I've spent the morning editing and commenting on cover letters and portfolio drafts. Here's three pieces of advice I used repeatedly:
1. "Use specific examples to develop your discussions and claims."
2. "Contextualize the examples you provide by discussing in the text of your letter/portfolio why your example is significant."
3. "Focus your discussion on what you have learned and not on the effort you put in to learn."
Let me develop the last of the three a tad more. Effort has some impact on your grade in every aspect of life, but in college, professors are much more concerned with what you have learned, your expertise, and the demonstration of your skills than they are in how hard you've worked. If all goes well, work in college (and in life) is demanding, challenging, difficult, and engaging. The same is true of that you'll find in most careers worth the work you put in to keep them. You do the work which is necessary to succeed. It's expected, and it usually receives very little praise. Usually, you get kodus for being productive, not for how hard you've worked to be productive.
Ben Franklin once said, if you want to get praised for how hard you work, you must be seen to work. This is why he made sure he was seen delivering his own papers, that is, so folks would notice, and his ethos (his reputation) would be raised as a hard worker. His delievering the papers, however, would have been meaningless if he didn't have the papers to deliever.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Reminder: Due Dates for Portfolio.
A *draft* of the portfolio is what is due Sunday. This draft should consist of draft versions of your cover letter, inventory, and evidence sections.
The final portfolio is due Wednesday, the last day of class. I want folks to take the time between Sunday and Monday to revise, polish, and ask any last minute questions.
Since one of the lessons I hope you will learn is the value to be gained in taking the time to collaborate, go through multiple revisions, and to proofread carefully, please do take the time between Sunday and Wednesday to make sure what you turn in is your best work.
Also remember, if asked, I'll be happy to look at drafts and offer revision suggestions. If you take advantage of this route, please preface your draft with the specific questions you want answered. Don't ask vague questions, like, "Is this all right?" Or questions like, "What kind of grade would this draft get if I turned it in now?" Focus your questions on specific concerns about the writing, rhetoric, structure, format, etc. of your draft. This will allow you to practice your budding metadiscourse and for me to give specific, useful pieces of advice which will help you improve your portfolios.
Write with questions.
Steve
The final portfolio is due Wednesday, the last day of class. I want folks to take the time between Sunday and Monday to revise, polish, and ask any last minute questions.
Since one of the lessons I hope you will learn is the value to be gained in taking the time to collaborate, go through multiple revisions, and to proofread carefully, please do take the time between Sunday and Wednesday to make sure what you turn in is your best work.
Also remember, if asked, I'll be happy to look at drafts and offer revision suggestions. If you take advantage of this route, please preface your draft with the specific questions you want answered. Don't ask vague questions, like, "Is this all right?" Or questions like, "What kind of grade would this draft get if I turned it in now?" Focus your questions on specific concerns about the writing, rhetoric, structure, format, etc. of your draft. This will allow you to practice your budding metadiscourse and for me to give specific, useful pieces of advice which will help you improve your portfolios.
Write with questions.
Steve
Friday, December 14, 2007
My expectations of you at this point in your writing career.
I wanted to pull the last point I made in the "Portfolio, FAQ" post out and develop it more. I also wanted you to take special notice of what I say here. It has to do with my expectations of you as a writer at this point in your life as a writer. Here's a more developed statement, and I hope it eases some of your worry about what I expect of you and, more importantly, what you should expect of yourselves:
"You need to remember: you are at the end of a first semester, freshman level writing class. I don't expect you to do everything perfectly or be able to produce fluent, fully effective prose with ease. If you could produce such with ease, you wouldn't need to be in freshman writing.
At this point in your development as a writer, I don't expect you to fully understand or to be able to implement and use every outcome or to write stunning prose. You should still be struggling, pushing your personal envelop, experimenting, and working on writing good, solid sentences and paragraphs. You should be experimenting with learning how to research and write different kinds of documents and figuring out a repertoire of moves which will serve you well in later writing. One of the joys of early learning is the freedom you have to experiment, screw up, and learn from experimentation, all with less costly consequence than the same mistake will have in later life.
Few people do well the first time they try something, and most are struggling the twentieth. They should be. Few things which are worthwhile can be conquered in a semester or a year. You know I believe in a crafts' approach to writing, one where you are always in the process of acquiring new skills as your needs and desires change and mature. I'm still working on writing better sentences, paragraphs, and documents. This continued struggle is part of the fun of being a writer.
I do expect evidence of:
1) substantial work toward producing better, more successful writing,
2) that you've learned the basic linkage between opinion and support,
3) that you understand and have begun to use process writing, and,
4) that you have a budding knowledge of rhetoric.
Most importantly, I expect you to have learned some useful techniques and a process through which you can make yourself a better writer."
"You need to remember: you are at the end of a first semester, freshman level writing class. I don't expect you to do everything perfectly or be able to produce fluent, fully effective prose with ease. If you could produce such with ease, you wouldn't need to be in freshman writing.
At this point in your development as a writer, I don't expect you to fully understand or to be able to implement and use every outcome or to write stunning prose. You should still be struggling, pushing your personal envelop, experimenting, and working on writing good, solid sentences and paragraphs. You should be experimenting with learning how to research and write different kinds of documents and figuring out a repertoire of moves which will serve you well in later writing. One of the joys of early learning is the freedom you have to experiment, screw up, and learn from experimentation, all with less costly consequence than the same mistake will have in later life.
Few people do well the first time they try something, and most are struggling the twentieth. They should be. Few things which are worthwhile can be conquered in a semester or a year. You know I believe in a crafts' approach to writing, one where you are always in the process of acquiring new skills as your needs and desires change and mature. I'm still working on writing better sentences, paragraphs, and documents. This continued struggle is part of the fun of being a writer.
