For this 100th issue of Word Works, it might be appropriate to reflect on what, of the many writing topics we've dealt with over the years, is most important. What do we most strongly believe, and most want to say, about what makes a writing assignment succeed in a class?
This will be, frankly, an essay. An "essay" in its original French meaning is an attempt, a trying-out of ideas to see what happens. (But then, in a sense, what kind of writing isn't an essay, at some stage of its development?)
First I should consider, what do I mean by "succeed"? There are several possible meanings. An assignment which students find clear and do-able; which they have a good chance of doing well at if they are willing to put in the work; which results in writing that teachers find easy to respond to and grade -- and, I hope, interesting; which causes students to learn more about the course subject; which, in the best circumstances, results in writing that teachers like to read and might even learn from.
How can a writing assignment be conducted so that it succeeds? As I brainstormed this question, a lot of answers came to mind. But then the essay started to look like a humongous list. Who would want to read it? I took a different tack and tried to get down to the few most basic ideas. There turned out to be four of them.
1 Writing assignments should advance the learning goals of the course.
Students need to know why they are doing an assignment and what they are supposed to learn from it. If they are asked to write a paper but don't know why, they are likely to see the writing just as busy work. Consequently, they may not invest much time or effort in the research and writing - and they may, in fact, learning nothing from doing the assignment.
What is the instructor's motive for assigning writing? If it's only to make the course tougher, that's not enough. If it's only to improve writing skills, that's no enough, either. There should be unique things students can learn from the writing that they can't learn as well in other ways. Writing gets students to grapple with complex information and make sense of it in their own words and sentences.
Syllabi for all courses at BSU are supposed to state learning outcomes or goals. The writing assignments, in turn, should indicate which goals they will help students achieve. The assignments should not just address the communication skills. They should include critical thinking skills, as well as knowledge of the course subject matter.
2Writing assignments should be viewed as a collaboration between the instructor and the students.
Collaboration may seem like a strange word to use here. Cooperation might be more accurate, but it also sounds pretty flabby. Collaboration is the word I want to use, and since this is an essay, I'm going to try to make it work.
I suppose the very least we can say about collaboration between the instructor and the students is that it's better than having them be adversaries. We can also say that all parties concerned invest considerable time and energy in a writing assignment, in one way or another. But surely we can say more than that. Collaboration means establishing an atmosphere of "we're in this together." Working through an assignment from start to finish is a kind of journey for both instructor and students. At best, it involves a mutual give and take, so that they work together to clarify expectations, discuss the writing conventions of the discipline, and explore the best methods for completing the assignment.
Part of the trouble with the traditional way assignment cycles work is that the students do all their work at the beginning, writing the paper, and the teacher does all his or her work at the end, grading the papers. There's no getting away from this pattern completely, to be sure. But when you think about it, it's kind of depressing. Very little collaboration takes place. The instructor and the class are almost like ships that pass in the night. A student handing in a paper can feel, after all that work, that the paper has just disappeared down a hole, to come back up later with a grade on it that may or may not have anything to do with the actual quality of the paper. Teachers sometimes feel that the papers have been written by a bunch of strangers who aren't in the class, because they don't seem to have paid attention to what they were supposed to do. I'm exaggerating, of course, but I've felt this way myself at times, as a student and as a teacher.
Let me see if I can name the elements of collaboration between instructor and students.
Designing assignments. Assignments must be carefully designed, and they must be given out in writing. Writing center consultants work with many students who come in with drafts, but no clear idea what the assignment is. It is hard to help these students, when there is no way to know for sure whether the drafts are really answering the assignments. Carefully designed assignments include clear definitions of the genre, audience (if there is a special audience) and purpose for the writing, and grading criteria. If necessary, the assignment lists explicitly what students should do and what they should not do. For instance, if they are to write a critique of an article, are they to assume that their readers will be familiar with the article or not? Should they evaluate what the article says, or should they assess how well it presents its subject, or both?
Setting high expectations. If the instructor makes it known that high-quality work is expected, students will work harder to produce it. I can think of three ways an instructor might convey high expectations.
Creating conditions for a continuing dialog about the assignment. This can take the form of meeting with students individually or in groups to check on their chosen subjects and their progress. The same can be accomplished by having students hand in periodic short writings about their progress on the assignment and a "writer's reflection" sheet along with the draft or finished paper.
