Writing

 

MU endorses the principles of the “writing-across-the-curriculum” movement which holds that instructors in all disciplines (and at all levels of teaching) share a responsibility for helping students learn to become better writers. The Campus Writing Program exists to support instructors in this mission. This section of the Manual offers practical information that teachers in all disciplines can use.

Every teacher should know MU’s writing requirement: All undergraduates receiving a degree must complete English 1000 Exposition and Argumentation (first-year composition) taught in the English Department and a prerequisite for:

• WI #1, a 1000- or 2000-level course taken anywhere in the MU curriculum taught by faculty in the disciplines
• WI #2, a 3000- or 4000-level course taken in the major taught by faculty in the disciplines

“WI” refers to courses that are formally designated “writing-intensive”after the faculty member has submitted a proposal. (TAs may not teach WI courses.) You can see MU’s Guidelines for WI Courses at http://cwp.missouri.edu. Students may, if they wish, take both WI courses at the 3000- or 4000-level. They may not take both at the 1000- or 2000-level.

 

Reasons to Use Writing in Your Teaching

• Students learn better
• Students become more engaged in the course
• Writing helps develop other skills sought in college

 

What Students Want when Teachers Assign Writing

 Students have remarkably clear and coherent ideas about what they appreciate and respect when teachers assign writing. They list three crucial features:

1. immediate and detailed feedback on written (and oral) work
2. high demands and standards placed upon them, but with plentiful opportunities to revise and improve their work before it receives a grade, thereby allowing them to learn form their mistakes
3. frequent checkpoints such as quizzes, tests, brief papers, or oral exams

The key is that most students feel they learn best when they receive frequent evaluation, combined with the opportunity to revise their work and improve it over time. (Light, Richard J. 1990. The Harvard Assessment Seminars, 8-9.)

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A Writing “Continuum”

 Writing might be thought of as occurring along a continuum, from informal to formal, with multiple points along the way. The ends of the continuum look something like this:

Informal writing is usually

• low stakes (ungraded or a small portion of an overall grade)
• only the first or second draft of something (not yet fully revised or edited)
• personal (the audience is oneself or a close peer)
• thinking-on-paper (to discover, develop, or clarify one’s ideas)
• “mechanics” are unimportant (the writing is still in progress)
• “writing-to-learn”

Formal writing is usually

• high stakes (graded or a very important document)
• a much later draft (carefully revised and edited)
• public (the audience is farther away, like a teacher or one’s boss)
• analytical or critical (the thinking is worked out; an argument is being made)
• “mechanics” are extremely important (correctness matters)
• “writing-to-communicate”

A combination of informal and formal writing assignments is usually helpful for students. When teachers get writing from students that is poor, often the student has turned in writing that is too close to the informal end of the continuum. Teachers can use this knowledge of a continuum to help students improve their writing by making students aware that good writing almost always requires a process before the final product is ready. One way is to give assignments in stages or steps, moving students through a learning path so they discover something worth saying.

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Using Informal Writing in Your Teaching

Teachers and students alike find that informal writing:

• Aids self-discovery
• Helps form ideas
• Enables problem solving
• Promotes decision making
• Furthers understanding of content
• Develops critical thinking
• Helps retain knowledge
• Deepens engagement w/material
• Enhances learning

 

John Bean’s excellent book Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom offers these twenty-five ideas for using informal writing. These come from pages 104-115. Easy-to-access descriptions for using them are in Chapter 6, “Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities.”

