Joining the Cadre

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Against all odds, we find ourselves again at the end of the school year, still open for business and still doing extraordinary work everyday. As my second year as composition coordinator draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on our composition program and the “dedicated cadre of faculty” who teach first-year writing.

That quote is found on the department’s web site and in the most recent departmental program review self-study. While I am the author of both, I didn’t write that phrase. In fact, when I first encountered it I stumbled at the word cadre, which struck me as a bit of English department flourish in the midst of bureaucratic emptiness. For me, cadre was a little too redolent of the military, of Navy SEALS and strike forces and elite teams on special missions. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to like this word. First, our teachers of writing are a cadre, a core team, an elite and highly skilled group with special expertise. They are also, in another meaning of the word, akin to revolutionary zealots—they are absolutely sure of the value of what they do even when that value is not always acknowledged by others. And let’s be honest, we are at war with university administrators, with accrediting agencies, with our Chancellor’s office, with public perception, and even with other parts of our own campus. We are at war with bad ideas and reduced funding, with shortcuts and cynicism, with well-intentioned policies and ill-intentioned mandates. In short, we need a cadre now more than ever.

I have also been thinking about what I’m going to do with my free time. (cynical laughter) My two years as composition coordinator will end this term, and while I have already started my new assignment as (once again) WPE director I know from experience that running the once a quarter WPE is nothing compared with “coordinating” (whatever that means?!) a large and successful first-year writing program, an impossible undertaking I might add if not for a dedicated cadre of faculty. Besides everything else, these weekly Comp Quickreads have occupied much more of my time than I ever expected. I have learned a great deal both from preparing them and from the responses I have received. And I have been gratified by the responses, even the teasing (I think) by Margaret and David who queried each other in the hallway “Isn’t that the author of the Comp Quickreads!” One reader noted with either awe or indignation, “How do you manage to treat every topic in the same number of words?” Some were quick to challenge my claims and call me on my at times simple and reductive thinking. Since my primary purpose in writing these weekly missives was to start or renew a conversation about what we do and how we do it, each response suggests that we have started that conversation and I hope we never tire of it.

Perhaps the more important purpose behind these short articles has been to begin to suggest the depth and complexity of writing and the teaching of writing. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many very intelligent people believe that writing either can be taught by anyone or cannot be taught at all. Our students know first-hand the falseness of both of these claims, but like Obama’s birth certificate or the five paragraph essay some ideas survive and even flourish in absolute and perverse contradiction of all logic and evidence. The truth is simple and inconvenient: writing and writing instruction take time; effective teachers of writing have expertise and experience; and a successful writing program cannot exist without a dedicated cadre of teachers.

Comp Quickread Topics I Never Got To (until now)

The following topics were on my list at the beginning of the year, but never made it into print.

Plagiarism and Other Crimes—I liked the title but never got around to the subject, which is too bad given the prominence of and misconceptions attached to plagiarism. The short version is that a first-year writing class is where a student is supposed to learn about plagiarism and how to avoid it. In a first-year writing class plagiarism is almost always a teachable moment.

Is There a Place for Timed Writing?—I chose to avoid this topic because my answer is not constructive. I would argue that there is a place for timed writing and that should dishearten us. High-stakes timed writing is the site of our devil’s bargain with the institution’s need for easy assessment, which in turn rewards the glib and superficial and punishes the deliberate and thoughtful.

The Five Paragraph Essay Must Die—I wonder what I intended to do with this topic? In reality, quite reasonable people argue for the utility of giving students temporary “crutches.” Increasingly I feel that these and other shortcuts are almost like an abdication of teaching, a cynical or frustrated admission that some (or all) people cannot over time improve their writing. That timed writing is often invoked as justifying the teaching of the five paragraph essay is merely another indictment of timed writing.

Preparing for the WPE

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The last Composition Conversation of the year focused on the role of ENGL 102 in preparing students for the Writing Proficiency Exam (WPE) The WPE is how CSULA has elected to implement the CSU Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement (GWAR), which requires all students to demonstrate competence in writing in order to receive a degree from a CSU campus. Ideally, prior to taking the WPE, students have taken ENGL 101 and ENGL 102 (or their equivalents), and countless general education classes in which they have had ample opportunities to write and revise. In theory, ENGL 102 is simply one of many classes students might take prior to attempting the WPE.

In practice, ENGL 102 might be for most students their most recent class that required writing or in which they received any writing instruction. Students are often encouraged by advisors to take the WPE as soon as possible after completing ENGL 102, a practice which makes obvious the central if not solitary role played by English department courses in addressing student writing at the university. So while the WPE is part of an all-university commitment to assessing and improving student writing, ENGL 102 instructors often feel a special responsible for preparing students for the WPE.

All of the participants at the Composition Conversation devoted some class time to the WPE in their ENGL 102 classes. The range of strategies, however, was wide. One participant generally set aside about half a class period in either the eighth or ninth week of the quarter to respond to student questions about the WPE and to let students know about the WPE workshops offered every quarter by the University Writing Center. Another instructor offers “WPE alerts” throughout the quarter. Whenever class discussion turns to a strategy useful for timed essay writing such as that demanded by the WPE, the instructor calls attention to the moment by referring to it as a “WPE alert.”

Some instructors devote as much as one or more class periods to preparing for the WPE. Some instructors distribute the WPE scoring guide and help students understand how the rubric is used to score student responses. Some instructors use the sample essays found online (at the University Writing Center web site) to illustrate the scoring guide. Some schedule a practice WPE as the midterm for the course. On the day of the midterm, students are given 90 minutes (as on the WPE) to respond to a WPE-type topic. As with the WPE, students do not know about the topic until they sit down to write. The instructor then scores the essays using the WPE scoring guide, with the only comments referring to the language of the scoring guide. Those students whose essays are scored “5” or “6” (i.e. clearly passing) are asked to share their timed writing strategies with the entire class.

Regardless of the time committed specifically to preparing students for the WPE, all participants noted the importance of directing students to services and resources available in the University Writing Center. Besides offering workshops, advisement, and UNIV 401 (the course alternative to the WPE), the Writing Center also maintains materials online, including a “Ten Tips for WPE Success” handout, sample scored responses, and “retired” WPE topics. Most important, perhaps is the fact that the Writing Center is not part of the English department, which reinforces the notion that writing instruction and assessment are the responsibility of the entire campus and not just one department.

The University Writing Center and the WPE

The University Writing Center has long been a key part of the university’s use of the WPE as something more than an obstacle to student graduation. The WPE, ideally, identifies students in need of additional advisement and/or instruction, both of which they can receive through the Writing Center in the following ways:

• A student who fails the WPE can meet with WPE consultants to go over his or her exam and learn why graders did not see it as passing; consultants can also help students prepare for re-taking the exam by discussing alternative writing strategies.
• Students can attend WPE workshops usually offered during the second and third weeks of every quarter. At the workshops, students are introduced to the logistics of the exam and offered advice on timed writing, including such basics as read the question carefully, and set aside time for planning at the start and editing at the end.
• A student might be advised to consider enrolling in UNIV 401, the course alternative to the WPE available to students who have failed the exam at least once. Successful completion of UNIV 401 satisfies the GWAR.

Writing at the University after 102

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When students finish ENGL 102 are they finished with writing at the university? Of course, we hope not, but the answer depends on the student and the student’s major department. After successfully completing ENGL 102, students are still required to take and pass the Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE) and an upper division writing course in their major program. Beyond this minimum, the university encourages faculty teaching both lower and upper division general education classes to incorporate writing assignments into their courses. In addition, students in some majors might have the opportunity to work on undergraduate theses and certainly in some majors students are expected to write in some, most, or even all courses in their major program.

