A new semester has just begun, and I once again find myself struggling to introduce a new group of first-year students to college writing.  This time, I tried to think of a new way to help them understand the necessity of active engagement in a writing class by stressing the difference between content classes and skill classes.  I explained to my students that content classes are the classes that college students take in the movies – the ones where students read the textbook (or not), come to class and take notes (or not) while the professor lectures, and then take exams over material covered in their readings and notes.  Such classes require little active engagement on the part of students, and this is, unfortunately, what many students come to college expecting their classes to look like.  Skill classes, I told my students, are an entirely different experience, much more akin to culinary arts or painting classes that they might have taken in high school.  In these classes, students are often assigned readings, but they’re not just reading to grasp “what happened” in preparation for a quiz.  Instead, they’re reading to observe the techniques that writers use, much as they might taste a finished dish to discover how the flavors blend or examine a famous painting to observe the brushstrokes.  It’s actually a very different kind of reading from the reading-for-comprehension that’s been drilled into our NCLB-raised students practically since birth, and I’m trying to make that difference as visible as possible to my students early in the semester.

Continuing with the writing as cooking or painting idea, I asked my students on the first day of class about their experiences in such classes (or pottery classes, or woodworking).  Their accounts all involved watching as someone else performed a task, then undertaking the same task for themselves (with the instructor’s guidance, of course).  Essentially, I’m telling them, that’s what Writing 101 will be like.  They’ll watch someone else paint (in this case, that means reading an essay that successfully incorporates dialogue, or uses lots of vivid sensory details, or marshals various types of evidence in support of a thesis, or makes graceful, clear transitions between complex ideas).  Then, they’ll come to class and talk about what they saw – the techniques, the individual brushstrokes or phrases, the structure and cadence of the writing.  Finally, after they’ve discussed their observations with me and their peers, they’ll try out those techniques for themselves.  For very difficult tasks, they’ll practice in groups, just as they might in a culinary arts or painting class.  But eventually, they’ll work on their own, producing their own soufflé or watercolor landscape or essay.

So far, this approach has yielded interesting results.  Of course, it’s only one week in, but I have noticed that students are talking about texts much more in terms of technique than of plot.  I hope that this continues throughout the semester, and I’ll do everything that I can to encourage it.  In any case, I would love to talk more with you about it at the symposium later this month.  See you all there!

Best,

Sheena D. Boran

FASTrack Instructor

Center for Writing and Rhetoric

University of Mississippi

I, like Karen, want my students to see themselves as writers.  Right now, I’m neck-deep in grading my first batch of essays for the year, a writing reflection project that asks students to examine how technology has affected their writing.  During class discussions surrounding this project, I have come to realize the extent to which my students are already writers: they spend alarming amounts of time texting, Tweeting, posting Facebook status updates, and even blogging, or at least commenting on blogs – about real issues, for real audiences (though not academic ones).  Part of me finds this terrifying; we’ve all graded essays in which students slipped into text speak, failing to capitalize first-person singular pronouns and phonetically substituting numbers for words.  But I have also come to see that some of the writing skills our students practice every day could easily transition to the college writing classroom.  In the tradition of numbered lists offered by Kathleen and Deborah, below are a few of the lessons my students have taught me during this project:

1.  Social networks generate heightened audience awareness.  Ask your students if they’ve ever posted a Facebook status that was misinterpreted or watched a single ill-advised tweet destroy a friendship.  These are hard lessons in audience awareness, and they occur in a real-world context.  Students are often very mindful of who sees what they post online; they know exactly how many followers they have on Twitter, and they’re eager to boost those numbers.  They’re often Facebook friends with parents, former teachers, and potential career contacts, and they’re acutely aware of how their status updates will “play” for mixed audience groups.
2. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”  Shakespeare’s Polonius gave us a few pithy gems, and this is certainly one of them.  Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters; most cellular plans limit texts to 160.  These limitations do, of course, give rise to the kinds of shorthand that strike horror into the souls of writing teachers, but they can also encourage writers to eliminate wordiness.  Students often write and rewrite tweets in an effort to convey complex observations within the character limit, and their goal is to make those thoughts worthy of re-tweeting.  They’re experts in the nuances of hashtags, using these as efficient rhetorical devices to link their tweets to others that they see as similar in theme or content.
3. They’re already joining conversations.  One of the basic skills of academic writing that we struggle to teach in first-year composition is the art of “joining the conversation.”  Many of our students are active blog readers, and they regularly comment on posts.  Look at the comments section of a blog (this blog, for example), and you’ll notice that it’s set up like a conversation.  It starts with people responding to the original post, but then some responders get responses, which can generate entirely new discussions.  Many of our students are already adept at joining ongoing conversations on blogs or Facebook pages; we can capitalize on those skills and adapt them to academic contexts.
4. Many of them hate the shorthand as much as we do.  This was the lesson that surprised me most.  In their reflections, many of my students wrote about judging others who posted grammatically incorrect status updates filled with spelling errors (intentional or otherwise) and shorthand as “lazy” or “uneducated.”  Those students went on to say that, because they judged others so harshly, they were careful not to commit those same offenses, lest they be judged as well.  In the forum of social networking, students recognize what’s at stake when they fail to proofread.  We could exploit this consciousness by linking grammar and proofreading explicitly to the kind of self-presentation that happens online.

I’m not a trendy – or a particularly tech-savvy – teacher.  I’ve never had a Facebook or Twitter account; I read very few blogs, and I usually comment only if there’s a prize involved.  My students know far more than I do about social networking.  Their essays made me realize that I could use the knowledge my students already have to start a conversation about writing that doesn’t insist on separating “papers for school” from real writing, and that acknowledges their expertise as writers.  I look forward to seeing all of you at the Transitioning symposium, and I’m eager to hear what your students are teaching you!