Writing Center

Faculty know that ideas rarely spring fully grown, that they evolve through a process of incubation, testing, and re-testing.  So, too, does effective writing require a process over time.  Students need time to develop their ideas, and they need time to experiment with the best ways to express those ideas, especially when it is likely their ability to express in writing will suffer as they learn new subject materials.  This development of ideas and expression over time is called the writing process, and can best be put into place with frequent writing practice, required revision, many small assignments that lead to larger ones, effective peer response, and with the consideration of elements of writing like voice and audience.

A basic premise of WAC is that writing can occur in many different forms, but how to decide what kind of assignments to make can be distinguished in terms of objectives.  "Writing to learn" assignments aim, through the process of writing, to have students learn and perhaps practice material.  These exercises usually are what might be termed informal writing and usually are short in length, emphasizing more the student's understanding and ideas than ability to polish.  For instance, a "writing to learn" exercise may have students write short paragraphs to one another explaining a process, procedure, or passage.  In the course of having to explain, the students learn the material more fully.  Other "writing to learn" exercises can be short response papers, postings to an on-line blackboard, lab notes, essay exams, brief summaries of texts (including class discussions), annotated bibliographies, or journal entries, any of which might become components of a larger, "writing to communicate" project.  "Writing to communicate" assignments aim through the process of writing to have students demonstrate their facility with subject matter and with the language to communicate it.  Consequently, these exercises usually produce more formal writing, when final products are expected to be lengthy, coherent arguments using the conventions of Standard English and the formal conventions of the discipline.  For instance, a "writing to communicate" exercise can be a lab report, an essay, a research paper, a poster, or a senior research project.

Faculty learning objectives in making writing assignments will vary, but we need to ensure the prompts make clear what we expect from the students.  While our written prompts should be concise, we also need to provide enough detail for students to understand what we expect of them.  Even if we want to retain the possibility of student discovery in our writing assignments, before we receive the final product we need to know what it should accomplish and what our criteria for evaluation are.  Not only, then, should we provide logistical details such as the due date, length of assignment and subject, we also should be specific about whatever issues pertain to our objectives: the formality of voice we expect, the intended audience, acceptable primary, secondary and on-line sources, and whether students are permitted to collaborate in their work.  Making this clear to our students at the outset will ease the process both for us and them.

If appropriate, some of the most effective writing assignments are sequenced, or build on one another over the course of a semester.  A sequence of related writings not only practices students in the building of ideas, this progressive building also minimizes the likelihood of academic dishonesty.  Since they happen over a period of time, sequenced assignments demonstrate to students how pieces of arguments accumulate, and are developed and enriched.  For instance, at the beginning of the semester students may write some writing to learn, very brief (1 paragraph to 1-2 pages) summaries of or responses to texts, teaching them how to glean the major thrust of an author's argument.  Those short writings can be augmented at the same time with more writing to learn 250-word weekly responses to reading materials or class discussion in an on-line forum like Blackboard.  Both the short writings and weekly on-line postings can be used to develop ideas in more formal, writing to communicate mid-length (3-5 pages) essays.  Those mid-length essays can then be used to compose longer (10-15 pages), writing to communicate research-based papers.  With all of the writings pertaining broadly to the same subject, students thus learn how scholarship and scholarly writing are practiced.  

Many students come to college having learned that research writing is a matter of gathering and synthesizing secondary sources. Conversely, when college-level teachers assign papers requiring research, we often expect to find students doing "scholarly writing," or joining an on-going conversation about the subject, with the research facilitating a writer's summary of and entry to the conversation with her own argument. The process of unearthing and using secondary sources for this purpose usually is introduced in FYS 101 courses and often in FYS 102 sections, but understandably the teaching of the research process and research writing should deepen after these introductory classes.

In making research writing assignments, think about the following issues:

• Only assign student writing that you want to read.
• Teach the methods and processes students will need to know to complete the assignment successfully.
• Use writing assignments to help students learn the material or processes you want them to understand.