That’s the idea, at least. What individual students encounter varies significantly from class to class and from major to major. First, assigning writing in GE courses, both lower and upper division, has been more worthy goal than actual practice outside of a few stalwart departments such as English. While traditional “letters” faculty might be very comfortable assigning and responding to student writing, faculty in other disciplines might not be comfortable teaching writing outside of their discipline-specific conventions. This reluctance has undoubtedly been exacerbated by increasing class sizes, which of course make meaningful writing assignments a virtually overwhelming burden for conscientious faculty. For example, GE classes in critical thinking have grown from an average of 43 students in 2001-2002 to an average of 66 in 2009-2010. Average class sizes in applied science (GE B3) have increased from 44 to 61 in the same period. Upper division theme classes in the humanities, where one might expect writing to be assigned, have grown from an average of 33 in 2002-2003 to an average of 48 in 2009-2010. And while there are useful strategies for reducing the workload of assigning writing (such as using more low-stakes writing and forgoing the marking (i.e. “correcting”) of papers, those strategies are wholly inadequate to the crippling pedagogic limitations imposed by the present economic realities.

As for writing in the disciplines, the amount, kind, and frequency, of course, depend on the discipline. Students in some major programs, such as English, history, philosophy, and others, can expect to write in virtually every class. Students in other major programs might be required to write only in their upper division writing courses. And the amount and frequency of writing required even in these “writing intensive” courses might vary significantly from program to program. Most programs are somewhere in between requiring writing in every class and requiring writing in only one class. Regardless of the desire, however, the same anxieties and economics that have limited the assigning of writing in general education courses no doubt has had an impact on writing in the majors.

Universities have always been forced to struggle with imperatives that are at best contradictory and at worst dishonest. The emphasis now is on the short-term economics of efficiency and speed, which translates into more students and more degrees in less time and with less cost. Lost in this emphasis is the long-term value and usefulness of an education that adequately prepares one for life and work. Reading and writing are central to such an education, but as with so much right now short-term economies have triumphed over long-term value.

University Writing Requirements at CSULA

In order to promote writing, the University has a four-part writing requirement for all students:

• ENGL 101, Reflective and Expository Writing;
• ENGL 102, Analytic and Persuasive Writing;
• the Graduation Writing Assessment Requirement, met by passing the Writing Proficiency Exam (WPE) or University 401; and
• an upper-division writing course in a student's major.

In ENGL 101, students write thesis-driven arguments that make use of external evidence. In ENGL 102, students extend their ability to interpret and analyze a range of texts, write longer and more sustained essays, carry out independent research, and integrate multiple sources into their essays. Research involves training in information literacy skills often offered in partnership with library staff.

The WPE is offered each quarter. Students are allowed 90 minutes to write an essay on an assigned topic of general interest. The essays are scored holistically by faculty graders. Students who do not pass the WPE are permitted to enroll in UNIV 401, a course alternative to the exam.

Each major program must require all students in the major to take an upper-division writing course. This course usually focuses on writing in the discipline.

Try It Out Vs. Get It Right

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Believe it or not, we get mail, and last week’s Comp Quickread brought more than the usual one or two notes from China. One reader offered a very important clarification that is worth quoting in full:

“One quibble—or maybe less a quibble than an extension of something you said: I think the problems created by students’ trying to sound “academic,” or just plain smart, by using big words, convoluted sentence structures, passive voice, etc., are definitely worth pointing out to students (not, of course, while you simultaneously smack them with a rolled up newspaper and yell “Bad! Bad student!”), as is offering them assistance in clarifying (and understanding) their meaning and finding alternatives other than “dumb it down a bit.” At the same time, though, I think it’s important for teachers to keep in mind that the impulse students display in attempting these sophisticated but ultimately unsuccessful structures and vocabulary choices is a good one, and hence ought not to be discouraged; quite the contrary. Certainly one of the implicit goals of academic writing is to “sound like the teacher” (if you will), but we can’t really expect perfect success right off the starting block. Nothing ventured and all that. Writing teachers especially need to make room in their classes for students to experiment and take risks in their writing without endangering their GPAs.”

This note raises many interesting points about the classroom spaces we create and about our roles as instructors. I think the most important point is the last one, that we, as writing teachers or as teachers in general, need to recognize that our students are experimenting with words, forms, ideas, perspectives, ways of seeing, ways of reading, and ways of knowing. They need spaces where they can take risks, fail, and try again, where they can try it out without worrying about getting it right. And before someone accuses me of dangerous coddling, the need for such encouraging spaces is acknowledged in early childhood education, studies of creativity in both the arts and the sciences, and literature on management and leadership.

If given the opportunity to take risks, students will try out different approaches and develop strategies to get it right. Their ability to get it right, though, is directly related to the complexity of the tasks we give them. At each moment of their development they are hopefully being challenged with new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of organizing and engaging with the world and those challenges are leaving traces in their writing. A first-year student whose writing has been concise and logical can produce a sprawling self-contradictory rant in response to a question about the ethics of downloading music. A third-year student whose writing has been a paragon of clarity and grace can produce a nearly incoherent paper on Immanuel Kant. Of course Kant himself produced many nearly incoherent papers on himself.

Creating classroom spaces that support experimentation, though, is an increasingly difficult proposition in the twenty-first century corporate university. The “get it right” forces are everywhere from the expectation that writing can be taught in a single course to the rush to measure everything the university does through learning outcomes. Perhaps we should be more concerned about creating the spaces that enable what J. S. Mill called each individual’s “experiment of living.”

Encouraging Experiments

What can we do to place greater emphasis on “trying it out” and less emphasis on “getting it right”? Here are a few classroom practices to consider:

Trying On Perspectives—Encourage students to think outside their conventional patterns by forcing them to “try on” the viewpoint of others. Students might be required to take up positions opposed to their own argument, work specifically with other writers who have taken opposing positions, or re-read a text with a raised consciousness (about gender or class, for example, or about some key idea such as “justice” or “nation“). Such activities in sympathetic imagining also help develop a sense of audience.

Low-stakes writing—These assignments allow students to take risks without significant consequences. Students might be asked to produce quick-writes, journals, or even mini-essays to work through challenging ideas. Such writing might eventually be incorporated into a high-stakes assignment, but only after appropriate feedback.

Multiple Drafts—Instructor feedback on intermediate drafts enable students to take risks in earlier drafts and then adapt and adjust to feedback from the instructor or from peers. Of course, most experienced teachers of writing incorporate multiple drafts into each writing assignment. To encourage students to take risks, however, early drafts should be ungraded.

Emphasizing Clarity

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In our collective anxiety about being overwhelmed by error-ridden sentences, many of us have neglected a crucial aspect of writing: style. For literature-types (hey fella, that's me you're talking about!), a writer's style can be as distinctive as a fingerprint and might have been the source of the initial interest in if not lasting appeal of the writer. Many of us became interested in writing because of an early fascination with style, whether it was the Keatsian romance of Fitzgerald, the synthetical and antithetical balancing of words, phrases, and clauses of Johnson, or the “enwinding” complexity and nuance of James.

When we talk about style in student writing we are usually talking about something else, something more like clarity and a certain amount of grace. Writing teachers will recognize those two terms as the subtitle of one of the best books on teaching style, Joseph Williams' Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Williams and others have redefined the discussion of style, moving it away from what we might call the “writerly” style of literary texts and towards what we might call the “readerly” style of primarily communicative texts (with due apologies to Barthes). As the name implies, a “readerly” text is one that is more attuned to the needs of the reader. If the writer's primary purpose is communication, then the expression should be clear. If a writer is not clear, the reader (or an instructor reading a student’s writing rhetorically) needs to signal this lack of clarity.

