Writing Assignments

Stage I: Your History

There are several things I want to know about each of you so I can get to know you as individual writers and so that I can start to adapt to your past experiences, your current needs, and your potential desires when it comes to the class. To help me get at that info, I want you to do two things in class today. First, I want you to read an excerpt from the first article we’ll be reading together by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle. In this excerpt, they discuss college writing student.

Source

Downs, Douglas, and Elizabeth Wardle. “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” CCC 58.4 (2007): 552-84.

Full Article Overview (Abstract) from Article

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as Introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

Excerpt

Jack and “English” (writing and reading) have never been friends, and they still are not.... But they have perhaps come to an understanding.

A twenty-nine-year-old chemistry major, Jack had tried college immediately after high school but decided that “the almighty dollar” looked better, so he worked as a state corrections officer before regaining the desire to return to college. Though articulate, thoughtful, and bright, Jack lacked self-confidence. His writing apprehension made his semester a long struggle to simply complete assignments. Although Jack earned only a C-, largely because of incomplete work, we include his story to illustrate how the course can work for less well-prepared students.

As his literacy narrative reveals, Jack’s experiences with English (again, both writing and reading) in grade school, high school, and college convinced him that he could do nothing right on paper:

I had very bad experiences that went back as far as I can remember. My mother, sisters, and father were all very good at English and could not understand how I was getting such bad grades in the classes. At one time, my father even said I was stupid. I guess I started to believe him and just kind of gave up. It got to the point that I just didn’t care, and I almost didn’t graduate from high school. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about everything, just those things I wasn’t good at. I loved Chemistry and Physics and Math, I had taken AP classes in all of those subjects and did well. It was just the English thing. (Reflective Letter)

Now that you’ve read through this excerpt about Jack’s experiences, I want you join the conversation about what many college students initially think of as “English.” I want to know what you think about writing, even how your ideas compare to Jack’s, to Diaz's, to Richardson's. I want to learn your language of writing and build out of it rather than just forcing a new terminology on you. So, think about the following questions as you respond:

●      Downs and Wardle give us a profile of Jack. What would your profile include? What are the moments that you think define your relationship to reading and writing?

●      What have your experiences been like with writing, reading, and learning--what Jack might refer to as the “English thing”?

●      How do your experiences with writing, reading, and learning in school compare to your experiences with those things outside of school?

●      How does learning work for you when it goes well? What happens when it doesn't?

●      What are your expectations for this class, a first-year college writing class? Where did you get these expectations from?

Do you have to try to answer all these questions? No. Work with what interests you, what gets your brain working, or even what annoys you.

Here are some other considerations:

• You have to think about the big question I'm asking, but you have to think up you're own version or a more specific and related question. 
• You have to think about reading and/or writing.
• You have to think about what form your profile should be in (something recognizable, a blend of familiar things, or something unfamiliar). Your form doesn't HAVE to be a traditional, five paragraph essay. The best "histories" will require you to make critical, rhetorical decisions about your form of writing, language, and structure.
• You have to think about an image or a story or an event or a singular thing that represents the key to your history. 
• You have to think about how a title is the first and possibly most important part of your writing because it's the first thing a reader faces. 
• You have to think about who you're writing for (me, our class, specific people in our class, specific people in your life), what you know about your potential audience, and how you'd like to get their attention. 
• At some point–maybe not at the beginning, more likely later on–you have to think about why any of this history matters. What do you and your audience learn by looking back at your experiences with reading and writing?

Is there a specific length to aim for? I want your writing to be long enough to help me understand who you think you are as a reader, writer, and thinker.

 Your history should:

1.       Be a well-told story about your development as a writer.

2.       Include vivid details

3.       Have significance, either expressed or implied

Though you don’t have to explicitly state it in your narrative, you should be able to relate what you discuss in your narrative to the articles and ideas we've discussed and read about. Does your experience support how Richardson explains writers develop? How has your education as a writer been similar or different to the approach advocated in the article? Do you this approach to teaching writing will help you grow as a writer, given your experiences in life so far? We will be discussing these questions in class.


How will you be graded?

