Amy's basic writing blog

Feeling "enough time" is not related to actual time starting to write

2010-03-31T11:01:00.004-06:00

I never asked the students in my study whether or not they procrastinated. But I did ask them if they felt they'd spent "enough time" on their papers.

See, 80% of procrastinators said they'd spent enough time, while 93% of non-procrastinators said they had. That makes sense, right? If you procrastinated, you're less likely to think you'd spent enough time on your paper. Except that the 93% of non-procrastinators is misleading. Of that 93%, several gave responses on the followup question that contradicted their answer on the "enough time" question. Only 83% of non-procrastinators gave an unequivocal "Yes, I spent enough time on my paper." And that's not out of line with the 80% of procrastinators.

And remember, all we're saying here is that non-procrastinators were more likely than procrastinators to say they'd spent enough time. The large majority of procrastinators still felt they'd spent enough time on their papers.

Here's the cool part. Since there were only five procrastinators in my study, that 20% who said "no" is only one person. This person reported starting to plan 21 days before the paper was due, the maximum of any procrastinator. And she started to draft 3 days before the paper was due. Also the maximum of any procrastinator. So the procrastinator who reported starting on her paper the earliest is also the only procrastinator who doesn't think she spent enough time on her paper.

Moving on to the Results and Discussion

2010-02-22T12:54:00.004-06:00

I'm mostly done with my methods chapter now. So I get to move on to the fun parts--results and discussion.

I'm a bit concerned that a barrage of numbers will turn off readers trained in English, so I'm going to try to combine results and discussion. Otherwise I don't know if anyone will actually look at my pretty histograms. (If you want to make a histogram in Excel, here is the best explanation. It's written for an out-of-date version of Excel, but it's so much clearer than version-correct explanations that it's still the most usable set of instructions for Excel 2007.)

So I'll need a section in which I cover the results from my questionnaires. Some of this information is quantitative and lends itself to tables and charts. For instance, I definitely need charts that depict when the students started their papers. I'd like to be able to show on one chart both times planning and times drafting. Maybe some distribution curves? I'm not sure.

I'll also want to have a chart that compares proofreading of procrastinators and non-procrastinators.

But some of the information from the questionnaires doesn't chart well, like "If you feel you should have started your paper sooner, why is that? " So I'll also need to discuss what kinds of answers students put down for open-ended questions.

Then the next section covers the data I pulled from the students papers--the length and the numbers and kinds of errors. I have several charts for this section already, but there are a few more in the works. I also need to do some regression analysis. Or at least find where I wrote down the regression analyses I did before...

Then the final section will be case studies of the actual procrastinators' papers. I didn't plan to do this when I designed my study. But since I ended up defining only five participants as procrastinators, it made sense to look at their papers more in depth. (See here, here, here, here, and here for what I posted previously.) I'm a big fan of quantitative data, but I think the case studies are useful for a few reasons. One, while the quantitative data can help show whether there are differences between the performances of procrastinators and non-procrastinators, it can't give much sense as to why that is. I could just speculate. For instance, since procrastinators appear to have fewer performance errors than non-procrastinators, I might speculate that procrastinators are just using simpler sentence structures. But instead of just speculating, I could actually pull out Mort's paper and note that he actually used complex sentence structures which got him into trouble with subject-verb agreement. Another reason I think case studies are a good idea is because people in the English department might actually read them instead of glossing over them.

Coding Surface Errors

2010-01-22T22:31:00.002-06:00

So what is a surface error, anyway? It's usually the kind of thing a student would call a "grammar mistake." It might be a misspelling, a comma splice, or a problem with number agreement. When I coded my data, I decided the best way to standardize my coding was to code those things that handbook listed as an error. Since the department required us to use the sixth edition Diana Hacker's "A Writer's Reference," it was the obvious handbook choice. I knew the handbook well, and I knew that it was a required text for the classes I was studying. I read through each paper marking errors according to the section Hacker covered them in. This method isn't perfect. Some "errors" are actually stylistic choices. But interviewing each participant about each error was out of the question, so I marked them as errors anyway.

Then I counted the errors in each paper. But I figured it was the concentration of errors that was important, not the absolute number. That is, if a student wrote a single paragraph which contained three errors, that translates into a higher concentration of errors than a student who wrote a ten-page paper with the same number of errors. So I calculated each student's average number of errors per 100 words.

The really tricky part is that I decided to divide the errors into "cognitive errors" and "performance errors." Cognitive errors follow a certain mental logic and are fairly consistent. A student may consistently write "a lot" as "alot." Performance errors are slip-ups. A student may type "they" instead of "the." I hypothesize that procrastination should show stronger correlation to performance errors than to cognitive errors. Performance errors may pop up when a student is rushed and doesn't proofread. But cognitive errors are difficult for students to catch in their writing, since they don't usually realize that they are making a mistake at all. So proofreading is unlikely to help, unless the student gets outside help from a friend or tutor.

So how exactly can I look at a grammatical mistake and know what caused it? How do I know if the student merely made a mistake or whether they misunderstood the rules of writing?

Two ways. One, I looked for patterns. If a student always puts a comma before prepositions, that's a cognitive error. They're clearly using a rule, even if it's not the right rule. On the other hand, if a student only once fails to capitalize the word beginning a sentence, there's no pattern. It's not likely to be a cognitive error.

The second way I determined if errors were cognitive was based on my experience as a writing tutor and teacher. I knew that certain errors were more likely than others to be cognitive errors. For instance, students who violated punctuation rules when joining independent clauses were often obeying the "comma when you take a breath" rule. Knowing that certain types of error were quite likely to be cognitive allowed me to classify an instance as cognitive if a pattern wasn't totally clear. But if I couldn't tell, I classified errors as performance errors.

I also calculated cognitive and performance errors per 100 words.

I Remember Coding Data

2010-01-22T22:08:00.003-06:00

So I'm working on my methods section. But, you see, it's been a couple of years since I actually conducted my study. I've moved twice since then. So my memory is fuzzy and my records are poorly organized. It took me over a week before I tracked down the questionnaire I used. Now my next goal is to write about how I actually coded the data. Luckily, I put a great deal more thought into coding than I did in formulating the questionnaire. And luckily I recorded at lot of those thoughts on this blog. So I don't have to reconstruct quite as much.

Basically, I looked at three things in the students' papers I collected. Length, surface errors, and use of evidence. So let's start with the simplest one, length.

Length is pretty straightforward. I counted the number of words in the papers. Some of the students who wrote the papers probably weren't familiar with this method of determining length, since they'd enlarged their margins and font size to make their papers physically larger. I did the word counts by hand, since I had hard copies of the papers. I didn't count words that were part of citations or headers. Only the actual body text. I did count words that were part of quotations.

I felt that length might not compare well across classes, because even though the three instructors were working with a pretty standardized syllabus, they might have had very different ideas of what length requirements meant. An instructor who automatically failed any paper which didn't meet a minimum length would likely receive longer papers than an instructor who considered length a guideline to help students figure out how much depth to go into. If such differences existed between the instructors of the classes I studied, I didn't want them to overshadow differences that might be associated with procrastination. So I found the median length of paper in each class in addition to an overall median length for all the papers. I considered a paper short if it fell in the first quartile of length in its class and long if it fell in the fourth quartile.

Does cutting time mean cutting revision?

2009-11-09T13:57:00.003-06:00

Believe it or not, I'm actually working on my thesis again. I'm only producing a couple of pages a week, but that's more than I produced for the entirety of the summer.

What I want to look at in the next week is the issue of time. In composition, the main criticism of procrastination is that it leaves the student with too little time to write. "Don't wait to the last minute to start your papers," we advise our students. When procrastination is mentioned in an article, it is usually followed with a reference to abbreviated revision time. Donna Gorrell says that students use procrastination to motivate themselves to write, but this creates the problem that "ideas which are essentially rough-hewn must remain that way, since there is no time for revision" (645). Ronald A. Sudol suggests (in 1985) that limited access to computer labs will prevent students from procrastinating, since they can only write when they can get in the computer lab, and that "the time spent reducing procrastination now can be better spent revising later" (332). This is the composition party line--procrastination is bad because it reduces time writing which eliminates revision.

First off, let's question the assumption that procrastination will necessitate chopping off some element of the writing process. When I delay a writing project, I have in mind how long I think it will take me to churn something out based on my personal writing process. I don't cut down my writing process, I just move it as close to the deadline as possible. I prewrite, I draft, I prewrite, I draft, I revise, I revise, I research, I revise, I revise. This is the same writing strategy I used as an undergrad. I may compress my writing process based on time, but I don't eliminate chunks of it.

Notice that we assume that revision is the part of writing that will be cut--not prewriting or drafting. The obvious reason is that revision occurs at the end of writing, and if we've managed our time poorly, we run out of time before we get to that part. But is that even true? I think Gorrell's example suggests that students use procrastination instead of prewriting, not revision. She writes that "Having a paper due the next morning is a marvelous incentive for the flow of ideas. Thoughts which earlier would not come now suddenly spring forward" (645). Isn't she suggesting that students procrastinate as an invention strategy, a kind of prewriting technique? Maybe where they're cutting time is actually on the front end of writing, not the back end.

And anyway, do we buy this "front end"/"back end" business? I thought we agreed that writing was recursive, not linear. Remember my writing process from above? Certainly revision can't occur at the beginning (unless one is reworking an old project), but it isn't a set amount of time at the end of a writing session. "Okay, done with drafting. Now time for revision." Some people may write that way, but certainly not all people. Even if the back end of writing is what's being cut off when students procrastinate, that's no guarantee that revision is skipped entirely.