Consider what students need to know before they can successfully do college-level research writing (excerpted from Bean 202-214):

• How and why to ask a research question: what does it mean to challenge parts of the on-going conversation, or to bring a new perspective to it?
• How to find sources: how does the Denison/OhioLink library system work?  What are on-line databases?  How does one intelligently use Web sources?
• Why to find sources: why is it important to use other people's ideas in expressing one's own?
• How to incorporate sources: when is it best to quote directly, to summarize, or to paraphrase?
• How to manage sources: what are the best methods for gathering and storing notes from sources?
• How to cite sources: why must one cite sources, and how is that done? Which style is used by each discipline?  How and why do citation styles differ?
• How to establish a rhetorical context: who is the audience designated for the student's writing? What is the purpose of the writing? How will these rhetorical elements affect the style of the writing, or the persona of the writer?
• How to follow a conventional or generic format: which form or genre are students expected to use in the writing?  Are students already familiar with it?
  

Here are ways faculty can, during the course of their classes, prepare students to become successful research writers (excerpted from Bean 206-214):

• Use an enquiry-based approach in your class to model how students can develop questions worth researching.
• Develop small, cumulative assignments that help students learn the process of research. Have these assignments culminate in the final research project. (See "Sequenced Assignments.")
• Develop strategies for teaching library and Web-based research. The library offers instructional research services; more information is available here.
• Help students think about sources outside of the library or the Web as research sources. If you primarily are concerned with students learning how to incorporate sources rather than finding them, ask the students to cite one another from class discussion in their writing.
• Well before the research writing is due, and to prompt students' thinking about their projects, ask students to submit a prospectus which addresses or includes:
• What is the research question or problem?
• Why is this question or problem significant?
• What does the writer expect to discover? What does the writer know already about the question?  Can the writer formulate a thesis yet?
• An annotated bibliography that demonstrates the writer has begun to explore the conversation, and includes short evaluative summaries of many texts on the topic that may or may not be used for the research writing.
• Teach students how to write a typical introduction: what is the issue, what is the argument or thesis, and what is the structure the argument will take?
• Teach students how and why to write titles typical of your discipline, such as a question, a summary of thesis or purpose, and a two-part title including a colon.
• Provide model writing.
• Have students write a brief narrative of their research and writing process well before the due date of the final project.
• Model the research process through an in-class project.

Bean, John C.  Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996.

Hjortshoj, Keith.  The Transition to College Writing.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001.

Walvoord, Barbara E. and Virginia Johnson Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool For Learning and Assessment.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.

Students come to college often believing the very best writing is the most difficult and most formal.  For some disciplines, the formality of this voice may provide a desirable anonymity.  Other disciplines, though, may want the subjectivity of the writer to be more apparent.  Decide which voices you want your students to use.  Do the conventions of your discipline for scholarly writing dictate an objective voice, limiting the use of first-person?  Do they require the opposite?  Since the intended audience may to some extent determine the voice, who is the audience?

Writing as rhetoric, or as a method of persuasion, takes into account three elements: the writer, the subject, and the audience.  What a writer knows about the particular needs of her audience will help her make the kinds of choices necessary to effective writing in almost any discipline: Who is my audience? What does the audience already know about my subject, and what more does the audience need to be told? What are the audience's motivations for reading?  What do my audience members already think about my topic and what do I need to say and how do I need to say to sway them towards my argument?  Different audiences will produce different answers to these questions, and are likely to affect most elements of the writing.

To have students practice the effects of changing audiences, try these exercises (excerpted from Mayberry and Golden, 14-19):

1. Examine a copy of four of the following and try to identify the intended audience for each.  (Advertisements on television can also be used.)  Estimate the level of education and the kinds of occupations each audience probably would have:
   
   Example: Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA): usually at least some graduate education.  Occupations: primarily graduate students in English or foreign language and literature and college-level instructors in these subjects.
   
