THOUGHTS ON USING WRITING IN YOUR OWN CLASS

WRITING AS A PROCESS. Recent innovations in the teaching of writing point to guiding students through a process, from brainstorming to performing research to drafting to revising to editing. Rather than simply giving a writing assignment and setting a due date, try setting several due dates and giving students a bit of feedback along the way. For example, you might require: 1) a one-paragraph proposal; 2) a progress report on research done; 3) a first draft; 4) a penultimate draft; 5) a closely edited final draft. Response can be minimal and might include one brief out-of-class appointment.

"RESPONDING" VS. GRADING. Most teacher responses to student writing are aimed at assessing how well or poorly the student answered the assignment--aimed, mostly, at justifying a letter grade. As an alternative to assessing or grading, try simply responding to student writing and inviting the student to revise. Elaine O. Lees points to many possible responses beyond merely "correcting," including: describing (telling a student what you think he/she has intended and accomplished); suggesting (offering a variety of solutions to a student's specific problem in a text); questioning (leading a student toward his/her own solutions); reminding (pointing to ways in which the original assignment might be better addressed); and assigning (rephrasing or even reinventing the assignment based on what a student has written so far). Such responses are not so much "summative" (in the sense that they sum up a judgment of a text) as they are "formative" (in the sense that they encourage revision), and are appropriate responses in the context of teaching writing as a process.

"WRITING TO LEARN" VS. "LEARNING TO WRITE." Since composition classrooms are devoted to teaching students how to write, faculty outside the composition program sometimes assume that using writing in their classrooms entails the same thing: teaching students to write. While faculty in many disciplines may in fact teach students how historians, biologists, or engineers write, they can also use a "writing to learn" approach. In other words, rather than focusing on mastery of writing skills, they can use writing to help students master subject matter. Not every writing assignment needs to be a formal essay, and not every assignment needs to be assessed for correctness. Some writing can be read only for a students command of key concepts in the class.

USING JOURNALS. In "Journal Writing Across the Curriculum," Toby E. Fulwiler argues that "assigning journals increases writing fluency, facilitates learning, and promotes cognitive growth, regardless of class size or disciplinary specialization." Journal entries can be assigned as homework: summaries of reading assignments, responses to lecture material, or answers to specific questions. Or journal writing can be done spontaneously at the beginning, middle, or end of a class to access students' prior knowledge of material, to test students comprehension of material, to set up a lively discussion of material. Respond to journals in the spirit in which they are written: briefly and informally, entering a notation in the gradebook that indicates only that a student completed the work. Or don't respond to individual student work at all, asking them instead to share their writing in small groups, to read passages aloud to the full class, or to duplicate and distribute passages to the class.

USING A VARIETY OF ASSIGNMENTS. Virginia Anderson, Professor of Biology at Towson State University, suggests a number of brief "writing to learn" writing activities to complement teaching in any classroom. They include asking students to summarize the major points of the course so far as way of preparing them for a lecture; asking students to generate visual representations of course material (graphs, charts, tables) with prose explanations; asking students to write questions about concepts that are unclear to them; and asking students to write answers to each other's questions.