My advisor has also helpfully suggested that I look at recommendations to "set aside" writing for an hour or a day or whatever. This is another prescription that revolves around time at the back end of a project for revision. But we should remember that time on the front end of a project can also be useful. We wouldn't likely label it procrastination, but we can let our ideas "incubate" before we start writing, adding time to the front end of the writing process. Donald Murray recommends this in "Write before Writing," and Maxine Hairston suggests that writing teachers can tackle their own procrastination by accepting is as part of a productive writing process and allowing it to pass after a few days (68). But we rarely give this kind of advice to students.

Works Cited

Gorrell, Donna. "A Comment on 'Toward Irrational Heuristics.'" College English 44.6 (1982): 644-645.

Hairston, Maxine. "When Writing Teachers Don't Write: Speculations about Probable Causes and Possible Cures." Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986): 62-70.

Murray, Donald. "Write before Writing." College Composition and Communication 29.4 (1978): 375-381.

Sudol, Ronald A. "Applied Word Processing: Notes on Authority, Responsibility, and Revision in a Workshop Model." College Composition and Communication 36.3 (1985): 331-335.

Traditional Process Studies Had to Omit Procrastination

2009-09-30T23:28:00.003-06:00

My study goes against the grain of process pedagogy, I think. You see, procrastination is a process issue, even if no process theorist has ever talked about procrastination in an article. But I'm really studying the written product! I'm not analyzing protocols of the steps the participants went through as they wrote their papers. I'm circling and categorizing errors. Sure, I'm also looking at questionnaires in which the participants gave some information about their writing process, but this isn't how process studies traditionally go.

And that's got to be part of the reason that procrastination wasn't studied during the heyday of process studies. If you're doing the cognitive protocol-based study, you're in a controlled environment watching the participant go through the whole process of writing. And while you can get useful information that way, you're missing a huge part of the picture of writing. The huge part that allows you to procrastinate for hours, days, weeks, or more. Time.

If you take writing out of a laboratory setting, a lot more goes on. You can't very well follow a freshman around for the whole semester to jot down every time she thinks about her term paper out loud. So while technically procrastination is a process issue, it didn't fit into the model for empirical studies that process theorists were using.

This is bad. What it did was allow our profession to have strong feelings about procrastination as an important issue since it apparently represented a dysfunctional writing process without research to support our beliefs. If we're teaching process, we're not going to just let our students wait until the last minute to start working on their papers--they need to be thinking and prewriting and drafting and revising over the course of time. Not just churning something out the night before the paper is due.

But none of this is based on empirical research. There weren't any studies done in our field to suggest that procrastination led to bad writing--and how do we know it's part of a bad process if we don't know it leads to a bad product?

"Uneducated"

2009-08-30T23:33:00.002-06:00

Someone I know personally has recently been slinging the insult "uneducated" toward people she disagrees with politically. She, however, did not graduate eighth grade and has a low level of literacy. I don't really know how to react to this. Even if people are uneducated, does that make them bad people? Does it make them unable to have reasoned opinions on political issues? And how does an uneducated person assert her superiority to others by suggesting that they are uneducated? Is the insult that entrenched that she can say it without blinking?

"Writing" is self-paced, but a narrow view of writing

2009-05-22T13:37:00.003-06:00

In "Writing as a Mode of Learning," Janet Emig indicates that writing is self-paced, and that "one writes best as one learns best, at one's own pace" (12). I'm reading and rereading this in context to try to determine whether this has anything to do with procrastination. Out of context, I could jump up and say that if writers ideally write at their own pace, we must be careful of pushing deadlines and labelling writers "procrastinators" for not meeting those deadlines.

But I hesitate to say that's what Emig was really getting at. She elaborates on the sentence in question by saying that "to connect the two processes [writing and learning], writing can sponsor learning because it can match its pace" (12). Now this may still imply that students have to write at their own pace, but I don't think that is Emig's point here. I think she's saying that students learn through writing because they only go as fast as they put words on paper. In fact, I think she's using the narrow view of writing I mentioned in my last post--actually sitting down and putting words on paper, not considering an assignment, thinking about a topic, doing research, and so on.

This reading of Emig is supported when she cites Sartre, who said he couldn't write anymore because listening to himself on tape was no kind of way to revise. He might need to review his words slowly, or he might want to skim through, but where writing and reading allow for that kind of self-pacing, talking and listening to a recording do not (13).

Emig, Janet. "Writing as a Mode of Learning." 1977. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 7-16.

Writing vs. Doing Homework

2009-05-06T11:49:00.003-06:00

It just occurred to me as I am reading old process literature, that it was quite easy to skip over procrastination based on certain approaches to studying process.

A certain segment of process researchers were looking for a scientific way to study writing. They used tape recorders and coding systems. They wanted to be objective and to have replicable results. These are essentially lab-based studies, then. The researchers would set up the lab, give the student an assignment, and study them on the spot, likely asking the student to talk through their thoughts and actions as they wrote.

This kind of research is useful and even important, but by being lab-based, it loses the ability to study procrastination at all. I mean, I suppose some students would still delay in a lab environment, but it's a rather different kind of situation than being given an assignment to turn in within a week, let alone by the end of the semester.

This makes some sense, in that the researchers were more interested in writing itself, not "doing homework." On the other hand, psychology researchers have tended to be more interested in the "doing homework" side, and this explains why I have found more of their research to be directly relevant to my study.

Procrastination is a Process Issue

2009-04-27T13:20:00.003-06:00

So I'd like to go over the state of research in procrastination in writing over time.

The sixties seem to be the last decade devoid of procrastination research. However, this decade is far from being irrelevant. In the sixties, we are introduced to "process pedagogy," a way of teaching writing that emphasizes "process"--the steps writers go through as they produce a document--over "product"--the final document. A product-oriented pedagogy asks "What does good writing look like?" But with a process-oriented pedagogy, the question is, "How do I produce good writing?" The distinction here is that knowing what makes for a good product doesn't explain how one goes about producing it.

So why is process pedagogy relevant to my study of procrastination in writing? Because procrastination is not an element of the written product, it's an element of the writing process. Theoretically, a product-oriented pedagogy shouldn't care about procrastination. As long as the paper turns out okay, it doesn't really matter when it was started.

But in process pedagogy, writers are expected to go through certain steps in producing their work. These steps may not be hard and fast--we can divide simply into prewriting, drafting, and revising. But because of the time crunch in procrastination, some of these steps may be rushed or skipped.

I need to go back to some early process literature to see if anyone hints at issues of procrastination or time crunch.

Citing a self-help book

2009-03-31T20:41:00.004-06:00

I've noticed several articles cite that procrastination rates may be "as high as ninety-five percent." My impression was that this number was frequently cited because it was the highest, not because it was the most accurate. I flipped to the reference page. The reference? Overcoming Procrastination, published by the Institute for Rational Living. I was a bit concerned that we were citing a book here, not a study. And not the most scholarly sounding book at that.

I requested the book. I opened it to the first page. Here's the opening:

How many college-level individuals procrastinate? Often? Seriously? No one seems to know. Incredibly, this important question has not inspired many factual studies. Our guess? About ninety-five percent. (Ellis and Knaus 1)

So it's just a guess? And this thirty-year-old guess is still being cited? The authors aren't even researchers; they're psychotherapists. Which is not to say they don't know what they're talking about, but rather to ask why on earth serious researchers keep citing them instead of doing some actual research on the numbers. I wonder if some of the citations were borrowed from other sources without checking the original source. It's not a scholarly source. It's a self-help book.

Work Cited

Ellis, Albert, and William J. Knaus. Overcoming Procrastination, or How to Think and Act Rationally in Spite of Life's Inevitable Hassles. New York: Institute for Rational Living, 1977.

Procrastination and Learning Disabilities

2009-03-16T16:04:00.002-06:00

I'm not particularly interested in learning disabilities, but I do care about diverse learning styles in the classroom. For my purposes, the label LD tends to obscure that diversity, so I didn't find "Procrastination and Motivation of Undergraduates with Learning Disabilities: A Mixed-Methods Inquiry" all that useful.

Students with LD were more likely than others to procrastinate (144). The researchers found that self-efficacy is differently related to students with learning disabilities than those without. (Self-efficacy is how good you think you are at something.) Apparently non-learning disabled students were less likely to procrastinate, the more self-efficacy they had with the task (144). But LD students have comparatively inflated self-efficacy (145). Compared to those not considered learning disabled, those with LD are more likely to think or claim they can handle academic tasks they aren't so great at. Perhaps because of this, self-efficacy isn't closely related to procrastination in students with LD.

One more thing, the researchers note in their literature review that procrastination is still less studied than other parts of psychology. In their review of PsychINFO in 2006, they "found 11,374 articles on self-efficacy, 4,056 articles on self-regulation, and only 422 articles with procrastination as a key word" (138). So while I'm personally impressed with the amount of studies on procrastination in psychology, especially in the past couple of years, there's still a lot of room in the field. It's pretty much under-studied across the board.

Work Cited

Klassen, Robert M., Lindsey L. Krawchuck, Shane L. Lynch, and Sukaina Rajani. "Procrastination and Motivation of Undergraduates with Learning Disabilities: A Mixed-Methods Inquiry." Learning Disabilites Research and Practice 23.3 (2008): 137-147.

Procrastination and Lack of Feedback

2009-02-24T10:45:00.003-06:00

I'm really happy to have found "Individiual Differences in Academic Procrastination Tendency and Writing Success" by Barbara A. Fritzche, Beth Rapp Young, and Kara C. Hickson. These researchers are interested in composition. As in, they actually cite compositionists in addition to psychologists. They're not just looking at what psychologists have found about procrastination, they're looking at what compositionists have said about the writing process.

In particular, Frizche, Young, and Hickson are studying the relationship between feedback and procrastination. They hypothesized that high procrastinators would be less likely than low procrastinators "to seek feedback on their writing prior to submitting it for a grade" (1550). On the other hand, they figured that those high procrastinators would see a bigger improvement from the feedback they did get.

