Bringing Sexy Back: Addressing Grammar, Style, & Genre in Writ 101

"...teaching student grammar skills is rarely associated with the political programs that characterize our disciplinary rhetoric and is seldom linked with rhetorical education or the practice of cultural critique. Grammar instruction, in short, is decidedly not sexy but school-marmish, not empowering but disempowering, not rhetorical but decontextualized, not progressive but remedial” (Micciche 718).

Why, yes, I combined Justin Timberlake lyrics with a quote from Micciche’s article in christening my post—after all, this is a blog, and didn’t we all agree that the genre calls for eye-catching titles? While I’m at it, I might as well throw in an image, since the blog genre also often calls for visuals to supplement the text:

I’m sure Bawarshi and Reiff would praise my genre dedication: their article “Rhetorical Genre Studies: Approaches to Teaching Writing” advocates the exploration and production of texts from multiple genres. They also assert that students should not just be able to recognize “typified rhetorical features” of different genres, but that they should have a “meta-genre awareness,” a sense of how skills cultivated and applied in each genre can be translated into other writing contexts (Bawarshi and Reiff 189, 192). Developing meta-genre awareness in our students should be a key goal for us as Writ 101 instructors, since, as as Laurel hints at in her post title, many of our students might be asking themselves the dreaded “How will this apply to my major?” question. We obviously don’t want our students to see Writ 101 as a pointless class; helping our students gain meta-genre awareness is one way to combat negative, defeatist attitudes.

So the concept is clear and the outcome is desirable—but after reading the first three pages of Bawarshi and Reiff’s rhetorical genre manifesto, I found myself questioning the application. How do we move the concept to the classroom and effectively foster the development of our students’ meta-genre awareness? Luckily for me, Bawarshi and Reiff spend the rest of the article introducing exercises designed to help students analyze, critique, produce, and contextualize various genres. From exploring the rhetorical patterns of multiple genres (194) and critiquing the syllabus (198) to inventing genre “mini-manuals” (201) and completing “genre ethnographies” on professors or other students (203), the authors provide a multitude of activities that could easily be adapted for my own classroom. And looking back, I realize that I have already planted the seeds of meta-genre awareness in my students by embedding reflection in my introduction of each new unit; as we began the Op-Ed, I asked what skills we’d developed in the first two units would be applied to their Op-Eds. To my fellow TAs: in what ways have you already or do you plan on developing genre awareness in your students? Did a particular exercise from Bawarshi and Reiff speak to you?

Just as I struggled with knowing how to show my students the cross-genre transferability of their skills, I’ve also had trouble situating grammar and style in my pedagogy. In 540 we've talked extensively about prioritizing higher-order concerns over their lower-order counterparts—and grammar is a concern that inevitably takes a back seat to more pressing issues with meaning and content. But what Micciche’s article taught me is that I’ve been seeing grammar as the overbearing school marm, not the sexy, transformative, rhetorically-driven force it could (and should, in our classrooms) be. As Micciche shows, when grammar is considered in terms of its rhetorical impact on a text, it’s not a “lower-order concern.” In fact, as Noel points out in her post, fully understanding how grammatical choices affect meaning in a text is actually a “high road transfer” that requires critical, reflective, and abstract thinking—skills that we all want our students to master. And evaluating grammar in terms of its rhetorical effect also shows our students that language has an “aliveness,” a “changing, transforming capacity” (724). Texts aren’t static; good writing isn’t magically placed in a writer’s head and translated to the page. There are specific choices one can make to produce powerful, engaging writing—choices in tone, diction, point of view, and metadiscourse, as Kolln enumerates in her chapter from The Curious Writer. By introducing our students to these choices, showing them how to recognize their effects, and giving them chances to experiment with them through invention and mimicry, we help them recognize that grammar isn't just a set of "repetitive drills and worksheets," a catalog of do's and do-not-ever's: it's a creative, intentional process that they are capable of participating in.