   The Wall Street Journal
   Time magazine
   Cosmopolitan
   People magazine
   The New England Journal of Medicine
   Popular Mechanics
   Soldier of Fortune magazine
   
   
2. The following passage is from a brochure on how employees can use statistics to improve the quality of their organization's products.  The intended audience for this brochure is company employees with a seventh-grade reading level and no previous knowledge of statistics.  How well does this passage communicate with its intended audience? If you believe the passage would be difficult for its intended audience, can you suggest ways to change it to make it more accessible to them?
   
   Quality can be best maintained by preventive action in advance of complete tool wear or predictable machine maintenance.  If we check characteristics of parts on a sampling basis as they are produced, it is better than sorting through a bin of hundreds of parts looking for the defective parts and then trying to determine which parts can be salvaged.
   
   Collecting and analyzing data on current operations is essential in supplier and company plants.  By studying the data, the causes of defects for each main quality characteristic can be investigated and determined.  Appropriate solutions, including redesign or reprocessing, can be developed.  Once problems are identified, a decision can be made whether to analyze past data to collect new information, or a combination of both.
   
   
3. Write a one-page essay to students in one of your classes, evaluating the effectiveness of that class's instructor.  Then write a one-page essay to the instructor about the same topic.  Make a list of the differences in the two essays.
   
   
4. Write a two- to three-page essay trying to convince a hostile audience of the appropriateness of any of these actions:
• Subsidized housing ruins neighborhoods, lowering property values and weakening community pride.
• Mandatory bicycle helmet laws are an infringement of personal liberty.
• While I have had some academic difficulties over the past year, my commitment to receiving a college degree and my newfound understanding of study strategies will contribute to my eventual academic success, if only you will agree to waive my suspension/my bad grade/my chronic absences.

Most assignments imply that the instructor is the only intended audience.  If so, instructors should not be surprised that students need to know "what the teacher wants."  Try making assignments that ask students to address audiences other than the instructor.  One very good writing-to-learn exercise is to have students write to one another, for instance, explaining to one another elements of the content material, and then conveying that same material to parents, the instructor, or a person completely unfamiliar with the material.  Each audience will require changes in background information, style, and voice.

Just as most students come to college with a limited academic sense of voice and audience, so too do they have little understanding of the distinction between primary and secondary sources.  Moreover, their experience in incorporating these sources into their writing is limited.  Since the qualifying of sources can change over time or in different circumstances, clarify for students what you consider primary and secondary.  While students do get some practice through their FYS courses in incorporating sources, they can benefit from reinforcement in other classes.  One way to practice incorporating sources while avoiding time-consuming research is to have students cite one another in a writing to learn exercise.  Requiring this makes students pay attention to one another in class discussion, take accurate notes and follow up with their classmates on those inaccurate or confusing notes, and learn better how to incorporate sources.

Many students in college struggle with incorporating sources, as most practice MLA style in high school (since the majority of writing is confined to English classes) and are unfamiliar with the citation styles of other disciplines.  Sometimes the confusion about different styles can lead students inadvertently to academic dishonesty.  We faculty can help students avoid this dishonesty by explaining the citation styles we expect them to use.  The Bedford Handbook, required of all incoming first-year students as of 2006, outlines in detail the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Psychological Association (APA) and Chicago styles.  Most style sheets are available electronically as well; including those websites on syllabi would emphasize to students that teachers value academic integrity.

Lunsford, Andrea A., John J. Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters.  2d ed.  Everything's An Argument: With Readings.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. [Chapter 3]

Mayberry, Katherine J. and Robert E. Golden. 2d ed.  For Argument's Sake: A Guide to Writing Effective Arguments.  New York: HarperCollins, 1996. [Chapter 2]

Ramage, John D. and John C. Bean. 2d ed. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing.  Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. [Chapter 4]

Wilhoit, Stephen W.  The Allyn and Bacon Teaching Assistant's Handbook: A Guide for Graduate Instructors of Writing and Literature.  Boston: Longman, 2003. [Chapter 2]

Many teachers invest considerable time in responding to their students' writing, even on final drafts.  Students benefit immensely from this alternative teaching venue, as they receive specific advice about their own writing and expression and confirmation of the things they are doing well.