They found that "high procrastinators wrote their papers early only when they received feedback" (1554). I'm looking at the numbers, but I can't tell much from them. I'm guessing this means that many high procrastinators received feedback without starting early, but few or none started early without receiving feedback?

Fritzche, Young, and Hickson conclude that "students may be able to mitigate some of the negative outcomes associated with their procrastination tendency by seeking feedback on their writing prior to turning it in for a grade" (1554). I'm a bit troubled by this phrasing. Feedback mitigates the problems with procrastination? What if the lack of feedback was the real problem, not the procrastination? It seems like the researchers are implying that problems caused by procrastination and problems caused by lack of feedback are independent, but that students can make up for a lack in one area by improving in another. But at this point I see no reason to assume the two are independent, especially considering that the researchers have already demonstrated a relationship between procrastination and not seeking feedback.

In the end, the researchers suggest something of a bridge between composition pedagogy and counseling psychology. Instead of relying solely or mostly on counseling to work on procrastination, teachers can help in how they structure assignments. They suggest that "requiring or making available writing center consultations, teacher student conferences, or peer workshops can provide students with an additional deadline: if they habitually procrastinate to their deadline, the extra incentive to complete at least some work earlier" (1555). They also suggest breaking up larger assignments into chunks that are turned in before the final draft.

Okay, so we already do all this, right? But composition research suggests feedback for a different reason, doesn't it? Feedback is good on its own, it's not just a way of forcing students to work on their papers earlier. But I'd say Fritzche, Young, and Hickson are actually on to the way these techniques are really used by Practioners in composition. I think we do often use peer review to force students to produce a draft, rather than making them have a draft so they can participate in the independently important peer review. Am I wrong?

We really need to straighten out what we know about procrastination, what we think about procrastination, and what we do about procrastination. Otherwise we could be going at this all wrong. Like, if procrastination isn't the real problem, then artificially removing procrastination by compelling students to turn in multiple drafts isn't going to fix the problem. Whereas if procrastination is correlated with something (like lack of feedback) that is directly harming the student's writing, getting at that issue should be more helpful.

Work Cited

Fritzche, Barbara A., Beth Rapp Young, Kara C. Hickson. "Individual Differences in Academic Procrastination Tendency and Writing Success." Personality and Individual Differences 35 (2003): 1549-1557.

It's not poor study habits that cause procrastination

2009-02-18T23:25:00.004-06:00

Laura J. Solomon and Esther D. Rothblum (1984) conducted a study to see if procrastination was about more than merely poor study habits. Apparently this was a common belief among psychology researchers in the 80s. They figured there were plenty of possible reasons to procrastinate that hadn't been studied: "evaluation anxiety, difficulty in making decisions, rebellion against control, lack of assertion, fear of the consequences of success, perceived aversiveness of the task, and overly perfectionistic standards about competency" (503). In the end, they determined that major reasons for procrastination other than poor study habits/time management boiled down to fear of failure and task aversiveness. (You may recognize these terms from Onwuegbizie and Collins's article cited in my last post. Solomon and Rothblum designed the questionnaires Onwuegbizie and Collins used.)

This is really important because, as Solomon and Rothblum point out, if time management isn't the major cause, we might not want to act like it's the only solution. If our students are procrastinating because they're afraid we'll grade them harshly, maybe the more helpful thing to do would be to help them be more comfortable being evaluated. Review drafts without grading them. Avoid making ad hominem comments on papers (the dreaded "I expected more from you"). Don't put an undue amount of emphasis on a single assignment (break it up into mini-assignments if necessary). If our students are procrastinating because they don't like the actual act of writing, help get them comfortable. Lots of in-class writing. Talk to students about their ideas before having them turn things in. Have them talk to each other. Have them write informally. Use mini-assignments that can later be used as jumping off points for or even sections of larger papers.

As for which factor accounted for most of the procrastination, the answer is statistically complicated. A large group of students reported task aversiveness, but the small group of students who reported fear of failure often reported that as their only reason for procrastination. So both angles are important to tackle.

Work Cited

Solomon, Laura J., and Esther D. Rothblum. "Academic Procrastination: Frequency and Cognitive-Behavioral Correlates." Journal of Counseling Psychology 31.4 (1984): 503-509.

A Study about Procrastination in Writing!

2009-02-17T21:41:00.003-06:00

I perked up pretty quickly at noticing an article had the both the words "writing" and "procrastination" in the title. What these authors (Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Kathleen M. T. Collins) have done is to administer a couple of questionnaires to a group of masters' students. One measured writing apprehension (which is what it sounds like, being apprehensive about writing); the other measured academic procrastination (procrastinating on school assignments).

According to Onwuegbizie and Collins, "these findings suggest that graduate students' apprehension about writing appears to be related to academic procrastination stemming from fear of failure and task aversiveness" (562). I'm skeptical about their use of "stemming from." Seems like a way to say "cause" without tripping the readers' mental alarms about confusing correlation and causation. In fact, Onwuegbizie and Collins go on to suggest that the situation feeds itself, that procrastination also causes fear of failure and task aversiveness...but they don't suggest any mechanism for that.

I'm not sure whether they mean that procrastination triggers guilt or other bad feelings which become associated with the task being avoided, or if they actually intend to suggest that procrastination causes bad writing, which reinforces the fear of failure. (The difference between fear of failure and task aversiveness is that fear of failure means you think you'll get a bad grade or harsh critique. Task aversiveness means you hate actually sitting down to write, even if you expect a good score.) I'm having trouble seeing another mechanism for reinforcing the fear of failure other than actually getting bad grades or something.

Now, this study is of grad students, where I'm studying undergrads. I skimmed an abstract today that suggested that level of education was not a major factor in amount of procrastination, but age was. Need to find that again.

Work Cited

Onwuegbuzie, Anthony J., and Kathleen M. T. Collins. "Writing Apprehension and Academic Procrastination among Graduate Students." Perceptual and Motor Skills 92 (2001): 560-562.

Do we really think we're keeping students from procrastinating once they're out of our classes?

2009-02-11T13:54:00.003-06:00

My thesis advisor asks if we writing teachers tend to assume procrastination is only an issue for our classes, not for classes other than writing. The implied answer seems to be yes, but it wasn't an implication I'd intended in my writing. It's not a question I'd ever thought about.

Isn't the whole point of having a required composition class that these writing skills are applicable across the curriculum? (It seems like that might also be the point of not having a required composition class, as was the case where I got my bachelor's.) We force students to take a writing class because we're going to teach them stuff they need for other classes, but stuff we figure they wouldn't actually learn in those other classes.

I think we know that students procrastinate in other classes, but maybe we think that our process models of writing are the key to preventing this. (I'm pretty sure we work under the assumption that procrastination should be prevented.) In theory, we hope our students will use the techniques they learned in the writing classroom in their other classes. I mean, this is what I told my students over and over again to justify to them why they had to take my class and why they had to write papers they thought were pointless. It's about learning these techniques which will serve as tools in the future.

It's a bit suspicious that I had to verbalize this belief so often. Was I trying to convince myself? Did I even believe my class was important? Did I secretly believe my students would learn to write better (as I had) when they had writing assignments that weren't merely exercises and attempts to teach techniques?

Maybe I was lucky to have some professors who were good at teaching writing, despite teaching classes that weren't necessarily writing classes.

I don't think most of us really believe that are students take away from our classes this great store of writing techniques and apply it to the rest of their classes. I think the most we hope for is to get them to think beyond the rigid rules they've picked up along the way and put more than five paragraphs in an essay.

I also think we're pretty moralistic about all this. I think we want to show our students how well things work when they don't procrastinate (because we require them to do in-class prewriting, submit drafts, revise based on peer review, and so on). I think we expect them to go right back to procrastinating in most cases, but now we can feel like we've taught them and they should know better. They deserve what they get now.

I don't mean this harshly. But the more I think about it, the more I feel that we care about procrastination because it is an easy way to judge students. They know they oughtn't to procrastinate, so when they do it, we can write them off.

Deadline number three

2008-12-01T12:03:00.002-06:00

If I am correct, today is the day my thesis is due (again). It's not done.

I work 50+ hours a week with erratic hours. It's pretty much the norm for me to be up until 5 am Friday and then get up at that time on Sunday. Now there are still plenty of hours left in the week, even if some of them are devoted to my husband. I've not been working very hard on my thesis in the past few weeks.

I decided that today I would come to campus with my husband and go to the library to work. That always is more successful than thinking I'll work at home. I brought my data, my drafts, my calculator, everything I would need. I sat at a table and set to work. But mostly I stared at my papers and felt tired. I wondered what was going on at Burger King right now. I thought about whether I needed to talk to my boss about anything when I stopped by this afternoon to drop off a calendar of events and the deposit key.

Maybe somewhere noisy would be better?

2008-10-20T19:23:00.004-06:00

Gregory Schraw, Theresa Wadkins, and Lori Olafson found that students mostly procrastinated because of other priorities. We instructors often get reminded that students have other classes. But topping the list of priorities was personal relationships. This reminds me of a time that I contacted a student about his excessive absences. He said he had to work, but that he knew school should be his top priority.

I didn't say this to him, but my thought was that school should be nowhere near his top priority. His health, psychological and physical, should be number one. Then personal relationships. Even supporting himself financially has to come before school. But none of that changed the fact that I would be grading him based on his performance in my class--it's a writing grade, not a leading-an-exemplary-life grade.

A few weeks ago, a writing center tutor asked me if I thought we should treat students differently based on why they didn't spend sufficient time on their papers. If they were working 40 hours a week, or had family problems, wasn't that a better excuse than partying too much? Or sitting around chilling instead of working?

I suppose it depends on what we meant by "treat differently." It would probably be a bad idea to have some all-purpose lecture about how if you sign up for a class, you have a duty to complete it to the best of your ability. So if I'm conferencing with students who are putting off writing for different reasons, obviously I should have different things to say to them.