Rather than marking and rewriting a student’s sentences (something every teacher of writing struggles to avoid), we can identify for students when their expression interferes with communication. For example, a teacher might note where he or she has trouble understanding the writer by writing in the margin “I get lost here,” or “This sentence confuses me.” We might also help the writer see the importance of clarity by signaling basic understanding but the need for greater clarity. We might note such moments in an essay by writing in the margin, “This part here strikes me as really important, but I had trouble with it.” By calling attention to these clarity “hot spots” (topic sentences, thesis, transitions, and so on), we help students focus on improving clarity where it matters most. Of course, we want every word, sentence, and paragraph to be clear and effective, but in any piece of writing some words and sentences are more important than others. These “hot spots” usually constitute the argumentative skeleton of the essay so the “work” the writing is doing at these points is simply much more challenging than the work being done in other places. When students encounter complex rhetorical tasks and when they are wrestling with challenging ideas, clarity and grace suffer and even errors return. Attention to these “hot spots” then will help students clarify their own ideas and improve the clarity of their expression.

Finally and at a minimum we should communicate our expectations about style when we assign writing. Teachers are sadly familiar with the difficult and long-winded prose that students produce when trying to imitate academic prose. Students do not produce such prose out of perversity (though at this point in the year it certainly feels that way); they do so out of ignorance. We might advise students to try for an easy, graceful, but not overly casual writing style and suggest that they read their papers out loud to make sure it sounds like spoken English and not like paper-ese.

Some Sources of Unclear Writing (taken from Williams’ Style)

Besides asking for clarity, expecting clarity, and signaling our disapproval when we don't get it, we can help students identify the sources of unclear writing. Here's a short list:

• Writing that tries to impress or intimidate us rather than communicate with us
• Writing that has been padded (the three page paper turned into the four-and-a-half page paper simply through the addition of words not ideas)
• Writing that is tentative and has nothing to say, usually because the writer cannot locate his or her authority to speak (this is really an audience problem)
• Writing full of long abstract nouns and no active verbs—"who is doing what to whom?" we might ask of sentences and not be able to answer

What can students do about problems with style? Here's some advice:

• Write with the needs of readers in mind
• Make your nouns concrete and precise
• Make your verbs active
• Be able to look at your sentences and say "I know who is doing what to whom"
• Be concise

CSU English Council Position Statement: Mandatory Early Start (April 2010)

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Background

In April 2009, the English Council of the CSU issued a position statement opposing the adoption and implementation of mandatory “early start” programs. “Early start” would require incoming first-year students designated as “not proficient” to begin “remediation” in the summer before they begin college. (In some models of “early start” students must not only begin “remediation,” but complete it before enrolling in regular classes.) Similar resolutions opposed to mandatory “early start” have been passed by the Academic Senate of the CSU and the Academic Senate of CSULA. In October 2009, the English Council of the CSU was informed that a task force had been assembled to study and report on the implementation of “early start.” In response the Council presented the task force with a “counter-proposal,” which reiterated the pedagogic and philosophic objections to mandatory “early start,” highlighted current successful practices, and offered the measured judgments of experts. At their March 2010 meeting, the CSU Board of Trustees adopted an ‘early start’ policy. In response, the English Council of the CSU drafted and approved the accompanying position statement.

CSU English Council Position Statement: Mandatory Early Start (April 2010)

We understand that the Board of Trustees’ resolution to implement Early Start programs on all CSU campuses is an effort to help integrate first year students into mainstream academic life quickly, humanely, and with a high degree of probability that they will graduate. We share this concern. However, along with the Statewide Academic Senate, the CSU English Council opposes a mandatory Early Start as a precondition for enrollment at any CSU campus. We believe that a mandatory Early Start program will not serve our students well for these reasons:

• Mandatory Early start is discriminatory, forcing an identified group of students to participate in summer as a pre-condition of enrollment to the university, even though this same population of students is not only fully qualified for admission, but arrive at the CSU having earned high school GPA’s of B or better;
• While we do support voluntary summer programs, as a mandatory program, Early Start is punitive, placing high-stakes preconditions on admissions to fully qualified first year students. This raises the questionable legality of denying admission to these students;
• Mandatory Early Start places undo financial burden on students who can least absorb it. Whatever financial aid students may receive cannot compensate for summer income lost and summer costs incurred, which could lead to resentment, hardship, and disenrollment;
• No valid evidence has been presented to us that Early Start is effective, and we do not feel students should be forced to enroll in programs whose educational value is unproven;
• By contrast, in a two-year experiment at SFSU, Summer Bridge was designed as an early start, where students who were highly successful in this summer bridge course (earning a B+ or higher) were promoted to the next level composition course. The students did so poorly that Summer Bridge went back to its original model as an addition to, rather than a substitute for, the full sequence of composition courses;
• There is a great deal of evidence from a number of campuses indicating that innovative first-year programs (e.g. directed self-placement and stretch) are successful at retaining students, improving compliance with EO 665 (system-wide, roughly 85% of students are compliant within their first year), and improving graduation rates;
• In a CSULA study, students who placed into regular semester basic writing courses had higher persistence rates than students who placed directly into first-year composition, showing that students who go directly into our existing first-year courses do as well as, if not better than, their more “proficient” peers;
• From long-term consultation with Chancellor’s Office representatives, we understand that remedial courses that do not count toward graduation are a problematic option in today’s budget climate. We believe that directed self-placement and stretch courses solve this problem. Early Start, on the other hand, creates an additional remedial course;
• Early Start is an unfunded mandate that will require substantial resources to design, implement, and sustain and that will place differential burdens on individual campuses.

For these reasons, English Council recommends that writing programs throughout the system decline to participate in the design or implementation of mandatory Early Start Programs. We understand that conditions are different on different campuses and that some writing programs might for various reasons feel compelled to participate, and these programs have our full support. Nevertheless, the Council as a whole feels it is important to voice our strong opposition to this ill-conceived, however well-intentioned, program.

Research as a Process

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Texts such as They Say/I Say begin with the assumption that to enter a discourse community, to learn to write and speak as a participant, one must learn what David Bartholomae calls “the commonplaces, the texts, the gestures and jargon of the group.” That entry, though, is usually a slow and gradual process. Susan MacDonald suggests four points on a continuum to describe the path students must navigate to enter the academic discourse community:

1. nonacademic writing
2. generalized academic writing concerned with stating claims, offering evidence, respecting the opinion of others, and learning to write with authority
3. novice approximations of particular disciplinary ways of using and creating knowledge
4. expert, insider academic writing

First-year writing courses tend to focus on the first two points of the continuum. Students are often asked to write in a range of genres that include many instances of what MacDonald calls “generalized academic writing” and the argumentative “moves” made explicit by Graff and Birkenstein focus almost exclusively on this type of writing.

But as MacDonald’s continuum makes explicit, key to entering the academic discourse community is the need to learn the research conventions of scholars and to recognize how these conventions might be discipline-specific. To some, these differences across disciplines are so great as to call into question the ubiquitous general education research paper. Richard Larson went so far as to refer to the “so-called ‘research paper’” as a “non-form” with “no conceptual or substantive identity.” If the research assignment focuses too narrowly on finding and reporting information, on regurgitating data into templates, then Larson’s objection is valid.

Research assignments in first-year writing courses are certainly susceptible to the pressures of teaching the “format” of the generic research paper even when no such format exists, or rather even when a dizzying number and array of formats exist. The generic research assignment also confirms common misperceptions about research and writing; that they are simple tasks of gathering, organizing, and transferring to paper information that is already known. Instead, research is best taught as part of a course designed to introduce students to the discourse communities that form around specific topics. And research assignments need to emphasize the qualities that underlie research in all disciplines: intellectual curiosity and personal engagement.

Furthermore, research like writing is best seen as a process. Research abilities, like writing abilities, are neither separate nor linear. As the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) notes of its recommended information literacy standards, “many of the competencies are likely to be performed recursively, in that the reflective and evaluative aspects included within each standard will require the student to return to an earlier point in the process, revise the information-seeking approach, and repeat the same steps.” To teachers of writing this description will sound very familiar.

