AL 833/Bump Halbritter

Mary Rosalez AL 833/Bump Halbritter Syllabus Project

High on the list of freshman priorities, floating somewhere between sleep and food and friends, are grades. We would like them to be motivated by ideals, by the desire to learn and become well-rounded adults. Silly, aren’t we? But the truth is, we can’t make them care and we can’t make them love learning, yet we can try to motivate them in that direction, help them to at least come to a modicum of understanding about how blessed they are to even be here. Still, they just want to pass, get that diploma, and get out there and work, work, work. Silly, aren’t they? One objective, then, in composing a syllabus for a writing course is to develop assignments that will keep them busy, hold them accountable, and encourage their writing skills, and all the while encourage them to think more critically—about everything. Critical thinking is one of Alma College’s main liberal arts objectives and—fortunately or unfortunately, I can’t decide which—they have thrown the beginnings of this squarely in the lap of my course. Every student is required to take English 101, and English majors need not take any other writing course. A lot of responsibility is on our shoulders. Too, this course is considered a rhetoric course, not just a writing or composition course, so there is admittedly a heavy focus on Aristotelian rhetorical ideas. Now that I am more aware of other rhetorics I would love to design a course that is more inclusive, but frankly there just isn’t time right now to change my course too drastically. Most of my pedagogy revolves around discovery learning, the idea that the students’ prior knowledge can simultaneously be tapped into and challenged, leading them to extend what they know into a learning experience. Like Peter Elbow, I believe that “Writers testify all the time to the experience of knowing more than they can say, of knowing things that they haven’t yet been able to get into words” (75). Discovery learning helps students learn how to put this knowledge into words. Olson says “that the act of writing can be a means of learning and discovery” (7). Through their writing, students can learn a lot. On the other hand, I don’t believe rhetoric is a body of knowledge that can be taught like calculus or astronomy, but is rather a skill, something that must be practiced and fine-tuned like music or gymnastics. This would be similar, I believe, to the idea “discovered” at the Dartmouth conference back in 1966, the “Copernican shift from a view of English as something you learn about to a sense of it as something you do” (Harris 1). We can direct students. We can guide them. We can point them in the right direction. We can wince at the sour notes and let them know when they finally get them right. We can encourage practice. We need to make them write, write, write. As David Smit says, “The subject of a writing course is writing” (186). Through practice, they will discover their weaknesses and strengths and will hopefully find their own voice—or at least a voice they are comfortable with. Does this sound idealistic? Perhaps, but I believe that some of the struggles of my students have been alleviated by this theory of practice and by the theory of discovery. The idea of discovery learning is highly process-oriented. It is the idea that students can learn through discovery more than they can through lecture, that as they “invent the university” as Bartholomae would put it, they begin to approximate the language they read and hear, the language of the academy (205). I hope to have a classroom that encourages students to do a lot of thinking before they write, and to have that thought come from classroom discourse, a discourse that approximates as well. I try, as I teach, to talk in their discourse enough to make them feel at ease yet talk in academic discourse enough to familiarize them with it, based on Elbow’s idea that “language acquisition is the absence of teaching. What people need for acquiring language is not teaching but to be around others who speak, to be listened to, and to be spoken to” (“Interchanges” 90). My hope is to get students to learn and discover as they write— through freewriting and the several papers. I often think students believe they can only write about what they know. Elbow says “…that writing is the creating or constructing of meaning, not the transmission of meaning already worked out (Smit 186). It truly is amazing what we can discover—about ourselves, about our thinking, and about our writing—when we write freely. Additionally, my syllabus is meant to have several writing assignments designed to give students the opportunity to write on a wide variety of topics and in a wide variety of genres. The beginning of the semester focuses more on papers that give students opportunities to write from what they already know and feel, a time for them to practice basic writing skills using ideas and thoughts that are comfortable to them, allowing the focus to be on skills and forms rather than just content. Harris says that “most learning should have its beginnings in some sort of expressive talk and writing—in language in which ideas and feelings are still being sorted out rather than being phrased as facts or conclusions” (8). The opinion assignments do just this: there is no right or wrong answer to the subject of a student’s ideas. Yet there are rights and wrongs—or at least goods and bads—in the English language. I have made assumptions before about students’ abilities to adequately write clear and simple essays: they struggled with theses, support, conclusions and basic grammatical and punctuation issues. As a result, when I wanted them to focus on content, they were absorbed with mechanics. I believe that if the semester begins with an opinion assignment then class time can be spent on the basics. Yet I hope to teach these basics using discovery learning, thus avoiding the “body of knowledge” approach.