But I took the tutor to be toying with the idea of grading more leniently on those with legitimate excuses. And that's just not my style. Either the paper is up to snuff or it's not.

Work Cited

Schraw, Gregory, Theresa Wadkins, and Lori Olafson. "Doing the Things We Do: A Grounded Theory of Academic Procastination." Journal of Educational Psychology 99.1 (2007): 12-25.

How Not to Write

2008-10-03T11:52:00.002-06:00

Let's say that all else being equal, procrastination is a bad writing technique. Even if some people "get away with it," they'd have written better papers if they'd gotten started earlier and had more time for research, reflection, and revision.

I don't have evidence for this, but it's the kind of commonsense notion that I expect is hard to let go of without direct evidence against it. Or even then.

It's still not all that useful to tell students not to procrastinate. I mean, it doesn't hurt to give them an idea of how much time you expect them to spend on the assignment. If they've never had to write something they couldn't do in one sitting, they could benefit from a description of a different writing process that might work better. But if the main advice is "start this paper as soon as you get the assignment sheet," then what will the student do?

Those who actually take the advice will most likely use the same writing process they would have used at the last minute. They'll merely move up the timeframe. So instead of writing it all in one sitting the night before, they'll write it all in one sitting the night they are given the assignment. Which is worse, by the way, since those who wait longer will have probably learned more about the subject in the meantime.

Identifying features of procrastination

2008-09-23T15:12:00.004-06:00

So I stopped by my university's library this afternoon after walking my husband to class. I didn't bring anything with me to work on...not even a spiral notebook. Just a pen that was riding around in my purse. But I thought I should take a look at recent journal publications. You know, the kind that are actually printed on paper.

Anyway, in CCC, Sean Zwagerman writes about plagiarism and takes a quick swipe at procrastination. He says, "About ten years ago, I was marking an essay whose night-before prose suddently transitioned into sophisticated literary analysis" (676).

"Night-before prose"? What is that exactly? He's clearly referring to a writing which can be easily identified as having been written recently before being turned in. But what are the identifying features? He doesn't say. I don't suppose I can expect an in-depth analysis of procrastination when the issue at hand is actually plagiarism. But, in scholarly articles, how do we get away with such problematic assumptions as teachers who can identify the age of a piece of writing by instructor's intuition?

And seriously, what are the identifying features of procrastinated writing? It's not surface error. It's not length. It might be the use of evidence, but how does that translate into "night-before prose"? How are we analyzing student prose? Sentence structure? Diction? Beats me.

I think about a basic writing student I had last year, "Patrick." Patrick had the strongest prose in my class, yet was one of the biggest procrastinators. The paper he wrote in an hour before class was more interesting than the one he worked with a tutor revising. This is not to say that the paper he wrote quickly was well-organized or well-supported. But I'm pretty skeptical that weak prose is a sign of procrastination.

You know what weak prose is a sign of? A student that needs to work on their prose. It's not just time pressure, it's gaps in learning that are the issue. Problems in student writing are not a moral issue with the students, something that would be solved if they'd merely shape up and follow the rules. Problems in writing exist because students haven't mastered the skill of writing--which is kind of why they're writing students in the first place.

Zwagerman, Sean. "The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity." College Composition and Communication 59.4 (2008): 676-710.

Gender and procrastination

2008-09-19T10:06:00.008-06:00

My husband asked me if having a male teacher correlated to more procrastination than having a female teacher. Well, beats me. I wasn't particularly interested in gender for this study. All three instructors in my study are male. I don't see any reason to expect that this would be a problem for the study, but I suppose someone could conduct a study to answer my husband's question. I could imagine certain teaching methods that encourage or discourage procrastination might actually correlate somewhat to gender, but it doesn't strike me as something that would make an obvious impact.

He also asked if the gender distribution of the class contributed to the amount of procrastination. Again, beats me. I didn't collect any data about the students' gender. I didn't even ask the students to report their genders on the questionnaires. I haven't tried to guess students' genders in assigning them pseudonyms.

Procrastination and Proofreading

2008-09-19T10:06:00.004-06:00

Of the students I studied, procrastinators were half as likely as non-procrastinators to report proofreading. At first glace this seems like a useful statistic, but I'm not entirely sure.

I didn't set up my questionnaire appropriately to actually study this question. I did not ask students whether they had proofread, merely what changes they had made to their papers. It's possible that students proofread but neglected to mention it. For instance, an instructor might have made a point in class about how proofreading could not stand in for more substantial revision. So when asked what changes they made to their papers, students might have felt they should report the changes their instructor liked to hear about, like organization or elaboration.

In order to determine whether a student had proofread their paper, I simply read what changes they reported making to their paper over time. If they said something along the lines of "fixed grammar" or "changed spelling," I counted that as proofreading. One student said he "added some commas," which I decided fell into the category of proofreading. I did not count "sentence structure" as proofreading.

Studying whether procrastinators proofread would properly require another study, preferably one that validated the reports with direct evidence of the students' writing processes. Since I'm only looking at the end product, the amount of surface errors more appropriate to measure. It just doesn't tell as much about the writing process, if that's what you're interested in.

Another concern I have is that students in Matt's class, procrastinators or not, were more than seven times more likely to report proofreading than those in Lee's class. So while procrastination does appear to correlate to proofreading, it isn't the best predictor of my data.

Mort doesn't have much trouble

2008-09-16T13:30:00.002-06:00

Mort says he planned his paper for three weeks before drafting it the night before it was due. He says he spent enough time on his paper and when asked if his reasons for waiting a long time to start his paper said, "Don't fix something that is not broken."

Mort's paper was the longest one I studied, 2798 words compared to his class's median of 1465. Where some of his classmates resorted to increasing their font size to make their papers physically larger, Mort seems to be using the Word 2007 default 11-pt. And it's not a string of block quotes making it longer. Instead, he takes on five possible solutions to the problem he poses. And while this doesn't make for the most unified papers, it doesn't immediately suggest procrastination even if it is actually a consequence of putting the paper off to the last minute.

Mort's rate of surface error is in the second quartile. And his problems really do seem often to come from trying out more challenging constructions. For instance, he has a few number agreement problems when the subject is compound and far away from the verb. Mort reports proofreading.

Mort's problems with evidence are also in the second quartile. His only issue is making unsupported claims. This is the kind of thing I'd expect from waiting to the last minute. I know when I'm rushing to finish a paper I often include claims I know need citations to support them but I simply don't have time to find them.

Am I rooting for procrastination?

2008-09-16T13:09:00.003-06:00

As I type up my thoughts on the causes of procrastination in these student papers, I wonder if I'm not being open enough to the idea that procrastination is a problem. I seem to explain away everything that might suggest procrastination is harmful. Which is reasonable in that if I do want to suggest procrastination has effects, I need to first rule out other explanations.

But I wonder what I feel as a teacher.

If procrastination accounts for a large proportion of problems in students' papers, what do I do? Do I just force them to turn in drafts and participate in other process-oriented activities? Part of me thinks it's easier to blame procrastination because it's a factor teachers don't have to feel responsible. We remind our students not to put off their assignments, so when they write bad papers at the last minute, it's their own fault.

Bryce has the expected problems

2008-09-16T10:16:00.002-06:00

Bryce began planning his paper 16 days before it was due but didn't actually write it until the day before. He felt he spent enough time on it, but perhaps would have benefited from time to "consider what [he has] written."

His paper's length falls in the first quartile. His rate of surface error is in the third quartile, and his problems with evidence are the highest rate in his class. This is pretty much what one would expect from a procrastinator--not enough time to fill the length requirement, to proofread, or to find and effectively use evidence. But so far he's the only procrastinator to fit the stereotype.

Every single one of Bryce's surface errors could be fixed by adding or deleting a comma. They are not the kind of errors he'd be likely to notice in proofreading since he probably isn't quite sure what the rules for comma usage actually are. In fact, Bryce reports that he proofread his paper. He doesn't say what specific kinds of changes he made, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of his errors were introduced as he was proofreading while others were corrected. I don't think procrastination causes students to unlearn punctuation rules, although it might make it harder to apply rules they have to think hard about.

Bryce's top two problems using evidence are weak lead-ins and using quotations where paraphrase would be more appropriate. Bryce mostly introduces his quotations in the sentence before but fails to set them off with signal phrases. As I said before, I doubt that this problem would be fixed with more proofreading. I can't imagine being too rushed to type "X says" and yet having time to explain the relevance of the quote.

Bryce has more trouble using unnecessary quotations than Otis. The fact that he sets off titles of competitions in quotation marks suggests to me that he is sensitive to issues of plagiarism, so he errs on the side of caution. I don't see any reason this fear would be more common in procrastinators, but they could feel it more intensely if they don't believe they have time to put evidence in their own words.

Otis proofreads but struggles using evidence

2008-09-16T09:08:00.003-06:00

Otis reports that he began research for his paper a few weeks before it was due but he didn't begin drafting until three days before he turned it in. He says he spent enough time on it because he "didn't feel rushed."

Otis's paper is in the first quartile for length--1192 words to his class's median of 1465. He has the lowest rate of surface errors in his class, but he's in the third quartile for problems with evidence. Otis does report proofreading.

A lack of sentence variety might partially explain Otis's lack of surface errors. But the fact that he tends to have overlong subjects with short verbs suggests to me that he's attempting an academic voice, even if it isn't one that his instructors appreciate. Another explanation is that Otis actually proofread his paper, despite putting it off. I still haven't crunched the numbers to see if procrastination makes one less likely to proofread.

Unlike Mary and Mark, whose evidence problems centered on just a couple areas, Otis has several problems. His top two are no lead-ins for quotations and weak lead-ins for quotations. He only once uses a signal phrase and rarely sets up the quote in the previous sentence. His next most common problems are using quotations where paraphrase would be more appropriate and citing his "own" conclusions. I'm particularly interested in his habit of using quotations instead of paraphrase, because in Otis's class, this problem was much more common among procrastinators than non-procrastinators. (The same is not true for Mark and Mary's class, however.)

