

The stakes aren’t quite as high in a writing classroom, but your students probably need much the same approach. Take it slow and easy: assign more short writing to let them begin to flex (or in some cases find) their writing muscles. Keep the stakes low, so they can experiment (and fail) without serious repercussions. And be patient: it may take longer, but they really can learn to improve their writing.

by Valerie Balester, Executive Director

I have been helping grade the Critical Thinking Assessment Test administered by the Office of Institutional Assessment and designed to measure critical thinking. Many of the questions require short essays, even though they are always more difficult to grade than multiple choice, true/false, or fill in the blanks. My guess is that the test makers include them anyway because the test measures both thinking and communication. It’s not enough to think critically—you have to communicate your thoughts coherently.  But there may be another reason they include written answers; namely, thinking and writing are in many respects the same process. As soon as we start to write our thoughts, we are forced to examine them in more depth and understand them more fully.  The more we revise and the more we are enticed into this process, the more we see the faults in our reasoning and the gaps in our knowledge, and our thinking, if we follow through, improves.  Sometimes, writing leads to a better statement of a problem or hypothesis. Sometimes, it leads to new problems. And sometimes, it even brings us to a solution. The data that was incomprehensible before we began to write now takes on meaning as we organize our thoughts and recognize connections between ideas. We know that writers who are knowledgeable about a topic make fewer errors when they write about it—one of the reasons First Year composition often includes writing about personal experience. The first step the writing process is invention, thinking of something to say and developing it by inquiry, research, experimentation, or other means.

An example of how writing spurs us to thinking more deeply: As I write this blog, I find myself considering concrete suggestions for strengthening the connection between thinking and writing in the classroom. I think teaching tips will illustrate and test my point—we can and should take time to connect writing and thinking in a content-oriented class within a college semester.  Although I will not indulge myself by exploring every possible means, in order to select a few, I have thought of many and then decided which to include in this post. So I think about the problem, make a list, then think about it more, then prune or add, then re-order and revise.

Below are my suggestions:

1)      Avoid limiting the number of sources students can use.  You probably hope they will research 15 sources and use 5. But too often they stop research when they reach the magic number Instead, tell them to include a “Works Consulted” page in their paper that will demonstrate their research process to you. The works they actually cite can be included in a “References” or “Works Cited” page.

2)      When you assign the writing, be explicit about how it helps achieve learning objectives in the class, and go beyond “communicating ideas.”  This is the ideal time to discuss your own research/writing process. Explain how writing about a topic, from taking notes to communicating results, helps you deepen and organize your thinking.

3)      Provide some in-class time for “invention,” the rhetorical technique of discovering something to say. For example, have a class discussion about possible approaches to the problem the assignment addresses, or ask students to throw out ideas developing the topic they might write about, and discuss them for all the class to hear. Or, a few days after you make the assignment, ask students to come to class with three possible topics, and have them discuss them in small groups to help them select and develop one.  You can find more ideas for invention at: http://writingcenter.tamu.edu/teaching-writing/course-design/assignments/low-stakes-writing/.

4)     Check back now and then to see how students are progressing with their research and writing. There are many ways to do this, but here is one: Ask them to write a mini-essay (in-class, no grade) about what they are discovering. After class, select the best two or three, and bring them to the next class to read aloud and discuss—what made them the best and what directions can you suggest to the author for further research or development of the idea? Invite other students to visit you during office hours if they want to discuss their mini-essay.

Whatever the activity, the goal is to make writing an integral part of the way students learn—they are writing to improve their knowledge and understanding of your course content, not merely to communicate ideas you have poured into them. When they write, they take what you teach and make it their own, and that, in essence, is critical thinking.

by Steve Kaminczak, Assistant Director

When Plato set forth to explain his Divided Line, he would often begin with his “Allegory of the Cave.” In this model, Plato likened an unenlightened individual to a prisoner chained in a cave. Only able to see shadows, this prisoner is trapped in a world of dark, false shapes. When escaping to the sunlit world outside of the cave, he makes the transition from perception to reality. In many ways, this metaphor fits the students that we teach. They come to us with preconceptions—with only perception sans awareness of the inner responsibility necessary to approach an assignment. At the writing center and as educators, we at times find ourselves in a unique position to offer a light in the dark, to become a guide.