I know that I plan to have my students read Kolln's chapter, then address and engage the content through group discussion and in-class activities adapted from her text—but I’m interested in where you all plan on embedding instruction on rhetorical grammar. Will you try to disperse it throughout the semester during the spring term? Will you save it for the portfolio unit, despite Micicche's warning that "when we reserve grammar-talk for the end of the drafting stage...we miss opportunities to discuss with students how the particulars of language use show us something about the way we figure relationships [sic] among people, ideas, and texts" (721)? Was anyone, like me, drawn to Micciche's idea of the “commonplace book”—in which students record, analyze, and emulate resonant, grammatically-and-rhetorically effective passages—but unsure of how to adapt it? (Perhaps it could work in the Life Place unit, since a bibliography or research log won’t be used—and having my students explore and experiment with their diction and tone seems very genre-appropriate for the personal essay). Is anyone reevaluating workshop plans to introduce rhetorical grammar? (I might have students pick one strong sentence from their partner’s draft and analyze how the grammar affects the content, then pick a “weak” sentence and rewrite it with rhetorical grammar in mind, similar to the activity Micciche introduces on 722). I’d love to swap ideas and strategies on how to bring sexy (grammar) back.

Laurel's Post: Writing?? But I’m a Physics Major!

I am already thinking about the end of the semester: Do I really have to read 24 portfolios? How will my students improve throughout the semester? Of all the things we discuss and read and analyze what will they remember and keep? I am lucky; my students know that writing is an important part of their lives. I don’t have to ‘sell’ them on the idea that they will need writing skills in their other classes and future careers. As I began to create my lesson plans for the personal-academic argument essay I asked myself: how can I teach skills that are applicable to all writing situations? But perhaps I asked the wrong question. After reading the article “Rhetorical Genre Studies Approaches to Teaching Writing” by Bawarshi and Reiff, I am now asking myself: how can I teach my students to transfer the knowledge that they have into the knowledge that they need?

It takes a high level of thought to abstract knowledge from one learning context and apply it to a new situation, but that is just what we are asking students to do after WRIT 101. Students must be able to consider how their experiences with the PAA, op-ed, reflection essay, personal narrative and portfolio might apply to their course on the geological makeup of the American west. Bawarshi and Reiff propose genre studies as a method that helps students transfer writing knowledge and skills across disciplines and writing situations. Just as the name suggests, genre studies is a close look into written and social genres and their rhetorical situations. In this definition of genre Bawarshi and Reiff include academic written material, public written material and social interactions (such as courses and conferences) (Bawarshi and Reiff 198).

Before reading this article, I had not thought that genre deserved such a central location in my WRIT curriculum. I covered the topic in passing: I would discuss genre only as an introduction to a new unit. For example, when we began the op-ed, I identified the major characteristics of the genre and provided a couple of examples. My students listened passively and some took notes. I did not realize that in simplifying this process that I was actually denying my students a chance to examine rhetorical situations.

This is the key idea that stuck with me from the article: students must know how to recognize the rhetorical situation and respond appropriately. Bawarshi and Reiff do acknowledge the importance of recognizing the subject, audience, purpose, organization and style that each genre demands (Bawarshi and Reiff 196). But students must also know how to apply this knowledge to the rhetorical situation. This article gives guidelines, heretics, considerations and challenges to identifying rhetorical writing situations. Bawarshi and Reiff identify a major benefit of genre studies in that it “create[s] a temporary analytical space between the genre and its situation, a space in which students can inquire into and connect rhetorical and social actions” (Bawarshi and Reiff 195). Students are also encouraged to look critically at the genre, asking questions such as: who is privileged in this genre? Upon what systems of power is this genre built? These are essential questions for all critical thinkers.