Syllabus: Rationales for Text, Ancillary Writing, Grading and Rubrics, Presentations, Group Conferencing, and Attendance

Rationale for Discovering Arguments: This text was co-authored by William Palmer, a former professor of mine, and a man who is now a dear friend. I have chosen it for two main reasons: First, the text is an excellent resource for style, grammar, readings, research strategies, punctuation, and bibliographies among others. Second—and more important—it represents theoretical and pedagogical beliefs that are similar to mine. I do not believe in heavy readings, but in several varied readings that students can respond to and recognize as having key features, readings that provide a sweeping nibble at the world of literature and texts that they may encounter. Such a wide variety allows the students to realize that writing is not limited to textbooks and novels, but that writing takes various technical and creative forms. Exposure to and understanding of the various genres and styles allows students to realize that this course is so much more than a class that will help them learn to write papers for college. This text contains several hundred readings and excerpts from texts and authors that present the students with a wide array of style, technique, and purpose. I believe in students writing as much as possible. I believe that, just like many other skills that are difficult to teach, writing must be practiced to be learned. It is not something that I can lecture on, have them take notes on, and then at the end of the semester take a test on, and then viola!—they know how to write. My pedagogy, then, requires students to write several papers, not just a few. This text takes students through several possible papers, and additionally has “Interchapters” that connect certain style issues and mechanical skills to the particular paper, skills that are pertinent to the writing assignment. The skills are presented in an order that allows students to discover certain mechanical tools first, as elements of strong writing rather than as corrective issues. Although the title of this book may lead you to believe that the book focuses solely on one particular type of writing—argumentation—this would not be the case. While argumentation is a considerable portion of it, the theory behind such a focus is that all writing needs to be making a point, needs a purpose, and needs to present the writer as someone who firmly presents some idea. I realize that my semester moves quickly from more expressivist writing to what Olson calls “assertive” writing. I’m not sure if this is as bad as he makes it sound, but I recognized my first semester the need I felt to get my students to make assertions, to have them make claims and to back them up. It seems, like Olson says, that “despite our attempts to introduce alternative genres […] the tradition of assertion and support […] defies even our most concerted efforts to subvert it” (9). He would like to see composition courses move toward “an openness to something unknown without any compulsion to master it or to assert a position on it” (13), but I find this to be the student tendency already. They would rather, it seems, never take a clear position. I have trouble getting them to be assertive and back up their ideas. Frankly, I just don’t know how to grade writing that is “in a state of perpetual receptiveness (Olson 14). Attached to this theory is the need for students to learn to think critically. Critical thinking is, I believe, central to a first year writing course (and frankly all writing). Students, in order to write and communicate well, need to learn to think analytically and carefully about what they read, what they see, what they say, what influences them, what influences others…the list could go on and on. Thus this book, while it leads students through several skills and writing techniques, subtly—and sometimes quite overtly—encourages critical thinking skills and leads them to an understanding of what critical thinking is. There are, however, drawbacks to this text: one is its length. I would not use everything, nor would I follow it from front to back—as you can see by the rest of my syllabus. But as far as textbooks go, I have yet to see one that meets my needs—and I believe the needs of the students —as well as this one. Am I biased because Dr. Palmer is my former professor and friend? He wonders the same thing. Am I biased because I have writing published in this book? Possibly. But so far I have been using this book and his methods in my classroom—tweeked to fit me and my teaching style of course—and I feel it is successful and natural for me. After all, even Neeley concedes that “how we teach our courses depends, in some part, on the courses we have taken in the past” (Good and Warshauer 21). If I am biased, I don’t believe it has hurt my students any.