As with their ideas about writing, students often arrive in college with a very narrow sense of research. Their success at the university and as life-long learners will depend on their coming to see knowledge as both shared and created, and research and writing as epistemic and recursive, as ways not only of making sense of the world but of making the world.

Correlating Writing and Information Literacy Outcomes

(from the WPA Outcomes Statement and the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards)

Research Process
Writing

• focus on a purpose
• use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating

Information Literacy

• defines and articulates the need for information
• reevaluates nature and extent of information need

Search Strategies
Writing

• respond to the needs of different audiences
• understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate resources

Information Literacy

• identifies a variety of types and formats of potential sources of information
• selects the most appropriate investigative methods or information retrieval systems for accessing information
• constructs and implements effectively designed search strategies
• retrieves information online or in person using a variety of methods
• refines the search strategy if necessary

Documentation
Writing

• practice appropriate means of documenting work

Information Literacy

• extracts, records, and manages the information and its sources
• acknowledges the use of information sources in communicating the product or performance

Using They Say/I Say

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on using They Say/I Say in writing classes. Now in its second edition, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, is one of the texts recommended by the CSULA Composition Committee for ENGL 101 and ENGL 102.

Graff and Birkenstein use Kenneth Burke’s famous metaphor of the “unending conversation” to illustrate the importance of convention in academic discourse. According to the authors of They Say/I Say, students have difficulty joining the academic conversation because they lack the language to make the expected argumentative and rhetorical moves. These moves are so common that the language used to express them has become stock language in academic discourse and can literally and productively be represented as fill-in the blank templates. Their book provides over a hundred such templates covering everything from introducing a quote (“According to X, ‘__’ ”) to explaining the consequences of one’s ideas (“These conclusions will have significant applications in __ as well as in __”). Participants generally praised the utility of They Say/I Say and offered some suggestions for using the text in a composition class. Concerns, though, were also raised about the use of such “crutches.” After all, the five-paragraph essay began as a temporary expedient to help students get started.

Some instructors using They Say/I Say assign group presentations on each chapter. One instructor allows students to design their presentation in whatever form they prefer. “Teach the way you would like to be taught,” was the advice given to students preparing their presentations. Another instructor requires groups to summarize the chapter, give examples of the templates from their own writing (or from their reading), and if they are unable to find examples to work with the class to develop examples of the templates in action. One instructor noted that during election season students found many examples of the templates in the public discourse surrounding political campaigns. Finally, to follow-up on the chapter(s) presented, one instructor included questions on subsequent peer reviews that required reviewers to identify templates in the writing of classmates.

Two primary concerns, however, were raised about They Say/I Say. First, one participant liked the quasi-meta-rhetorical quality of the text. In making explicit common rhetorical moves, the authors had “succeeded” in reducing rhetoric to a series of formal gestures. The result, however, is a rhetoric text that rarely appeals to rhetoric. Curiously the authors don’t always refer to the rhetorical purpose of a rhetorical move, or do so only implicitly. The absence (or implicitness) of rhetoric in They Say/I Say could result in the second concern: that students would take these templates as not temporary aids to future development but as the endpoint of development. Instead of mastering rhetoric students might believe they only need to master the templates. And without the rhetorical training needed to understand how the templates work and to recognize the historic and cultural contingency of these particular templates, how could a student ever progress beyond the mere repetition of these mechanical forms? As is often the case, the answer is education. The templates in They Say/I Say might free us of the mechanical details of rhetorical moves but not of the need to teach why some moves are more effective and appropriate than others.

From the “Introduction” to They Say/I Say

Burke writes:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. --Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form

What we like about this passage is its suggestion that stating on argument and “putting in your oar” can only be done in conversation with others; that we all enter the dynamic world of ideas not as isolated individuals, but as social beings deeply connected to others who have a stake in what we say.

Graff and Birkenstein, They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

Low and High Stakes Writing

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In our professional lives all of us engage in a variety of writing tasks, each with its own purpose, intended audience, and associated conventions, and increasingly instructors are attempting to create a similar variety of writing tasks in their classrooms. Besides providing students with a variety of writing tasks, instructors also hope to encourage more writing by students without increasing the already heavy "paper-load" instructors face. Everybody agrees that students should do more writing, that more writing will lead to better writing, and that writing is essential to learning. But how do already overburdened instructors balance the legitimate pedagogic need for more writing by students with the equally legitimate claim of too much student work and not enough time to respond to it?

An important distinction that has emerged in response to this problem is that between "low-stakes" and "high-stakes" writing. Most instructors are already familiar with high-stakes writing, because they already require it of students. High-stakes writing is usually formal, structured writing that is assigned a grade. The writing might be take-home or timed, and the grade is usually a significant part of the course grade. In general, high-stakes writing is supposed to:\

• demonstrate what students have learned
• follow the conventions of formal academic prose (as well as discipline specific conventions)
• be relatively error free (when written outside of class)

High-stakes writing assignments are stressful for students and involve considerable work for the instructor.

Low-stakes writing falls under the general category of "writing to learn" pedagogy and is often used in writing classes as invention strategies. Low-stakes writing is also often used to assess quickly how well students understand course material. The writing is usually

• short and informal
• impromptu (in-class) or take-home
• intended to stimulate thought, and keep students engaged and thinking during class
• never corrected or graded

While the instructor might read low-stakes writing, the instructor should avoid lengthy comments, corrections, or even assigning a grade. Instead of a grade, most instructors use a simple acceptable or not-acceptable system (i.e. credit or no credit, check or minus) or simply "handed-in" or "not handed-in." If the instructor chooses to provide a comment, it will usually be directed to the content of the writing and not the form. For example, an instructor might need to signal in a comment a problem, such as a student not responding to a journal topic, inappropriately paraphrasing in a summary assignment, or otherwise misunderstanding the writing assignment. In general, comments, if used at all, should be brief.

Listed below are some examples of low-stakes writing assignments:

Journals
Freewriting or Quickwrites
Mini essays
Role-playing writing
E-writing

Low-stakes writing can also serve as pre-writing for high-stakes writing assignments. In-class brainstorming activities might lead to brief paper proposals which might lead to a formal paper. In short, low-stakes writing is not a substitute for high-stakes writing, but research seems to indicate that it improves student performance on high-stakes writing assignments.

Some Examples of
Low-Stakes Writing

Journals: Probably the most common low-stakes writing found in composition classes, journal entries might be guided, such as focused responses to particular questions, part of a dialogue journal, where the instructor and student carry on a conversation through the journal, or open-ended and closer to freewriting.

Freewriting or Quickwrites: These (usually) in-class activities help students work through what they know and understand and what they don’t know, which helps instructors gauge student comprehension. They also serve as effective invention strategies, especially for blocked or anxious writers.

Role-playing writing: Students might be asked to write a dialogue to explore another person’s role or perspective, or “record” an imagined interview with an author, expert, or someone holding a contrary opinion.

E-writing: Electronic discourse is becoming more commonly used for informal low-stakes writing. Students might be asked to participate in online chats, post to a bulletin board, or take part in an email discussion. Students might also be asked to create their own blog or respond to blog entries, though the public nature of blogs and blog postings complicates the idea of informality.

Reading Student Writing Rhetorically

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Instructors in all disciplines recognize the importance of writing to learning. Three-fourths or more of instructors respond that students learn more in courses where writing is required, and nearly all say that good writing skills are important to success in their fields. Why then do nearly two-thirds of instructors report that they do not have time to assign or respond to writing? As any experienced instructor knows, this survey data is not contradictory. When most instructors report not having time to assign writing, they are probably referring to not having time to respond to student writing.

