University Writing Center

by Valerie Balester Executive Director

The College of Liberal Arts has initiated a Civil Dialogue initiative. It should be a university-wide priority. The initiative aims to promote and foster civil dialogue within and outside the classroom.  The committee charged with spearheading this initiative defines civil dialogue as “A form of communication that allows people to express vigorously their opinions and points of view in a way that contributes to rigorous and constructive deliberation on significant issues and empowers personal and professional relations.”

The College of Liberal Arts has complied resources for helping teachers handle potentially polarizing or controversial topics in the classroom. For example, they describe how to foster civil dialogue by creating safe spaces, articulating ground rules, identifying stakeholders (including those often marginalized) and assumptions (especially those we may take for granted). Check them out at http://clla.tamu.edu/committees/civildialogue/resources-for-civil-dialogue.

One of the most important functions we perform in the University Writing Center is to talk to students about their work in progress and to listen with respect to their ideas and opinions. We may also question some of their ideas, ask for more evidence, challenge them to develop points more fully. We do so because we believe that feel that writing starts with civil dialogue. Likewise, in W and C courses, civil dialogue can be an excellent prelude to writing or speaking assignments.

There is a profound relationship between dialogue and writing. Testing ideas in conversation is one important means b y which writers discover what they want to say.  Writing is, in a sense, a way to extend conversations–the literature of a field is a conversation, embedded in other conversations that occur at conferences, on social networks, and through other venues. The implicit rules for how those conversations should occur are the basis of civil dialogue.  As academics we promote a respect for the ideas of others and freedom of speech, and we assume that all participants in a dialogue are being truthful. We expect, as well, that dialogue is a form of dialectic, a way in which we search for meaning or truth.

Besides testing their own ideas, students engaging in civil dialogue must do the hard work of listening to other perspectives with respect. The process of judging what others say and weighing their own ideas primes them for writing, public speaking, or debate. Have students discuss, then write or speak about, a common topic, or related topics, so that you can use civil dialogue as a bridge to public forms of communication. For example, have a class or two devoted to a controversial topic covered in your course objectives, perhaps related to something students are also reading about. Consider having both whole class and small group discussions. Ask students to record or reflect on the ideas discussed, then use these notes to come up with a research question or thesis.

Another way to prepare students for writing or speaking is to create a study circle in the class. A study circle is a group of people who come together over time to solve a problem or to take action—and the format is perfect if your class is based on inquiry. The study circle has a moderator, most likely the instructor in a class, who sets out the main issues, lays the ground rules for discussion, encourages everyone to participate and consider alternatives, and provides an opportunity for a final reflection. You can read more about this technique at the National Issues Forum (http://www.nifi.org/educators/index.aspx).

Whether they enter the work world, academia, professional school, or public service, students will benefit from learning to respectfully and rigorously engage in civic dialogue.

by Candace Schaefer, Associate Director

I suppose that we’ve all experienced the feeling at one time or another: the immobilizing fear that comes from not writing when we are supposed to be writing. I am in my seventh year of Ph.D. study, and I have watched many of my peers graduate and move on while I am still mired in what I would call sporadic yet chronic writer’s block. I finished my coursework with ease, but when faced with the proposal and the dissertation, I found myself making stutter starts and lots of stops. I was making progress, but not at the pace I wanted, and I was spending more time worrying about not writing than actually writing.

What is ironic and a bit sad is that I’m a writer and a writing teacher by profession. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time teaching other people how to write. I have helped graduate students complete their literature reviews while I struggled to complete my own. My block made me feel like a fraud in my professional life, and feelings of inadequacy only made writing more difficult.

However, the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t writing at all or that I lacked the confidence or ability to write. In fact, I was writing everything except what I should have been writing. I finished a journal article and a proposal for a textbook while I was supposed to be working on my dissertation proposal and literature review.  I wrote conference papers and reviewed the works of others.

From time to time, however, I would run into former classmates who were also having trouble writing. Faced with reality, we’d commiserate over our mired status and make excuses. Just when I thought that I’d never figure out what was wrong with me, I picked up a small book that taught me how to think my way out of the mess I was in.