At this point in the post you might be wondering, well what about invention? What about grammar and organization and all of those things I have been writing in the margins of my students’ papers? While Bawarshi and Reiff identify these elements as “lower road transfer[s]” they are still very important parts of being a good writer (Bawarshi and Reiff 190). Micciche takes up this point in her article “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” It is important for students to understand the rhetorical effect of different grammar systems. They must also be able to express themselves clearly, that is, in a grammatically correct manner. These are skills that our students will be able to use throughout their lives. Grammar, along with style, is just as important as the “high road” processes of transferring abstract information. And perhaps the understanding of rhetorical grammar that Micciche outlines could be counted as a “high road” process because it does depend on a complex knowledge of rhetorical situations.

Taking the High Road

When I saw the title of Laura Micciche’s article, “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar,” I thought, Finally! Someone’s going to justify my crazy urge to freeze the class and address the grave abuses of commas and apostrophes I’ve been seeing! The hanging participles! The run-ons, oh my! And though I really knew Micciche had no intention of serving my neurotic teaching impulses, for at least the first three pages of the reading, I blissfully disregarded the pairing of “grammar” with “rhetoric,” and all its implications for an instruction of grammar that is not so Strunk and White, and waited for my moment to arrive.

Of course, it never did. Of course, Micciche never said, “Doing an intensive 50-minute formal grammar workshop is a totally effective way of spending your instruction time.” Because, of course, it’s not.

Formal grammar instruction is, as our second reading by Bawarshi and Reiff, “Rhetorical Genre Studies Approaches to Teaching Writing,” illuminates, an instruction in which the end is only a “low road transfer” (190), the best case scenario being an automatic but empty understanding of why commas cannot join two independent clauses but semi-colons can, or how to correctly employ parallelism. What we must strive for is the “high road transfer,” which “depends on the deliberate, mindful abstraction of skill or knowledge from one context for application to another” (190). The emphasis is mine; while Bawarshi and Reiff go on to focus on genre rather than grammar instruction, I would like to pay particular attention to these ideas of deliberateness and mindfulness as important connectors for the ideas in both of these articles, as well as the exercises presented by Kolln in “The Writer’s Voice.”

When I finally came to terms with Micciche’s proposal that we do not actually teach formal grammar in the classroom (So long, lecture on appositives! So long!), but rather a rhetoric of grammar, I began to realize that what she was suggesting we strive towards as instructors was much less daunting and far more exciting and effective than the grammar workshop. We must teach purposefulness – the fact that writers do certain things for certain effects – a concept that our students are in dire need of learning, coming from a high school writing atmosphere of formulas and state-mandated results. My students have absolutely no idea that their writing has consequences (with the exception, perhaps, of the social consequences of a snarky Facebook wall post); moreover, they have no idea that good writers, writers they admire, think very hard about the consequences of every aspect of their writing, from punctuation to content. That, essentially, it doesn’t just pour out of them in the form my students see on the page.

Traditional grammar instruction does not teach consequences (though there are certainly consequences to teaching it). However, instruction of the kinds proposed in our readings – Micciche’s commonplace books, Bawarshi and Reif’s heuristics for genre analysis and Kolln’s group discussions on voice – demand that students become deeply involved with the writing in front of them, to “dig around in the writing of others and really think about what makes it tick” (Micciche 728), as well as its cultural, social and political implications. Students then exercise their discoveries and analyses in their own writing – a practice I am so love with that I can’t wait to introduce it to my classroom.

With each inquiry project unit, much of my instruction focuses on one or two examples of the genre at hand, and through that unit, we examine those examples in ways that reflect my students’ progression in writing in this genre. For example, in the first week of the personal academic argument unit, we read an excerpt from Rick Bass’s The Ninemile Wolves and discussed the purpose of writing the piece, where we could see argument and research forming and how the “I” worked; toward the end of the unit, we then discussed this piece in terms of style and voice. I see now that I was only halfway there; not once did I talk about the purposefulness or the consequences of Bass’s content and style, and ultimately, I think my students were unable to connect what Rick Bass was doing to what they might do in their own essays. What I intend to do with our reading for the Life Place Essay unit, then, is put them on a course to analyzing the purposeful moves Didion, Silko, McLean, etc. make in their writing, to treat punctuation and genre as tactics and strategies, and give them opportunities to experiment with the consequences of their own writing.