Responding to student writing as a reader, not just a grader. Everyone has to get a grade. But in terms of collaboration, it's the least important part of the instructor's response. If anything, it's counter-collaborative. It doesn't tell students whether the instructor actually read the papers or just threw them down the stairs and gave grades according to where they landed. We owe students the respect of showing that we actually read what they wrote and considered it carefully. The students who are most often neglected are the good writers. I hear the complaint over and over from writing center consultants, who were hired to train and to work in the center partly because they are good writers. They complain that when they get A's on their papers, their instructors often don't write anything to explain why their papers were so good. As one consultant said, "I wish they would tell me what I did well so I can do it again." Such response is surely part of collaboration.
3Writing should be treated as a process.
The idea that writing is a process is so commonplace these days, I hesitate even to mention it. But it must be mentioned, because in the writing center we see so many instances of classes where writing is not treated as a process. We see students struggling with assignments because they have been given no directions or suggestions as to how to go about doing them. There is much they don't know. For instance, in some kinds of writing, such as essays, the parts can be written in several different orders. Writers can start at whatever point they find easiest and gradually work toward the hard parts. They may write the introduction last of all, after they have explored what the paper is really about. After finishing the draft, they can often move parts around to find the most effective order. Other kinds of writing, such as sociological studies, must start with the introduction, which must present the question to be researched very clearly before the study can even be conducted. The discussion can't be written before the findings have been presented. The parts of the study build upon one another other. I'm glad we can be there to help students understand that different genres of writing are written in different ways.
Writing is sometimes a messy process, and time-consuming. But we owe it to our students to help them find the most efficient way to do it well. Instructors might demonstrate, for instance, their own favorite ways of finding something to write about, developing ideas, organizing, drafting, and revising.
One important implication of writing as a process is that learning to write is a process, too. It's true that all good writing has certain features in common, but it's also true that the conventions of rhetoric, the ways of thinking about claims and evidence, the modes of documentation, and other aspects vary from one discipline to the next - even between disciplines you might think to be closely related, such as English and communication and history. Students who have learned to handle certain kinds of writing competently will suddenly find all their skills falling apart when they try do to unfamiliar writing.
The best trick we know of for improving students' writing in a class is to assign two or three shorter papers rather than the monolithic "term paper." If a term paper is the only formal writing assignment in the course, it will not do much to improve students' writing. Granted, the allure of the single long paper is strong. It would seem that students could research more deeply into the subject and get the experience of a long sustained effort. And these can be real advantages. But students are likely to find the long project more of a chore than a learning experience. More often than not, they will not learn enough from a single long project to be worth all the sweat they have to put into writing it, or the instructor puts into grading the papers.
If students write two shorter papers, they will learn from the first one and have a chance to apply what they learn in the second. Our experience in the WACRATS program is that the second set of papers is invariably better than the first. One caution: if there are two assignments, both should be substantial. If the first paper is just a short warm-up exercise, it won't prepare students adequately for the second assignment.
If it is necessary to assign one long project,
we recommend breaking it into two or three
stages, spaced a few weeks apart. The
instructor can collect and respond to each
stage. This has the advantage of steering
students in the right direction if they are in
danger of doing the assignment wrong or
producing an inadequate response to the assignment. One instructor who uses the WACRATS program does this regularly, with good results.
4Writing assignments should be surrounded by other writing.
If the formal writing assignments are the only writing students do in the class (I'm not counting essay exams), then the assignments are likely to be less successful. Writing ought to be a normal mode of learning in the class. Students should be doing regular write-to-learn activities, in order to get accustomed to writing as a normal mode of learning in the class.
It is not hard to establish writing as a normal mode of learning. Journals are an obvious way, but not the only way. Students can respond informally to readings and class sessions. They can write "minute writings" about what they have learned and what points are still muddy. The point here is that writing does not have to take up a huge amount of a class's time or energy. There are a lot of little ways to use writing that don't intrude on class time - in fact, that enhance and reinforce what the students are learning.
So that's my essay. Certainly many of the issues I've discussed are more complicated and problematical than the essay makes them sound. Also, it gets a bit preachy toward the end, which isn't very essay-like. I hope you'll forgive these shortcomings. We writing-across-the-curriculum types tend to get like crusaders. We have to remind ourselves to shut up sometimes and listen to what students and faculty have to say about their experiences and needs. I hope you'll let me know, because we still have a lot to learn.
RL
Word Works is published six times during the school year by the Writing Center, English Department, Boise State University, Boise, ID 83725. Rick Leahy, Managing Editor. Phone: 208/426-3585. E-mail: writing@boisestate.edu. You can find issues back to #67 on the BSU Writing Center's web site: http://www.boisestate.edu/wcenter/. Other back issues are available from the Writing Center. Call, write, or e-mail for copies.