In Understanding Writing Blocks, Keith Hjortshoj explains that writing blocks occur when the writer thinks and does something that disturbs the flow from thinking to writing. Although Hjortshoj acknowledges that writing is a recursive, non-linear process, blocked writers often repeat tasks unnecessarily, such as researching or reading, and eventually find themselves in endless loops of activity. The writers are working very hard, but they are not writing. They are going about the business of writing, even to the point of revising sentences, but they are not making progress on their writing.  They may feel that their writing is not good enough in draft form, or they may be reacting to criticism from professors that they did not expect.

In general, Hjorthoj posits that writers are most often blocked when they change levels or types of writing. It is at this point of transition that writers get lost in the enormity of a writing task or take on a topic that is too broad or too complex to articulate. They do not feel capable of taking on a new type of writing task or find that their writing skills do not seem to be transferable from one writing project to another. Hjortshoj suggests that blocked writers ask themselves the following questions:

• When and in what kind of writing did the block begin to occur?
• What other kinds of writing can you complete without so much difficulty, and why?
• Where, in the writing process, do you encounter a block?
• What kinds of activity surround the block? In other words, what are you doing up to the point at which you get stuck, and what do you do next?
• What ideas about writing, about yourself as a writer, or about audiences and standards, are associated with this problem?

When I asked myself these questions, I saw a lot of myself in Hjorthoj’s text. Furthermore, I was able to identify why I wasn’t writing. Often I thought I was done with a task, but when I took my completed work to my committee chair, she sent me back to rethink, revise or restructure something I had done. My committee chair would not have framed her directives as being major setbacks as much as expected revision tasks, but I was devastated. My work should have been perfect, and it wasn’t. Every time I had one of these self-imposed setbacks, I descended into a funk and avoided thinking or writing for days and weeks on end.

Right now I’m what I would call a blocked writer in recovery. I still have a long way to go to ensure that I don’t keep undermining my own success, but I also know now what triggers my blocks and have developed coping mechanisms to work around them.

I empathize with all of you reading this who are struggling with writer’s block, especially when people provide pithy or over simplistic advice like  “Just do it!” as if writer’s block could be cured by an advertising slogan.  And if you are ready to start trying to figure out why you can’t write when you really can, try asking yourself the questions that Hjorthoj poses. You may be pleasantly surprised that you had the answer all along.

by Valerie Balester, Executive Director

If you are giving your students feedback on their writing and allowing them time to revise, you’ll probably see improvement. But maybe you still see unrealized potential. If you think your feedback isn’t going far enough, some of the following techniques might give you better results.

1) Develop criteria to guide and evaluate writing in collaboration with students.

If you want students to understand what you are looking for in a document, ask them to help you write a rubric. The rubric identifies the criteria for evaluating a document, and by deciding on what it should require, students learn more actively what standards they need to meet to produce quality writing.  Start with discussion about what makes good writing of the type you want them to produce. In class or for homework, have them analyze a model—a good example of the type of writing you expect—and use what they see to create a description of A quality. If you have more than one class to devote to the exercise, you might ask them to also describe poor writing. Use their notes to build a rubric, then ask them to practice evaluating another piece (this time it can be student writing from another class or professional writing) using the rubric. Discuss how the class rated the samples. By the time you are finished, most of your class will have a much clearer understanding of the rubric.

2) Students don’t trust each other to edit, so don’t ask them to.

Peer editing is risky; peer response gets better results.  If you ask students to be peer editors, they won’t (rightly) trust one another. They know their peers may be shaky on the finer points of grammar and punctuation. They should be responding to each other’s content, organization, and argument.

3)      Provide peer and instructor feedback.

The more readers, the better. Every time a reader provides feedback, the writer has to consider revisions, and we know that writing improves with revision. So build incentives to revise frequently into your syllabus.

Instructor feedback. You don’t have to comment on every paper to provide helpful feedback. Randomly select two to four student papers at the end of a peer response day and read them carefully. From those papers select some passages or sentences that are strong but need improvement. If you select weaker writing or common errors, be very aware of the need for tact. You want to keep the level of trust high. Make a handout for discussion in the next class.

Another way to provide feedback is the in-class conference. On days when students are doing peer response in class, you hold 5-minute conferences with anyone who wants one (if they all do, you may have to devise some system like a lottery for those who get to see you during class). Use a timer to ensure you spend only 5 minutes per student. Basically, students should come to you with one specific question. If they don’t, concentrate your time by checking their introduction and structure (look at the beginning of each paragraph) or by reading a paragraph of their choice and giving in-depth feedback on that.