Careful reading of and commenting on student writing can be very time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few simple changes that can dramatically reduce the time required to comment on student writing:

1. Instructors can incorporate more low-stakes writing in their courses, where students gain the benefits that come from increased writing without instructors suffering the burden of increased "grading."
2. Instructors can create more effective writing assignments that help students identify the purpose, audience and genre of the assignment and therefore produce better work.
3. Instructors can develop clear grading criteria that help students understand how their work will be evaluated, and help instructors evaluate that work.
4. Instructors can read more "rhetorically" and less prescriptively.

Arguably the most controversial of the above suggestions is the last, and yet adopting it would probably have the greatest positive impact on instructor workload and student writing. For many instructors much of the time spent responding to student writing is really time spent editing someone else's text. While instructors should pay some attention to correctness and clarity, usually the student's greater need is rhetorical.

To read rhetorically is to read as the audience, to assume the position of reader for the writer and respond accordingly. The shift is subtle but powerful. The teacher is the authority and pronounces on correctness and incorrectness. The reader is not the authority (the writer is) and can only comment on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the presentation. When the instructor responds rhetorically, the discussion about student writing shifts from rules and prescriptions to purposes and choices.

Emphasizing the rhetoric of student writing focuses attention on the effects (intended and unintended) produced by the writing and the kinds of questions readers ask, which can be divided into the following categories:

Focus: What is the text about? Does the writer tell me early on or do I have to hunt around to find it? Do I always know what the focus of the text is or are there places where I'm unsure? Has the writer neglected to discuss other aspects implied by the main idea(s)?

Development: Is special and detailed knowledge required to understand what the writer is saying? Does the writer (incorrectly) assume readers possess this knowledge? Is the evidence or description adequate to the task? Am I persuaded by the evidence? Is the description detailed enough for the writer's purpose?

Organization: Is the organization of the material effective given the writer's purpose? Does the writer recognize and effectively employ the conventions of this genre?

The Triage Approach

The following procedure was developed for writing tutors by Dr. John Edlund, now at Cal Poly Pomona.

Skim the draft quickly to find the major problems or areas of possible improvement.

Respond to the draft by identifying problems at the global level, the sentence level, and the grammatical level.

Global/Rhetorical (the paper as a whole)

Considering the audience and format required by the assignment or the purpose for the writing:

• Do the content, tone, organizational scheme, and other characteristics serve the writer’s intention?
• What fairly simple changes would immediately improve the paper’s readability or effectiveness?

Syntax/Style (Readability or sentence-level negotiation of meaning)

• Is the text “readable” (easy to process)? If not, what is the problem?
• Are any sentences awkward, unclear, or incomprehensible?

Grammatical Systems

• Are there consistent problems with particular grammatical forms?
• Can “consciousness raising” facilitate acquisition of these forms?
• What would you put on a “personal proofreading checklist” for this student?

Research and Information Literacy

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on information literacy, but the discussion quickly turned to teaching research skills and research writing in first-year writing courses. This shift was unsurprisingly given the close connection between research and information literacy. If research is the university’s attempt to institutionalize inquiry and each student’s attempt to discover his or her intellectual curiosity, then information literacy identifies the foundational skills necessary to feed that desire to know.

The conversation initially focused on the resources available to help ENGL 102 instructors incorporate information literacy in their courses. A range of instructional materials were developed by CSULA librarian Catherine Haras and have been available online at the composition faculty resources web site since September 2008. These materials include exercises that encourage students to explore the library’s resources and think about the different types of research materials available. Also included are sample assignments and guidelines for incorporating and assessing student research specifically in ENGL 102.

Several participants also mentioned class visits to the library to participate in research workshops. These workshops introduce information literacy skills and help students navigate the wealth of resources available. All participants commented on the success of these workshops, though some suggested they were underutilized and others reported the concerns expressed by the librarians that students could be better prepared. The librarians have suggested that instructors could do the following to make the most of the library visit: 1) Review the materials on information literacy posted on the Composition Faculty resources page; and 2) Help students develop a focus for their research assignment prior to the library visit and even have students send their topics to the librarian so that he or she can prepare specifically for the students’ research focus.

While the availability of these resources makes it possible to teach research in a first-year writing course, some participants noted that ENGL 102 is merely one piece of the puzzle. Just as first-year writing courses are not solely responsible for writing instruction at the university, ENGL 102 is not solely responsible for ensuring information literacy competency. Some even wondered whether research was appropriate in a first-year writing course, noting that the teaching of research in first-year writing is a controversial subject. The Writing Program Administrators (WPA) Outcomes statement for first-year composition did not initially include any outcomes related to research and only later added one under the category “Composing in Electronic Environments.” Some experts believe research is better taught in the disciplines, and of course students’ research experience at the university will hopefully include several self-initiated and self-directed research projects in their major courses. But as one participant observed, research skills like writing skills develop slowly over time and after much practice. While we can’t “inoculate” them with information literacy, we can expose them to the process. If we attempt to teach a “product,” we will almost always fail because the research project is a discipline-specific genre. If we attempt to teach a “process,” we can help students conduct independent research and join the academic research community.

Core Information Competencies: An Outline

The CSULA information literate student can:

1. Define the research topic and the need for information
2. Access information effectively and efficiently
3. Evaluate information critically
4. Organize, synthesize, and communicate information for a specific purpose
5. Ethically and legally access and use information

(taken from “Core Information Competencies” developed by the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, CSULA)

Information Literacy Instructional Materials

The following materials developed by the JFK Library are available on the Composition Faculty Resources web site (http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/cinfolit.php)

Library Exercises:

• Information Diary
• Narrowing a Topic
• Managing What You Find: Research Journal
• Scholarly Journal or Popular Magazine
• Web Site Evaluation

ENGL 102 Materials

• Constructing the ENGL 102 Research Assignment
• Model Rubric for ENGL 102 Research Outcomes

Library Research Tutorial

• http://www.calstatela.edu/library/research/

Reading and Curiosity

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To observe that curiosity is central to reading is not unlike observing that breathing is necessary to life. But what is curiosity? And if it is so important to reading, how can we as teachers foster it? Artists, philosophers and scientists have long been interested in curiosity and have frequently associated it with appetite. Edmund Burke claimed that curiosity “has an appetite,” and we speak casually of a hunger or thirst for knowledge, of curiosity as something beyond our conscious control and demanding to be satisfied. Philosophers speak of curiosity as a desire to know that exists independent of the utility of knowing and therefore is different from a simple need for cognition. We might feel the need to know how to complete a form, but that is not curiosity. We might feel the need to know whether Bono has a real name, but that too is not curiosity. In the first case the desire is instrumental and in the second it is essentially generic, part of the general stockpiling of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Curiosity requires what philosophers call a motivationally original desire to know something. In other words, curiosity is a desire to know that originates with and belongs to the individual. It is my desire to know. It is essentially involuntary, non-utilitarian, and deeply personal.

And therein lies the problem. As commentators on and reformers of education have noted at least since Socrates, curiosity is central not only to reading but to the active intellectual engagement with the world that is the ultimate goal of education. But as most of these same commentators have noted, educational institutions seem perversely designed to stifle curiosity. According to one expert, the teacher’s goal ought to be “to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming ... fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things.” That one hundred years ago John Dewey needed to emphasize the importance of inquiry and that one hundred years later these same words seem to speak directly to our times suggests either that there really is very little new under the sun or that fostering inquiry and curiosity is something we find easy to claim but difficult to enact.

Perhaps here as elsewhere we can trace our Anglo-American roots. Matthew Arnold, writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, noted that the word “curiosity,” which in other languages was used positively to denote “a high and fine quality” of human nature, was in English a negative term associated with idleness. It was the English after all who made curiosity fatal to felines. We might disagree with Arnold’s comparative linguistics, but his observation that we are uncomfortable with curiosity—the “free play of the mind on all subjects”—and too easily satisfied with “very inadequate ideas” should strike us as all-too-familiar.