Forgive me father, I have sinned: the Evaluative Process

This week’s readings touch on how instructors evaluate their students’ work (both written work and participation). Reading through the suggestions for evaluation offered by Chiseru-Strater felt more like a list of sins I had committed during my evaluation of PAAs.

Critical reading, constructive response, and reflective thought: these are the sort of practices we are encouraging our students to adopt in this class, yet as I read through the articles, what struck me most was just how much I had failed as an instructor to make these things apparent in my evaluations of PAAs. For example, Chiseru-Strater, discussing the subjective nature of the evaluative process, suggests we should bring students into it by having them draw up and discuss their own list of criteria for what makes writing good. (185) Did I do that? No. She mentions the use of a self-evaluation form at the end of each paper. Did I have my students fill one out? Nope. When she goes on to discuss her old methods of evaluating a student’s draft by marking up “each paper, making comments about grammar, syntax, and spelling along with comments about focus, voice, and detail.” Even though we were warned to be cautious with our red pens, I still couldn’t resist the impulse to mark up grammatical problems, spelling errors, and strange punctuation. I think Chiseru-Strater puts it best, saying, “Under that standard grading procedure, I did not really distinguish among my many responses, and for that reason it was difficult for my students to decide which comments were more important than others.” (190)



Sommers echoes this sentiment, stating, “teachers’ comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purpose in commenting.” The result of this appropriation of text by the teacher is a very confused student who will often times simply correct what they can based on the comments they’ve received and will not look much further in how to change their paper.

Dirk discusses the importance of stressing to the students what exactly we expect from students in terms of evaluating their participation in the course. I thought it was interesting how he mentions the widely-varied views of what students imagine a teacher bases participation grades upon. Again, I began to think of my own class. It's true I have stressed the importance of participation, but I have failed to really explicate what I expect of my students, how their own definitions of participation might differ from my own.

So, am I guilty of not bringing the students into the evaluative process? Yes. Of not stressing enough the importance of self-evaluation? Yes. Of commenting on papers in a way that may give students the wrong impression about what is most important when revising a paper? Yes. Of not being clear to the students about what I expect of them in terms of participation? Yes.


Yes, I am guilty of all of the above. I think we all are. But the silver lining is there is time to absolve ourselves by making strides to redefine our own evaluative processes. So for this week, I'm curious to know, what are you guys guilty of in terms of your own evaluative processes? What would you have done differently if you could go back and start the class all over again?


Yes, we have sinned. But hopefully we can learn from the errors of our ways. Until then, I guess we'll just have to settle for saying a few Hail Marys and hoping one day we'll be better.

What Message Are We Sending?

One of the more awkward, dark and uncomfortable things I’ve participated in recently was evaluating student reflection papers. For one week, several hours a day, I confronted myself with numerous interrogative questions as I took to my pen to student papers, “Am I a good person? What, exactly, am I trying to communicate to this student? Why do I think this sentence is awkward? What if they hate me, or worse, hate writing after this? What, again, did I specifically ask them to do in this assignment?”