In-Class Writing

1. Writing at the beginning of class to probe a subject

2. Writing during class to refocus a lagging discussion or cool off a heated one

3. Writing during class to ask questions or express confusion

4. Writing at the end of class to sum up a lecture or discussion

 

Journals

5. Open-ended journals

6. Semi-structured journals

7. Guided journals

8. Double-entry notebooks

9. "What I observed/what I thought" laboratory notebooks

10. Contemporary issues journals

11. Exam preparation journals

 

Reading Journals or Reading Logs

12. Marginal notes or focused reading notes

13. Readings’ logs or summary/response notebooks

14. Student responses to reading guides

15. Imagined interviews with authors

 

Creativity Exercises

16. Writing dialogues

17. Writing bio-poems

18. Metaphor games, extended analogies

 

Others

19. Occasional thought letters

20. Electronic mail

21. Exploration tasks to guide "invention" for a formal writing assignment

22. Portfolio system

23. Practice essay exams

24. Thesis statement writing

25. Frame paragraphs

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Tips for Designing Good Formal Writing Assignments

Start with your overall course objectives clearly in mind, and make sure the assignment reinforces them. If the writing assignment does not tie to your course goals, students will perceive it as busy work.

 

Use problems from your discipline rather than topics. For example:

Topic (from Communication): Select two television commercials and write a coherent essay about how myth is used to create consumer demand.

Problem : As a new staff member for a small marketing firm, you’ve been asked to advise a manufacturer about marketing its new widget on television. How might you suggest the firm use the concept of myth to create consumer demand?

Topic (from History): Drawing on our recent lectures and readings, write a five-page essay describing African women's experience of colonial rule in Nigeria.

Problem: You've just been hired as a script writer for a major motion picture studio. Your first project is to transform Buchi Emechita's Joy of Motherhood into a film script for Steven Spielberg—but he wants to change the ending so that it’s more upbeat. Write him a three-page memo arguing why this will (or will not) work.

If students are new to your discipline and to the conventions in which your field thinks and writes, make your expectations as clear as possible. Don’t assume they know what a literature review or a critical essay looks like in your field; show them.

If the assignment is long, break it into parts that are turned in sequentially. Give students an opportunity (or require them) to revise their writing based on feedback from you.

Give students a scoring guide or rubric tailored to the assignment, so they know what you’re looking for and how you will evaluate the writing. This will require more time on the front end for you, but will save much time on the commenting and grading end. It also reduces student grade complaints.

 

Tips for Responding to and Grading Student Writing

 Look for ideas, not errors; put most of your effort into commenting on the quality of the content and argument (see last point below); it helps if you read the whole paper first before marking on it

• Use your comments to encourage revision, rather than justify the grade
• Limit your comments to three or four main items to work on in one revision
• Point out what’s working well
• Hold students accountable for correcting their own “mechanical” errors; don’t do their editing for them; require students to own a handbook or look online for grammar help
• Put minimal comments on final drafts of papers; your input is more valuable when students can still revise what they’re writing
• Refer students to one of MU’s writing centers:
  • Student Success Center for non-WI classes
  • Campus Writing Program in 325 GCB for WI classes
  • Total Person Program for student athletes
• Focus on higher-order concerns first, lower order concerns later

Higher order	Lower order
meets the assignment	grammatical errors
has a thesis (if required)	misspellings
makes an argument	punctuation mistakes
uses appropriate evidence	style
is organized

 

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How to Save Time When Using Writing in Your Teaching

John Bean offers these proven strategies for managing the workload when teachers assign writing. These come from pages 237-238 and are described in Chapter 13, “Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Paper Load.”

1. Design good assignments
2. Clarify your grading criteria
3. Devote a class hour to generating ideas
4. Have students submit something to you early in the writing process
5. Have students be the first readers of each other's drafts (i.e., use peer review)
6. Refer students to your writing center
7. Make one-on-one conferences efficient
8. Consider holding group conferences early in the writing process
9. Use efficient methods for giving feedback on papers
10. Put minimal comments on finished products that will not be revised

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For More Information on Writing, Teaching, and Learning:

 On Campus

Campus Writing Program offers Faculty Workshops every fall and winter the week before classes start. Faculty receives stipends for attending. Call 882-4881.

Online Resources

Campus Writing Program’s website: http://cwp.missouri.edu

Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu

Print Resources

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

Gottschalk, Katherine and Keith Hjortshoj. (2004). The Elements of Teaching Writing: A Resource for Instructors in All Disciplines. Bedford/St. Martin’s: Boston & New York.

 

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Contributed by Martha Townsend, Director, Campus Writing Program and Associate Professor of English