Group items tagged

Writing as an exercise in learning

This article is about 5 steps you can take, as a writing teacher, to digitize your writing workshop. There are many more, though, so "stay tuned" for future articles!

Laurie Halse Anderson… invites readers to spend 15 minutes writing every day during the month. She provides writing prompts, advice, and encouragement. All readers have to do is set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes and write.

a pedagogical movement that began in the 1980s. Generally, writing across the curriculum programs share the philosophy that writing instruction should happen across the academic community and throughout a student's undergraduate education. Writing across the curriculum programs also value writing as a method of learning. Finally, writing across the curriculum acknowledges the differences in writing conventions across the disciplines, and believes that students can best learn to write in their areas by practicing those discipline-specific writing conventions.

This guy has some very interesting thoughts, but can teachers really afford to follow some of his advice??  

His sense of audience is ridiculous. I'm all about creativity, even in academic writing. My students have a variety of creative opportunities, but the fact remains that they need to learn how to put thoughts together effectively. I just looked at two essays that had absolutely no coherent point, even though they featured personal experiences. He made a comparison between essays and novels. Dude! They are two completely different forms of writing. They have different goals and different parameters. Yes, the 5-paragraph essay is a stilted, inauthentic form of writing and it is largely on its way out, but at the secondary level, it is the training wheels some students need to learn how to organize their thoughts coherently. No matter how they write, they still have to say SOMETHING.

He does exaggerate for effect, e.g. his claim that students are told to write in a style similar to classic literature--ridiculous! No one is told to copy any writing style previous to 1950, unless it is graduate students being told to mimic the horrible jargon of academic journals, but I think that's a different "bad" than what he means here. He avoids what should be his real topic--truly bad writing; I mean incompetent, to the point of being an effort to follow, poorly structured writing. We see this writing from the strongest cases of ESL students and from students who seem to have skipped several grades in school or who have never read a great deal in their school years. He leaves off the most important tool for teaching writing, and that is frequency. Anyone who only writes by email, Facebook, and twitter, and only writes something for a class once or twice a semester, will never break into a "conversational" form of writing (with complete sentences and paragraphs) that will be recognized as literate, normal, and natural. We recommend starting with short, non-graded writing and, by writing 2-3 times a week, working up to something more substantial. If teachers can do that, then college student writing will improve, but the plan requires patience and consistency from the teacher.

I liked this article because it talks about how it is easier for resistant writers to write by blogging.

The question we are faced with, then, is this: how do we prepare our students to write effectively in environments that don't yet exist? While I'm sure there is more to add to this list, I suggest that there are three domains of literacy that, if students become aware of them, will prepare them for new digital writing environments. Namely, students should be aware of the speed of digital communications and the types of interactions that speed encourages, the ways in which digital writing environments preserve and provide access to data, and how writing technologies manage the divide between public and private.

So what happens between the end of that two-course sequence and the start of the rest of those students' college careers? If pressed I would offer a hypothesis or two: In many courses that are not focused on writing skills, instructors might not provide detailed enough instructions on their writing assignments to convey to the student what the instructors' expectations are, and A different issue is whether or not the student understands the course material: a badly written essay may be the result of the student author not understanding the subject rather than not being a capable writer.

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1, is a collection of Creative Commons licensed essays for use in the first year writing classroom, all written by writing teachers for students.

I thought this was a great article on the differences between collegiate level writing and high school writing. Moreover, it lays a groundwork for writing a paper. If only there was some way to convey these differences to our students in a way that they will understand without feeling discouraged. I think the weakness of the article is that it is very long, if I wanted to pass this on to a student I fear that the sheer length would deter them away from both reading it and/or finishing it. On the other hand, if we could manage to make this simpler or convert it into a series of short workshops for students then I think the content would be extraordinarily beneficial.

The primary aim of this study is to generate a large and uniform data set that leads to a better understanding of the writing behaviors of students across a variety of institutions and locations. Working from the assumption that students lead complex writing lives, this study is interested in a broad range of writing practices and values both for the classroom and beyond it, as well as the technologies, collaborators, spaces, and audiences they draw upon in writing.

"Students and teachers need the terminology of grammar so they can discuss sentences easily, so they can talk about the parts that don't fit together and the parts that should be moved around. And it is such discussions about sentences, along with lots of reading and writing, that help students write correctly and well - and maybe land a job." -- Let's consider putting this quote up in a prominent spot in our writing labs!!

An overview is provided of the importance and why writing in math is different. A recommended checklist is provided to help students write clear math papers.

Some excellent questions for building an assignment. Look beyond the writing assignment pedagogy to the general aspects of any assignment.

There are a variety of tech tools and methods out there for teaching writing that can make the process easier and more fun for both teachers and students. While not every high-tech way of teaching writing will work for every class or every student, there's enough variety that there's bound to be something for everyone.

Three weeks ago I added another layer to our digital writing workshop:  I introduced students to Google Docs, and with it learned the power and potential of yet another space that again is changing writing instruction as I know it.