I do expect evidence of:
1) substantial work toward producing better, more successful writing,
2) that you've learned the basic linkage between opinion and support,
3) that you understand and have begun to use process writing, and,
4) that you have a budding knowledge of rhetoric.
Most importantly, I expect you to have learned some useful techniques and a process through which you can make yourself a better writer."
Researching a Genre: The Portfolio.
Anytime you encounter a genre new to you, like the portfolio, research it online. There are numerous sites which deal with the Freshman English portfolio, and a few minutes spent doing some research on these sites can provide some valuable ideas for your own. You'll also be learning to research genres, not an inconsiderable skill. You also might want to look at the "reflective cover letter" or "reflective learning."
It's funny how many folks will research the right stereo or computer to buy, but it never occurs to them that they can research how to write better and things like genre or how to conquer sentence fragments.
Write with questions.
Steve
It's funny how many folks will research the right stereo or computer to buy, but it never occurs to them that they can research how to write better and things like genre or how to conquer sentence fragments.
Write with questions.
Steve
Portfolio, FAQ:
1. How do you want me to submit the portfolio?
Create one long document in which the major sections are separated by page breaks, and then add me as a collaborator to it. Since everyone now knows how to use Google Docs, use this program. As always, feel free to get collaborative help on the document. One of the things you're learning is to use others in your writing process.
Following this plan, you'll get to see your grade earlier, as I can leave it in the comments. Make sure you *want* everyone on your viewer/collaborative list to see your grade; so, edit your share list accordingly. If it's all right to leave your grade at the beginning of the document, leave me a note at the beginning of the document telling me it's all right to post your grade in the document. At the least, having one long document separated by page breaks will allow me to have every thing you want to say and use in one place, and I can search the document with some ease. This shared format meets the rule of making things as easy as possible for both reader and author to fulfill their goals/needs. Within the portfolio feel free to connect via links to other documents or work you want me to see and think about.
If this format doesn't work for you, we can negotiate other options; so, feel free to ask. I can think of web pages which would work here.
2. What's the overall format for the documents I include?
a. Cover Letter
b. Inventory
c. Evidence supporting the claims made in the cover letter and inventory
3. What should I put in the cover letter?
Your cover letter is the place where you make a claim as to the grade you have earned and convince me to believe your claim. You can use this space to address what you anticipate to be my concerns about your performance, tell me the lessons you've found most valuable from the class, make claims about the effort you've put into the class, show me in action what you have learned, explain why you didn't do an assignment or turned it in late, etc. In specific, I will be looking to see if you've picked up what the major lessons of the class are and if you're: 1) able to speak about them in the context of your learning; and, 2) if you put these lessons into practice in your letter. Frankly, I'm also hoping to learn how to make the class more effective for students like you in the future.
4. How will you grade the cover letter?
I will be looking at the quality of your claims and the quality of the support you put together to help me believe your various claims. In terms of claims, I will judge them by how they are made and on their plausibility. In terms of support, I will look for sufficient support and a good deal of evidence, epically examples and clarification. The evidence should be plausible, detailed and--in most cases--specific. I will look at your ability to speak knowledgeably about the work you include in the evidence section and about your own writing. I will look at your tone, voice, and style and judge its appropriateness to the writing situation. Since this is a letter written to an English professor about your learning in his class, I will look at issues of usage and grammar. Finally, I will look for evidence that you've used process writing to construct the document.
5. How will you grade the inventory?
Again, I will look for specific claims about what you know/learned about the outcomes and how you use the skills and knowledge they describe in your writing and/or other aspects of your communication. I'm looking to see if you've come to be able to speak knowledgeably about yourself as a writer and speaker. If you remember my post about metadiscourse, I'm looking for evidence to see if you've gained and/or started a useful metadiscourse about your writing and yourself as a writer. I'll look at how you use examples from the evidence section to support your claims.
6. What can I include in the evidence section?
Any writing or other work you've done as a communicator.
7. What should I include in the evidence section?
Since we both share the work you've done as an author in this class, this work should become the basis of your portfolio. You shouldn't try to include it all. When I say work, I mean pre-writing, notes, emails, comments on papers on which you've helped, proofreading exercises, posts, etc. All this is fair game.
You may also include or point to work you've done else where, in your daily life, for a job, or in school. This includes creative writing, games, photos, etc.
You can also include excerpts from longer pieces or let a single piece of evidence do multiple duty.
If you haven't done all the work for the class, support the arguments you make in the cover letter and the inventory with work from outside the class, and address the fact you didn't do all the work in the cover letter, explaining why. Since I'm training you to make a good argument and to use rhetoric, here's a high stakes place to implement your skills. I'm looking for evidence you've learned, not that you've toed the line; and, I don't really care when you learn, that is, as long as you do and can use the knowledge.
8. What should I not do in the evidence section?
Don't just do a core dump. Pick and choose your evidence. Part of what I'm looking at is your ability to pick evidence which supports your arguments well. Portfolios are meant to showcase your work in such a way that they support the purpose for which you put them together. In this case, you're trying to get a handle on your self as a writer, your work in this course, and what you've learned in the course. (Oh, and I assume you hope to garner a high grade for the course.) I'm trying to do the same and to use the material to make a fair judgment of the grade your work in the course had earned.
Don't hand me the kitchen sink. Think of your audience here. Just like students, professors are *very* busy folks at the end of term. We've got lots of reading and thinking about students and their work to do. We're meeting and working with worried students, and we're taking care of the business of the university knowing that folks will not be very available over the holidays to help. The upshot is we appreciate students who help us do the best job we can.
Don't make the mistake of not having some sort of organization for your evidence section. Don't go overboard here, but I need to be able to find the work you speak about in your cover letter and in your inventory. Assume your reader is tired, has been reading and grading for a day, has had too much caffeine, and needs to take a break. Imagine how pleased this reader is when he is able to find the information he needs to make an informed, fair decision with relative ease.