When I say that paraphrase would be more appropriate, I'm talking about quoting facts that are worded in unimpressive ways. My feeling is that students do this because they find paraphrase difficult or intimidating. Perhaps the original quote was difficult for the student to understand, so they couldn't put it in their own words. Or the student has been warned about the problem of paraphrasing incompletely, risking charges of plagiarism, so they simply resort to quotations to avoid that problem.

It's possible that spending more time on his paper would have helped Otis introduce his quotations better (as with Mary), but it seems unlikely that it would have prevented his dropped quotes (as with Mark). I could also imagine that spending more time would have helped him write more paraphrases, but that seems like a reach. He had plenty of evidence, he just didn't use it very well. Practice might help, but just writing for longer probably wouldn't have.

"Mary"'s paper pretty average

2008-09-15T18:32:00.003-06:00

"Mary" reports that she'd been planning her paper for a few weeks before she actually drafted it three days before it was due. She says she "rewrote" the final draft because of computer problems, but it's not entirely clear whether she means that she had to start over or whether she merely had to retype it from an earlier printed draft. She doesn't think she spent enough time on it, mostly because of the computer problems she had at the last minute.

Mary's paper is right at the average for her class. Her rate of surface errors is in the first quartile. She's not writing grade-school level sentences, but she could use more sentence-level transitions. She'd probably run into more errors if she were writing more complex sentences, but she's not clearly avoiding challenges either. She didn't report proofreading.

Mary's rate of problems with evidence is the median for her class. Her top two problems rank one and three among non-procrastinators: weak lead-ins for quotations and lack of follow-ups. Where Mark's quotations fit clearly in the context of the paragraph but lacked signal phrases, Mary's quotations have signal phrases but neglect any explanation of how they fit in the paragraph. She's learned the rule against dropping quotations in, but she still doesn't really use her evidence, she just tosses it in and puts "According to X" in front of it. But she doesn't really do this more than her non-procrastinating peers.

If she'd spent more time on her paper, she might have been more able to explain the relevance of her quotations. I know that when I'm rushing to finish a paper, it's usually my explanations that suffer. I find myself hoping the reader knows where I'm going with my point. But it's also possible that Mary would not have noticed this problem in her paper, since she already understood the point she was trying to make and might not have realized that someone else wouldn't follow.

"Mark" has few mechanical errors, but struggles with evidence

2008-09-15T18:02:00.004-06:00

Now that I've gotten a feel for the general differences between the procrastinated and non-procrastinated papers I collected, I'm going back over the procrastinated ones to better understand what's going on there. Here's what I've learned about "Mark"'s paper.

Mark reports that he wrote his research paper two days before it was due and then rewrote the whole thing one day before it was due. He says he put it off so long because he's "lazy," but he feels he spent enough time on it anyway.

He's right at the average length for the papers in his class and has rate of surface errors in the first quartile. And his sentence structure seems reasonable for a FYC class with pretty frequent subordination. So his lack of error isn't obviously caused by avoiding challenges. He didn't report doing any proofreading.

On the other hand, his rate of problems with evidence is the highest in his class. His top two problems are weak lead-ins for quotations and unsupported claims. (These are the top two problems for non-procrastinators in his class as well.) In Mark's case, most of his quotations are "dropped in" without signal phrases, but they do logically follow the sentences before them. He also relies completely on secondary sources about a comic book character, never directly citing the comics themselves.

It's hard to say whether starting his paper a few days sooner would have helped Mark. It might have given him more time to look up sources for some of the claims he wanted to make. But it probably wouldn't have prevented his dropped quotes. In my experience teaching and tutoring, people who drop quotes simply don't understand that it's a no-no--even after multiple one-on-one sessions intending to explain it. Unless he used those extra days to take his paper to the writing center or conference with his instructor, Mark probably wouldn't have fixed those dropped quotes because he probably didn't think they needed fixing.

Procrastinated papers have more problems with evidence

2008-09-09T08:52:00.002-06:00

While mechanical errors didn't prove any more of a problem for procrastinators than their non-procrastinating peers, the same is not true for problems using evidence. Under evidence problems I'm including problems integrating quotations, unsupported claims, and using the wrong kind of evidence (such as quoting others' opinions to stand in as the writer's conclusion). I do not include citation errors. Since these were freshman research papers, most of the evidence was of the sort found in books and websites, but I count examples under evidence as well.

Both classes had procrastinators in the fourth quartile for rate of errors in use of evidence. That's .37 and .13 errors per 100 words for the classes overall but .67 and 1.0 for procrastinators. Looking over the kinds of errors, nothing jumps out as being more of a problem for procrastinators than for the rest of the classes. The distribution of kinds of evidence errors looks to be about the same.

I was a little surprised after finding little difference in terms of length and mechanical errors to find a difference in use of evidence. One explanation that jumps out at me is the possibility that no one--procrastinator or not--is effectively proofreading her paper. I should look back over the questionnaires to see if procrastinators were any more or less likely to report proofreading.

One thing that separates mechanical errors from use of evidence is the expectation of prior knowledge in first year composition. While the classes probably had some instructions in avoiding comma splices, I'm sure if I asked the instructors they'd confirm that more class time was spent on research and quotation integration. So why might non-procrastinators do better here? Well, I'm tempted to think that non-procrastinators were more likely to actually be in class. I don't have any data on attendance, so this is just speculation. But if a student procrastinates because they don't want to work on the assignment, they might just skip class for similar reasons, missing out on important lessons. On the other hand, students with no free time (such as those working full time) may not be keeping up studying or may miss class for other reasons. So I can imagine that students who wait until the last minute to write their papers might also be students who miss out on lessons. But that may be a reach.

Why would procrastination reduce error?

2008-09-07T07:01:00.002-06:00

As I said below, my data indicate a slightly lower rate of error in procrastinated papers than otherwise. It'd be a bit of a leap to conclude without more research that procrastination helps. But lets say it did turn out that waiting to the last minute resulted in writing with fewer errors. What might the reasons be?

Usually when students explain that they prefer to procrastinate, they allude to creative energy of some kind that only arrives as the deadline looms. I can't recall a student ever telling me they made less errors that way, but such a situation isn't entirely unimaginable. In my imagination, the student thrives on the stress of needing to put a paper together in a short amount of time and actually becomes more productive. Although this is possible, I'm fairly skeptical. Sometimes I've thought I became productive when I procrastinated and then found a bunch of performance errors circled by my professors.

Students who struggle more with cognitive errors (a term I'm not in love with) may be a different matter. Since they misunderstand the rules of grammar, they can actually make their papers more error-filled the more they work at them. But since my study was of freshman composition classes and not basic writers, this seems unlikely to be the main explanation.

Maybe fewer errors isn't even a good thing. People screw up when they push the boundaries of their comfort zone. Freshman papers often contain errors that simply come from imitating a style they haven't yet mastered. Helping students to master the style they're already going for is a lot easier than trying to get students to stop writing sentences that sound like they could follow "See Spot run." Students who think that grammatical errors are what separates good and bad writing may have perfect grammar but still write bad papers.

I need to go back to the papers that were procrastinated on and determine what kinds of errors they contain and whether the lower rate of error might have been caused by playing it safe and not attempting anything more complex than a compound subject.

Procrastination Reduces Errors?

2008-09-07T06:29:00.004-06:00

As it turns out, of the students in the three classes I've studied, the procrastinators didn't write particularly worse papers. At least not by the two indicators I've looked at so far.

One might think that waiting to the last minute to start a research paper would result in it being too short. Nope. There was more difference in length from one class to another than between procrastinators and non-procrastinators. One of the procrastinators actually wrote the longest paper in his class. None of them wrote the shortest. Procrastination has no clear consequence on paper length.

It would also seem reasonable to expect that procrastinated papers would contain more errors, for two reasons. One, waiting too long to start the paper may leave the writer without time to proofread. This should leave evidence of "performance errors"--the kinds of mistakes we all make when we don't watch ourselves. Two, students who avoid the task of writing may well be doing so because they believe they are bad at it. These students might leave evidence of "cognitive errors"--the kinds of mistakes we make when we are confused about the rules. These mistakes will simply not be caught by self-proofreading and can actually be made worse (since the proofreading is done by the student's wrong impression of the actual rules).

But no, procrastinators don't make more errors. Of both classes with procrastinated papers, the error rate was lower with procrastinators. The procrastinators in one class had an error rate of .5 errors per 100 words. The class average (median) was .67--slightly higher. In the other class, procrastinators had an error rate of .9 errors per 100 words. That classes averaged 1.7.

Here again the difference between classes is stronger than the difference between procrastinators and students as a whole. Procrastination doesn't increase errors, but the numbers are awfully close (.5 to .67 and .9 to 1.7) with a limited amount of data (less than fifty students) to jump to the conclusion that it helps.

My Thesis

2008-08-26T21:43:00.002-06:00

So I've had some troubles with my thesis. Getting human subjects approval took longer than I anticipated, and there were some hangups collecting data in a timely fashion, leading to me collecting data right up until when I was supposed to have the thing actually finished.

But I knew I could finish over the summer. Then my husband and I separated, shaking up my whole life. I thought I'd still be able to work on my thesis but I stupidly ended up working two jobs to total about sixty hours a week. I was sleeping in split shifts, so the thesis was not getting done.

Then my husband asked me to move back in with him. I got back to only working one job (thirty hours) but was focusing (rightly) on my marriage. But part of what we learned in counseling was the importance of alone time--so I should have been able to make time for my thesis.

When my manager at Burger King found out I didn't have job prospects for the fall, she offered me a promotion. Maybe it was stupid to take it. Now I'm working fifty hours a week. I'm telling myself that now that my husband is in school instead of home all the time in the evenings like he was over the summer that I'll be able to sit down and actually write. But I presume I'll come up with another conflict then.