Rationale for Ancillary Writing: Elbow thinks of journaling and freewriting as a way to “heighten discovery and learning” and says that in freewriting “Students can discover that they can write words and thoughts and not worry about what good writing is or what the teacher wants, they discover that their heads are full of language and ideas…and discover they can get pleasure from writing” (“Interchanges” 89). I believe that the end-product, the formal paper, is a conglomeration of several things which include critical thinking, well-constructed language, and a strong voice. Students who are consistently made aware of how their language is affected by these things, and are given the tools and the practice to enable them to use them, are students who learn to do more than transfer ideas onto a piece of paper; they are students who become aware of the complexity of language and writing. Because I believe that writing is a skill that takes guidance and practice, the classroom needs to be a place where students are given the tools they need to become writers and the practice time to hone their skills. Students enter the semester already knowing how to write; it is my job to help them learn to write well. It is, after all, composition. They are composers. They are composing a symphony of words. Few will become Rachmaninoff, but all will (ideally) learn to find their own sense of the rhythm, balance, and power of the written word. Journaling, drafting, and homework are designed to help students organize, recognize, and recall, to spend time on process and writing without concern for error. Journaling itself— freewriting without concern for spelling or grammar or grades—has intrinsic value that cannot be achieved any other way. As Elbow says, “Writing in class helps me not just sanction, dignify, and celebrate writing; it helps me frankly coach students in various concrete practices and techniques and approaches toward getting words on paper” (“Writer” 74). When students are forced (or allowed, depending on how you look at it) to write what they are thinking without hesitating or editing their words, they are often surprised at what they come up with. Because I would like them to then share or talk about what they have written, it takes the freewriting to another level: dialogic discourse. This is where “students [can] situate what they write into the conversation of other members of the classroom community to whom they are writing and whom they are reading” (“Writer” 79). This is where I can do that “coaching,” which in turn leads to wonderful discussion and hopefully wonderful ideas. I wouldn’t necessarily define my entire philosophy of teaching around this, but as does David Sumner, I want students “to participate in in-class discussions about issues, to discover points of stasis, to generate questions at issue, and then to respond to those questions in argumentative essays” (Good and Warshauer 58). The ancillary writings are to germinate all of this.