Peer feedback. Besides the class workshop devoted to peer response, you can ask students to read each other’s work for homework. No matter how you organize peer feedback, encourage specific suggestions and make sure students understand their roles. I usually ask them to give honest, tactful, and specific feedback k about what they like and what they don’t like or understand.  I also arrange so that they hear from at least two peers and explain that reactions and suggestions may well differ, since we all bring different skills and expectations to the task of reading. I stress that as writers it is ultimately their responsibility to weigh all the feedback they receive and decide how and whether to incorporate suggestions.

4) Set them up to provide feedback to themselves

Suggest  they work on a revision for an hour or so, set it aside then come back and review what they did earlier, again making changes. Talk about your own writing process and how you revise based on feedback from others. There is no better way to convince them—they don’t care much that their English teachers revise (unless they are English majors), but they may be very surprised that their engineering, biology, philosophy, or math professors do.

by Nancy Vazquez, Editor of Writing Matters, the faculty newsletter of the University Writing Center

I once heard an experienced professor give the following advice to a group of nervous, first-time composition instructors: If you ever run out of things to talk about during class, he advised, have your students write for part of the period. He recommended this not only because it could get a flustered, inexperienced teacher out of a jam, but also because it was good for the students. He knew they needed the practice.

Experienced instructors don’t usually worry about running out of things to say in class. Instead, they have too much to accomplish and not enough time to fit it at all in. Still, I think there’s something important any instructor, even a veteran, can take away from that advice for first-timers.

The truth is our students don’t get enough practice writing. The requirements we have in place are a start, but depending on your students’ majors and schedules, there’s a good chance they go entire semesters, if not years, without writing anything for a class. And they simply won’t become better writers if they don’t get a chance to develop and flex their writing muscles.

Of course, once your syllabus is set, it’s hard to think of giving time up for writing, especially since you have material to cover. But what good is material that’s covered, if it’s not also understood and remembered? That’s where writing comes in. Writing can help that material sink in and make sense for your students. Writing won’t detract from their learning; it will enhance it.

By asking students to write, you’re not just making them practice a necessary skill, you’re also asking them to connect with what they’re learning.

So, as the semester rolls along, look for opportunities to sneak some more writing into your course.

• If your students don’t seem to be engaged with the course material, have them spend a few minutes summarizing a reading.
• If they seem to be confused about what to study before an exam, ask them to jot down their ideas.  What do they think is important in what they’ve learned?
• If it’s a rainy Tuesday and you want to shake things up before a class discussion, get them to write first instead of speaking.

You don’t have to grade what they write; you may not even need to read it, at least not every word.

After all, it’s just practice–and it’s exactly what they need.

by Valerie Balester, Executive Director

Do you remember when you received a bifurcated grade on a paper—something like A for Content and C for writing? Conventional wisdom is that “writing” is something we do after we gather content and decide upon arguments: writing is the part where we select words, organize, punctuate, and put thoughts into language.

But there’s another way to look at it. Thinking about content and arguments is as much a part of writing as selecting and arranging words. That part of the process where you think up what to say, often by reading, taking notes, or talking to others, is sometimes called pre-writing, but there’s really nothing prior about it. It’s an essential element of the writing process.

And it happens that we think not only before we write, but as we write and revise. Writing generates new ideas. Writing is not simply organization, grammar, style, and mechanics imposed upon thought.

When we assign writing in the major, we are not simply asking students to communicate an idea already formed or a concept already learned. They are not “just writing”—they are also thinking within their new disciplines. To invite students to communicate in our disciplines is to teach them to think like we do: to value certain arguments over others, to understand the nature of evidence, to use particular formats, to present data in certain ways, and so on. What kinds of arguments will a mathematician make to prove a theorem to her peers? And how might a biochemist report on research in a way that will gain him a grant?

Your students won’t learn this from a technical writing class taught by someone outside your discipline.

When you assign writing in a W or a C course, consider whether the task serves to strengthen students’ understanding of content—will writing about history help them to consider what history is from a philosophical as well as a factual perspective? Can they use the facts they learn in physics and apply them to a real-world problem to help them learn at a deeper level?

Think of writing as another mode of learning, one that can engage students in a highly satisfying way and that can let them demonstrate to you how much they have really been able to enter into your discipline. Challenge students to think as well as to communicate. And spend some class time discussing how writers in your discipline think, how they organize arguments, view evidence, and present ideas. You’ll see much better writing and learning as a result.