Here's a link to the RUBRIC

STAGE II: Working With, Exploring, and Taking Apart Constructs

English 1301 Writing Project

Stage 2-(Re)Theorizing Misconceptions

Constructs are mental frameworks that people build in order to make sense of the world around them. One of the key features of an effective construct is that it quickly begins to seem ‘natural’ or inevitable, rather than made-up.

--Downs and Wardle, Writing about Writing (35)

Downs and Wardle go on to say that, “another way to think about this is to recognize that many of our conceptions, our common sense understandings, of writing are actually misconceptions that don’t hold up under close scrutiny” (167). You could also think of it as an unconscious hypothesis. You think that Writing is X, and that reality seems unquestionable, its underlying values invisible...until we take a closer look. So far this semester, we’ve read and talked about several constructs including “good writing,” “academic writing,” and “college reading” as well as more general constructs of what it means to be a “writer” or a “reader.”  Later, we’ll also read and talk about “feedback” and “revision.” But, for now, in this assignment, I want you to focus on a single construct or conception about writing or reading and analyze it in an essay (with other first-year writing students as your audience). To do that, you’ll need to explore your own ideas about your chosen construct/conception as well as see what others think about it. To get started with that, you’ll need to ask yourself a number of questions. What follows is a list of questions I wrote to help you explore your own and others’ ideas about the construct of “good writing.” If you end up choosing a different construct/conception than “good writing”, just adjust the questions to fit what you’ve decided to work on (i.e., exchange “good writing” for “reader” or “error” or whatever).

●      What is your idea of “good writing”?

●      Where have your ideas about "good writing" come from?

●      Can you think of a time when your conception of “good writing” didn’t work or didn’t seem “right” in the context?

●      Is your conception of good writing limiting in any way? Would you behave differently as a writer, or understand yourself differently as a writer, if you conceived of “good writing” in a different way?

●      How have the readings we've done so far influenced your ideas about what “good writing” is?

●      What do other people think about "good writing"? For this one, you should do a little research. You could survey or interview your classmates or kids in a local high school or a small sample of people working in various professions (or whoever you’re interested in asking––people on Facebook––whoever). Or you could even do some research into how your construct is represented in various media outlets which shape public perceptions about what counts as “good writing,” or how the TAKS test or new STAAR exams shape our ideas about “good writing.” The possibilities are almost endless based on your particular interests, so talk with me about how you’d like to learn more.

●      What misconceptions do people tend to have about “good writing”? How might we go about changing those misconceptions into a more meaningful or useful way of thinking about “good writing”?

Now, these questions are just designed to get you thinking. They’re not a template for your essay’s organization, nor should you feel compelled to write about each one, though some are more important than others (bullets 3 and 4, for instance, might not speak to your experiences, so you might choose not to end up writing about those in your essay). However, they are a good guide for what it means to do analysis.

When you write your essay, you’ll need to make sure you have a claim you’re trying to make. You’re building a theory here, a way of seeing this construct, hopefully, in a more meaningful or useful (or healthier) way.

Length: I truly hate giving page limits as a “good” essay might vary in length, but I’m guessing this would be pretty hard to do in less than 3 typed (double-spaced) pages. You can always write more or less, and we’ll be giving you feedback on what you’re doing all throughout the process.

Stage III

Writing Stage 3- Planning Inquiry: Your Personal Research Proposal

English 1301 Writing Project

Stage 3-Planning Inquiry

This stage will involve writing a Plan of Inquiry, which will have the following parts:  

●     Discussion of your chosen construct & (mis)conceptions about that construct. This is first in your plan of inquiry because I want you to think about how your research question fits in to a larger discussion about writing, reading, and/or research. You can take what you did from the blog as a place to start, revising what you have.

●     Discussion of your research question—What is it, and why are you interested in it? You can take your earlier draft of this and revise/build on it if you’d like, but I need you to be as detailed as you can possibly be at this point. What larger issue(s) is/are at stake in your question?  

●     List of keywords you’ve tried in your research (indicating which ones worked and which didn’t) as well as which databases you’ve searched.

●     List of relevant sources (written as correct works cited entries) with brief annotations. These “annotations” should include a summary of the author’s main claims and evidence/reasons used to support those claims.  