When I walked through the Missouri State campus today, I realized I was seeing potential Burger King customers, not writing students. That concerns me a bit. I realize that when I quit Burger King last fall in order to concentrate on school, that I missed it more than I'm missing teaching.

Bending or Breaking My Own Rules?

2008-04-25T08:54:00.002-06:00

My department has a policy that all major assignments must be turned in, in the order assigned, before a student is eligible to pass a course. I state this in my syllabus along with my interpretation : I will not accept a paper after the due date for the next paper. In accordance with this policy, I emailed a few of my students a while back to let them know they would no longer be eligible to pass.

One student asked for an exception. He "really need[ed] to pass." He hadn't been to class in over a month and hadn't turned in a paper in two months (and those by email). For a while there, I honestly couldn't remember what he looked like.

I told him to come by my office with a better case than "I really need to pass" and we'd talk.

I looked through my grade book. In order for him to pass, he needed to submit a revision, four new papers, and make nineteen blog posts, all in less than a week, all at passing quality. When he showed up for his appointment, I told him that I didn't think he could pull it off, but I'd let him try.

I'm still not entirely sure I should have budged on my interpretation of the English department policy not to accept papers turned in out of order. But I feel like at least this way he can't blame his teacher for his failure.

Comp Exams!

2008-04-05T12:08:00.003-06:00

I just finished my comp exams. I only spent four days studying (but one of those was the entire day). I'm pretty happy with how I did. The comp exam questions for my area of emphasis are clearly fifteen years old, as they deal with dead issues and don't mention any theorist who was first active past 1990. But I went ahead and worked a current theorist into one of those questions that was situated in the 1980s. I hope that makes me look smart rather than evasive. (I did cover the old stuff too.) I also answered a question about personality theory because I love to talk about the Myers-Brigg. I ran out of time on that one before I was able to refine it too much, so I hope it still makes sense.

Update: I passed!

Grammar Game

2008-03-11T11:26:00.002-06:00

Last semester I didn't cover grammar extensively in my basic writing course. I started using worksheets to fill in time around mid-term, and I marked recurring errors in students' papers. But it killed me that one of my hardest-working students was unable to pass my class because he never shook a grammar problem that I marked in all his papers but didn't spend much classtime on.

I may have gone overboard this semester by assigning each student a grammar presentation, but my hope is that if nothing else, students learn the one issue they present. I've been wanting to incorporate grammar games for a while, but today was the first time I had the extra classtime to do it. Grammar games give students the opportunity to use grammar to control sentences instead of merely fixing mistakes. In "Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation," Margaret Tomlinson Rustick shares a game called "Sentence Survivor" (53). Basically, you start with a long sentence on the board and the students take turns erasing words until there's no way to make the sentence shorter. They can take one, two, or three words, as long as they're in a row. Rustick says to use a compound-complex sentence, but I'd say anything over six words will do. The idea is to leave a complete sentence but for the opposing team to get stuck. Obviously the meaning of the sentence changes with the various moves.

The students liked the game, and we had a surprise star. Near the end of the second round, she asked me if she could add punctuation. Of course--that makes the game more interesting. She jumped up and erased three of the last four words leaving only, "Why?"

Hmm. Rustick didn't mention that possibility. There's nothing grammatically wrong there, but it's not actually a sentence. It led to the other team using "Ferocious!" as their final move a couple of rounds later. I'd say "Why?" is more acceptable, but if the students are able to envision contexts in which "Ferocious!" is acceptable--well, that's the whole point of the game, right?

Work Cited
Rustick, Margaret Tomlinson. "Grammar Games in the Age of Anti-Remediation." Journal of Basic Writing 26. 1 (2007): 43-62.

The Downside of Tutoring

2008-02-27T08:41:00.003-06:00

The downside of tutoring is that students expect their papers to turn out perfect.

The course that teaches future basic writing teachers (the course I originally wrote this blog for) requires grad students to arrange tutoring sessions with basic writing students. It's a great idea, since most of them will only have a vague notion of what these writers are like. (They're pretty normal people.)

After I passed back my students' second graded paper, one student approached me visibly upset about her grade. She explained that the tutor hadn't seen any grammatical problems and that the problems in her paper were the result of his suggestion.

I've been a tutor. I don't honestly believe that this particular tutor gave her bad advice. She simply misunderstood his advice, or in trying to apply his advice, took a risk and used devices that she hasn't yet mastered.

I guess I need to further emphasize that the goal is for them to leave this class as good writers. If the tutor hadn't made suggestions, she might not have had those grammar errors. But she would be in the exact same place she had been as a writer. It may seem to her that something bad happened because her grade wasn't so great. But hopefully in the end something good happened--she learned something new.

I Was Thinking about Letting Class out Early

2008-02-21T13:52:00.003-06:00

My students had a paper due today, and five of the fifteen of them were giving presentations. When I started class, only six people had showed up--and only two of those who were supposed to be giving presentations. I keep a few worksheets and activities on hand at all times in case my lesson plans run short, but I wasn't sure I could justify an hour of busywork. And these six students were the ones who actually showed up, so they deserved to go home early, assuming that's what they wanted.

Most of the rest of the class showed up fifteen minutes late. We did get to see all five presentations, and there were only fifteen minutes left at the end. I got up to clarify something from one of the grammar presentations (on pronoun-antecedent agreement), and next thing I know students are asking questions about semicolons. So we talk about semicolons and other ways to connect independent clauses. And then a comment about colons. By the time I briefly cover the grammar questions, we're out of time.

For those who have taught college writing, this is probably not surprising. Students want grammar. They know (or think) they struggle with it and want to be able to follow the rules. However, teaching grammar is not hip in composition circles. And of course, I'd never teach grammar at the expense of other elements of writing. I insist that one of the requirements of a good paper (not even excellent, but just good) is that it actually be interesting.

If only I could get them to pay as much attention to discussions about other issues as they pay to explanations of punctuation.

What makes for a good narrative?

2008-02-05T15:19:00.000-06:00

Honestly, all I wanted was for someone to say that a story needs to have a point. But instead my students suggest that good dialogue makes a piece more interesting. Another student suggested dramatic irony. And, yeah, he knew what it meant. Stories that float around the office are a lot more likely to degrade students than to brag on them. But it was pretty cool to have such sophisticated suggestions. Being able to analyze literature doesn't mean they're good writers, but it might mean that they're good readers, which is halfway there. There's only so much I can do to help a student who's never read a book.

How will I know what to fix?

2008-01-29T14:45:00.000-06:00

Today my students had a peer review scheduled, so they were required to bring drafts of the papers which are due Friday. When I clarified that they would not be turning these preliminary drafts in to me, one student asked, "How do we know what to fix if you don't read our papers?"

She didn't know what kinds of changes her rough draft could go through that weren't specifically directed by her teacher. Which is a reasonable concern from someone who may have never been asked what she thinks about her own paper.

With this class, I'm trying to instill the notion that revision is about making things better, which may not involve "fixing" anything. Last week I asked if anyone had ever read anything they didn't like. (The answer is pretty obvious.) One student hadn't liked Animal Farm. We discussed why that was. It wasn't because George Orwell had bad grammar or even wrote confusing sentences. It was just the idea of animals running a farm that bothered the student. So, I emphasized, the kinds of things that would have improved the book are not the kinds of things students usually change in a rough draft--spelling and word choice. Making something good is more complicated than making it correct.

Writing Process of Basic Writers

2007-05-23T12:17:00.001-06:00

Apparently when Sondra Perl wrote "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers," the term "basic writer" hadn't yet caught on. Perl, in fact, doesn't seem to like the way Shaughnessy characterizes basic writers. She notes, "These unskilled college writers are not beginners in a tabula rasa sense, and teachers err in assuming they are" (38). Certainly Shaughnessy didn't mean that basic writers had no backgrounds, and Perl thinks that Shaughnessy is right to focus on the logic of basic writers mistakes--but Perl wants to focus on process more than product.

Perl shows that basic writers had just as much logic behind their writing process as Shaughnessy showed that they have behind the written product. They think about the topic, they write, they correct errors, and they do this all rather systematically. So basic writers aren't just going at writing willy-nilly. The question is, what are they doing wrong? Perl seems convinced that it is a preoccupation with error and the attention that it draws away from content that is the problem. This is at least partially confirmed when the process and product of the personal writings are compared to the objective writings--students wrote more fluidly for the personal writing, and although they were still less than perfect, they were better.

It seems that since Perl is particularly concerned with process, she would be in favor of a curriculum like that at my university, where most of the assignments in basic writing are of a personal nature. Although the students may not always have the opportunity to write personal essays, if writing personal essays helps them change their writing process for the better (so that they think more about content and less about errors), that improved process might eventually carry over into more academic writing.

Works Cited

Perl, Sondra. "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers." 1979. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2003. 17-42.

Switched to Google Reader

2007-05-04T14:39:00.000-06:00

By the way, I've switched from Bloglines to Google Reader. As one would expect from Google, it's much prettier. You can view a list of posts with snippets instead of Bloglines' clunkier view posts so-many-days old, making it look basically like Gmail. And it does have folders in addition to Gmail style tags, so you can easily condense the list. It's also an easy switch, since you can simply click "export" from Bloglines and then "import" from Google Reader.

Content Matters

2007-05-03T07:38:00.000-06:00

The first time I discovered plagiarism in a student paper, I was pretty shook up. This student was making a D in my class and had gotten an F on his latest paper. But it hurt me when a sentence sounded off and I had to check Google. Now that was my first semester teaching, so Sara Biggs Chaney might have been a bit more hardened against the experience, but in her case she had high hopes for the paper and the A student who had written it. Where my student may have been desperate or confused about using sources, Chaney's student was likely expressing a disrespect for academic writing and Chaney herself despite being quite capable of handling the assignment (31).

