Responding to Student Essays

One of your most time-consuming tasks in teaching freshman writing will be to respond, evaluate, and critique your students' work. Most likely you will have twenty students (and some have two classes, so multiply by two), and in addition, you have graduate study of your own. So in addition to the sheer amount of pages, you also need to account for ways to 1.) Gain students' trust in your judgment, 2.) Understand what you are asking for, and 3.) Not overwhelm them.

The last, I think is the hardest. Regardless of how students feel about any given assignment, their writing is highly personal to them. It is difficult for them not to take critique as personal to themselves rather than merely about improving a piece of writing. Like it or not, their feelings are involved, and alienating them risks their ignoring all of the hard work you put in to help them.

You will have read commenting strategies from twelve different readers, and I'm sure that you noticed that their styles are very different ones. Their choices are determined by their various theoretical beliefs about writing, their interactions with their students, and their teaching experience. Ultimately you will all choose the style most appropriate to yourselves, but you should also bear in mind how your students may react. Some will be very sensitive to even the slightest negative comment..there's no help for that except reassurance that you are trying to help. Others may be quite open to comments no matter how harsh. Most students are averse to humorous comments--to them, the grade they will receive is serious business. Some will want more comments, but most can get by with less. They can only focus one two or three things at a time, realistically; and grammar, though important, should not be the first of them.

If our goal is to push them to think harder and more deeply, focusing on the surface errors encourages them to do the same, when what you really want is more development.

To save time, you can use one of several rubrics available in texts and online, but bear in mind that each student is an individual, and will need and deserve personal attention. Try to avoid the "rubber-stamp" comment ( "Introductions should pull the reader in and tell them what the essay is about") in favor of ones that take into account that essay particularly. Specifics are always more helpful, and class meetings are when discussion of the general parts of the essay and their purposes should take place.

There's no easy way to respond to students that I know of that is fast or easy. Sorry about that...just keep thinking about how much better they'll write--and how much more they'll be able to accomplish in life with these skills to back them up!

Writing a Syllabus

It seems to me that most teachers see the syllabus as a thankless task that needs to be accomplished; we tend to rush through these (and often, to be honest, have less time to accomplish them than we need). Syllabi are vital to good instruction, and are indispensable to assessing both the outcomes of our individual students and to our programs. Writing one with little or no teaching experience is a daunting task; yet all of us have to write our first. Perhaps it is easier to think of the syllabus for your course as a writing task, just like the ones your students will be assigned over the course of the semester. It also has a particular audience--and that audience is both the students and the Writing Program/Department. It also has a rhetorical stance and purpose--it organizes you and your students. It will set the tone for the class depending on your diction and structure. Are you formal or informal? Flexible or not so? Demanding but fair?

You can't go wrong if you go about the task by thinking first: "What do my students need to know?" and then "What will they want to know?" After that, you should also think about how you want them to act, what you want things to look like, etc. Policies and procedures protect both you and your student--they state up front exactly what students have to do and how you want it done. They should be clear and concise. They should not have any typos or errors if you expect perfection in your students' work. They should contain any information about the course where students will be expected to follow directions.

Your day-to-day schedule may change slightly to accommodate vagaries of the classroom and students; but the overall plan should remain the same. Once you teach a course more than once, you will revise (nearly guaranteed--I still do all the time) but it should cover anything you can think of as necessary information.

I can't stress enough how important your outcomes (objectives) are...this is the glue that holds everything together. If students have met all of the outcomes for the course (or even just most of them) you have done your job and they have done theirs.

Joe Williams and Error

"Phenomenology of Error" began as an article that later became the text Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. One reason that I always use this article is that it tends to put errors in grammar and syntax into perspective for both students and teachers. There is no question that without those two qualities, any given piece of writing may be unreadable even with the best intentions of students; but somehow errors that students make in these areas irritate or anger instructors far out of proportion to their importance en fin. The other problem for students is that each instructor has her own pet peeves grammatically speaking, and students often must write without knowing which are most important to their instructor.

Williams divides the plethora of "common errors in usage" into three categories: those that no native speaker of English will make when not distracted and that all English speakers will notice; those that most English speakers and writers will notice most of the time; and those that almost no one will notice (except for the most grammar conscious of English instructors). This makes the task for students who may not have spent any time with grammar in the last few years more manageable. If they concentrate on the middle category, they have less to look out for and feel less stressed by the line-editing of their essays and can concentrate on the idea that they wish to convey.

Grammar should never be a part of the composing process, and should not get much consideration upon revision unless the error obscures meaning completely. The time for editing spelling, typos, and other issues of structure should only occur after the major content revisions are complete. This process is far more efficient (after all, students may delete entire sentences and add more before they finish creating meaning in an essay, and the effort of editing is wasted on those sentences), and allows them to focus on more global issues.

I have used Style as my rhetoric text in ENGL 190 several times, and find that it helps students out immensely. It is highly readable, and at the same time passes on all of the most pertinent stylistic information to them. In addition to instruction from this text, I also feel free to share with my students the grammatical missteps that tend to irk me: passive voice that is out of place, using "that" when referring to a person ("who"), and excessive use of commas. That way, if they don't have a strong background in grammar coming into class, they can avoid the ones that really bug me while they work on the others.

Thinking about Audience

Gerald Graff talks a bit about the foreignness of classical argument in "Clueless in Academe." This causes me to re-think how I teach the idea of the various audiences for an argumentative essay to my students. They tend to think that there is only one kind of audience, and the same argument will convince everyone; so I started out by comparing argument to a chess game. The object of the game is to take the king; whatever other pieces you lose along the way may not matter too much, as long as you have the "right" pieces to corner the king and eventually take it.

I found out that not too many of my students play chess, so I tried to come up with something from within their own experience. Then I hit on something that they all might be able to relate to that varies audience and how they approach the topic. The one I used most recently is the argument that you would make to convince a parent to let you borrow the car: suppose that you know that your mother is a push-over for anything that you want--the flimsiest of reasons will convince her--and she reacts well to an emotional argument. Further suppose that your father is usually more difficult to convince, and that you will need good, strong, logical reasons to convince him. Construct two separate arguments, one for each person, taking into account the "biases" that they have.

I've done the same kind of exercise with dating (ever popular). Assume that you are pretty sure one guy (or girl) is already interested in you, one hardly knows you are alive, and one is straddling the fence--some days he or she seems interested, others not. Construct a different "date" that you think will be convincing to each possible partner.

It doesn't require that they know anything more than the usual about dating (or borrowing the car) but gets them thinking about who they are talking to...

Our First Reading

I like to start with Mike Rose because he has a really good outlook on students and their problems.  He was not a "model" student himself, and so he understands what's going on in students' heads.  "I just Wanna Be Average" is one chapter of his book, Lives on the Boundary.