Curiosity, with its tendency to ask questions and to question the answers, discomforts the status quo and dissatisfies the self-satisfied. Dewey wrote one hundred years ago, “In the feeling, however dim, that the facts which directly meet the senses are not the whole story, that there is more behind them and more to come from them, lies the germ of intellectual curiosity.” We might ask ourselves what we do in the classroom to encourage this dim feeling, to help students form the authentic questions that will help them satisfy their motivationally original desire to know that belongs only to them. We might ask ourselves what we do to protect the spirit of inquiry and each student’s curiosity.

From John Stuart Mill

Last year marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty. The following is taken from the conclusion, where Mill addresses the possibility of state-controlled education and warns of its dangers if it becomes too focused on basic skills and vocational competencies.

“The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of [each individual’s] mental expansion and elevation, to a little more of administrative skill, or that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish” (Chapter 5).

Engaging with Texts

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We spend a lot of time in the English Department thinking about texts, whether they are in the form of a physical book written by a famous writer or in the form of the world as a text. We teach texts and produce texts. We require students to read texts and we hope that they will produce texts of their own. Given our passion for texts, is it any wonder that our composition courses focus on helping students engage with texts. In fact, our recent revision of the ENGL 096 scoring guide associates strong writing with meaningful and appropriate “engagement” with texts and adequate or inadequate writing with routine or minimal “response” to texts. But what exactly is the nature of that engagement? What are we asking students to do?

At least part of what we expect students to do is very mechanical. Quotation, paraphrase, and summary, the differences between them and their appropriate uses often occupy parts of several class meetings and feature prominently on learning objectives for first-year writing courses. Then there is the arcane and seemingly impenetrable world of citation and proper bibliographic format. MLA, APA, Chicago, ACS, CBE, ASCE, IEEE, AIM, AIP and other equally mysterious conventions probably strike students as cruel and perverse. Certainly some part, perhaps an inordinate part, of what we expect students to do with texts is mere machinery.

We also expect students to be capable information gatherers. Texts represent repositories of information, data that students hopefully transform into knowledge. But as students become more experienced readers and writers, they hopefully become more analytical and critical as both readers and writers. Texts that stood before as irreproachable in their authority might be subjected to increasing skepticism when viewed against a background of contradictory texts, conflicting perspectives and controversy over what counts as “fact.” Once the bulwark of unthinking deference has been breached, texts become less and less pronouncements from on high and more and more lived rhetorical documents governed by the very real human concerns of purpose, audience and conventions. It is finally at this stage that we encounter something that looks familiar to experienced readers and writers.

Rather than asking what we expect students to do with texts, perhaps we should have started by asking what we do with texts, or even more simply, why we read. Readers might respond that they read because they want to know, learn, feel, experience. “There is no frigate like a book,” according to Emily Dickenson. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from reading comes from the raising and satisfying of this curiosity that appears at the center of our reading experience. Reading, as Peter Brooks notes, might be tied up with desire, a kind of “epistemophilia” that motivates us to become involved and invested in the text.

Curiosity it seems is at the center of our reading experience. Without curiosity and the pleasure that goes with it, students will struggle to move from passively “responding” to texts to actively “engaging,” becoming entangled in and grappling with texts. Active reading strategies can help students enter into a conversation with the text. We can also help by modeling the kinds of conversations we have with texts, and by facilitating the kinds of conversations we want to have about texts. Most important though might be helping students recognize their own curiosity and the pleasures of asking the right question.

Encouraging Active Reading and Inquiry

• Before beginning a new reading, especially one in a new genre, it is important to create the context for the reading. Why are students being asked to read this text? What kinds of questions might they have? What might prove difficult to them?
• Encourage students to read actively, making notes and carrying on a conversation with the text.
• Encourage students to record their initial impressions and questions immediately after reading. What were they thinking about at the end? What did they find satisfying? What did they find unsatisfying? What questions do they still have?
• Encourage students to relate the “knowledge” of the text to what they already know. What did they read that was new? What was surprising? How has the “knowledge” of the text altered their thinking?
• Encourage (or require) students to prepare “authentic” questions for sharing with the class. An “authentic” question is the student’s own question—one is which he or she is invested and to which he or she is likely to persist in seeking answers.

Recap of Composition Conversation-Effective Writing Assignments

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The most recent Composition Conversation focused on one of the most rewarding and difficult tasks faced by teachers of writing: designing effective writing assignments. Many of the ideas that emerged in the discussion applied not merely to designing writing assignments but to good teaching practice. Two key insights dominated: developing good assignments takes time and frequent revision, and students benefit when challenged to come up with their own ideas and their own way of presenting them.

The conversation began with a litany of best practices, some obvious, others less so. All agreed that assignments should be in writing and that instructors needed to devote sufficient class time to going over the assignment. The assignment should focus on what students were supposed to do (not simply what they were not supposed to do). If the assignment required a specific process, the assignment should specify those steps as explicitly as possible. As much as possible, the criteria to be used to evaluate the work should be made clear at the time of the assignment. One participant noted that students often use an assignment sheet like a recipe—the clearer and more explicit we can make our instructions and expectations, the better the results.

Where do the good assignments come from? Most participants could recall starting with writing assignments of their predecessors, colleagues, and possibly teachers. “The best teacher is the best student” is one formulation of this common adage. Another is “the best teacher is the best thief.” But participants noted that while good teachers might start with the work of others, they also personalize and refine assignments over time. Everyone could recount some terrible essay assignment they inflicted on students, but everyone could also recall “fixing” the “bad” topics through revision. One participant offered this instructive advice: make notes on a topic as you read student responses to it. These notes might address what students do well, what they do poorly, and how students might have misread the topic. The notes might be simpler: “Never use this topic again!” The key is recognizing that developing a good assignment is not very different from developing a good technical document—the teacher needs to know his/her purpose, his/her audience, and must be willing to test the document on actual users to find out whether it works, and use the feedback of readers to improve each draft.

What characterizes a good assignment? All agreed that good assignments allow students to develop their own ideas and their own ways of presenting them. Usually from the best of intentions assignments become overly directive and limiting, and substitute the instructor’s thinking for the student’s. “Helping” easily slips into “doing for.” Sometimes students are given little or no choice in their response and struggle to work within the narrow limitations of a single topic to which they must but cannot respond, or an overly simple task that leaves them with little to do other than repeat the argument of the assignment. Some participants noted that some students imaginatively go beyond a topic, but by doing so produce an essay that runs the risk of appearing “off-topic.” In portfolio-assessed classes, the danger is other readers might see such license as signaling an inability to respond to an assignment. But teachers can usually distinguish between innovation and inability. in short, students benefit from our high expectations and suffer when we oversimplify what is in fact complex.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without limiting them?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps or process that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment?
  

Questions a Student Might Ask of an Assignment

• What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What am I supposed to demonstrate?
• What exactly am I supposed to do?
• What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
• Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
• How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
  

Stretch Composition

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The Composition Committee has presented to the English Department a proposal to pilot stretch composition at CSULA. Much remains to be resolved and many levels of approval are still required, but the initial response has been encouraging.
Some might wonder why the department is considering changing its developmental writing program. A recent assessment found that CSULA students were effectively placed, successfully prepared, and ultimately retained at a higher rate than non-developmental students. While the success of the current program is impressive, stretch composition offers the promise of even greater successes while retaining what has so far proven most effective.