Rationale for Grading and Rubrics: I always grade using a rubric, as attached to each major writing assignment, and those rubrics are based on the five criteria for grading essays (see attached). My reasons are simple: First, I prefer to make grading as objective as possible and a rubric accomplishes this. Second, I want grading to be as fast and simple for me as possible and a rubric accomplishes this as well. Third, I feel students have a right to know why specifically they received the grade they did and, again, a rubric accomplishes this. Fourth, I like having something concrete to refer to when working with revisions or talking to a student about a grade (although I haven’t had one student question a grade yet—perhaps because of the rubrics). I design my rubrics, though, a bit differently than many others I have seen. They are broken up into the five criteria and then, within each criteria, I specify what that would look like for each paper. This comes from realizing that I was repeatedly writing the same comments over and over on student papers. When I realized this, I decided instead to put them into the criteria, give them the rubric ahead of time so they know what they will be graded on, and then just go down the list and make check marks. I still leave an end comment—using the “positive sandwich” (I don’t remember who I’m quoting here)—but this has reduced my grading time from over 30 minutes per paper to around 12. As far as determining grades for the semester goes, I use a 1000-point scale. I believe it is easier for students to know where they stand with their grade according to points rather than percentages or straight letter grades. I gave ancillary writing 100 points (10%). Students will be doing a considerable amount of writing in class, between journaling and writing prompts and drafts, and, while these are never really graded, they are important for them to do. Thus I will be checking to see that they do these things regularly and give them credit for them. The minor assignments and presentations are worth 250 points (25%). The students will be writing and presenting a lot, so this simply makes sense to weight it this heavily. I do grade these, on a 4.0 scale (which I then average and convert to points), yet I will readily admit that I am pretty easy on these. I don’t use rubrics, I don’t pay much attention to mechanics, and what I’m looking for is critical thinking. I make this clear to them and give them very specific ideas of what I’m looking for in each assignment (it varies). In-class essays are each worth 50 points (5%), not enough to hurt their grade much if they don’t do well, but enough to make them matter. They can mean the difference between an A and an A/B, for example, so students make sure to show up and write these. Because I don’t really believe in testing in writing class, however, these serve other purposes and I don’t like to weight them too heavily. Major papers are weighted each 100 points, except for the research paper which is certainly more difficult, more time- consuming, and longer and is therefore weighted 200 points, which altogether is the equivalent of half their grade. I decided 100 points for the first three was sufficient to make them important yet not the be-all and end-all of their grades. Technically they can, however, do poorly on every paper and still pass if they do everything else 100% (not that this would ever happen, but it’s possible). The portfolio is required by my department and is not used as a major assessment tool. I do, however, have them write a reflective statement to go with the portfolio and that is essentially what I grade. I want them to put effort into this, so I give it 50 points (5%). To sum this all up, I wanted to weight each portion of the class in ways that will help students understand that process and product are both important, that writing a lot is essential, and that success or failure in every area affects the success or failure of every other area. Too much weight in any particular category deemphasizes those elements of composition that I believe are important. I sometimes worry that my grading is too product-heavy, that I don’t put enough weight on process; it’s about 50/50. I have leaned in the other direction before, but I have discovered that grading something as subjective as process is difficult (like grading something fuzzy like “participation”—who really is going to give a student a bad participation grade in college?). Too, I have found that those students who do all the process stuff end up with good product and those who don’t participate in all the process work don’t have the best product —so inevitably the grade ends up the same.

Rationale for Student Presentations: I believe that, while the main goal of the course is writing, a freshman composition course should go beyond paper and pen: students will benefit from learning to develop presentations in various forms and having to do them in front of the class. From this, they will gain, first of all, extensive knowledge of the material they have to present. I assign them a variety of presentation assignments, everything from poster presentations to actual debates, in order to tap in to the various ways that material can be presented outside of a paper. These presentations have several benefits: they have to think on your feet, get other students to respond, and be able to explain in more than one way if someone doesn’t understand. They have to be patient. They have to be persistent. These presentations also encourage students to work together, to tap into one another’s brains and realize that writing is not just a solitary act. Much of what we do as writers comes from what we do with others. It keeps them from getting behind in their process. It keeps them from shallow thinking because they don’t like to look stupid in front of their peers. It keeps them from getting bored with repetition. And while I do understand and, in part, proscribe to the cognitive writing process theory, I feel more strongly drawn to the ecological model, the socially constructed model “of an infinitely extended group of people who interact through writing, who are connected by the various systems that constitute the activity of writing” (Cooper 372). Good writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Presentations, too, are a teaching tool: without realizing it, students are, in effect, teaching. I realize that teaching a few little presentations will not give them the full experience of what it means to teach, but whether students are aware of what they are learning or not, they are doing so much more than conveying information. Wilbert McKeachie, in his book Teaching Tips, believes that “Students teaching other students must actively organize and reorganize their own learning in order to explain it. Thus they themselves learn from teaching” (100). I have to agree.