9. What are your expectations as an audience concerning the work I've done?
You need to remember: you are in a first semester, freshman level class. I don't expect you to do everything perfectly. I don't expect you to fully understand or to be able to implement and use every outcome. Heck, you know I believe in a crafts' approach to writing, one where you are always in the process of acquiring new skills as your needs and desires change. I do expect evidence of substantial work, that you've learned the basic linkage between opinion and support, that you know and have begun to use process writing, and that you have a budding knowledge of rhetoric. Most importantly, I expect you to have learned some useful techniques and a process through which you can make yourself a better writer.
Create one long document in which the major sections are separated by page breaks, and then add me as a collaborator to it. Since everyone now knows how to use Google Docs, use this program. As always, feel free to get collaborative help on the document. One of the things you're learning is to use others in your writing process.
Following this plan, you'll get to see your grade earlier, as I can leave it in the comments. Make sure you *want* everyone on your viewer/collaborative list to see your grade; so, edit your share list accordingly. If it's all right to leave your grade at the beginning of the document, leave me a note at the beginning of the document telling me it's all right to post your grade in the document. At the least, having one long document separated by page breaks will allow me to have every thing you want to say and use in one place, and I can search the document with some ease. This shared format meets the rule of making things as easy as possible for both reader and author to fulfill their goals/needs. Within the portfolio feel free to connect via links to other documents or work you want me to see and think about.
If this format doesn't work for you, we can negotiate other options; so, feel free to ask. I can think of web pages which would work here.
2. What's the overall format for the documents I include?
a. Cover Letter
b. Inventory
c. Evidence supporting the claims made in the cover letter and inventory
3. What should I put in the cover letter?
Your cover letter is the place where you make a claim as to the grade you have earned and convince me to believe your claim. You can use this space to address what you anticipate to be my concerns about your performance, tell me the lessons you've found most valuable from the class, make claims about the effort you've put into the class, show me in action what you have learned, explain why you didn't do an assignment or turned it in late, etc. In specific, I will be looking to see if you've picked up what the major lessons of the class are and if you're: 1) able to speak about them in the context of your learning; and, 2) if you put these lessons into practice in your letter. Frankly, I'm also hoping to learn how to make the class more effective for students like you in the future.
4. How will you grade the cover letter?
I will be looking at the quality of your claims and the quality of the support you put together to help me believe your various claims. In terms of claims, I will judge them by how they are made and on their plausibility. In terms of support, I will look for sufficient support and a good deal of evidence, epically examples and clarification. The evidence should be plausible, detailed and--in most cases--specific. I will look at your ability to speak knowledgeably about the work you include in the evidence section and about your own writing. I will look at your tone, voice, and style and judge its appropriateness to the writing situation. Since this is a letter written to an English professor about your learning in his class, I will look at issues of usage and grammar. Finally, I will look for evidence that you've used process writing to construct the document.
5. How will you grade the inventory?
Again, I will look for specific claims about what you know/learned about the outcomes and how you use the skills and knowledge they describe in your writing and/or other aspects of your communication. I'm looking to see if you've come to be able to speak knowledgeably about yourself as a writer and speaker. If you remember my post about metadiscourse, I'm looking for evidence to see if you've gained and/or started a useful metadiscourse about your writing and yourself as a writer. I'll look at how you use examples from the evidence section to support your claims.
6. What can I include in the evidence section?
Any writing or other work you've done as a communicator.
7. What should I include in the evidence section?
Since we both share the work you've done as an author in this class, this work should become the basis of your portfolio. You shouldn't try to include it all. When I say work, I mean pre-writing, notes, emails, comments on papers on which you've helped, proofreading exercises, posts, etc. All this is fair game.
You may also include or point to work you've done else where, in your daily life, for a job, or in school. This includes creative writing, games, photos, etc.
You can also include excerpts from longer pieces or let a single piece of evidence do multiple duty.
If you haven't done all the work for the class, support the arguments you make in the cover letter and the inventory with work from outside the class, and address the fact you didn't do all the work in the cover letter, explaining why. Since I'm training you to make a good argument and to use rhetoric, here's a high stakes place to implement your skills. I'm looking for evidence you've learned, not that you've toed the line; and, I don't really care when you learn, that is, as long as you do and can use the knowledge.
8. What should I not do in the evidence section?
Don't just do a core dump. Pick and choose your evidence. Part of what I'm looking at is your ability to pick evidence which supports your arguments well. Portfolios are meant to showcase your work in such a way that they support the purpose for which you put them together. In this case, you're trying to get a handle on your self as a writer, your work in this course, and what you've learned in the course. (Oh, and I assume you hope to garner a high grade for the course.) I'm trying to do the same and to use the material to make a fair judgment of the grade your work in the course had earned.
Don't hand me the kitchen sink. Think of your audience here. Just like students, professors are *very* busy folks at the end of term. We've got lots of reading and thinking about students and their work to do. We're meeting and working with worried students, and we're taking care of the business of the university knowing that folks will not be very available over the holidays to help. The upshot is we appreciate students who help us do the best job we can.
Don't make the mistake of not having some sort of organization for your evidence section. Don't go overboard here, but I need to be able to find the work you speak about in your cover letter and in your inventory. Assume your reader is tired, has been reading and grading for a day, has had too much caffeine, and needs to take a break. Imagine how pleased this reader is when he is able to find the information he needs to make an informed, fair decision with relative ease.
