Writing in a Computer Lab

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?

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"?

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

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

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

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

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.