Responding at length does not fit into every faculty member's work schedule, however, and responding at length may not always be the best strategy to affect student writing.  Moreover, unlimited responding-responding to every problem or mishap-can be confusing to student writers.  If faculty members choose to respond, then, their responses should be connected to the writing assignment's criteria for evaluation.  That is, if elements like adherence to the disciplinary form, use of evidence, and succinct conclusion are the major criteria for evaluation, those should be the main subjects for response.  This is especially so if students will write drafts subsequent to receiving teacher comments, since it is likely the errors of grappling with new material and ideas will be revised away.

Teachers who want to respond can do several things:

1. Limit marginal responses to criteria for evaluation.  Add a lengthier narrative response at the end of the writing for clarification.
2. Respond to criteria for evaluation and to sentence-level errors in the margins.  In this case, it might be useful to put a type of response in each margin: criteria for evaluation responses in left-hand margin, sentence-level errors in right.
3. Develop a sign system for grammatical errors that sends student writers to The Bedford Handbook .  For instance, if a writer is using commas incorrectly, write "372" (the page number in The Handbook for a discussion of how to use commas) in the margin next to the error.
4. Use peer response.  If you would like to incorporate peer response into your teaching but don't have the time, consultants working in the Writing Center may be able to facilitate these group meetings.  Contact the Director of the Center to learn about this.

Peer response is another alternative, in addition to or in lieu of teacher comments.  Students who have done an activity similar to peer response in high school refer to it as "peer editing," and if a faculty member only wants students to check one another's writing for mechanics and grammar, peer editing may be adequate.  According to students, peer response is more useful.  In this activity, groups of four or five students read one another's writing, respond to it with guidelines given by the teacher, and discuss each paper.  This session takes approximately one hour.  Peer response can be done in class or out of class, depending on the time available.  The value of peer response is that students, with guidance, usually can identify the same problems in the writing that teachers identify, an assessment that is fairly persuasive to the writer.  Moreover, as students read one another's writing they learn about their own.

Once the ranked list of criteria for evaluation is developed, a teacher may use either an "analytic" (sometimes called "general description") or a "holistic" (sometimes called "primary trait") model for deriving a grade.  (Excerpted from Bean 255-265.)

1. "Analytic" model:  assigns separate scores for each criterion.  For instance:
• Quality of Ideas:  30 points
• Organization and Development:  30 points
• Clarity and Style:  30 points
• Grammar and Mechanics:  10 points
  
2. "Holistic" model:  reflects the instructor's overall impression of the writing.  John Bean provides the following as an example of a holistic scale for grading article summaries (Engaging Ideas 262):
• 6    A 6 summary meets all the criteria.  The writer understands the article thoroughly.  The main points in the article appear in the summary with all main points proportionately developed (that is, the writer does not spend excessive time on one main point while neglecting other main points).  The summary should be as comprehensive as possible and should read smoothly, with appropriate transitions between ideas.  Sentences should be clear, without vagueness or ambiguity and without grammatical or mechanical errors.
• 5    A 5 summary should still be very good, but it can be weaker than a 6 summary in one area.  It may have excellent accuracy and balance, but show occasional problems in sentence structure or correctness.  Or it may be clearly written but be somewhat unbalanced or less comprehensive than a 6 summary or show a minor misunderstanding of the article.
• 4    A score of 4 means "good but not excellent."  Typically, a 4 summary will reveal a generally accurate reading of the article, but will be noticeably weaker in the quality of writing.  Or it may be well written but cover only part of the essay.
• 3    A 3 summary must have strength in at least one area of competence, and it should still be good enough to convince the grader that the writer has understood the article fairly well.  However, a 3 summary typically is not written well enough to convey an understanding of the article to someone who has not already read it.  Typically, the sentence structure of a 3 summary is not sophisticated enough to convey the sense of hierarchy and subordination found in the essay.
• 2    A 2 summary is weak in all areas of competence, either because it is so poorly written that the reader cannot understand the content or because the content is inaccurate or seriously disorganized.  However, a 2 essay convinces the grader that the writer has read the essay and is struggling to understand it.
• 1    A 1 summary fails to meet any of the areas of competence.
  