At the UWC, each consultant faces the common pitfall of taking ownership over each paper that she works with; however, we train consultants that when this occurs, these students leave the center still in a world of academic echoes, a place where an A+ might imprint a sense of dependency on us, or a D will cause a student to feel the consultant failed them. With the right strategy, our consultants can guide the student to take full responsibility for the essay, and in the end the student can leave us with both a positive experience and a pride that will be reflected in his future work. As an undergraduate and then graduate peer consultant, I developed specific strategies to help foster independence within each student I consulted. These easily transferred when I taught writing in the classroom.

Finding the Student’s and Our Own Awareness:

Self-responsibility in life is an essential component to inner growth. Why should this differ in a student’s academic life? At times, I worked (both at a writing center and in the classroom) with a student that had nothing to say. It’s easy to wonder if such students are simply full of apathy or just disinterested in the educational process. It was specifically during my work as a peer tutor that I gained awareness that this isn’t always the case. The majority of our students is often overwhelmed, and while they want to take responsibility for their own learning, they don’t know how or where to start. Having taught almost ten years in the freshman composition classroom, I can commiserate with a professor’s vantage—some students just seem lazy. But working one-on-one, I found that my own approach could be refined to provide students the tools to take initiative and to develop awareness and ownership of their writing.

The experience of working in the writing center allowed me to become aware of my own role and responsibility, that my job as both tutor and teacher must be more than to dole prescriptive advice, but to instead guide the student toward his own awareness. I learned that speaking in terms of “we” often breaks this ice. (Where should we begin; how do you think we might rephrase this?) This imparts to the student that I am working with him, yet nudges the student from lethargy to action. It’s subtle, but places the student in the driver’s seat through the use of open-ended questions, and “we” keeps me as a passenger. I aim to find a point of equilibrium, where my student feels comfortable with guiding the session and understands I won’t be telling him what to do, but instead invite him to find solutions in his own voice.

Thinking Holistically:

Most writing centers follow a useful maxim: the goal should be to improve the student, not the essay. This principle can easily transcend into the classroom. If in a session, a consultant merely marks errors in grammar or falls into the “wouldn’t this sound better” trap, the student will only see our role as that of a word mechanic. Instead, my goal is to encourage students to examine any feedback through his own filter—as a decision he must make with a goal of developing the writing strategies he already has. During a session, when a student looks to me for a definitive answer, I would bring the conversation outside of the essay and answer back, “you’re the judge,” or “that’s up to you.” While I don’t advocate a strategy of approaching each essay with kid gloves, I aim for the student to leave a session feeling better about himself and his writing ability and not solely the form and content of the paper. This instills that the content is a product of his own ability, and the choices he makes are his responsibility. In the classroom, my students understood that they weren’t working for a grade, but that the end result was more under their control.

A Peer Tutoring Approach

The UWC aims to ensure our clients’ ownership of their essays. Students often visit us in search of an “expert.”  In training our consultants, I stress the importance of not needing to assume this role. Just because we suggest a change to a paper, or guide a student toward a change, doesn’t mean the student should leave with our rigid dictum set as law in his mind. Pushing a student toward critical thinking—weighing in the strategies we impart and his own decisions—a student will leave a session empowered and with a sense that he has an ability to choose how the essay turns out. This empowerment will lead to a student’s sense of responsibility which he’ll bring to your classroom.