Rationale for Group Conferencing: During the past few years I have been teaching college writing, I have group-conferenced nearly every paper, and the students love it. A group conference, in a nutshell, is peer workshop with me there. The students give one another their papers in groups of three, read them, and fill out the group conferencing sheet. When they come for their conference, I have not read the papers. It is the students’ responsibility to have read it and thought about it critically. I ask all kinds of questions about purpose, what they’ve learned, what works well, etc. I have done these for years and they are an absolute success, and for a variety of reasons: First of all, it alleviates pressure for me: I don’t have to read all their drafts and comment on them ahead of time. Secondly, the students are put in a position where they are required to think critically about someone else’s paper, which in turn makes them think critically about their own writing. More than once during these conferences I have had students tell me that they learned so much just from seeing what others had done—what to do and what not to do. Because they must be ready to talk about the other students’ papers, they must do some critical thinking. Another reason for the success of group conferencing is that I am there—as opposed to workshops in class where I would only be able to float from group to group—to guide the students, making sure that they do more than simply tell the writer that they have a good paper, something I have seen happen more than once. I’m aware of the fact that my presence can change the nature of peer workshopping—but frankly that’s the whole idea. Harvey Weiner feels that “the teacher’s presence as a group member challenges one of the basic tents of collaboration in the classroom…to help students gain authority over their knowledge and gain independence in using it” (57). While I can appreciate this problem, it isn’t my main concern in these workshops. My main concerns are to make sure the workshop goes well, to make sure they are giving one another good advice, to make sure they are thinking critically. I don’t honestly think that throwing students into peer workshops right away is productive: it’s tantamount to asking them to grade a paper. They don’t know what they’re doing. Group conferencing is a sort of discovery learning, a scaffolding if you will. And they do peer workshops without me, but not right away. Most of all, though, the students seem to really get a lot from this. They feel at ease critiquing one another’s papers without feeling attacked, they get input from more than just me (they don’t think they get any input from me, which I think is great), and they get to know one another and enjoy reading each other’s papers. I do, however, feel the need to talk with students one on one at some point. This semester I chose to do individual conferencing for the last paper. I want to talk not only about their current paper but also about their writing in general. I believe I will do the same with this schedule, allowing the students to meet with me and cover any issues they feel they need to address. Rationale for Attendance Policy: I have tried several approaches to attendance: an attendance policy, no attendance policy, and no attendance policy with assignments due every day that couldn’t be turned in if you weren’t there. Undoubtedly the most successful results have come from having an attendance policy. I’m aware that college students are adults and should be forced into coming to class. But I have also found that if I don’t require their attendance, they are much more likely to miss class even if it’s just a few times. The pace of my class makes it very difficult for someone to succeed who isn’t there, so I have an attendance policy. With one exception, it has been quite successful since its implementation.