I understand and salute Chiseri-Strater when she reflects on her grading process as feeling “vulnerable and confused, so that my grading was one of avoidance” (179). After our first introduction to composition evaluation, I think we can all agree that indeed, evaluation “is a web of the personal, the textual, and the developmental” (182). Dissecting this web and understanding its layered components, I suppose, will take more time in the lonely and confusing grading trenches. We are novice evaluators. After examining my first official numerical evaluation to my students – I feel a strange sense of defensiveness to my rubric, my time and my comments. The same can be said for our students. They are on the other end, perhaps expecting something entirely different that what you’ve labeled their paper with or what you’ve communicated in class. What’s left is this strange, multilayered conversation that only takes place on paper, meant to serve as an equitable conversation between their work and your expectations. It’s dangerous and scary ground. Here we are in a class that only offers one form of numeric evaluation halfway through the course – this is a challenge for both our students and ourselves. Fresh out of public education, where perhaps the only sense of worth and evaluation is communicated to our students through numbers – we are trying to do the same, only through commentary. “Grades are important to students; moreover, they have a twelve year history of dealing with them that is not easy to erase…Both students and teachers, then, have troubles about grades and the influence of grades on our teaching and learning practices” (180).

The Sommers article highlights a lot of possible confusion between unhealthy evaluation commentary and the kinds of meaningful, successful, commentary that is possible, “Written comments need to be viewed not as an end in themselves – a way for teachers to satisfy themselves that they have done their jobs – but rather as a means for helping students to become more effective writers” (155). What I hope to take from this introduction to the complicated world of student evaluation is that the ultimate and underlying goal in our commentary should serve as a message of encouragement. A message that seeks to help the growth of writing skills. We should steer from a sending of the kinds messages based solely on correction informed by our opinions, which may lead to feelings of determent. From this moment on, I hope to take Sommers advice in maintaining a healthy parallel in what I say in class – and on paper. “The key to successful commenting is to have what is said in the comments and what is done in the classroom mutually reinforce and enrich each other” (155).

I’m going to reflect on this experience of first-time evaluating, take a deep breath and move forward with these new and hopeful philosophies of evaluation. For next time and the remainder of the year, I’m going to tape this section of Sommers in my office:

“The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting our new, that have not learned. We need to show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery – to show them through our comments why new choices would positively change their texts, and thus to show them the potential for development implicit in their own writing” (156).

Responding to Student Writing

This week’s readings were practical and helpful.  I will confine my post to the feedback and evaluation processes as discussed by Chiseri-Slater and Sommers, emphasizing some of the ways I am applying what I’m learning.  Hopefully, you guys will also share how these articles are changing your thinking and approaches.

Chiseri-Strater:  Self-Evaluation

For me, the key takeaway from Chiseri-Strater’s article was the need for students to have a role in their own evaluation.  Chiseri-Slater says that pondering her own reading habits caused her to rethink her one-way street (teacher only) approach to evaluation, and to involve her students in the process.

She examines the pitfalls of common evaluation and feedback methods, concluding that students better invest themselves in an evaluation process that is both clear and self-determined.  She writes that students themselves can help develop the criteria by which they are graded.  She suggests that students turn in self-evaluations and, in conference with the teacher, discuss their reasoning.

After some initial skepticism, I agreed with these ideas.  Previously, I had decided to develop a rubric for the op-ed (I did not use one for the reflective essay).  From now on, my students and I, through class discussion, will develop the rubric together.  When turning in his or her op-ed, each student will include a completed self-assessment derived from the same rubric.  We each will assess the paper independently, and then come to agreement in conference.  In the end, each student’s evaluation will comprise 25% of his or her paper’s grade.

Sommers:  Wide-angle vs. Close-up Feedback

After reading Sommers’ article, I felt confused.  When studying her examples of actual comments on actual papers, I knew I needed to improve my feedback methods.  But I did not know how. 

All along, my concern has been that my feedback might become an information dump that confuses rather than helps.  My own responses to my students’ writing eerily mirrored those of the teachers in Sommers’ examples.  I realized I was trying to accomplish too much at once.  How could I give clearer feedback that leads directly to improved writing?

While wrestling with this question, one afternoon I was shooting some photos of a long quote etched on a headstone.   I could not view the entire quote because I was using a long-distance close-up lens.  Then a thought hit me:  this is the reason my feedback was confusing my students.  I was using a micro focus when students first needed macro feedback.

