The Center for Writing Excellence

Guiding Assumptions

• That enriched writing is a philosophy, not a technique. Amounts and types of writing will necessarily differ from discipline to discipline, but what unites these courses across the curriculum is the idea that writing will enhance learning in any discipline if it is a basic teaching strategy.
• That writing will be a significant method students will use for understanding and communicating course content.
• That students will be informed in a syllabus at the beginning of a course that it is writing intensive and that their writing will be a significant part of their evaluations.
• That instructors are committed to providing meaningful and timely feedback to students about their writing.

Recommendations and Suggestions

Because the possibilities for interpreting the above principles are so vast and because designing writing exercises may be new to many instructors, below are some issues to be considered when creating new courses or revising current ones.

How frequently and how much should students write? Writing is at least 25% of the course work. The guideline for how much writing students should produce is approximately 5,000 words or the equivalent of 20 typed pages, some of which may be informal and not typed at all, e.g. journals, project logs, reflections. Students will have opportunities for multiple writing and feedback. However, one should also consider other defining criterion appropriate to the discipline: How complex is the writing task? Can complex tasks be broken down into component parts? For example, a history or sociology or health course might require a research paper involving forty or fifty sources. For that course, the paper, perhaps with one revision and one or two preliminary research summaries might serve. But a literature or biology or art history course might best be designed so that students comment on class readings or fieldwork or slides every day or so. Both formats could be considered “writing enriched.”

How many kinds (or forms) of writing should be incorporated into the mix of assignments? For some courses, practicing one form (the report, the essay, the feature article, the annotation) may be the best way to unlock content. For others, a mix of forms will better serve the students (the letter and the journal entry and the short research paper and the long term paper). Whether one form or many, when writing is a significant part of the student’s work and course evaluation, the course is considered “writing-enriched.”

How much revision should students be expected to do? For some courses writing a new version (e.g. a new letter, a new book review) is as effective as revising earlier versions. For other disciplines, reworking an item is the only way to master the form. It is probably true, however, that if a specific assignment is not revised, then the student ought to at least practice the form several times.

Should the writing be formal or informal? Informal writing includes such tasks as keeping journals, writing up notes, recording personal observations, reacting to speakers or films in class. Formal writing includes clearly defined forms appropriate to the discipline, perhaps the research paper in biology, the market survey in advertising, the proposal in engineering, critical or evaluative writing in studio arts courses. A course with either formal or informal writing could satisfy the notion of “enriched.” However, we urge a mixture of both.

Could team projects, which produce a final written report, qualify as enriched writing? In some disciplines—engineering, business, education, communications — team projects are central to their educational philosophies. But in these cases, it is sometimes difficult to be certain that a specific individual actually did any writing. The whole point of a team project, after all, is for the students to learn teamwork. But a team course could be made “writing-enriched” and still use the team concept with some adaptations. There is the “magazine model,” in which students are supposed to sign their sections of the project (much as a writer has a byline in a magazine). Or there is the “peer review model,” in which students are asked to write individual critiques of other projects (much as an academic paper with many authors is reviewed by selected individuals).

Should evaluation of student writing be by the instructor only or by peers? Both techniques are used widely and successfully. The advantage of the peer review system is that students learn from others and that they receive feedback and perspectives other than that of the instructor. It also helps students to become thoughtful critical readers of other texts, student or otherwise. The disadvantage of the peer review approach is students can be very unskilled in reading carefully for weaknesses and strengths; thus, it requires that the instructor (or the instructor in collaboration with the WAC program) model for and train students in appropriate peer critique and response.

Should writing be “taught” directly or just assigned as part of coursework? The intent of officially recognized writing-enriched courses is to provide some instruction in writing appropriate to the course and the discipline. However, we understand that in ten weeks it is difficult to balance both the discipline’s core material and writing instruction. If one has to cover the nineteenth century or the principles of supply and demand or the psychology of the third grader, is there time to explain how to improve writing? Here again, individual instructors will have to judge the needs of their students to decide how much class time is needed for instruction, but use of detailed handouts or web sites about the writing assignments can supplement classroom time without shortchanging instruction of other material.

Conclusion

These guidelines and recommendations are deliberately vague in order to allow for a variety of writing-enriched courses. Ideally enriched writing courses lead to meaningful learning and better communication skills. Experience and experimentation will lead instructors to create a balance of assignments that is right for their students, one that will push students to understand and communicate more deeply about the content of the discipline.

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Guided-Journal Tasks Keyed to Your Lectures
For this approach the instructor creates guided-journal tasks that encourage students to use information from the lectures. For example, these tasks can ask students to tie lecture material to their own experiences, to reapply information gained from the lecture to new contexts, to consider the pros and cons of certain propositions in the lectures, or to design new questions based on the lecture. The important component here is to create tasks that can only be completed if the student paid close attention to the lecture.

A second approach for the use of guided-journal tasks (or in-class freewrites) is “to engage students with a problem that the day’s lecture will address or to activate prior learning and personal experience that will facilitate learning of new material.” For example, if your lecture for the day is going to address a new mathematical equation, you can begin by asking students to discuss ways in which they would apply that mathematical equation in their personal lives. By allowing students the opportunity to relate in-class information with real life, it becomes easier for them to apply that information to other concepts and/or other disciplines. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.)

See Chapter Six, pages 107-108 of Engaging Ideas, for an explanation of guided-journals; see Chapter Seven for suggestions on the design for tasks.