First implemented in the early 1990s at Arizona State University, stretch composition is based on a simple principle: some students need more time and more experience to develop competence in and confidence with academic writing. Stretch composition takes the “content” of a first-year writing course (such as ENGL 101) and “stretches” it over two or three quarters of instruction. The “content” of ENGL 101, of course, is not so much a thing or even a skill—it is a complex intellectual, social, and cultural activity best developed in communities over time.
Time and community are two of the three characteristics found in all stretch composition programs. When given more time to write, revise, and discuss writing, students do better with their writing coursework and feel better about their learning experience, especially when that experience takes place within a community of writers. Cohort models, where students stay with the same instructor and same students, lead to effective learning (and writing) communities and allow the instructor to determine pacing and even curriculum appropriate to a specific group of students. The third key characteristic of stretch programs is college credit for all writing classes. College-level work should be rewarded with college-level credit. Since both the stretch version and the un-stretched version of ENGL 101 achieve the same learning objectives, stretch courses should be credit-bearing.

Research from the last decade conclusively supports the effectiveness of the stretch model. Programs that have adopted stretch models have seen a conclusive rise in student retention, pass rates, and performance. These benefits can be traced to the following:

• Because stretch programs are “college-level,” students are no longer stigmatized as “remedial.”
• Because stretch programs use cohorts, student engagement increases.
• Because stretch programs keep students and instructors together, classes are able to build on content and skills from prior quarters and achieve nearly seamless curricular alignment.
• Because the stretched nature of the courses effectively teaches writing and revision as a task to be completed over time, students perform better on writing tasks in their majors.

Much work remains to be done, from data gathering and report writing to course design and development. Course design begins with a relatively easy question: What would a two-quarter or one-year ENGL 101 look like? We often think to ourselves, “If only I had these students for a little longer...” With the stretch model, we will have them for a little longer. What will we do?

The Simple Principles of Stretch Composition

• Separate developmental courses imply well-defined points that divide one writing course in a sequence from another. This assumption, drawn from other disciplines such as developmental mathematics, does not take into account what the research shows—that writing and language competence develops recursively, not linearly and incrementally.
• Students can be offered different paths to the same end-point. Some paths might involve a single course, others more than one course.
• The most important determinant of the effectiveness of writing instruction is time. Some students need more time to attain competency; others can achieve it in less time.

The Design of the Pilot

The initial pilot would involve less than 300 students out of an incoming first-year class of 1,800-2,000. Six sections of ENGL 110ABC and eight sections of ENGL 112AB would be offered in 2010 2011.

ENGL 110ABC: Stretch Composition (30-week first year writing course)
ENGL 112AB: Accelerated Stretch Composition (20-week first year writing course)

Reading Strategies Revisited

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Repeatedly in the Composition Conversation on invention, participants called attention to the centrality of reading and discussion as an invention strategy. The most recent Composition Conversation focused specifically on reading and the strategies that teachers employ to help students become better readers.
In a recent survey of first-year writing students at CSULA, 30% of respondents characterized their reading ability as average or poor with that figure rising to nearly 50% for students placed in ENGL 095. Given this level of dissatisfaction, it isn’t surprising that, as one instructor stated, students often claim to “hate” reading. Clearly for many students, reading is difficult and a source of frustration. To overcome those frustrations, participants offered a range of strategies.

First, participants noted the importance of making reading explicit and devoting class time to discussing the reading and how to read the reading. One place to begin is the course reader. Most composition readers and reader/rhetoric texts contain an introductory section on reading strategies, such as “Getting the Most Out of Your Reading” in Models for Writers, or “Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process” in 50 Essays. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum not only devotes an entire chapter, “Critical Reading and Critique” to the subject, but discusses effective reading processes and strategies in virtually every section of the text. These resources provide effective overviews of the reading process and the practices of effective readers.

But simply asking students to read about reading isn’t enough. Participants agreed that significant class time must be devoted to discussing texts and modeling strategies for understanding texts. We might take for granted that students have read and understood the assigned reading, but while they might have “read” it, they often have not understood it in the ways we expect. Some students might struggle to understand what they have read because they have limited active vocabularies, which as one instructor noted can be addressed through explicit attention to vocabulary development through journal writing and even instruction in using a dictionary.
Other strategies focus on more global understanding of texts. Some instructors ask students to write summaries of texts, a task that is common in the classroom, but universally acknowledged to be more difficult than it appears. Some have students “quickwrite” about a reading at the beginning of class to help them focus on the key questions of the text. Others use “recollection” units, where small groups are asked to come up with global summaries of a reading.

All students, however, benefit from focused attention to questions of meaning and significance. What is the writer saying? What is the significance of that? Questions of the first type ask for summary and focus on what might be called the information content of the reading. Questions of the second type ask for analysis and draw attention to rhetorical purpose and the writer’s strategic choices. Discussion that focuses on questions about meaning and significance, and small groups that enable students to discuss such questions, produce two key results: students come to a shared understanding of a text, and students begin to understand that meaning is constructed through deliberation and conversation.

Basic Reading Strategies

• Good readers preview the reading by reviewing the table of contents, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. They attempt to understand how the text is organized before they start reading.
• Good readers identify a purpose for reading: Why am I reading? What do I hope to get from the reading (information, ideas, pleasure)? How will I know when I’ve accomplished my purpose?
• Good readers place the reading in context. When was it written? By whom? For what purpose? What genre does it belong to and what conventions are associated with that genre?
• Good readers read quickly but are prepared to re-read. Does the writer always use topic sentences? Are paragraphs mostly filled with different kinds of evidence all supporting the same claim? Can parts be skipped or quickly skimmed?
• Good readers engage with the text, ask questions of the text, agree with it, disagree with it, relate it to other readings, and note when it confuses them.
• Good readers are able to summarize the text and frequently will reflect on the experience of reading. What is its main point? What was most/least effective about it? What problems did I encounter while reading?

The Audience in the Text

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Who are my readers? As I sit here on a Sunday afternoon thinking about the concept of audience in a composition class, I am struck anew at both the centrality and the difficulty of this idea. Do I think of my readers as Plato and Aristotle seemed to think of the rhetor’s audience, as something to be mastered, susceptible listeners capable of persuasion provided I know how to persuade them? Or do I think of my readers as Blair or Campbell might have imagined them—intelligent, logical, rational, a bit skeptical but open to persuasion through effective argumentation? Or do I think of my readers as Walter Ong suggests I should, as a fiction, a mere construct of my mind created by me to serve my purposes?

Maybe I could figure out how to address my audience better if I knew more about them. Perhaps if I knew this audience that I am addressing I would better know what they wanted to read, what pleased them or displeased them, what persuaded them and what bored them. This approach focuses on the “real world,” where writing has clear and obvious purposes and where readers are specific and knowable. Not surprisingly, this idea of audience is popular in business and technical writing. The entrepreneur is encouraged to think of the banker who will read the business plan and decide on a loan. The engineer is encouraged to think of the accountant who will read the project proposal and decide on funding. Both the banker and the accountant are actual people and at least in theory knowable.

Or maybe I can never know my readers because they don’t exist until I invoke them. Maybe this “audience invoked” by my rhetorical choices is the only audience that exists. When the narrator in Middlemarch states, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (italics added), we (the novel’s readers) long to be part of the we invoked by the narrator, a community of readers full of wisdom, generosity, and humanity. We become the readers Eliot’s narrator wants us to become, but we don’t exist until the narrator invokes us.

But what if I don’t see myself as part of the narrator’s we? Similarly, what if my readers reject my attempts to construct them? Certainly readers are both actual physical people about whom I could learn more and constructs brought into partial being by my choices as a writer. Readers are both active as in the “audience addressed” model and passive as in the “audience invoked” model.

It might be tempting to narrow our conception of audience to something manageable, and in fact as teachers we often do. Students can grasp the idea of readers—other people with other backgrounds, experiences, opinions, and ideas—because they are themselves readers struck at times by the foreignness of the texts we ask them to read. They know first-hand the experience of being not merely the “audience addressed” but the “audience unaddressed.” Their confusion as readers, though, makes real the duties and responsibilities faced by any writer (including student writers) whose primary purpose is to communicate.