From now on, I will assess papers in a two-stage process.  First, I will employ wide-angle assessment.  I will work with students on “big picture issues” (idea, organization, flow, thought, content, etc.).  Only when those issues are improved will I shift to “detail issues,” line editing questions such as grammar, conciseness, and mechanics.

Summary

From now on, I will view student evaluation as a collaborative process, and I will respond to papers using a two-stage process that provides wide-angle feedback before offering close-up help with details.

How did you respond to Sommers’ and Chiseri-Strater’s information?  Will their ideas alter how you evaluate--and respond to--your students’ work?

Evaluation: No Easy Task

As I sit with neatly arrange, yet unavoidably towering piles of essays scattered across my desk (some of my own, many of them belonging to my 101 students), I can’t help but recognize how timely this “theory” reading assignment is for the work we are doing in and out of our classes right now. This goes back to what Kate suggested the purpose of this blog is: a forum to communicate between the authors’ ideas, our own understanding of the texts, each other’s ideas, and our experiences as instructors. Kate described this as “theorizing teaching WRIT 101 using the week’s readings as a focus” in the post the preceded all of ours. Theorizing with a small ‘t’.

The readings this week, focusing on evaluation through such interrelated topics as participation, responding to student writing, and effective assessment strategies, knit together an overarching concept of reviewing and revising our own practices as instructors for what is most effective to improve the writing of our students. This may seem obvious, but as the authors proved time and again through example and study, many common moves among teachers don’t particularly signal what they expect it to to students and many evaluative criteria teachers create aren’t effectively articulated to the students to whom they are being applied. We have some work to do.

Early on in her piece “Evaluation as Acts of Reading, Response, and Reflection”, Chiseri-Strater confesses that “grading made me feel so vulnerable and confused that my attitude was one of avoidance” (179). I must admit, I am not unfamiliar with this general feeling, although I have been able to push through my hesitation and jump into some very interesting discussions and some situations that really require attendance. Am I the only one? She later suggests that this discomfort might better be looked at as an opportunity for learning and revising our own practices. Do you feel like this is possible within our first semester or does it happen over more time?

She suggests that students feel “manipulated” when the grading process is concealed. I think a strength of WRIT 101 is how clearly evaluation criteria and grading policies are laid out for our students, and for us.

She goes on to discuss how/why she’s decided to not rely on standard evaluative guides:

While I still find such guides useful for initiating class discussions about evaluation, objective scales are no longer part of my grading process. I'm now convinced that objective grading scales foster an overreliance on external standards of authority, prevent teachers from figuring out their own attitudes and procedures for evaluation, and mask the many interesting pedagogical issues involved in the assessment process. (180)

And on page 185, she discusses how/why she brings “students themselves into the assessment process.” Do you see opportunities for us as teachers to further incorporate our students into discerning guidelines for evaluation? It often seems that the more ownership students have over a concept or aspect of class, the more willing they are to fully grasp and respect it.

I also found it enlightening that in responding to student work (in the case of Eric writing about the abuse his mother received at the hand of his father), she found an opportunity for both her and her student to “potentially contribute to [social/political] change” (183). Here again, we’re brought back to what I think is a core goal of WRIT 101: preparing our students to write not only in their field, but also as active citizens. Have you found any such examples in your own classes? Or ways to build it into your curriculum?

Later, Chiseri-Strater suggests that “midterm evaluations are shaped by teachers' desires to get students to assume more responsibility and accountability for their work” (195). Do you feel that teachers’ desires for this are met? I think for some of my students, it may be the case, but for some who are struggling, it may be more disheartening than anything and I fear they might give up completely. Are we building confidence or breaking it down?

Now that I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time one reading, I’ll limit my time on the other readings.

Sommers focus is on effective response to student writing, and she helps us get into this by exploring what we as writers want to know : “if our writing has communicated our in-tended meaning and, if not, what questions or discrepancies our reader sees that we, as writers, are blind to” (148). If we can get our students to be invested as writers and we can respond to logic, organization, and meanings within a work—more than just mechanical errors—Sommers believes revision will then truly be a place of crafting a stronger overall piece. Do you agree? How can we navigate this differences and the need for our students to be invested in their writing enough to make the necessary deep revisions?