Feedback Lectures
In a feedback lecture, the instructor allows time for the students to comment on what needs clarification or to address a thought problem provided in the midst of the lecture. During an appropriate time in the lecture, the instructor pauses to provide space for the students to write for several minutes. Once the students have finished writing, the instructor can ask one or two students to read what they have written or collect them to read a random sampling of the responses after class. These freewrites create a dialogue between the students and the teacher, while offering insight into the students’ thinking process as well. Aside from providing valuable feedback for the instructor, the freewrites also serve as a transitional period for the students. The break from the lecture to write will help students refocus their attention and can help increase their listening for the remainder of the class. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 1996.)

Lecture Summaries
Required lecture summaries promote better listening by encouraging your students to be accountable for what they hear during the lecture. At the end of a lecture, either in class or for homework, the instructor asks the students to write a one-page summary of the lecture. At the start of the next class, collect the lecture summaries from the previous day; later, read a random selection as a way of checking student understanding. (Source: John C. Bean. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.)

Through this process students become active listeners, because they know they will need to report what they heard in the lecture, but students also become active learners. When students take notes from a lecture, they often write down exactly what the instructor said, but do not really hear what is being said. By taking the
notes they wrote during the lecture and having them then compose a summary based on those notes, the students engage with the lecture and attempt to understand it in their own terms.

Instructors also benefit from this process, for they can gauge whether or not their students understood the lecture. As you randomly read the summaries given by your students, you can see if they comprehended the content of the lecture, and if not, you can make adjustments in your lecture based on the problem areas seen in the summaries. (For further discussion of summaries, see Chapter Seven, pages 128-129, and Chapter Eight, pages 145-146 of Engaging Ideas.)

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It is helpful to respond through a hierarchy of concerns from higher to lower order.

Global Re-vision: To engage a writer in deep revision, in actually re-thinking or re-seeing their work, we need to invite them to work at the macro level. Our comments should be aimed at ideas, whether the draft follows the assignment, whether the draft addresses the appropriate problem or question, quality of the argument, whether there is too much or not enough information.

Organizational Re-vision: This level of revision can be imagined as reshaping and reworking. Our comments should be directed at whether the draft is effectively organized at the macro level. As we comment we can ask such questions as can the draft be outlined or diagramed? What should be added? What should be eliminated? Does the reader have enough sign posts to follow? Are there gaps in logic, evidence, or information? Are there transitions where there need to be? We can also direct our comments at the micro-level. Are paragraphs coherent? Is the paragraph too long? Too short? Trying to cover too many points?

Polishing Re-vision: Under most circumstances you should be concerned with commenting on these in later drafts. Too often we have been asked to “revise” (the above operations) when what teachers really wanted was for students to polish and proofread. We often jump to this lower-level concern too quickly because these errors are easy to spot. Yes, grammatical errors, misspellings, etc. are an annoyance and important to “clean up.” When helping another student with polishing and proofing, look for the “patterns of errors” that they make and explain how to fix one or two of these. (While we have a tendency to count individual errors, writers are usually making one or two errors over and over again.)

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1. Design good assignments

   Assign exploratory writing; consider using microthemes. Create assignment handouts specifying task, purpose, audience, criteria, desired manuscript form.

2. Clarify your grading criteria

   Create a scoring guide or peer review checksheet. Hold an in-class norming session.

3. Devote a class hour to generating ideas

   Create a small group brainstorming task. Have members of pairs interview one another.

4. Have students submit something to you early in the writing process

   Consider asking for a prospectus, a question-plus-thesis summary, or an abstract. Use these to identify students who need extra help.

5. Have students be the first readers of each other’s drafts

   Require peer reviews (either response-centered or advice centered)
   To preserve class time, consider out-of-class peer reviews.

6. Refer students to your writing center (or lobby to start one). Recognize the value of writing centers for all writers, not just weak writers

   Stress the usefulness of writing centers at all stages of the writing process.

7. Make one-on-one conferences efficient

   Focus first on higher-order concerns (ideas, focus, organization and development)
   Begin each conference by setting an agenda. Develop a repertoire of conferencing strategies. Consider using idea maps and tree diagrams.

8. Consider holding group conferences early in the writing process.
9. Use efficient methods for giving feedback on papers

   Comment on late drafts rather than final products (or allow rewrites)
   Make revision-oriented comments, focusing first on higher-order concerns. When time is at a premium, use a grading scale or a scoring guide instead of making comments.

10. Put minimal comments on finished products that will not be revised.
11. Read John Bean’s Engaging Ideas. Jossey-Bass, 1996.

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Spadiel and Stiggins’s study (1990) revealed how students misread and reacted to teachers’ comments (pp. 85-87).

“Needs to be more concise”
- Confusing. I need to know what the teacher means specifically.
- This is an obvious comment.
- I’m not Einstein. I can’t get everything right.
- I thought you wanted details and support.
- Define “concise.”
- Vague, vague.

“Be more specific”
- I tried and it didn’t pay off.
- It’s going to be too long then.
- I try, but I don’t know every fact.
- You be more specific.

“You haven’t really thought this through”
- That is a mean reply.
- I guess I blew it.
- How do you know what I thought.

“Try harder”
- I did try!
- Maybe I am trying as hard as I can.
- Baloney! You don’t know how hard I tried.
- This kind of comment makes me feel really bad and I’m frustrated!

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

Writing-to-learn activities and strategies differ substantially in means and ends from traditional, formal writing. The following comparison highlights a few of these differences.

If writing IS thinking then constructing writing-to-learn activities serves our students’ learning by asking them to push beyond a surface understanding, by asking them to engage in a process of knowledge making, by asking them to think through a variety of perspectives, theories, or ideas, and by taking at least some responsibility for their own learning.

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