●     Discussion, if relevant, of any primary research you’d like to do. For some of you, it makes sense to do some primary research––surveying, interviewing, and/or analyzing documents or activities you have direct access to. So, if this makes sense for your project (particularly if you’re studying a particular group’s attitudes or knowledge about something), then give me a sense of the kind of research you’d like to do and how you’d go about doing it in the time we have. Ask me if you have any questions about this part—the sooner, the better.

●     Discussion of potential audiences. Who cares about this question? Who might you envision sharing what you learn with? But I’ll caution you here not to say anything like “the general public” or an “educated audience”; those really don’t mean anything because there’s so much diversity within those groups that you would struggle to craft your project for them. Even “all college students” is problematic. So, try to think strategically here. If you’re aiming for high school students, why not high school students from the school where you just graduated or where your kids are going? Why not college students who have specific trouble with reading the writing assignments their instructors give them? The better you define a potential audience, the easier it will be for you to make writing choices informed by their beliefs, needs, values, and concerns.

●     Discussion of potential purposes. What do you think you might do with your project? For every project, there might be 1-5 (or more) things you could do with your project depending on who you choose as your eventual audience and what you want to claim. So, think of all the potentials at this point. You can make decisions about this later. 

●     Discussion of potential forms/genres. Given your potential audiences and purposes, how might you communicate your message to your audience? Again, there are lots of possibilities here, and I don’t want you to be bound by conventional research project genres like the “research paper” or “an essay.” Your audience and purpose will dictate this decision, so remember that most people don’t read essays when they want to learn something or need to find a solution to a problem. This plan of inquiry—and what it will eventually become, which is the reflective essay—is the closest thing to a “research paper” you’ll be writing.

STAGE IV

English 1301 Writing Project

Stage 4-Pursuing Your Question, Developing Your Theory

Epigraphs to Ponder Over

I know some of you are whispering, "Socrates could pass his time elsewhere quietly and be safe." If I reply, "But I have a duty to God," few will believe I speak the truth, so let me say this instead. My questioning, as much as it annoys you, serves the greatest good, for the fact is the unexamined life is not worth living.

--Plato, "Apology," Trans. by Keith Quincy (2004)

Do you ever listen to yourself talk?

--Brian, Episode 25, "E Peterbus Unum," Family Guy (2000)

Introduction

Before I explain what I want you to think about and create at this stage, I want to tell you about a goal I have for you with this piece of writing. I want you to experience what I call personal research. If there is one common type of experience among us, it's that we've all been through a lot of schooling and writing (forced and/or voluntary). We may not have been reflecting on it very much while we were going through it, but we still have a wealth of memories, experiences, and associations that contribute to our current ideas about how you got here, what you think happens in learning and/or at school, and what you would like to see happen because of your ideas and desires. So I will ask you in this project to mine your experiences and see what compelling stories you can tell or points you can make. This is always, in part, where our theories of how the world works come from.

I'm almost to the nitty gritty, but I want to say a bit about what your goals can be. For this stage, I'm not asking you to demonstrate how well you can mimic what others have said. I'm not giving you an essay checklist that you do in a certain order. So if you're used to knowing what you're going to write before you finish reading an assignment, you'll need to adjust your approach. If a college writer knows everything s/he will say when s/he starts a piece of writing, s/he probably doesn't need to do it in order to learn anything. Inquiry and developing a theory about how something works is about investigation more than imitation.

The Nitty Gritty

We've been thinking, reading, and writing about what it means to write and read and how each is connected to learning—what many now refer to as “writing studies.” At this stage, it’s time for you to start a conversation about writing, one based on what you are bringing to the table right now. In the past, I have called this stage a "literacy narrative," "an educational self-portrait," and an "identity map." I'm not happy with any of those attempts to define what I want you to write. Instead of naming it this time, I want to simply tell you what questions you need to consider (these are your constraints) and then talk about what you might do (these are your opportunities).

If I were going to start a conversation with each of you about this assignment, I would start with some questions: How did you get here? What do you want? How do you think you're going to get it? Then, after we talked for a long time, I would say, So what does all that have do with writing, reading, and/or learning? Those are the questions at the heart of this assignment.