Dirk presents a discussion about participation. According to him, students and teachers are on very different wavelengths about what constitutes participation, how it is evaluated, and what role it plays in the classroom. How do we ensure we’re are clear with our students (and ourselves, for that matter) about participation’s place in our class? Is there room for discussion and different ways of incorporating it (or not) into our grading policy?

Now, please use what you've learned from these readings to respond to this writing!

Connecting Students with their Writing

In reading the articles assigned for this week, I found myself viewing the texts through my experiences thus far with my class. I identified three central problems to address in my class regarding invention and revision.

First, my students have struggled narrowing down questions or topics to write about. Many of them commented that they are accustomed to having topics assigned to them by their teachers, and so the invention process was like pulling teeth. I also wonder if my students' ages are a factor in the difficulty of the invention process: though everyone has opinions, perhaps self-knowledge is less developed. As Trim and Isaac remark, “discovery... is a singular experience since it depends on what writers already know about themselves. In other words, when we discover an idea that we want to explore further, what we are really discovering is our interest in that idea—not the subject matter itself” (114).

As I was reading Bamberg's account of the changing notions of revision through history, I was reminded of my students' often less than helpful comments for their partners in pair conferences. The few students who said more than “I liked your paper, it was good,” paid attention to the tiniest punctuation errors and missed the huge organizational problems, or the lack of a coherent argument. I found myself growing frustrated by this more mechanical understanding of revision, but realized that my students probably don't have the resources to draw upon in order to offer substantial feedback to their peers. In the upcoming unit, I included a session on workshopping, as per Bamberg's suggestion, during which I will ask for student feedback on how to create more effective and useful workshop criteria. I hope that if my class is involved in the process of designing their own workshops, they will have a higher stake in making them work.

The final and most serious problem is that I have the sense that my class is not invested in their writing, except in as much as it will earn them grades. I feel this is linked to Bamberg's assessment of school writing assignments, which “often don't give students an opportunity to write for real audiences or purposes” (115). This is where I think the emphasis on students' experiences and stories is key, as “connecting personal identity and purpose to more public contexts and subjects can play a significant role in helping people to write confidently” (Antlitz 82). I feel that the personal academic argument was a good foundation for this goal. I think this class will be a continual search to find a way to engage my students, both in their writing and in the class itself.

(Brittany's Post) Don’t Give Your Students the Fish

No, the title of my post isn’t a admonition against the seafood options at UM dining halls. Rather, it’s a reference to an oft-quoted proverb “If you give a man a fish, he will have a single meal. If you teach him how to fish, he will eat all his life.” The same idea clearly emerges in all four articles up for discussion on Monday. As instructors, we want our students to succeed in our courses and transfer effective thinking and writing skills beyond our classroom. And to do so, we must be prepared to give them their fishing rod, hooks, and bait—or, in other words, to show them valuable strategies for workshop, revision, brainstorming, and invention.

Betty Bamberg clearly explores and evaluates many revision strategies in her chapter on the subject; she also differentiates between higher-order concerns (which “reconceptualize revision as a primary means of developing, elaborating, and shaping the intended meaning of a text,” p. 108) and lower-order concerns (which characterize revision as “a mechanical process involving little more than correcting errors or making minor changes in sentence structure or word choice,” p. 108). As Bamberg’s survey of the literature shows, most college students perceive and implement revision in terms of the lower-order concerns—which we as composition instructors know can be frustrating, since making these surface-level changes doesn’t really strengthen our students’ writing abilities in the long term (nor, really, their assignments in the short term). It’s understandable that our students would perceive revision this way, especially given that the first composition course established at Harvard (and later imitated and implemented at many other institutions) was created as a remedial course, designed to rectify students’ issues with conventions, not content (109).