In short, like all rhetoric it comes down to choices. To some degree a writer chooses his or her readers, fashions them, imagines them, invokes them. But equally important is whether the writer chooses to acknowledge his or her readers, accept them, speak to them, meet them where they are in order to advance them.

Some Common Ways of Thinking About Audience

Aristotle: “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” [This formulation of ethos, pathos and logos is seen as emphasizing speaker (ethos), audience (pathos), and speech art (logos).]

Walter Ong: “The historian, the scholar or scientist, and the simple letter writer all fictionalize their audiences, casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play the role assigned.”

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: “The most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer.”

Lester Faigley: “The social perspective . . . moves beyond the traditional rhetorical concern for audience, forcing researchers to consider issues such as social roles, group purposes, communal organization, ideology, and finally theories of culture.”

Teaching Invention

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Journal writing, topoi, stasis theory, Burkean pentads, clustering, brainstorming, listing, tagmemics, double-entry notebooks, cubing, freewriting, hermeneutics. Beginning in the mid-1960s, renewed interest in the rhetorical concept of invention (or prewriting as most teachers of writing refer to it) led to an explosion of invention strategies for the classroom. The first Composition Conversation of the Winter term focused on “Teaching Invention,” and began with a simple question: What strategies are taught in the classroom? The answers revealed a key distinction. Developmental students benefited from basic “unconscious” prewriting strategies such as journals, freewriting, and listing while first-year composition students benefited most from “conscious” activities that helped them understand and respond to texts.

Since invention helps writers figure out what to say, it is closely tied to the writing task. First-year writing classes (i.e. ENGL 101 and 102) emphasize careful reading of often complex arguments in disciplinary texts and writing that must directly respond to these arguments. Participants agreed on the importance of discussing reading assignments in depth, noting that students needed to know “what they were responding to” to begin formulating effective responses.

One instructor illustrated this process by describing a recent classroom activity. Students watched a documentary critical of gender representations in Disney films. To begin, the class was asked to sum up the criticisms articulated in the film. They were then asked to “switch sides” and offer counter-arguments to these criticisms. Then they were asked to offer counter-arguments to the counter-arguments and the process continued. Most teachers of writing employ similar strategies to help students examine arguments critically and develop their own resources for analyzing and inventing arguments.

Developmental students (i.e. ENGL 095 or 096), of course, also benefit from attention to reading and argument, but they often need to examine their own writing process. Perhaps because developmental writers are more likely to have had negative experiences with writing (or more specifically with writing instruction), they are more likely to suffer from writer’s block or writing anxiety. For these writers, successful prewriting strategies disable the “conscious” filter and allow them to tap “unconscious” knowledge.

Such strategies postpone the imposition of rules and conventions as one participant paraphrased Mike Rose. Keeping a journal, freewriting, and other “editor-disabling” invention strategies, help students write their way to their ideas. To be successful these strategies need to emphasize speed and be “low-stakes.” For example, one participant described a freewriting exercise where students were told that their writing was entirely for themselves. Later students were asked to freewrite again and told that other students would read their freewrite. The results were predictable: students performed the first low-stakes freewrite easily and struggled with the second.

Ultimately, teaching invention is inseparable from helping students recognize their own writing processes, and how those processes can be made more effective and efficient. Invention helps writers tap knowledge they already have and understand knowledge available from others. It helps a writer figure out what to say, which is another way of saying it enables a writer to know what he or she knows. Is there any greater knowledge?

Some Key Invention Terms

Assessing the Rhetorical Situation-—audience, purpose, genre and conventions

Brainstorming-—thinking out loud in a group

Classical-—ethos, logos, pathos (types of appeals), topoi (topics of invention), stasis (determining the issue), dissoi logoi (arguing both sides)

Clustering-—a visual form of listing

Cubing-—describe it, compare it, associate it, analyze it, apply it, argue for or against it

Double-entry notebook-—summary/response journal

Dramatism (Burke’s Pentad)-—heuristics to determine motive: Act (What is happening?), Agent (Who is doing it?), Agency (What method?), Purpose (What is the intent?), Scene (Where?)

Freewriting-—an attempt to tap unconscious knowledge

Journalist’s Questions-—who, what, when, where, why, how

Journal Writing-—record of daily observations, responses to reading/ideas

Listing-—free association of ideas in point form

Outlining-—informal or formal listing of ideas

Scratch Outlines-—like “listing” but with some attention paid to sequence and subordination

Tagmemics-—examine the surface (‘particle’), dynamic (‘wave’), and comparative (‘field’) aspects of a topic

Designing Effective Writing Assignments

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The many pedagogic resources available on designing effective writing assignments mostly agree on the importance of beginning with three questions:

Why? Why are students being asked to write?

For whom? Who is the audience for the writing?

What? What form will the finished product take?

These three questions, of course, correspond to purpose, audience, and genre, and an effective assignment will help students identify the purpose, audience, and genre of their writing.

While instructors might believe that the purpose of an assignment is clear, most inexperienced writers have difficulty identifying their purpose for writing. Often they believe their purpose is to complete an assignment, which leads to safe and disengaged responses. Consider providing a succinct statement of purpose, such as “Your purpose in writing this essay is to identify the main proposals for transforming the Los Angeles River, and then argue for the approach that you believe will be most effective.”

Many instructors are already including information about audience in their topics. It is not surprising, for example, to find a statement like the following on an essay assignment sheet: “While it is tempting to think that you are writing to me, the instructor, you should consider the entire class to be your audience.” Such advice is certainly a start, but students often find imaginary scenarios helpful, such as writing a letter to a public official or submitting a report to a campus group. Such scenarios, while obviously artificial, help students recognize the demands that real audiences can make. Courses that incorporate community engagement move one step beyond these artificial “real-world” scenarios to actual writing tasks (such as producing memos, brochures, user instructions and other documents) produced for flesh-and-blood readers.

As to the form of the finished product, we can be most helpful to students by being as explicit about our expectations as possible without being so directive and limiting that students are left with a “fill-in the blanks” assignment. Format, page length, process, even “pet peeves” about style and grammar should be stated upfront. If I believe that the only appropriate use of the word “thing” in a student essay is a reference to a 1951 film about vegetable-based aliens, then I should state that expectation on the assignment. In short, if students are expected to use certain forms and follow certain conventions, they should be instructed to do so.

Thinking about these three questions is only one way of approaching assignment design. We might also think about the assignment as it might be seen by our students. From the student’s perspective, the key questions might be

1. What is the instructor’s purpose in creating this assignment? What skills, knowledge, and/or abilities am I supposed to demonstrate?
2. What exactly am I supposed to do? What is the central task?
3. What is the process? What steps are required to do the assignment properly?
4. Who, other than the instructor, might read or use this document?
5. How will the instructor know the best papers from the worst?
   

While effective writing assignments take time and effort to create, well-planned assignments are not only easier for students to do, they are easier for the instructor to grade.

Questions to Ask When Designing an Assignment

• What purpose are students attempting to accomplish with their writing? Is this purpose do able?
• Who's the audience for their writing? How much do students know about this audience?
• How familiar are my students with this genre of writing? What do they need to know about this genre to be comfortable and successful?
• How long should the paper be? Why this length?
• What is the assignment’s central task? What at a minimum must they do or what at a minimum must they address?
• What might students find difficult about this assignment? How can I help them without being overly directive and limiting?
• Is there a specific sequence of steps, or process, that will help students write a successful essay? Does this process allow opportunities for feedback and revision?
• What are my evaluation criteria? How well do these criteria line up with my goals for this assignment? Of these, which are most important?