Observe, Think, Write, Reflect, Repeat. Not Necessarily in That Order.

I finished my first round of conferences with my ENG 215 students this week. Their first project is what we might call a "demi discourse analysis" of a scholarly and a popular source on the same topic. It's time-consuming but I like giving feedback in conferences a lot more than I like just collecting drafts, writing feedback all over them, and handing them back. It was an especially fascinating, exciting, and exhausting three days for me, as it's the first time I've taught this project and I was both nervous and eager to see, in my students' drafts, what they'd learned in the past few weeks about discourse analysis and, though their analyses, about the discourses of the fields they're majoring in. As usual, when I talk with my students about what they're writing and why, I learn a lot not only about my own teaching, but about their prior writing experiences.

Here's one thing I noticed:

A lot of my students focused at least in part on "credibility markers" as a significant discourse feature. Most of them reduced "credibility markers" to "citations" and many proceeded to not only describe the type and frequency of citations, but to make evaluative claims about the trustworthiness of the sources based solely on that. What I inferred from this: we tout peer reviewed sources as the "gold standard" for academic writing in FYC, and our students have bought into it heavily, and mostly uncritically. This is a problem.

I am pleased to say, however, that some of my students did hesitantly, haltingly, apologetically push back against their own parroting of this narrow FYC-induced view of credibility, which opened up a neat learning space for us to think and talk about how we construct credibility in a more nuanced way. In the future when I assign some version of this project, I'll be sure to spend class time exploring this before drafts are due.

Another (related) thing I noticed:

It's genuinely hard for my students to describe discourse features without also passing judgment on them--regardless of how often I've pushed back against the idea that any particular discourse feature or convention is objectively, universally better or worse than another. I'm not sure if this is because of prior academic writing instruction (I suspect so, at least in part, but I think it might also be a cognitive development thing; as Andrea Lunsford said at an IHR seminar I attended last week, composition studies needs to pay more attention to neuroscience) but it seems to me that in teaching "critical thinking" we might be putting a little too much emphasis on the "critical" and not enough on the "thinking"--and definitely not enough on observing--an essential part of the process that is totally elided by the term itself. I'm reminded of Samuel Scudder's classic essay, "Learning to See." Are we so concerned with teaching our students how to write arguments (that is, to make claims and support them with reasons and data) that we're neglecting to teach them to really, really look at the data, and to think about it deeply, before deciding what to say about it?

These problems are, of course, partly the result of the absurd impossibility of having to teach "college-level writing" to a couple of dozen students in sixteen weeks or less. No curriculum is going to be able to do it all, and even if we could strike a perfect balance in a given semester, we can't necessarily control what skills and concepts and notions about writing our students carry with them once they leave us behind.

OK, two more things, really quick:

Thesis statements often have to be revised, sometimes significantly, after a draft is written. This surprises and troubles my students, until I tell them it always works that way for me, too. We don't just write to report what we think. We write to learn what we think.

Writing a conclusion is hard. Really, really hard. And no formula or procedure I've ever heard or ever given has ever actually worked at all consistently. There are as many ways to write a conclusion as there are papers. Possibly more. If you think I'm wrong--if you have a foolproof method for writing conclusions, please, please share it. I will thank you and so will my students. And so will our readers.

Image Source: ASU Writing Programs. Tag, you're it!