Major Papers: Rationales for Assignments and Assignment Sequencing The first unit focuses on opinions. We begin by reading three articles on education, ones that I’ve used before and tend to get students particularly riled up, especially Jacob Neusner’s essay “The Speech the Graduates Didn’t Hear.” The students first read these and respond to them in an online forum, a way to be sure everyone—including the quieter students—are heard. This is also a way to “situate what they write into the conversation of other members of the classroom community to whom they are writing and whom they are reading” (Elbow 79). They have a lot to say about these articles, and their critical thinking skills kick in pretty quickly. Too, they are writing about something they know very well: school. They have been students for years and can feel confident about responding to what these authors have to say. As Elbow would put it, “unless we can et things up so that our first year students are often telling us about things that they know better than we do, we are sabotaging the essential dynamic of writers. We are transforming the process of “writing” into the process of “being tested” (81). Next they analyze the authors’ rhetoric in groups. Rhetorical analysis, for most students, is incredibly difficult: they have trouble separating how they are being persuaded from what they are being persuaded about. It is also chock full of those nasty little “terministic screens” that Kenneth Burke talks about. So putting them in groups and having them present instead of write, for starters, makes them a little less uncomfortable. From here they move to online blogs on education to hear what other students and teachers are saying about current issues in education. They summarize—to ensure that they understand what they are reading—and respond to these as well, as they did with the articles in a more structured, guided way. All of this leads into their first major paper, an opinion paper on education based on what they have been reading. As they have been working on the other projects in class, they will be working on this opinion paper as well, mostly through journaling and in-class writing prompts. I explain to my students right away about the two-layered process inherent in all of our units: as they are working on minor papers and presentations, these are all part of the critical thinking process and the writing process that will enable them to write successfully for the major papers. By the time we get to the major paper, the students will have written a lot already about education and will have formed strong opinions, thus will be eager—and they usually are pretty eager—to write these major papers. When these are done, we work on fine-tuning a paragraph for publication on a blog outside the campus, one that the public can read and hopefully respond to, in an academic blog space (learnerblogs.org). And (as if this isn’t enough), we are working on understanding the five criteria for good writing (see attached); logos, pathos, and ethos; and “showing”—using personal examples as support. I consider these the basics of rhetoric and solid student writing. Once the basics are out of the way, the semester progresses into a series of papers that require a higher level of critical thinking. The second unit, strategies of argumentation, asks students to argue for a definition of a word. They still are working from what they already know and what they observe, yet this time their knowledge is not likely something they have ever thought about before: the power of words. We begin by having them, as a group, come up with a definition of the word “quality” and then, using one of the strategies of argumentation, they have to literally argue for their definition. The critical thinking here comes from several students using several strategies to argue for their own definition—and usually the class comes up with seven different definitions. We pick apart language and what words mean, all the while using rhetorical strategies. Then this is repeated again with a close look at the essay “Brute” written by Richard Selzer, where he ambiguously tells a story of two possible brutes. The students, then, have a debate and they have to have support from the text for their argument and support from their own experiences. What is building here are several things: students are learning rhetorical strategies by using them, they are learning to support their claims first by their own experiences then by a text, they are creating knowledge through class discussion and interaction, and they are creating and understanding of language and its complexities. This all leads up, again, to their next major paper, one where they choose a word, define it, and then argue for that definition using text and their own experience. Unit three—rhetorical analysis—builds yet again on what they have done so far. This unit is by far the most difficult, filled with terministic screens, academic discourse, and concepts foreign to most students. I have yet to teach this unit without major whining and struggle. Yet students are, inevitably, much better writers and critical thinkers for the experience. They struggle with the critical thought involved when having to discover not only what writers say but also how they say it, what affect it has on readers, and why. My belief is that this is often too much at once. It’s like setting the table with a complete Thanksgiving dinner for a one-year-old who can barely digest Cheerios and expecting her to tackle the turkey leg, the cornbread stuffing, and the pumpkin pie. A syllabus that allows practice means several papers before the rhetorical analysis—not just exercises or journal entries or handouts, but actual papers—where the students have to first use rhetorical tools (they already do, but they would become conscious of them) and do critical thinking about their own writing first. Before doing rhetorical analysis, then, students write a paper concentrating on what they are saying and how they are affecting the reader, then a paper focused on how they create rhetoric. At this point, hopefully, they are ready to analyze another’s rhetoric. They begin by summarizing. It may seem like a step backwards, but if we don’t begin this way then, I have learned, it takes a week just to get them away from talking about the topic and to focus on analysis. It’s been a big stumbling block and this helps—at least some. Then in groups they analyze the effects of style and present their findings to the class. This assignment usually amazes the students: they had no idea how much things like metaphor, repetition, and punctuation can affect persuasion. Then we move into rhetorical analysis—hard core analysis that they struggle with. I have, in the past, had them do this alone. They failed (yet learned) to really grasp this. I have changed my approach to this assignment almost every semester. Then last semester I hit on a gem: chatting their way through it. So we take two days in the computer lab where the students are put