Walvoord and Anderson suggest these 12 principles for thinking about evaluation in general (10-16):

1. Appreciate the complexity of grading; use it as a tool for learning.
   "Give up false hopes of a perfect, simple system. Accept that the grading system will have flaws and constraints.  But focus on using the power and complexity of the grading process as a tool for learning in your class" (10).
2. Substitute your best judgment for the aspiration to be absolutely objective.
   "Recognize that there is no such thing as an absolutely objective evaluation based on an immutable standard. As a teacher, your job is to render an informed and professional judgment to the best of your ability" (11).
3. Do not obsess over the grades you give; distribute your time effectively.
   "Spend enough time to make a thoughtful, professional judgment with reasonable consistency, then move on" (11).
4. Be open to change, since grades acquire social meanings.
   "The social meaning of grading is changing all the time.  Your grades and grading system will be interpreted and used within the system that is-not the one you wish for or the one you experienced as a student" (12).
5. Listen and observe.
   "Focus on understanding and managing the meaning of grades to various kinds of students.  Be very clear and explicit to your students about the meanings you attach to grades and the standards and criteria on which you base your grades; don't assume they know" (12).
6. Communicate and collaborate with students.
   "Try to build in your classroom a spirit of collaborating with your students toward common goals.  Explain the criteria and standards you hold for their work and seek their active engagement in the learning process" (13).
7. Integrate grading with other key processes.
   "Grading cannot be separated from planning, teaching, and interacting in your classroom.  [W]e suggest making grading integral to everything else you do" (13).
8. Seize the teachable moment.
   "When a student bursts into tears or shouts angrily in your office [about a grade], don't be flustered or dismayed; be alert and stay focused.  What do you want the student to learn in this moment?" (13).
9. Make student learning the primary goal.
   "[Students'] involvement in learning is in part determined by their perception of faculty members' interest and friendliness toward them, including the fairness and helpfulness of the testing and grading system and the teacher's communication about their work and their grades" (14).
10. Be a teacher first, a gatekeeper last.
    "[I]n a just society, in a meritocracy, the sorting should happen only after everyone has had an equal chance to learn and should be based on what people have been able to learn" (15).
11. Encourage learning-centered motivation.
    "Students are most affected by their engagement with you [the teacher] and with others and by the values of the campus community.  Engaging and connecting with your students is a way to increase their motivation for learning" (16).
12. Emphasize student involvement.
    "[W]e urge that, in every aspect of your teaching and grading, you seek meaningful student involvement-that is, the student's investment of time and energy in the academic enterprise" (16).

Bean, John C.  Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996.

Walvoord, Barbara E. and Virginia Johnson Anderson.  Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.

Here is what John Bean has to say to teachers across the curriculum about grammar(excerpted from Engaging Ideas, 59-66):

1. Students' "poor grammar" has not just arrived with the most recent generation of students.  College teachers in the United States have railed against errors in student writing since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.
2. "Students' prose contains fewer mistakes than teachers sometimes perceive" (60).  We all have our own peeves about grammar, and we're especially sensitive to them when we read for error as opposed to reading for ideas and coherence.
3. "Our students have more linguistic competence than the surface features of their prose sometimes indicate" (61).  Most of their errors are accidental or the result of misunderstanding.
4. "Errors in student writing increase with greater cognitive difficulty of the assignment" (63).  Once the ideas are in place is the time to pay attention to the grammar.
5. "Errors often disappear in students' prose as they progress through multiple drafts" (64).  Again, students are ready to pay attention to grammatical errors when their ideas are in place.
6. "Teachers can expect to see sentence problems in first drafts and on essay exams" (64), largely because writers are still working out their ideas in these first attempts at written communication.
7. "Traditional procedures for grading and marking student papers may exacerbate the problem" (65) of students' poor use of Standard English grammar.  The instructor's marking every grammatical error can be demoralizing to students, especially if there are a lot of errors, and this marking will not help the student learn how to identify and amend the problem for him or herself.