9. What are your expectations as an audience concerning the work I've done?
You need to remember: you are in a first semester, freshman level class. I don't expect you to do everything perfectly. I don't expect you to fully understand or to be able to implement and use every outcome. Heck, you know I believe in a crafts' approach to writing, one where you are always in the process of acquiring new skills as your needs and desires change. I do expect evidence of substantial work, that you've learned the basic linkage between opinion and support, that you know and have begun to use process writing, and that you have a budding knowledge of rhetoric. Most importantly, I expect you to have learned some useful techniques and a process through which you can make yourself a better writer.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Is there a difference between structure and format?
A student wrote with the question above. Find my response below:
Structure refers to methods of the organization of ideas or content, as in comparison and contrast, chronological, least important to most, etc. Format deals more with how a document is laid out in terms of appearance. There is some overlap between the two, and no doubt this overlap and how loosely I've used the terms is the source of some of your confusion.
Let me know if you need any further clarification.
Structure refers to methods of the organization of ideas or content, as in comparison and contrast, chronological, least important to most, etc. Format deals more with how a document is laid out in terms of appearance. There is some overlap between the two, and no doubt this overlap and how loosely I've used the terms is the source of some of your confusion.
Let me know if you need any further clarification.
The Relationship Between Writing and Literature.
In reading back through your papers and my blog, I realized that part of the big picture I hadn't offered you is the relationship I see between the study of literature and the study of becoming a better writer. Also, I haven't let you see me writing for audiences other than the class.
The following response will help correct both oversights. It's written to colleagues--that is, college professors-- who teach freshman writing, and it's part of an ongoing conversation about the place of literature in the 101/102 sequence of courses you're currently taking. In fact, it might have some impact on how 101/102 gets taught at UAT, so feel free to wade in via the comments if you want to offer a student perspective. One of the lessons I've taught you is that what you say is driven by the audience for whom you write, so you'll find this post heavily laden with jargon and ideas specific to the discipline and profession of English. Don't worry about getting a handle on each and every idea. Do spend some time thinking about the moves I make in framing my argument.
I expect my audience to be unreceptive to the idea of not using literature as the basis of teaching freshman writing, so I work to limit and distance myself from the very arguments I introduce and want them to believe. By distancing myself and introducing each idea as tentative but well thought out, I'm hoping readers who are opposed to my stance will have faith in how I think and, hence, give my ideas more thought and closer attention.
I'm also working to frame my argument as a tentative position in an ongoing discussion. I make this move because I don't want my audience to feel they *have* to take a position in response to my argument and defend it. My purpose here is to get them thinking and, as a by product, get them questioning some of the assumptions on which their current position is based.
In part, this is an ethos move. I'm a long term member of this discourse community, and I don't want to create clear areas of intellectual turf which *have* to be defended. Mostly, it's positioning myself as a member of the community who is willing to be reasonable and change my mind, that is, if I'm given enough good reasons to so do.
In assuming this stance as an author, I encourage readers who oppose my argument to take a *higher* moral stance in which they are even more willing than I to change their minds. I encourage readers who share my position to feel good about the ethos of "our crowd," and I show readers who are undecided that my side and, in particular, I know how to participate in public, civil debate. In other words, regardless of how my opponents respond, I come out looking reasonable, possibly more reasonable than do they, and well positioned to concede any ground I need to concede.
Finally, the post may well give you some useful insights into why I designed the course as I did and where the knowledge I presented fits into the larger picture of your English curriculum.
As always, write with questions.
My post follows:
"Miles' passionate argument for the value to be derived from literary study has had me thinking a lot about my own take on how literature can be used to teach critical thinking and reading and in trying to figure out my uneasiness with using literature in my own freshman writing classes. As usual in such situations, I've fallen back on writing to try to articulate my own current thinking on the subject. Forgive a rather long post, and I share it with some trepidation, but the relationship between literary study and writing is at the heart of much of our current discussion as a writing faculty, and I wanted to spend the time it took to figure out where I stood, give Mile's argument the thought and reflection it deserves, and--most important--try to get a handle on the implications for students."
"The truth is, I don't remember ever having to come to love the "L" word. As far back as I can remember, I've been an English geek, and I've always loved literature. The desire to keep literature alive in society, more than anything else, was what brought me into the profession; and, in many instances, the insights I see students gain into their own lives through learning to interpret literature well are what have kept me going."
"My own passion for having useful stories stay in circulation is one of the reasons I love teaching American and Native literature. Listening to Native storytellers and writers, I've learned that literature isn't a nice add on for communities and individuals. It's an essential tool though which communities define their selves, survive in the face of challenge and change, and find a basis for a shared understanding of the world which unites. For me, literature isn't just one more aspect of culture; it is an essential aspect of healthy individuals, communities, and societies. Mary Lou Atawaka in _Selu_ and Leslie Silko in _Ceremony_ both write about how a shared wealth of story is "the stomach of people" and of how stories assist us in remembering who we are and in finding our place in the world."
"To help her students understand a Cherokee take on the place of literature in their lives, Atawaka shares a corn seed with each of her students . In the discussion which follows, Atawaka tells the story of Selu, the Corn Mother, and the lessons Selu has for the people. One of these lessons is:
"Eat the individual corn seed, and it will help sustain you. Plant the same seed with those of your classmates, cultivate them together, and the seeds which will sustain one of you for a short time will sustain the whole class and others; indeed, the crop you can grow will provide not only food but seeds for the community which, in its turn, will grow and prosper. But corn needs a special kind of cultivation. If a seed is planted and cultivated alone, a corn plant will grow, and it will flower, but it won't be able to produce more corn. In the kernel of corn lays the stomach of the people. To be productive, each kernel needs to be cultivated among other corn plants, and each will help pollinate the other. Literature is corn, and story lays at the literature's kernel. Both are sacred. From them we can derive harmony, the food of the individual and community, and the sharing which is the basis of each."