in groups. They have read and annotated the same article as the others in their group, and then they get online in Moodle (Alma’s version of Angel) and log into the chatrooms I set up for them, where I can jump in or watch. I have a set of questions for them to work through as they chat. This worked so well last year that I am going to do it again: I was amazed at how they managed to understand rhetoric and analyze it so well in this type of forum. All this, again, leads into their major paper: analyzing and evaluating two articles on the same topic. Their job is to read them, summarize them, then argue for which one is the most persuasive. This paper, as before, combines the elements of the previous two—persuasion through personal knowledge and experience and persuasion using textual evidence—yet adds on the additional work of rhetorical analysis. Too, they look carefully at words and their ambiguities; at logos, pathos, and ethos; and at argumentation strategies. Then, of course, the course culminates with “the big kahuna” as I put it: the research paper. Alma College only requires students to take one writing course, and this is it. Thus we really have a lot to cram into one semester. And one of these things is a research paper. Frankly I wish I didn’t have to teach it because it is such an inauthentic thing to write, but I know they need this for the rest of their years at school. Yet every time we get to the research paper I feel once again as though I am merely here to serve the academy. At the same time, everything we have done so far leads up to this paper: they understand what goes into opinions, how to use different strategies to persuade, how language is ambiguous and tentative, how to read their research critically, and ultimately how to persuade. They do very academic things like research proposals, annotated bibliographies, research reports, etc. Obviously I’m not as fond of this assignment as the others, but I hope to create a semester that progresses to a place where students feel comfortable and prepared to write a long paper like this. It usually is the case. We do one more unit after the research paper, but it is a mini-unit and involves no formal writing. We discuss visual rhetoric by studying editorial cartoons and the students do presentations. This actually does build well on what they have learned over the semester, and the students do learn from this unit, but to be honest I do this unit mostly because I need the extra week to grade all the research papers. If this weren’t the case, I would introduce visual rhetoric in a different way. The first half of the semester is, admittedly, more “writerly” as Elbow would say, less academic. While they are writing in an academic setting, their assignments are designed to focus more on things the students would be able to take ownership of papers they would hopefully enjoy writing, mainly papers where they get to speak their minds and talk about themselves. The second half of the semester then shifts into taking similar assignments and putting them into a more “academic” sphere, writing that requires students to think more critically about texts and other genres in a more scholarly fashion. If I try to place all of these assignments somewhere within Fulkerson’s taxonomy, for example, I realize that I can’t do it; I tend to wander. The semester starts with the writer, “emphasiz[ing] the voice and interests of the writer” (Wilhoit 28). But then we move to reading response, rhetorical analysis, and research, whence it becomes a unit on “the rhetorical techniques that help writers meet the needs of or sway readers” (Wilhoit 28-9). At the same time, this unit is very subject-oriented, thus a mimetic approach designed to help “students learn how to learn about the world beyond their own experience” (Wilhoit 29). Yet I continually, throughout the semester, talk “language, format, and conventions of writing” (Wilhoit 29), putting me in the formalist camp. I just have nowhere to pitch my tent. Too, I don’t know exactly where this would fall with Elbow and Bartholomae, but like Elbow, “I insist I can have it both ways” (“Interchanges” 88). Students can start the semester writing for themselves and end the semester writing for the academy. Although I don’t consider the writer and academy to be as separate as Elbow does, I do believe that certain assignments can be considered more academic: an academic paper is one you would never write outside of academia. The audience is academia. The subject is grounded in academia. It’s an academic paper—like this one. But I’m hoping students won’t see things this way. I’m hoping they’ll see all of their writing as being both for them (the writer) and for me (the academy). If they really think everything they do is just for school and in no way for them, that defeats the purpose of education, which is ultimately for the student. This is why all my units also have an element of publication, one where the students’ ideas ultimately end up out in cyberspace for everyone to read. I’m hoping, since this is the first time I’ve required this, that the additional element of writing for real audiences—even if the audience remains mysterious and a bit ephemeral—at least someone outside of the classroom will be reading what they have to say. It makes these assignments a bit more genuine. I also encourage—and have a few times required—my students to submit their writing to the “My Turn” column in Newsweek and/or to submit it for the writing contest. My goal is always a semester that allows students to get the practice they need while helping them feel confidence in their own writing abilities. I really want to get out of their way, to de-center myself from their writing process, because ultimately I know that all students come into my class knowing how to write; 101 is not a course that literally teaches them how to write, but to write better, stronger, and more effectively. They just need to practice. I know from my own experience that the more I write, the better I write. The more papers I am forced to crank out, the more I learn. The wider the variety, the more prolific I become. I am not thinking that all my students will leave the semester loving writing like I do. That would be highly unrealistic. But I would like them to leave the semester feeling confident that they can write, and write well. Many are unsure what freshman writing curricular goals should be, “whether they should focus on personal expressive writing, introduce students to the essential of academic discourse, promote the writing of essays as a way to reflect critically on significant cultural issues, or a number of other goals” (Smit 200). I may be naïve, but I don’t know why we can’t include a small element of all these things. I would never encourage a musician to learn only one type of music or to play only one composer any more than I would encourage a writer to learn only one type of writing or one purpose for it. Why can’t they practice a little bit of everything, so long as they are practicing?