Standard English grammar should not be ignored by students and teachers.  Timing, however, may be everything.  The end of the writing process might be a time more conducive to revising for Standard English grammar since the writer's ideas already have been worked out.  In the interim drafting period of the writing process, faculty may consider doing these things to help students understand the importance of using Standard English grammar:

• If you are asking students to wrestle with new ideas in draft writing, you may want to ignore violations of Standard English in your responses to student writing if the errors do not interfere with communication.  Ensure your students understand that, for now, you are overlooking these things, but they will eventually become important.
• If what you are reading is an early draft, respond largely to the writer's ideas.  If the writer's unconventional use of Standard English inhibits your understanding, then respond to the grammar.  If you are reading a final draft, then the expression of ideas and the mode of their expression-grammar-may be weighed by you as equally important.
• To expedite the working out of ideas, have students write informally and often (writing to learn).  When they get to the more formal writing (writing to communicate) stress that form and content-grammar and ideas-are interconnected.
• Decide which elements of Standard English are most important to your students representing themselves and their ideas in their writing.  Is spelling most important to how the ideas will be received?  The absence of sentence fragments or comma splices?  Or is it the proper use of articles? 
• Students learn best when taught grammar through their own writing.  Give them lots of opportunities to write, times when conventional grammar may not be central to the purpose of writing but when you have the chance to see patterns and to address them by referring to The Bedford Handbook, a source required of all first-year students as of 2006.
• If you see patterns recurring with one student, talk with the student individually and direct the student to a source that will help amend the problem.  (See "Grammar Sources" below or ask students to work with a consultant in the Writing Center if they seem unable to work out these difficulties themselves.)  If you find that the majority of the class is experiencing these challenges, set aside 10 minutes of the next class period to explain the problem.

Issues to consider:

• As writers' ideas become more sophisticated, their need may grow for more sophisticated grammar.  For instance, many, if not most, students do not understand when to use a semi-colon and when to use a colon, yet the conventional use of both suggests to a reader sophisticated ideas.  Try to anticipate students' need for a new grammar "vocabulary."
• Decide whether an error is a matter of performance or knowledge; is it sloppiness or misunderstanding?
• Establish your set of priorities for addressing error:
1. Errors that affect comprehension
2. Errors about which the writer is most concerned
3. Errors about which the reader is most concerned
4. Frequency of errors
5. Errors that are about usage and idiom, not a rule
6. Errors that can be corrected by learning a rule

References and Further Reading

Braddock, R., R. Lloyd-Jones and L. Shoer.  Research in Written Composition. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.

Connors, Robert and Cheryl Glenn.  The New St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing.  New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.

Fulwiler, Toby and Art Young, eds.  Programs that work: models and methods for writing across the curriculum.  Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1990.

Haswell, Richard H.  Gaining ground in college writing: tales of development and interpretation.  Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1991.

Hunter, Susan and Ray Wallace, eds.  The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction: Past, Present, Future.  Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1995.

Schwalm, D.E., "Degree of Difficulty in Basic Writing Courses: Insights from the Oral Proficiency Interview Testing Program," College English, (1985), 47. 6: 629-640.

Williams, Joseph M. and Gregory G. Colomb.  "University of Chicago."  Fulwiler
and Young, Chapter 5.

On the Web:

"Guide to Grammar and Writing" at http://www.ccc.comment.edu/grammar
"The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing" at http://www.nutsandboltsguide.com/

In Print

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth.  The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

O'Connor, Patricia T.  Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English.  New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1996.

Links

Many colleges and universities have produced valuable materials for teachers and made them available on-line.  These materials include handouts, syllabi, rubrics and essays about composition.  See "external links" on the Further Resources page for access to some of these sources.