Category: Praxis Blog

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One key to students’ making the transition from high school to college writing revolves around what Sommers and Laura Saltz call the “novice-as-expert paradox” (134). According to Sommers and Saltz in “The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshmen Year,” freshmen “build authority not by writing from a position of expertise but by writing into expertise” (134). Students must assume the role of expert or adopt the voice of authority which they do not yet possess. This observation recalls a similar claim made by David Bartholomae. Sommers and Saltz argue that students’ lack of expertise results in the “prevalence of the descriptive thesis in freshmen writing” (134). A descriptive thesis “names or reports on phenomena rather than articulating claims based on analysis of the evidence” (134). Students write descriptive theses rather than truly analytic ones because they must devote so much energy to comprehending the subject matter. Yet, Sommers and Saltz do not see this as a failure, so much as a “symptom of a novice working on an expert’s assignment” (135). The data from Sommers and Saltz’s longitudinal study of Harvard students suggests that the most successful students embrace the idea that they are novices being trained as experts. Although “asking freshmen to do the work of experts invites imitative rather than independent behavior” (135) it enables students to practice the skills which they will employ as experts.

Sommers and Saltz’s findings suggest that it may be beneficial for instructors to explicitly frame their courses in terms of stages on the path from novice to expert. Moreover, instructors can show students examples of descriptive theses and analytic ones to help them understand the level at which they are being asked to engage with their sources. Some students will still have trouble writing analytic theses, but they will begin to apply vocabulary from the course to their own writing. Instructors can scaffold assignments so that students first practice summarizing material, then learn to synthesize the arguments of others, and finally make arguments of their own. Sommers and Saltz observe that many freshmen embrace writing as an opportunity to participate in a wider conversation about important issues. It is essential for instructors to help students conceive of their arguments as forays into this larger discourse, rather than mere exercises.

In Assigning, Responding, Evaluating: A Writing Teacher’s Guide, Edward White advocates asking students to write a specific kind of reflection on their portfolios. White argues against grading portfolios holistically–a method he claims is best for grading individual essays–or by simply averaging the scores of all the pieces comprising the portfolio. Instead, White argues that students should write a reflective letter which argues how their portfolios fulfill the course goals. This letter, then, “becomes the overt argument, using the portfolio content as evidence that the goals have been met” (178). This exercise forces students not only to reflect on the course goals as they compile their portfolios, but to revise their final products in light of those goals. By reflecting on the extent to which their portfolios fulfill the course goals, students will realize the strengths and weaknesses of their writing. White suggests that teachers primarily focus on this reflective letter when grading students’ portfolios, yet teachers should still grade the portfolios themselves, especially in light of whatever revisions students have made to earlier drafts of their work. White himself recognizes that there “may well be important qualitative differences between the reflective letter and the content of the portfolio” (183). An exceptionally well written reflective letter may not fully compensate for a relatively poor portfolio and vice versa. Moreover, students should also reflect on their writing process, especially how and why they revised earlier drafts. Still, White’s suggestion seems to be a good one.

I will be teaching a section of ENG 181 themed around “Time Travel.” We will be reading a wide range of texts which address issues of history, memory, identity, and the relationship between time and art. One of those texts, Flight, is by the innovative and widely acclaimed Sherman Alexie. A CFDE mini-grant of $300 would enable me to facilitate a conversation via Skype between our class and Mr. Alexie. Such a conversation would not only give my students the opportunity to ask Mr. Alexie questions about the text, but also enable them to engage with a professional author who has published in diverse genres, including novels, short stories, and poetry. This will deepen their insight into the representation of time in Flight, as well as help them understand how one writer approaches his craft.