Rationale for In-Class Writing Exams: I have gone back and forth on this in-class writing quite a bit, but have landed on the side of keeping them. I’ve had reservations for several reasons. For one, I believe that, from the students’ perspective, the in-class essay is really nothing more than a test, even though we do spend some time discussing the in-class essays they write for other courses and how to do these successfully. Too, the writing process, while it often can require a student to think on his/her feet, is not about whipping off whatever comes to mind. The critical thinking and revision that helps students truly learn to write are not taught in a spontaneous writing exercise. These essays, then, simply test their ability to critically think and put those thoughts in written form in a 40-50 minute period. While testing has its merits in most other venues, I don’t believe it is vital to a writing course. But I still do it. I have a reason for this madness. I have discovered that, in this short time, students often come up with ideas and language startlingly superior to what they would write if they had the time to be more critical of themselves. So my main—and rather underhanded—reason, it turns out, for these in-class tests is that many students don’t believe me when I tell them that they can write better if they don’t edit as they go, if they just write without worrying so much about error and grammar. I always suggest things like writing with their monitor turned off. I give them writing prompts in class and tell them they can’t stop writing. I encourage them to turn off the red and green squigglys in Word. Yet they continue—at least some of them—to edit as they go. But what happens in these exams is that students don’t have time to edit much and I tell them I’m not counting mechanics really, as long as I can read it. Then they write, quit worrying, and more often than I can remember end up with writing that flows better, is more natural, makes more sense, and is simply better. When this is pointed out to them after the first exam, they are dumbfounded—and then they believe me. Ultimately, students can learn to trust themselves more. In the long run, the hope is that they will come to a place where such spontaneous writing doesn’t bother them at all, but rather comes naturally. So I do test them—and as a result am able to test their writing process as well.

Works Cited

Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English. 48.4. Apr. 1986. 364-75.

Elbow, Peter. “Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College

Composition and Communication. 46.1. Feb. 1995. 72-83.

Good, Tina and Warshauer, Leanne, eds. In Our Own Voice: Graduate Students Teach Writing.

Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.

Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997.

“Interchanges: Responses to Bartholomae and Elbow.” College Composition and

Communication. 46.1: Feb. 1995. 84-107.

Olson, Gary. “Toward a Post-Process Composition: Abandoning the Rhetoric of Assertion.”

Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm. Carbondale and

Edwardsville, IL: SIUP, 1999.

Smit, David. “Curriculum Design for First-Year Writing Programs.” The Allyn and Bacon

Sourcebook for Writing Program Administrators. Eds. Ward, Irene and William J.

Carpenter. New York: Longman, 2002.

Weiner, Harvey S. “Collaborative Learning in the Classroom: A Guide to Evaluation.” College

English. 48.1. Jan 1986. 52-61. Wilhoit, Stephen W. The Allyn and Bacon Teaching Assistant’s Handbook: A Guide for

Graduate Instructors of Writing and Literature. New York: Longman, 2003.