"Each time I teach literature, I spend a day with the students talking about story, community, and society; and, I've used Atawaka's story of the Corn Mother and distributed my share of NDN corn. I tell you this, because I want you to understand the place of literature in my own life and world and to provide a basis for a discussion of why I don't teach Western literary analysis in my writing classes."
"In other posts, I've discussed how our very love of literature can undermine the task of teaching writing. To equate literary writing with good writing or to equate literary analysis with good reading is a dangerous equation for students of writing and critical reading to adopt. Why?"
"1) Our understanding of literature and how to form our understanding of it is very much connected to our Romantic, Modernist, and Post-Modern roots. The essential lessons of each philosophy are so bound up with how literature is taught and understood in the academy and society at large that it is difficult, if not impossible to tease out the dangerous ideas from the useful. I don't want to get sidetracked too much here, but a brief overview of what I mean might be useful."
"1a) One legacy of Romanticism is the view it propagated of the author as genius. While great writing *may* be the product of genius and talent, anyone with the drive, discipline, the right rubrics and schema, and the chance to practice can produce good, solid, craftsman like writing. By good writing, I mean writing so crafted as to allow the author to accomplish his or her purposes with a text."
"Tied up in the Romantic view of the author as genius is the belief that the ability to write well is governed by talent. It isn't. Also, tied up in Romanticism is the dangerous notion that one is either right brain or left, good in math or in the humanities, and if one is good in the sciences or technology, one isn't good in English. We've all dealt with the legacies of this last, but the single most dangerous legacy of the Romantic view of author is the arrogance which accompanies the Romantic author's view of his or her self. Whenever we provide a basis for the individual to cultivate the belief they are of higher sensibility (however you want to define that last), we are on dangerous ground. Think of Hitler and Superman here if you want. I usually think of Elias Boudinot and how his view of himself as a Romantic author contributed to the death of most of two generations of Cherokees along the Trail of Tears."
"1b) If anything, the legacy of Modernism is worse. If literature is to have any use in the world outside of producing pretty words and insightful prose, not that these last aren't useful, it has to be part of how society works, not a separate category of thought requiring an elite, hyper-trained intelligence or an absurd amount of leisure. The Romantics began the focus on the individual at the cost of community engagement, but the Modernists brought the notion to full flower. With the Modernist, there's a nostalgia for the social role literature and the author once played in society, but too often it's a despairing nostalgia. I'm a firm believer that it was the Modernists view of literature which combined with a research orientated professorial chaste to make the study and appreciation of literature much more difficult than it needs to be. Add in author/critic Romantic arrogance, American Anti-Intellectualism, and the high vs low literature split, and you have a recipe for the study of literature being seen as irrelevant to how the majority of society lives. If you're looking for someone to blame for the increasingly marginalized place of literature in society, you could do much worse than to look at the Victorian 'Art for Art's Sake' crowd and the disciples of Eliot. We live with the legacy of making literature an intellectuals' sport rather than a lived part of the citizen creating a good life and a working community."
"1c) Post-Modernism is too easy a target. It is the natural by-product of the Romantics and Modernists. We communicate every day, and we manage to do things useful work with writing; but, Post-Modernism celebrates the breakdown of communication and an Existential and Linguistic explanations of why communication doesn't and can't work. These explanations, in turn, are derived from the false dichotomy of idealism and realism. Add in the emphasis our culture places on novelty, as opposed to the value of creation within a set of assumed limitations of genre, and you have folks assuming the paradoxical stance of creating works which celebrate the "new" insight that they can't be understood. Such Play is dangerous, that is, if it's taken to the extreme suggested by the logic of Relativism."
"1d) My point here is that students bring all these existing rhetorics to our English/writing classes which explain why literature isn't important and shouldn't be, and they can fall back on any of them to rationalize a lack of success and, worse, unwillingness to do the work required to become a good writer. Regardless of the truth behind these rhetorics, they allow students to view literary analysis is an elitist activity with little (if any) connection to their lived world and where many professionals are willing to admit 'right'--as opposed to 'better'--interpretations are impossible. From the right perspective, these beliefs are partly true and very useful. This is the main reason I find it easier to approach teaching writing as a separate field of study only tangentially related to the study of literature, and I actively work against the identification of English classes and the profession as a whole with literary study."
"2) My next point is an obvious insight, but it's one, as trained professionals of literary interpretation, we too often forget, namely, just as the use of genre or the assumptions about the roles of audiences and authors are specific to discourse communities, so to are interpretative rubrics. The theories of hermeneutics which govern how we construct interpretations in literary study are part and parcel of our discourse community and the ideas of the professional reader and critic which have governed it."
"While many of our practices, like close reading, can translate well into other disciplines and ways of looking at the world, they are far from the only useful ways of looking at the world, that is, the only critical thinking and reading rubrics which need to be learned. On a related note, our students often bring extensive training in the interpretative rubrics of literary analysis. Talk to many of them, and they'll describe high school English as a series of courses which consisted of little writing and much reading of literary texts, classroom discussion of these texts, and attempts to learn rubrics and the use of rhetorical device such as irony, tone, and symbolism."
"The fact that this focus on literary device and writing which is aware of itself as high literature is a product of Modernism and New Criticism--that is, the product of hermeneutic and professional legacies specific to literary study as a discipline in the 20th Century--is lost on most, if not all freshman. A nuanced view of how we as a discourse community interpret literature as just one among many competing theories of how to construct interpretations isn't a view easily fit into a writing course, that is, without spending a *lot* of time on the history of literary study, information which most students will never need to know."
"As a side note, one reason I get so excited about the Reynold's Learning Communities and Writing Across Communities is that I can borrow a focus on other critical thinking and interpretative rubrics or, more precisely, I can let other teachers focus on these rubrics, and I can spend my time teaching writing and its interpretative rubrics instead of how to construct a good literary interpretation."