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In “How Many Writing Teachers Does It Take to Read a Student Essay?” Tobin Lad argues that “the student essay seemed to be the only form of writing and only material artifact that we as English professors would or could not treat as a text” (23). Lad recounts his initial mystification at reading “The Googu Manifesto,” written by one of his Indian American students about certain stereotypes about a particular group of Indian immigrants. Instead of pointing out the ways in which the student’s piece lacked coherence, Lad treated it like any other text. After consulting with a number of colleagues, who brought various theoretical lenses to bear on “The Googu Manifesto,” including performance theory, postcolonial theory, and humor theory, Lad developed a rich interpretation of this student text. Issues of parody, hybridity, and sublimation emerged from various readings of what initially appeared to be a confusing and haphazardly organized essay. Had Lad merely urged this student to iron out the essay’s structural “problems,” he would have completely missed its generative ambiguity.

Although Lad’s exercise was incredibly time-intensive and for that reason hard to duplicate in most classes, the idea of reading student texts as texts seems important. Sometimes student texts are ambiguous because the student is having trouble articulating a clear thought, but other times students are expressing genuine ambivalence about a complex issue. When the latter is the case, it would be far better for writing teachers to help students think through their ambivalence–and write about it in an interesting way–rather than simply try to get them to express a clearer, more simplistic idea.

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Andy Crockett’s piece—“Rhetorical Analysis: Terms of Contention”—in Strategies for Teaching First Year Composition offers an assignment to help students understand the “flexible and contextual nature of words” (146). Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that human speech is simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal, Crockett seeks to help students perceive how words gain meaning in relation to a whole web of other words, which in turn derive meaning from other words, and so on. One aspect of Crockett’s assignment that I think is useful is an in-depth study of a key term, such as “impeach” or “monopoly,” selected from a specific reading. Students use a dictionary to define their chosen term and find synonyms using a thesaurus. Then, students establish a cluster of words related to their key term. With this new sense of their key term’s location among other words, students create a taxonomy to illustrate the relationships among their cluster of terms. I think it would be interesting for students to perform this kind of analysis on more than one key term in a given piece, ultimately creating a taxonomy showing the connections among the words most important to the argument.

Both Vershawn Ashanti Young and Suresh Canagarajah advocate the validity of code meshing. They argue that code meshing is not only legitimate, but actually enhances our language. Young argues that code switching re-inscribes segregationist principles, whereas code meshing reflects the heterogeneity of actual speech. Forcing students to code switch holds them to an artificial linguistic standard, while allowing them to code mesh lets them express themselves in language natural to them.

Yet, while one might want to allow students the freedom to code mesh, one also has the responsibility to prepare students to write fluently for audiences who might not accept code meshing as legitimate. What kinds of writing assignments would both teach students how to deploy standard English and allow them to experiment with code meshing? In “Toward a Rhetoric of Translingual Writing,” Canagarajah discusses a course built around a “serially drafted and peer-reviewed literacy autobiography” (8). While Canagarajah did not instruct her to do so, one student did not code mesh in her first draft, but did so to varying degrees in subsequent drafts. It might be useful to explicitly ask students to go through this process: one might ask them to initially avoid code meshing, but then encourage them to do so in later drafts. As they receive feedback from their peers, students can develop a sense of how others interpret their code meshing.

In First Time Up: An Insider’s Guide for New Composition Teachers Brock Dethier advocates an holistic model of grading. Dethier poses the question of whether the “errorless bullshitting argument truly deserves more credit than the heartfelt but barely literate personal essay” (68). I would take the latter over the former any day. Lack of sentence level errors is a lot less important than a faulty or poorly supported argument. Dethier also relates that while early in his teaching career he graded grammar mistakes fairly harshly, he now tries to grade on the basis of the “whole interacting mishmash of factors” (68). Although mechanical errors need to be corrected, I want to give students as much credit as possible for effective prose. Finally, Dethier incorporates the concept of “risk” or “degree of difficulty” (69) into his rubrics. I think this is a great idea and plan to employ it in my own teaching. Students should know up front that writing a piece which has few errors, but “says nothing, goes nowhere” (69) will not be graded as highly as more ambitious work, even if it has more sentence level errors. Class discussion of what constitutes a risky paper vs a safe paper can help students as they choose writing topics.