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?

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)

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