"3) All this brings me to what I consider the most essential point, namely, there are enough reading rubrics specific to rhetoric and writing to take up any one year of the curriculum; and, for most students, freshman writing will be one of the few moments in a crowded curriculum where they will get exposure to writing specific interpretative rubrics and get a chance to practice them with an informed teacher grounding their study. I find it enough to do to get students to understand the author/audience/text triad and how it forms successful communication. Add in the ethos, logos, pathos triad; how to figure out an author's purpose and its effects on how a text is constructed; researching genres; the notion of discourse community; audience analysis; process writing, and you quickly come up with a rich set of critical thinking rubrics which are writing and rhetoric specific."
"At most, we've got a limited number of assignments which will fit into any 112 or 111. Here's a set of my current set of favorites:
*Research a discourse community and write a description of the kind of writing which is done in the community. Here, I try to get students to focus on a discourse community of which they are a member or which they want to join as a professional.
*For each piece of formal writing and some of the informal, write an analysis of who your audience is and what you want to accomplish with your text. I find personal metadiscourse blogs useful for this kind of writing about writing.
*Research a genre and how to write effectively in the genre. As part of this assignment, develop a format the class will follow in producing successful examples of this genre of writing. I usually ground this assignment in a researched, online review and individual, group, and class writing and discussion.
*Research an area of the writing process or your most common surface level writing problem and write a "how to" process paper in which you describe to an audience of your peers how to recognize, fix or improve your "problem."
*Write a process paper in which you describe a process you currently use. I follow up on this assignment with a discussion of process writing and Kaizen, by getting students to identify one aspect of the process they describe which they could improve via a small, high impact change, and, increasingly, with a self description of the process they have used to create a specific genre of writing and of a specific, small change to the process which could make to become more effective or efficient writers.
*Research and write about the ideas of ethos, logos, pathos, and telos. Using these terms, analyze a common communication situation such as dating, the job interview, or the teacher/student relationship.
*Using the description of the learning outcomes described in the syllabus, do an inventory of where you are as a writer and how your knowledge and skill set compares to that expected of freshman writers. Update your response to each outcome as we discuss and complete the formal writing projects in the class. As you draft and revise this inventory, make sure to make clear claims about your learning and the outcome and to support this claim with discussion, illustrations, and examples from your own writing.
*Write a cover letter for a class portfolio in which you reflect on what you have learned in the course and what you have found to be most valuable. As part of this letter, make a claim concerning the grade you believe you have earned, and provide me with sufficient reasons and examples from your work this semester to believe your claim.
*Pre-writing, proofreading, and revision exercises as part of each of the assignments."
"That's a lot to fit a year of any curriculum. Add in a growing, articulated, nuanced definition of what constitutes good writing, and there's enough to teach and do without ever once talking about high literature."
Steve
PS As a kind of footnote, I should add that I don't believe in a clear division between rhetoric, writing, and the study of literature, that is, if we see and teach literature as including a broad range of texts and literary analysis as making sense of the author's intentions and the historical and social situations in which a text did its major work. In fact, I've come to distrust easy categorizations in general in favor of the value I find in forums like this where inquiry is dialogic and insights derive from debate, messy, muddled explanations, and each insight flows out of continual discussion and reflection. My current take on the relationship between literature and writing is that both are best seen as aspects of rhetoric whose hermeneutic and composition practices interpenetrate one another. This take has me focusing on rhetoric as the more fundamental and useful methodology through which to teach writing at the freshman level, but it is just my take, and it is just my take at this moment.
The following response will help correct both oversights. It's written to colleagues--that is, college professors-- who teach freshman writing, and it's part of an ongoing conversation about the place of literature in the 101/102 sequence of courses you're currently taking. In fact, it might have some impact on how 101/102 gets taught at UAT, so feel free to wade in via the comments if you want to offer a student perspective. One of the lessons I've taught you is that what you say is driven by the audience for whom you write, so you'll find this post heavily laden with jargon and ideas specific to the discipline and profession of English. Don't worry about getting a handle on each and every idea. Do spend some time thinking about the moves I make in framing my argument.
I expect my audience to be unreceptive to the idea of not using literature as the basis of teaching freshman writing, so I work to limit and distance myself from the very arguments I introduce and want them to believe. By distancing myself and introducing each idea as tentative but well thought out, I'm hoping readers who are opposed to my stance will have faith in how I think and, hence, give my ideas more thought and closer attention.
I'm also working to frame my argument as a tentative position in an ongoing discussion. I make this move because I don't want my audience to feel they *have* to take a position in response to my argument and defend it. My purpose here is to get them thinking and, as a by product, get them questioning some of the assumptions on which their current position is based.
In part, this is an ethos move. I'm a long term member of this discourse community, and I don't want to create clear areas of intellectual turf which *have* to be defended. Mostly, it's positioning myself as a member of the community who is willing to be reasonable and change my mind, that is, if I'm given enough good reasons to so do.
In assuming this stance as an author, I encourage readers who oppose my argument to take a *higher* moral stance in which they are even more willing than I to change their minds. I encourage readers who share my position to feel good about the ethos of "our crowd," and I show readers who are undecided that my side and, in particular, I know how to participate in public, civil debate. In other words, regardless of how my opponents respond, I come out looking reasonable, possibly more reasonable than do they, and well positioned to concede any ground I need to concede.
Finally, the post may well give you some useful insights into why I designed the course as I did and where the knowledge I presented fits into the larger picture of your English curriculum.
As always, write with questions.