See, I'm not sure how you think writing or reading happen or how learning works, and I want to know about your theories even while we are working through other people's ideas. I also don't think that “writing” and “learning” are easily defined, or that they happen only in classrooms, or that we always have control over what we write and what we learn. So I won't assume that the only relevant memories you have are school-related—think about other places. I won't assume that there are always long-term goals for writing and learning like job security—think about other human desires. And I won't assume that any of our educational clichés, like “writing is everywhere” or "knowledge is power," are water-tight—think about a time when you felt lost for something to say or when your knowledge of something made you more powerless than powerful.

For this stage, then, I want you to follow your Stage 3-Plan of Inquiry in order to create an essay in which you explain a theory you have about writing, reading, and/or learning. You'll continue developing the question you have about your experiences with writing, reading, and/or learning, you’ll look back at our texts and search for other relevant sources that speak directly to your question, and you’ll figure out how to organize your ideas into a coherent essay expressing your question, your research, and your resulting theory.

There is no one way to present a theory. There are, though, some things you’ll have to incorporate into your essay:

1.     Your Question: Why is it important and to whom? What does it involve, what types of things are you investigating in order to answer it?

2.     Your Sources and Evidence: Where are you getting information from--your experiences, writers/experts who have asked similar or related questions, other people you have access to? How do we formally give credit to these sources?

3.     Your Theory: An answer to your question that you think makes sense based on your investigation.

Good luck and good writing!

Stage 5: Reflecting on Reading, Writing, and Learning in Your Portfolio

A Reminder of My English 1301 Goals

Through your work in this class, you should begin doing the following things:

●     Develop and build confidence in your abilities to create, interpret, and evaluate texts in all types of media.

●     Develop knowledge and inspire new ideas through writing.

●     Become a rhetorically effective writer who can respond credibly and accurately to a variety of writing situations.

●     Learn to write with a purpose.

●     Develop an awareness of how and why you revise your writing.

●     Develop an understanding of the importance of getting feedback from others when writing.

●     Develop habits for thoughtful and effective questioning.

●     Develop reading strategies for analyzing texts (your peers’ papers as well as the readings you’ll be working with).

●     Learn how to work constructively with each other through group work.

●     Learn how to creatively take risks.

●     Become familiar with appropriate style guidelines for class projects.

Epigraphs to Ponder Over?

Epigraphs? To rip a famous line, We don’t need no stinking epigraphs. You are the epigraphs and the epilogues, the alphas and omegas, the beginnings and the endings of what went on in this class. And here, in this final stage, is where you will look back at what you’ve done in order to look forward to what you will do as a reader, writer, and learner once we part ways.

When we began this semester, we talked about how this class might not be what you’ve typically thought or experienced English classes to be. I wanted to help you think about what reading, writing, and learning are—in your lives, in school, and in the weird spaces where both overlap and we learn about ourselves and the world. And I wanted to do this by having you read, write, and think about what other people study and say about you as writing students. This approach may indeed sound like more than what your typical writing class aspires to do, but for me it has everything to do with rhetoric, with thinking, writing, and interacting with others through language. Asking questions, reading about what others think, thinking about your own responses to these questions, and discussing the questions with others allows you to enrich your understanding of yourself and the world in which you live. All of this helps give you a sense of perspective, a sense of where you fit in to conversations that have been going on for many years and will continue to go on long after us. I believe doing this work matters to your development as students and to your development as contributing, thinking participants in the world, and so I am proud to have been with you along the way, always helping you, always pushing you, to better compose your ideas with language.

At the beginning of the semester, I asked you to compose a theory about reading, writing, and/or learning, which, I hope, helped you begin the semester by thinking about who you are as a writer and a language user. In Stages 2, 3, and 4, I asked you to develop, investigate, and write about a question connected to writing studies so that you could then suggest your own answer and its significance. Now, you’re working on adapting your ideas in Stage 4 to a public and useful document in Stage 5. And, on top of all that, you did a lot of writing about your ideas and reflecting on what you’ve read, written, and thought about over the course of the semester.

I hope you’ve come to see that writing isn’t a set of discrete skills that can be mastered in a single semester and then applied with ease to all future writing situations. Writing (in any medium) is hard because it’s hard, and we all need feedback from others to see where we’re accomplishing what we meant to and where we need to clarify and/or re-imagine what we want to say and how we want to say it. I hope, too, that you have learned something about your own writing through your revisions and that you have come to appreciate the value of revision as a way for us to be as effective as we can be in our communication with others.