–

The Divided Line and “Allegory of the Cave” were ways that Plato explained the transformation from illusion to reality. The gist was a search to explain the distinction between objects that are real and concepts that exist in our minds. The relationship between student and a consultant isn’t so different from this “theory of forms.” As the prisoner of the cave leaves the shadows, he understands things as they really are and progresses toward absolute truth. When we sit down with each student, we too free them from the world of shadows and toward a new understanding. Our work grants the freedom and in turn promotes the responsibility for our students to succeed in the classroom.

Some time ago Professor Sam Cohn in the Department of Sociology brought to my attention a problem with writing in an upper-level class. As he puts it, students were not interested in remedying their problems with prose, and these were many. Then he came up with “Prose Moments.” I want to share his technique, using his own words (from a personal email dated 10/13/09).

Every week when papers come back, I take one paper with particularly egregious writing, blank out any information that would identify the student in question, pull out two to three particularly problematic paragraphs and hand them out for students to edit in class. Students edit silently for five to ten minutes. We then discuss the original selection and the suggested improvements. This is called a “Prose Moment.”

My own comments on the original prose can often be critical. However the students are substantially harsher than I am. Both the original author and the other students in the room can see that it is not just the teacher who is being judgmental on this issue. Other peers view student writing as being inadequate and can be very unkind when there are obvious errors in a paper. This helps convince both the original author and other witnesses to the scene that student writing behavior needs to change.

Because of the barrage of criticism associated with being the author of a selection chosen for a Prose Moment, there is a pressing necessity to protect the feelings of the human being on the receiving end.

1)    There is strict anonymity. No one ever knows who the author is of the work being critiqued. This is even more confidential than matters we reserve for FERPA protection.

2)    There is a house rule that no student can be selected more than once a semester for the “Prose Moment.” Even if you dread seeing your prose being dissected in front of the class, there is some comfort in the fact that you can only face that experience one time. Once you have been hit, you have been effectively immunized against further public discussion.

The good news is that the system works. I had tried other methods of teaching prose in my classes. Prose moments seem to be much more effective at producing results.

The writing problems in my class have been about 80-90 percent cleaned up. The September grades show an enormous percentage of papers getting penalties for writing problems. The November papers have far fewer penalties.

To my surprise, we were able to commit a substantial block of time to prose instruction and still get most of the relevant sociological content into the rest of the contact hours. Yes—some substantive revision was required, but that mostly meant the dropping of some relatively ineffective weaker material.

The writing in my class is not perfect. I still get a number of sloppy papers from repeat offenders, and the occasional hastily written paper from an otherwise good student.

However, since previous classes without this methodology saw NO upward trend and saw pervasive problems continuing chronically, I consider an 80-90 percent clean-up to be a very good result.

I agree with Professor Cohn’s analysis of why this technique works, and I would add  three more reasons: (1)  students are motivated to pay attention when editing prose with which they identify, (2)  using prose from their class papers brings home to them that their instructor really does read closely and really does care about more than content, and (3) editing is a step they generally skip, so they don’t get much practice at it. Allowing some class time to be devoted to developing this skill can pay high dividends.

If you are interested in some good book on prose style that can help you teach the art of editing, I recommend the following:

• Lanham, Richard A. Revising Prose. 5^th ed. or Revising Business Prose, 4^th edition. Pearson-Longman.
• Quinn, Rix. Words That Stick: A Guide to Short Writing with Big Impact. Ten Speed Press.
• Thomas, Francis-Noel and Mark Turner. Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Princeton University Press.
• Williams, Joseph. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 9^th ed. Pearson-Longman.

For a more grammatical approach, try:

• Kolln, Martha and Loretta Gray. Rhetorical Grammar, 6^th ed. Pearson-Longman
• Morenberg, Max and Jeff Sommers. The Writer’s Options: Lessons in Style and Arrangement, 8^th ed. Pearson-Longman.

I have copies of these at the University Writing Center that you can review if you are unable to obtain an exam copy. Just email me at uwc@tamu.edu. But if you don’t have time for extra reading, just use your own ear, your own experience as a writer, and some good common sense. The mere act of paying attention to prose usually results in improvement.