In composition, we tend to focus more on presentation than content. This makes sense, because writing isn't really a content course. We need to help students work with whatever content to produce good essays. But Chaney felt she'd made a mistake by ignoring the content of Amber's paper about the irrelevance of paper writing. She felt that Amber could become academic by going through the motions of academic writing (30), but Amber still believed paper writing was not important. And Chaney didn't really listen to her ideas. She was interested in the paper, but only formally. She wanted to see the moves of academic writing, but basically ignored the content.

I'm writing a paper in another class in which I connect this deemphasis of content in composition classes to the Foucault's author function, as explained by Gail Stygall. That is, while it makes sense in a composition class to emphasize the form of writing, to talk about the moves of academic writing, we really can't neglect the actual content if we want our students to be real writers. Real writers and readers care a lot about content. If we start ignoring the actual content of our students' papers, we're basically dooming them to perpetual student-hood. I can imagine where Amber's beliefs about the irrelevance of paper writing were only strengthened by the fact that her writing teacher thought she could write a great paper which condemned the entire process--writing, then, is just an act. It doesn't do anything, it doesn't say anything, and it certainly doesn't prove anything. In the real world, Chaney would likely have made her actual disagreement with Amber's content central to her evaluation of the paper. She might have conceded that the argument was well made, but she'd have given center stage to the fact that it just didn't hold up.

Now we can't grade our students' papers on how well they fit the beliefs we already have, but we can be a little more honest about our subjectivity and the role content plays in good writing.

Works Cited

Chaney, Sara Biggs. "Study of Teacher Error: Misreading Resistance in the Basic Writing Classroom." Journal of Basic Writing 23.1 (2004): 25-38.

Writing in a Computer Lab

2007-04-20T21:13:00.000-06:00

In "Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom," Catherine Matthews Pavia
is worried that computer classrooms accentuate and perpetuate differences between students. She concludes, "Being enrolled in a writing class in a computer lab when they do not have much computer knowledge may lead students to doubt their abilities when what they really need is confidence" (17). On the other hand, Amie Wolf is less concerned, saying, "The technology helps us to reach our students in many cases." Wolf, instead of simply sticking with basic typing of essays, actually incorporates more technology into the classroom with a "digital media project." To Wolf, the technology is motivating--which doesn't seem to contradict Pavia's experience with students like Matt who came to class early just to use the computers (8).

I'm not sure if Pavia's research supports her conclusion that computers might be a problem for basic writing students, because it seemed that the students who weren't adept with computers were still quite motivated, despite Pavia's worries. It would make sense to be concerned at first, but her research does not seem to actually show negative affects. Matt and Maria wrote significantly less than some of their class members, but it is hard to know if this is attributable to computers. Additionally, if the effect is not permanent--if the students are not turned off from writing, the small amount of slowing down might not really be a problem. They might do better once their typing skills and familiarity with computers improve. And they will have to, because most college writing is going to have to be printed from the computer, if not actually drafted on the computer.

Now I'm not saying that basic writing courses should be taught in a computer lab. In fact, I'm a bit uncomfortable with that, as I prefer to draft A) alone and B) longhand. Although it's good to get students to see typing as part of drafting instead of only for typing up finished drafts, we also don't want to imply that drafting should be done exclusively on computers. There should be more to class than sitting around typing. I'd like to have a little more idea what Pavia actually does in class besides journalling, but I guess she is trying to avoid using computers exclusively by assigning "writing without the computers" (19), but again, I am not sure to what extent students should be deprived of the ability to choose the medium they'd like to compose in. We want to expose them to various methods, but that can be done without specifying that students hand in handwritten documents. I'm just really uncertain that the conclusions Pavia comes to actually follow from her research, but maybe someone can help me out.

Works Cited

Pavia, Catherine Matthews. "Issues of Attitude and Access: A Case Study of Basic Writers in a Computer Classroom." Journal of Basic Writing 23.2 (2004): 4-22.

Wolf, Amie. Online chat. 16 Apr. 2007.

Is It Just a Matter of Teaching Variety?

2007-04-06T12:51:00.000-06:00

My response to TW seemed too long for a comment. To my last post (regarding the possibility that the 110 syllabus encourages "poetic writing"), TW comments:

While this might cause some confusion regarding expectations--that's a big part of learning to write. So in a way, by providing them assignments with very different purposes, audiences, and/or expectations you are preparing them for real-life academic writing experiences where one professor might assign--oh, I don't know--a blog writing assignment and then a book review. They need to understandt that what is acceptable in one context is not necessarily going to fly in another.

Certainly--the assignments in English 110 are apparently designed to prepare students to have to write completely different kinds of papers--textual analysis vs. position paper vs. research paper--making sure the students can see the different purposes of the assignments. Despite different purposes, those are all academic (transactional) writing--and although blogging is less formal (more expressive), it doesn't usually go towards the literary (poetic).

My assumption was that "poetic" writing is generally reserved for creative writing classes--not exactly what 110 is designed to prepare students for. So I want to teach my students different modes, but I wonder if those should be mostly of the transactional sort. I should admit, however, that I recall doing four creative writing projects in my college career, and I didn't take any creative writing classes (Feminist Theory, Global Futures, Prose Fiction, and Senior Seminar). We don't see much creative writing in the writing center, either, but I think that has partly to do with students being less comfortable getting help on "creative" assignments.

It seemed to me, at least when I wrote the last post, that the memoir is easy to teach in such a way that makes it a different kind of writing than anything else they'll have to do--variety is good and all, but I don't teach my students how to write sermons or screenplays because my job is to prepare them for "academic writing." I do think, however, that the memoir can be taught as a more "transactional" piece, but that it may take some effort to do so. I guess I'm still not sure how important that effort might be.

Are We Encouraging "Poetic Writing"?

2007-04-03T09:36:00.000-06:00

Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk tackles the tough question of whether (and how) to incorporate personal writing in an academic writing course in "Personal and Academic Writing: Revisiting the Debate." As Dr. Cadle mentioned in class, Missouri State tends to incorporate some personal writing but not let it be the focus of the course. My class begins the semester with a memoir and incorporates reflections on the subjective research process in their I-search, although this semester I'm trying out letting them choose to write a formally objective research paper instead. Even the memoir isn't totally personal, though, because it is thesis-driven, about a life-changing event in the writer's life.

Mlynarczyk's use of James Britton is helpful here to distinguish between different kinds of writing. Britton divides writing into poetic, expressive, and transactional (Mlynarczyk 6). Expressive writing is the most natural, self-centered writing, and because it is so natural, we try to tap into these abilities before asking students to totally take on academic discourse. Transactional is communicative and includes academic writing--this is what we're training students to write for the rest of college. But we still value the poetic, or literary, writing. Unless our students are writing majors, they won't be doing a lot of poetic writing, but we like to read it. It is very tempting to grade the memoir as a piece of literary writing, to see it primarily as a story, or a work intended more for entertainment than information or persuasion. This probably isn't totally wrong, but might we be leading our students down one path, only to expect them to go in a different direction for the rest of the semester? Mlynarczyk notes that Peter Elbow says that choosing between personal and academic writing makes him "feel as though [he is] trying to walk toward two different mountains" (qtd. in Mlynarczyk 11). By assigning the memoir first, which utilizes expressive writing but often veers toward poetic, are we pointing our students toward a mountain that we won't let them approach? Perhaps Mlynarczyk's approach of assiging journal entries (you know, like these blog things we're doing) is a better approach, because it utilizes expressive writing to transactional ends without the temptation of poetic writing.

Works Cited

Mlynarczyk, Rebecca Williams. "Personal and Academic Writing: Revisiting the Debate." Journal of Basic Writing 25.1 (2006): 4-25. Communication & Mass Media Complete. 27 Feb. 2007. <http://search.ebscohost.com>.

Learning by Discovery

2007-03-27T12:47:00.000-06:00

I think involving students in research is a great way to help them take ownership of their learning. Instead of simply being granted information from a teacher, the students are actually finding things out (and not through a particularly contrived method where a teacher asks leading questions until the student says what the teacher wants to hear). In such a class, knowledge doesn't belong to an elite group of intellectuals--the teacher is still an authority, but she's not the only (or even the best) path to knowledge.

My favorite exercise in Discovery of Competence is Shawn's "The Tether Ball Tragedy." In order to study the difference between spoken and written language, Shawn was assigned to tell his story orally to the class, which was transcribed by another student. Then Shawn read the transcript and produced a written version of the story. The students analyzed why the two were different (Kutz, Groden, and Zamel 102). The analysis is important, because although Shawn would probably learn something from telling the story in two different media, writing an analysis forces the student to explain why writing requires greater precision and explanation than speech. Moreover, by having to write a reflection on the experience, Shawn put in words what he learned, solidifying what could otherwise have remained hazy ideas about the differences in speech and writing. Rather than relying on the teacher to write on his paper "Elaborate," Shawn figured out for himself. He learned through real experience, so the understanding is deeper and more likely to stay with him than if he'd interpreted conventions in written language as simply rules imposed by teachers.

Works Cited

Kutz, Eleanor, Suzy Q Groden, and Vivian Zamel. The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook, 1993.

Even Summaries Need a Point

2007-03-16T15:01:00.000-06:00

My group in this class is writing the "writing about reading" wikibook chapter. We've split this into summary and critique, and there's been discussion that even high school students don't do much summary--what basic writers really need to work on is critique. Now I have helped people with honest-to-goodness summary assignments in the writing center, but I also wasn't quite sure that students needed advice on writing a summary. Mina Shaughnessy anticipated our hesitance to teach summary, saying that "most composition texts--and teachers--give little attention to summarizing except to warn students that they ought not to confuse a 'mere' summary with a critical or analytical statment. Yet we find little evidence that students are able to summarize effectively" (268). Shaughnessy would be happy to know that I actually talked to my students about summary this week, covering a chapter on summary from "They Say / I Say" (Graff and Birkenstein). I was already grading the students' annotated bibliographies when we got to this chapter, and I realized I should have taught it sooner.