At this point in the semester, you’re winding up Stage 5 and you’re in the middle (I hope!) of trying to get everything wrapped up––for this class and maybe for others––and because of that, you probably haven’t had much time for reflection. Perhaps reading through the description above of what we’ve done so far represents the first time you’ve thought about the considerable work you’ve done as a whole and not as individual pieces that have to be finished by a certain deadline. What I’m hoping you’re able to do now is begin to put all these pieces together, to try to think about what you’ve done from a “big picture” perspective. I want you to begin to think about what you’ve learned, what the challenges have been, and how you’ve dealt with those challenges. For many, it may take months or years––long after the course evaluations––to realize the full effects of what you’ve learned.

To begin this process of reflection, which I imagine will continue well past the time when your English 1301 portfolio is due, I want you to write a reflective cover letter for your portfolio. In this letter, I want you to tell your story of English 1301. Where did you begin? Where have you ended up? What happened along the way? To do this, you will need to study the work you’ve done for the class––your in-class and homework assignments, the Project Stages and all of your revisions, notes, and workshops. What do you see there? Look back at my goals for us in the class at the top of this project, and, also, here are some questions you can think about as you reflect on your experience:

●     What do you know about yourself as a writer now that you didn’t know before? What strategies have you learned to use to make your writing more effective?

●     What were the important questions for you?

●     Where do you see glimmers of understanding? What do you still need to work out in your mind? Where do you see yourself not being able to say/do what you wanted to?

●     What have you learned about composing, about rhetoric, about revision, about yourself?

●     What were the things that helped you learn?

●     What were the challenges you faced this semester? How did you deal with those challenges?

●     What do you still want to know more about?

You could also grid out what you’ve done this past semester using the table below. The questions above and/or the table below will help you prepare to write a really insightful and detailed reflective essay, one that is a study of your writing and your writing process’s development.

	Instructor’s Goals	Writer’s Goals	Intended Audience(s) and Reasons	Form and Theory for How It Should Work	Important Peer Review Comments and/or Suggestions	Important Instructor Comments and/or Suggestions	Your Revision Choices	Biggest Accomplishment in Writing This Project	Area(s) of Project You Would Like to Continue Working On
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Stage 6

Your primary audience for this will be me since I will be using it as a guide to your portfolio. Your letter will offer me a way of reading the work of your portfolio, and by extension the work of the class, and should help me understand what you’ve learned from reflecting on your work in the class and from putting the portfolio together.

Though you certainly don’t have to, you could try to come up with an overriding metaphor that would help me see your experience in the class (or a part of it) in a way that honors the complexity of what you’ve had to do, or you could come up with a visual map of some sort––-a collage, a portrait of the class––that would clearly articulate the strands of what your experience has been, what you’ve learned, and how different texts, ideas, strategies, moments are meaningfully connected. You could also come up with a video clip or a short CD of music you put together in which you try to represent your experience in the course and what you’ve learned about writing, about work and education, and about yourself. You could focus on one piece of writing that you’ve revised extensively throughout the semester and analyze your revision choices--a case study of your own writing. In any approach, you will need to have a written component in which you walk me through your reflection. Given the multimedia opportunities you’ve had throughout your English 1301 Writing Project and the role of technology in composing, an “alternative” reflection would be very appropriate, but it isn’t necessary. What matters in this reflective piece of writing is that you are specific and thoughtful about what you’ve learned and that you refer to the specifics of your writings and activities in the class.

As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t really complete Stage 6 until you’ve revised your previous writings, which is where much of the learning in this class takes place. But you should begin thinking about how you want to approach this stage, reflecting on the work you’ve done so far as soon as you can. I will be happy to take a look at your drafts of this reflection in the next few weeks during class. I won’t give you a page limit, but many students end up with around 5 very tight, revised pages. These cover letters will play an extremely important part in my evaluation of your portfolio as they will show me what you’ve learned and what you’ll be able to carry with you once your time in our class is over. Please, however, do not think of this reflective writing as an opportunity to ask for a grade or as a request for you to flatter me. I want to know what the class has enabled you to do/think, and I am really excited about reading your reflections. They’re often my favorite part of the semester.

Good luck, good writing, and kick some...well, you know how that one plays out.