As instructors, it’s our job to help students rethink their definition of revision to reflect the rhetorical focus that emerged 60s—to help them see revision not as the addition of commas or elimination of contractions made to satisfy the instructor’s red marks, but as a “re-seeing” of their draft’s ideas, its content (110). To do so, we must create lesson plans that make our students engage in critical thinking; emphasize the importance of higher-order concerns over lower ones, both in our evaluative criteria and in our in-class workshops; model successful peer review sessions; and monitor the verbal and written feedback we give to our students, making sure they reflect concern not just for conventions, but for textual meaning and how it’s conveyed to the reader. Of course, whether they choose to implement the higher-order revision strategies we model in-class or in our marginalia is ultimately up to them, but I know I sleep better knowing I’ve prepared my class for the rhetorical challenges that await.

In addition to embedding paradigms for revision in our pedagogy, we must also provide examples of effective invention strategies for our Writ 101ers. It’s important to note that students might not always be aware of what invention constitutes, and where or when they can employ it. As Lesner and Craig assert, oftentimes “readers and writers may be misled to understand invention as something that takes place in one definite moment that can’t be revisited while in the middle of writing” (127). This misconception—likely bolstered by the fact that invention exercises are usually positioned in the beginning of units and then abandoned as work goes on—diminishes the recursive nature of composition. And this can be detrimental to students’ writing; once they feel “locked in” to a topic they’re unlikely to modify it, which can lead to unfocused or oversimplified drafts. It’s important to help our students understand that, as Trim and Isaac state, “writers can brainstorm ideas, hone in on a topic, and refine that topic continually, no matter how much drafting, researching, or revising has already occurred” (108). Invention can and should intervene at any point in the writing process. Trim and Isaac also point to a phenomenon that we might soon encounter as our students select Op-Ed topics: the difficulty many of them face when asked to come up with their own subject. I’m allowing my students to loosely interpret sustainability and move their topics beyond just environmental ones; I thought that giving them room for creativity would be more fun for them. However, as Trim and Isaac assert, in high school students are often given a list of topics to choose from—being unmoored without a list and told to invent their own focus can be downright terrifying (109).

So how can we help our students embrace their creativity and recognize invention’s potential uses throughout their writing processes? I think we must embed invention in our curriculum, not only as a starting point but as a “pit stop” for students to return to at many points along the unit. Including invention in the middle of a unit plan would give students the freedom to reevaluate and, if necessary, adjust their topic, claim, focus, or whatever higher-order element that needs reconsideration. Craig and Lessner model many invention strategies that could be tailored to our classrooms and placed throughout the unit plans, from rhetorical reading exercises (130) to visual and auditory outlining (137-8 and 140). Trim and Isaac detail strategies for brainstorming topics individually and as a group, as well as a rhetorical awareness activity that calls for students to “invent a genre” (119-121) and a small group exercise designed to refine students’ research topics—a good invention strategy to use at a “post-research point” (121-2). Antlitz too offers multiple (and extremely creative) invention strategies, ranging from role-playing as famous authors, costumes and all (96-7) to posting ideas as status updates on Facebook to see what feedback they generate (102-3). Though Antlitz’ strategies may be a bit too eccentric to implement in my own classroom, the motive behind them—to get our students “to see the subject of [their] writing through [their] own vision of it”—rings true (92). As with revision, the intent behind teaching invention strategies is that our students could take the same exercises and apply them to writing done outside of our course—making them creative and self-sufficient writers.

So next time you go to teach, ask yourself “Have I taught them to fish?” If the answer is yes, give yourself a pat on the back and watch excitedly as they cast their lines, knowing that though it’s their choice whether they follow your instruction or not, you’ve provided all you could for them to succeed. And if your students don’t know how to fish, step back and ask yourself what you can model to help them understand and implement critical writing strategies like invention and revision.