My post follows:
"Miles' passionate argument for the value to be derived from literary study has had me thinking a lot about my own take on how literature can be used to teach critical thinking and reading and in trying to figure out my uneasiness with using literature in my own freshman writing classes. As usual in such situations, I've fallen back on writing to try to articulate my own current thinking on the subject. Forgive a rather long post, and I share it with some trepidation, but the relationship between literary study and writing is at the heart of much of our current discussion as a writing faculty, and I wanted to spend the time it took to figure out where I stood, give Mile's argument the thought and reflection it deserves, and--most important--try to get a handle on the implications for students."
"The truth is, I don't remember ever having to come to love the "L" word. As far back as I can remember, I've been an English geek, and I've always loved literature. The desire to keep literature alive in society, more than anything else, was what brought me into the profession; and, in many instances, the insights I see students gain into their own lives through learning to interpret literature well are what have kept me going."
"My own passion for having useful stories stay in circulation is one of the reasons I love teaching American and Native literature. Listening to Native storytellers and writers, I've learned that literature isn't a nice add on for communities and individuals. It's an essential tool though which communities define their selves, survive in the face of challenge and change, and find a basis for a shared understanding of the world which unites. For me, literature isn't just one more aspect of culture; it is an essential aspect of healthy individuals, communities, and societies. Mary Lou Atawaka in _Selu_ and Leslie Silko in _Ceremony_ both write about how a shared wealth of story is "the stomach of people" and of how stories assist us in remembering who we are and in finding our place in the world."
"To help her students understand a Cherokee take on the place of literature in their lives, Atawaka shares a corn seed with each of her students . In the discussion which follows, Atawaka tells the story of Selu, the Corn Mother, and the lessons Selu has for the people. One of these lessons is:
"Eat the individual corn seed, and it will help sustain you. Plant the same seed with those of your classmates, cultivate them together, and the seeds which will sustain one of you for a short time will sustain the whole class and others; indeed, the crop you can grow will provide not only food but seeds for the community which, in its turn, will grow and prosper. But corn needs a special kind of cultivation. If a seed is planted and cultivated alone, a corn plant will grow, and it will flower, but it won't be able to produce more corn. In the kernel of corn lays the stomach of the people. To be productive, each kernel needs to be cultivated among other corn plants, and each will help pollinate the other. Literature is corn, and story lays at the literature's kernel. Both are sacred. From them we can derive harmony, the food of the individual and community, and the sharing which is the basis of each."
"Each time I teach literature, I spend a day with the students talking about story, community, and society; and, I've used Atawaka's story of the Corn Mother and distributed my share of NDN corn. I tell you this, because I want you to understand the place of literature in my own life and world and to provide a basis for a discussion of why I don't teach Western literary analysis in my writing classes."
"In other posts, I've discussed how our very love of literature can undermine the task of teaching writing. To equate literary writing with good writing or to equate literary analysis with good reading is a dangerous equation for students of writing and critical reading to adopt. Why?"
"1) Our understanding of literature and how to form our understanding of it is very much connected to our Romantic, Modernist, and Post-Modern roots. The essential lessons of each philosophy are so bound up with how literature is taught and understood in the academy and society at large that it is difficult, if not impossible to tease out the dangerous ideas from the useful. I don't want to get sidetracked too much here, but a brief overview of what I mean might be useful."
"1a) One legacy of Romanticism is the view it propagated of the author as genius. While great writing *may* be the product of genius and talent, anyone with the drive, discipline, the right rubrics and schema, and the chance to practice can produce good, solid, craftsman like writing. By good writing, I mean writing so crafted as to allow the author to accomplish his or her purposes with a text."
"Tied up in the Romantic view of the author as genius is the belief that the ability to write well is governed by talent. It isn't. Also, tied up in Romanticism is the dangerous notion that one is either right brain or left, good in math or in the humanities, and if one is good in the sciences or technology, one isn't good in English. We've all dealt with the legacies of this last, but the single most dangerous legacy of the Romantic view of author is the arrogance which accompanies the Romantic author's view of his or her self. Whenever we provide a basis for the individual to cultivate the belief they are of higher sensibility (however you want to define that last), we are on dangerous ground. Think of Hitler and Superman here if you want. I usually think of Elias Boudinot and how his view of himself as a Romantic author contributed to the death of most of two generations of Cherokees along the Trail of Tears."
"1b) If anything, the legacy of Modernism is worse. If literature is to have any use in the world outside of producing pretty words and insightful prose, not that these last aren't useful, it has to be part of how society works, not a separate category of thought requiring an elite, hyper-trained intelligence or an absurd amount of leisure. The Romantics began the focus on the individual at the cost of community engagement, but the Modernists brought the notion to full flower. With the Modernist, there's a nostalgia for the social role literature and the author once played in society, but too often it's a despairing nostalgia. I'm a firm believer that it was the Modernists view of literature which combined with a research orientated professorial chaste to make the study and appreciation of literature much more difficult than it needs to be. Add in author/critic Romantic arrogance, American Anti-Intellectualism, and the high vs low literature split, and you have a recipe for the study of literature being seen as irrelevant to how the majority of society lives. If you're looking for someone to blame for the increasingly marginalized place of literature in society, you could do much worse than to look at the Victorian 'Art for Art's Sake' crowd and the disciples of Eliot. We live with the legacy of making literature an intellectuals' sport rather than a lived part of the citizen creating a good life and a working community."
"1c) Post-Modernism is too easy a target. It is the natural by-product of the Romantics and Modernists. We communicate every day, and we manage to do things useful work with writing; but, Post-Modernism celebrates the breakdown of communication and an Existential and Linguistic explanations of why communication doesn't and can't work. These explanations, in turn, are derived from the false dichotomy of idealism and realism. Add in the emphasis our culture places on novelty, as opposed to the value of creation within a set of assumed limitations of genre, and you have folks assuming the paradoxical stance of creating works which celebrate the "new" insight that they can't be understood. Such Play is dangerous, that is, if it's taken to the extreme suggested by the logic of Relativism."
