composition

Last week, I had to read Mina Shaughnessy's 1976 essay "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing" for our professional development session at the writing center where I work. I've read her book Errors and Expectations (1977), but this was the first time that I had a chance to read any of her shorter works. Though the article is nearly 40 years old, the problems and solutions described by Shaughnessy are still applicable today. Shaughnessy's main argument in the piece is that educators need to stop considering basic writing "a writing course for young men and women who have many things wrong with them" (291). Instead, she argues that writing instructors need to begin to examine their own teaching and learning processes and the complex and contextual needs of their students. To show how these issues manifest themselves in the university, Shaughnessy outlines a "developmental scale for teachers," complete with four stages. They are: Guarding ...

The Four Big To-Dos of #4C13 It's been a week and a half since I returned from the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication in Las Vegas, NV. I wanted to avoid the bombardment of #4C13 posts that immediately followed the conference. But now that a little time has passed, I want to share with you what I learned during my (way too brief) time at CCCCs. These are a few things you should be doing if you are interested in the field of Composition. Stop Being Afraid of Data In the panels I attended and presented in, one thing became obvious: there is need for more empirical and qualitative research. While "big data" has become a buzz word, the presentations that I attended that were based on empirical and/or qualitative research were doing important work that managed to speak into the needs of students and other developing writers while still taking into account the concerns administrators and other stakeholders in the education field. Research enabled these p...

If you’re reading this post, it means I've landed safely in sunny Las Vegas, NV and am most likely sitting comfortably in the Riveria Hotel, where the 64 th annual Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) is being held. I’m a first-time attendee this year. The theme, “the public work of composition,” drew me in, being that it speaks directly into one of my research interests, Public Discourse. On the schedule are many interesting panels, ranging from inquiries into digital literacy and service learning to “everyday writing” and writing centers. Scholars such as Kathleen Blake Yancey, Victor Villanueva, and Ellen Cushman, will be presenting. I am also looking forward to seeing the familiar faces of some of my favorite professors and classmates. Anne Ellen Geller’s presentation is “ Waiting for IRB: Researching Seniors' Meaningful Writing Experiences across Three Institutions” (C.14). Harry Denny will present at a panel titled “Developing Methods for Self-Spo...

Today, as I attempted to prep students for one-on-one conferences, I had them answer a list of questions to bring to our meeting. My last questions was "Do you have any questions for me about writing?" I expected a bunch of requests for specific instruction, such as "how do I write the perfect conclusion?" or "what are some ways I can come up with topics?", but what I got instead were several questions about my own experiences with writing. They asked me about my feelings about writing, whether I deal with constraints, the kinds of vocabulary I use when I write, why I teach writing the way I do, who my favorite authors are, and what I consider "good" writing. I guess what this suggests to me is that I need to be more transparent about my own struggles and successes with writing. Students want to know who their teacher is as a writer. They don't seem to want to me to establish credibility and claim myself as a writer. Instead, it seems like th...

Two days a week, I work in a writing center. I have been working there since July of 2009, with one break in between to do a year of a Doctoral Fellowship. The whole experience has been wonderful. I learned a great deal of what I know about teaching writing and performing Writing Studies scholarship in this center. Because I have been there for a while, I also have the pleasure of helping to train new tutors (we call them "writing consultants"). In this particular center, we typically have a summer training session, where we role play and read articles related to writing centers and writing studies. Then, we move into a mentorship phase. For the first week, a new consultant will observe the sessions of an experienced consultant mentor. After a session or during downtime, the new and experienced consultants talk about those observations and any lingering questions. The following week are "training wheels" sessions. The new consultants hold their own sessions while th...

Today, I went back through my folders of research, trying to get back in the swing of the semester. I picked up the article "Composing for Delivery" by Kate Kessler. The article was initially published in the November 2005 edition of The English Journal.  In this article, Kessler makes a fairly convincing argument for doing what she calls "composing for delivery" or creating "a call to write" for students in a Composition course. Building off the fifth canon of classical rhetoric, delivery, she implements a curriculum that forces students to write for purposes beyond the classroom (which, may I add, she never denotes as "real world"). She finds that as a result of this method students learn to compose with their own purposes in mind while also considering audience and effective rhetoric. In this particular article, Kessler observes how students develop rhetorical sensitivity through letter writing (actually mailed to the intended audience) and pr...

The semester is now officially wrapped up, and I've sent in all my grades. Grades, as many of you probably know by now, are the bane of my existence. I hate giving them. Sometimes, I'm not even sure I know how to do  it. Evaluating writing is so subjective, even when you try to be consistent and objective. So this post is kind of a -- in the words of one of my fabulous students -- "am I doing this right?" sort of thing. I've traded out the standard system of grading each paper for a 50/50 contract/portfolio grading method. The contract grade is based on participation, completion of blogs and small writing assignments, and turning in drafts of major assignments. Everything must be done on-time and according to assignment criteria in order to be given full credit. Anything turned in after the cut-off date gets no credit. The portfolio is grading according to the department standards for A, B, C, D, or F. The thing is when you give students a chance to revise their d...