Thinking About Writing

Thinking About Writing.

Here’s a link to Andrea Lunsford’s interview about the Stanford Writing Project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIKu_hZT2BM

Argumentative Moves in SSHRC Grant Writing

University of Alberta, May 17, 2010

I’m on the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. At one of our meetings here at the NCTE convention we were told that communicating about what the CCCCs is doing is part of our work. So I’ll be updating this site from time to time with news and links to new resources on the CCCCs site, including new Position Statements and groups that are working on issues such as childcare at the CCCCs convention (we’ll be offering that again this year in Louisville, for example).

In a story in today’s National Post, Conrad Black expounds on the benefits of tutoring other inmates who are trying to improve their writing abilities.

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/11/14/conrad-black-the-transformative-effect-of-teaching-my-fellow-inmates.aspx

Send this link out to students who might be interested in writing a short essay in response to one of the 6 prompts listed on the contest website:

www.pearsoncanada.com/writingrewards

This story from the Chronicle of Higher Education tells you what you need to know about how some students are responding to writing papers:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i28/28a00102.htm

Towards the end of the article they point out how some PhD students are using these services.

Kathleen Yancey, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and professor at Florida State University, provides an excellent overview of writing instruction in the US over the last 100 years, including some interesting comments about where we’re going as a profession in her article “Writing in the 21st Century”:

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Press/Yancey_final.pdf

Don Tapscott’s book, Grown Up Digital (McGraw-Hill 2009), gives a broader sense of how the digital revolution has affected the next generation.

http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_current.asp

This came through today from the NCTE and gives a quick glimpse of what writing should be (not editing, not copying):

Not all schooling is equal. In too many schools, too many students suffer an education of drill and memorization but are deprived of high-level thinking activities, of intellectual discussions, of opportunities to synthesize information and respond creatively — elements that form the basis of education for other students in other schools. Too many poor kids encounter expectations that deem them worthy of discipline and “the basics” rather than nurturing high-level thinking. According to Kylene Beers, president of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), it is critically important that all students experience a rich, intellectually rigorous curriculum filled with all sorts of writing. “While writing, more than any other intellectual endeavor, sharpens our thinking, in too many schools, especially schools overwhelmed by poverty, writing is not about thinking but about copying; not about creating but about editing; not about persuading or telling or sharing or clarifying but about completing fill-in-the-blank activities or circling verbs in blue and nouns in red or counting the number of sentences in a paragraph to make sure the prerequisite three (or four or five) are there.” According to a new report from NCTE, unless we can reduce the number of schools that turn to scripted programs and highly structured class routines — sometimes almost militaristic environments — we will continue to be left with an education of America’s poor that cannot be seen as anything more than a segregation by intellectual rigor, something every bit as shameful and harmful as segregation by color.

I’m at a conference on student engagement at Wilfrid Laurier today, and the presentations I’ve gone to so far reinforce how important writing is to engagement. Many of the kinds of things that presenters are suggesting or describing involve writing, often in creative ways.

Clare Goulet, for example, talked about having students prepare these extensive anthologies (90 pages) as term projects. Harry Vandervlist talked about a course that required students to attend a mountain writing conference and produce several writing projects, workshop their ideas, and meet online.

In the US, undergrads can do almost 50% of their degree in liberal studies (that was the case at DePaul where I worked for 12 years). So they needed to learn to write in a wide variety of disciplines. They also took two semesters of first-year writing; students who weren’t up to that level also could take pre-university writing courses to get up to speed. The goals of the courses were not, explicitly, academic writing; instead, the goals were a kind of general writing ability in the first course and “the [generic] research paper” in the second course. They had to remain vague because the students could end up in any number of discipline-based liberal studies courses. What is more, though, is that within the composition courses instructors could adopt one of a variety of goals for instruction: to create active citizens, to create good academic writers, to create writers of error-free standard dialect English, and so on. In Canada, the goal is more and more focused on “academic writing.” This was always the goal at Winnipeg, for example. The cultural goal of creating an educated citizenry who is politically active is not on the agenda in Canada; our participation rates for post-secondary education reflect that difference, too (far less of the population attend post-secondary education in Canada, historically). We’re much more focused on creating students who are good writers of academic prose.

You might check out Henry Hubert’s book, Harmonious Perfection: Development of English Studies in Nineteenth-century Anglo-Canadian Colleges (1993, Michigan State UP) if you want to know more about the intellectual tradition the Canadian approach grew out of. Nan Johnson’s work on 19th century rhetoric is also useful and draws on some Canadian sources: Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America: Nan Johnson (Southern Illinois UP).