"1d) My point here is that students bring all these existing rhetorics to our English/writing classes which explain why literature isn't important and shouldn't be, and they can fall back on any of them to rationalize a lack of success and, worse, unwillingness to do the work required to become a good writer. Regardless of the truth behind these rhetorics, they allow students to view literary analysis is an elitist activity with little (if any) connection to their lived world and where many professionals are willing to admit 'right'--as opposed to 'better'--interpretations are impossible. From the right perspective, these beliefs are partly true and very useful. This is the main reason I find it easier to approach teaching writing as a separate field of study only tangentially related to the study of literature, and I actively work against the identification of English classes and the profession as a whole with literary study."
"2) My next point is an obvious insight, but it's one, as trained professionals of literary interpretation, we too often forget, namely, just as the use of genre or the assumptions about the roles of audiences and authors are specific to discourse communities, so to are interpretative rubrics. The theories of hermeneutics which govern how we construct interpretations in literary study are part and parcel of our discourse community and the ideas of the professional reader and critic which have governed it."
"While many of our practices, like close reading, can translate well into other disciplines and ways of looking at the world, they are far from the only useful ways of looking at the world, that is, the only critical thinking and reading rubrics which need to be learned. On a related note, our students often bring extensive training in the interpretative rubrics of literary analysis. Talk to many of them, and they'll describe high school English as a series of courses which consisted of little writing and much reading of literary texts, classroom discussion of these texts, and attempts to learn rubrics and the use of rhetorical device such as irony, tone, and symbolism."
"The fact that this focus on literary device and writing which is aware of itself as high literature is a product of Modernism and New Criticism--that is, the product of hermeneutic and professional legacies specific to literary study as a discipline in the 20th Century--is lost on most, if not all freshman. A nuanced view of how we as a discourse community interpret literature as just one among many competing theories of how to construct interpretations isn't a view easily fit into a writing course, that is, without spending a *lot* of time on the history of literary study, information which most students will never need to know."
"As a side note, one reason I get so excited about the Reynold's Learning Communities and Writing Across Communities is that I can borrow a focus on other critical thinking and interpretative rubrics or, more precisely, I can let other teachers focus on these rubrics, and I can spend my time teaching writing and its interpretative rubrics instead of how to construct a good literary interpretation."
"3) All this brings me to what I consider the most essential point, namely, there are enough reading rubrics specific to rhetoric and writing to take up any one year of the curriculum; and, for most students, freshman writing will be one of the few moments in a crowded curriculum where they will get exposure to writing specific interpretative rubrics and get a chance to practice them with an informed teacher grounding their study. I find it enough to do to get students to understand the author/audience/text triad and how it forms successful communication. Add in the ethos, logos, pathos triad; how to figure out an author's purpose and its effects on how a text is constructed; researching genres; the notion of discourse community; audience analysis; process writing, and you quickly come up with a rich set of critical thinking rubrics which are writing and rhetoric specific."
"At most, we've got a limited number of assignments which will fit into any 112 or 111. Here's a set of my current set of favorites:
*Research a discourse community and write a description of the kind of writing which is done in the community. Here, I try to get students to focus on a discourse community of which they are a member or which they want to join as a professional.
*For each piece of formal writing and some of the informal, write an analysis of who your audience is and what you want to accomplish with your text. I find personal metadiscourse blogs useful for this kind of writing about writing.
*Research a genre and how to write effectively in the genre. As part of this assignment, develop a format the class will follow in producing successful examples of this genre of writing. I usually ground this assignment in a researched, online review and individual, group, and class writing and discussion.
*Research an area of the writing process or your most common surface level writing problem and write a "how to" process paper in which you describe to an audience of your peers how to recognize, fix or improve your "problem."
*Write a process paper in which you describe a process you currently use. I follow up on this assignment with a discussion of process writing and Kaizen, by getting students to identify one aspect of the process they describe which they could improve via a small, high impact change, and, increasingly, with a self description of the process they have used to create a specific genre of writing and of a specific, small change to the process which could make to become more effective or efficient writers.
*Research and write about the ideas of ethos, logos, pathos, and telos. Using these terms, analyze a common communication situation such as dating, the job interview, or the teacher/student relationship.
*Using the description of the learning outcomes described in the syllabus, do an inventory of where you are as a writer and how your knowledge and skill set compares to that expected of freshman writers. Update your response to each outcome as we discuss and complete the formal writing projects in the class. As you draft and revise this inventory, make sure to make clear claims about your learning and the outcome and to support this claim with discussion, illustrations, and examples from your own writing.
*Write a cover letter for a class portfolio in which you reflect on what you have learned in the course and what you have found to be most valuable. As part of this letter, make a claim concerning the grade you believe you have earned, and provide me with sufficient reasons and examples from your work this semester to believe your claim.
*Pre-writing, proofreading, and revision exercises as part of each of the assignments."
"That's a lot to fit a year of any curriculum. Add in a growing, articulated, nuanced definition of what constitutes good writing, and there's enough to teach and do without ever once talking about high literature."
Steve
PS As a kind of footnote, I should add that I don't believe in a clear division between rhetoric, writing, and the study of literature, that is, if we see and teach literature as including a broad range of texts and literary analysis as making sense of the author's intentions and the historical and social situations in which a text did its major work. In fact, I've come to distrust easy categorizations in general in favor of the value I find in forums like this where inquiry is dialogic and insights derive from debate, messy, muddled explanations, and each insight flows out of continual discussion and reflection. My current take on the relationship between literature and writing is that both are best seen as aspects of rhetoric whose hermeneutic and composition practices interpenetrate one another. This take has me focusing on rhetoric as the more fundamental and useful methodology through which to teach writing at the freshman level, but it is just my take, and it is just my take at this moment.
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