Summaries are not as easy as they look, and they're more important than they're given credit for. A good analysis has to start with a good, if brief, summary. And many students struggle to write a good summary. Shaughnessy points out that students may have experience summarizing narrative works, which usually telling the main events in the order they were written. However, asking a student to summarize a news article or a scholarly essay should not result in a chronological list. Hypothetical example:

This article talks about _______. It also says _______. Also, __________. Then it goes on about ________.

A summary, I pointed out to my students, is not a list. Shaughnessy advises: "they should try to state in one sentence what the main point of the work is" (269). Graff and Birkenstein tell students to make the main points support an "overall claim" about the work (33). A summary is not as easy as it looks--like any piece of writing, it has to have a point.

Works Cited

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York: Norton, 2006.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Reading is Better than Drills

2007-03-09T15:40:00.000-06:00

Of all the errors that Shaughessy covers in Errors and Expectations, spelling and vocabulary are two that are most clearly connected to reading. Spelling isn't completely random in English, but there are too many rules to simply memorize, even with the drills that Shaughnessy provides (178, 180). Exposing students to one rule that would significantly improve their writing sounds like a good idea. That way they don't feel like there's simply no way to learn to spell. But on the other hand, bombarding them with lists of rules had got to be more intimidating that handing them a dictionary and teaching them to use it. It's good to help students realize that there's a method to much of English spelling's madness. But let's not fool ourselves--spelling is mostly memorized and the rules that Shaughnessy shares are probably best learned simply by internalizing the patterns through reading, not through drills.

I think Shaughnessy's approach to vocabulary is more workable. She admits that real gains in vocabulary are subject-based and take time--exposure to the vocabulary of the field (224). It doesn't hurt to learn word parts--unlike spelling, which is usually memorized or guessed at, word meaning really can be deciphered by taking a word apart and looking at the meanings of its parts. Again I'd be careful not to overload students with charts or drills, but studying a few basic roots and prefixes and exercises in explaining the shades of meaning among synonyms really shoud help students have an easier time with words.

Works Cited

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Authorship and Teacher Comments

2007-03-02T15:41:00.000-06:00

Gail Stygall argues that Foucault's concept of the author is important to how we treat basic writers. Basic writers (and for that matter, writing students in general) aren't afforded the same charitable interpretation that we give to "authors." Authorship (authority) is part of literature, but not student writing or anything else not viewed as literature. According to Stygall, "If an author writes a passage that is unclear or that is not obviously related to what came before it, then readers assume there is a reason for it, embedded in the author's intent or milieu" (189). A writing teacher, however, tells the writer that the paragraph is off-topic and moves on. That's not entirely fair, of course. The more time that I work with students in the writing center, the more I realize that even the weakest writers do everything for a reason. (Occasionally practical reasons like being unsure of the grammar of particular expression.) But those reasons are hard to figure out without a face to face meeting. Otherwise, what more can we do than point out that the paragraph seems off topic and should be removed or have its importance clarified?

Along with this, Stygall points to research that indicates that "teacher commentary often appropriates and redirects the student's texts" (189). It's too easy for the teacher to assume that they understand what the student means and then express it in the teacher's terms. (This also implies a meaning that transcends expression, not an uncontroversial concept.) Mina Shaughnessy does this!! A student wrote, "However, I don't believe that a student whould determine whether or not he will to attend college chiefly on the basis of financial, but that of the importance of obtaining a qualified educational background, and the services he could be to his fellow men" (45). Without additional commentary, she translates it as "A student shouldn't go to college in order to earn more money but to learn more and help others" (45). Now these have approximately the same meaning, but certainly there are shades of meaning that are different--Shaughnessy doesn't mention the importance of "educational background" itself. Further, if an experienced writer had composed such a sentence, the form would have figured into the meaning. We'd've assumed the wandering quality was intentional, perhaps to reflect a life journey. Who knows what justification we can come up with if we already believe the writing is good?

Works Cited

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Stygall, Gail. "Resisting Privilege: Basic Writing and Foucault's Author Function." 1994. Landmark Essays in Basic Writing. Ed. Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001. 185-203.

Grammar and Style Instruction

2007-02-16T15:55:00.000-06:00

In "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone," Min-Zhan Lu is actually quite clear about how grammar should be covered in writing classes. She insists on the importance of taking the time to look at every apparent error as a stylistic choice and to let the students figure out what choice might be better. She created handouts over a student using "can able to" so that entire classes could work out what was meant and a better way to say it. Part of her reasoning is that there's something wrong with interpreting student work in a different way than professional work. Lu doesn't believe that you have to earn the right to play with language--she doesn't give published authors special privileges. In response to Theodore Dreiser's willingness to have native English speakers edit the German sound out of his prose, Lu asks, "why do we assume--as Dreiser did--that until one can prove one's ability to produce 'error-free' prose, one has not earned the right to innovative 'style'? (170). And in fact, my high school teachers argued exactly that--you are not allowed to break the grammar rules that you see broken by established authors until you know them well enough.

There does seem to be a bit of logic behind the idea of only breaking the rules you understand. Grammar rules are conventions--breaking those conventions is going to have a particular effect on the reader. You ought to be making an informed choice when you mess with readers' minds. Lu would appear to agree with that point--however, instead of simply naming problems or correcting them, she believes in walking the writer throughout the process, actually helping them to become informed.

Some "grammar errors" are innocuous. Comma splices and run-on sentences are sometimes more effective than their grammatically correct alternatives. When I'm grading papers, I ignore them. When I'm working in the writing center, I frequently point them out and ask the writer to consider whether strict punctuation is more important than the rhythm of the sentence. Most people assume that the correct punctuation is better, even when it reads worse, so they "fix" it. I don't blame them--some professors write assignment sheets that call contractions errors.

Lu insists that we ought to spend this time with students, rather than accepting the fact that we can't. But how useful would it really be to spend twenty minutes on every error in a three-page paper? For one thing, even if you approach it from the standpoint of style, grammar isn't everything. I'd really like to be able to work with my students on supporting arguments part of the time, instead of spending every moment on style. For another, a lot of mistakes aren't as profound as "can able to." Some are editing errors, some are spelling errors, and some even the writer can't explain. While it's good to be able to approach grammar from a stylistic perspective and give writers choices, it seems like rather than actually spending all our time doing this, we can do it occasionally and help students to internalize the idea.

Works Cited

Lu, Min-Zhan. "Professing Multiculturalism: The Politics of Style in the Contact Zone." Representing the "Other": Basic Writing and the Teaching of Basic Writing. Eds. Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu. Urbana:NCTE, 1999. 166-190.

How do you know where to start?

2007-02-06T19:19:00.000-06:00

When Adrienne Rich got into teaching basic writing, she was motivated in large part by "white liberal guilt" (3). She recounts a common "secret fantasy" of English teachers--a diamond in the rough, a student whose brilliance would shine through their working-class language and poor handwriting. I think she'd've loved what Bartholomae calls the "Fuck You" essay (173). Bartholomae, however, had not sought out a position working with underprivileged youth. He taught in large part because his fellowship ran out (172). He was looking for something entirely different than Rich was, and because he didn't prepare himself for working with basic writers, he commited himself to spending "14 weeks slowly and inevitably demonstrating their failures" (172). He perceived his job was to prompt them and judge them--not so much to teach them.

I can get on my high horse to look down at young Bartholomae, but it's not so simple. Part of the problem with teaching is knowing where to start. If you assume your students already have the background, you simply prompt them and judge them. Rich, on the other hand, thought she knew what she was getting into and was more prepared to coax her students. But she still had to make certain assumptions about where they were starting from. Her assumptions were undoubtedly simplistic, and possibly condescending.

There's really no way to know exactly what you're getting into--to know when students only need reminded that they're mixing "it's" and "its" and when they don't know the difference (or have internalized an incorrect system).

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum." 1993. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. Ed. Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001. 171-184.

Rich, Adrienne. "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." 1973. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. Ed. Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001. 1-13.

They Choose to Be Here

2007-01-30T12:55:00.000-06:00

In the writing center, I work with such a variety of students. From those who honestly only need help with grammar and usage (ESL graduate students) to those who have difficulty understanding how to analyze instead of summarize. I distinctly remember working with a student whose professor had handed his response back ungraded and told him to go to the writing center. I don't know what it would have felt like to have been the student who was (in essence) told that what he had to say didn't count unless he could say it in academic English.

But he was there. Despite his obvious difficulty with academic English, this student not only had the courage to come to college, he had the courage to come to the writing center to get help instead of throwing the paper away and giving up.

When I worked with special ed high school students, I was sometimes rather frustrated and concluded they shouldn't be there. After all, if you can't read by the time you're in high school and you don't care to put in at least a little effort, then what is the point? But being only fourteen, they didn't have a choice. That's not the kind of situation that Adrienne Rich and Mina Shaughnessy write about. Shaughnessy was probably right that the basic writers were "strangers in academia, unacquainted with the rules and rituals of college life, unprepared for the sorts of tasks their teachers were about to assign them" (3). But they wanted to be there. Maybe they didn't want to be in a writing class specifically, but they chose to enter college, and Rich points out, "Many dropped out (a lower percentage than the national college dropput rate, however); many stuck it out through several semesters of remedial English, math, reading, to enter the mainstream of the college" (4).

I want to continue to remind myself that basic writers are here by choice and that motivation is key to their success.

Works Cited

Rich, Adrienne. "Teaching Language in Open Admissions." 1973. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. Ed. Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2001. 1-13.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Hello world

2007-01-24T19:43:00.000-06:00

This is Amy's blog for basic writing.