What I Hope My Students Learn about Academic Writing
In my fifteen-week Academic Writing course, tomorrow will be the fourteenth class, and students will write an in-class essay summarizing what they’ve tried that has worked for them, their personal summaries of the course. I could phrase their essay question “What have you learned about academic writing” though its current iteration is “Which writing process and documented essay lessons have worked best for you,” and I remind students that the syllabus has all the options bolded. “Don’t forget to bring your syllabus, the coursepack of readings, all your prior assignments—you may consult any of them—even quote from your own earlier writing—to answer the essay question,” I explain. My husband claims teachers each have one big lesson, but “one” and “big” make me nervous. I suspect one of mine is the power of questions, more specifically, since this is a writing course, the power of questions to motivate writing.
I model this by giving students the question for the first and second short documented essay, and they consistently report that it seemed easier than usual to get the essays drafted by “just answering the question” though wait a minute—no doubt they’ve written essays to answer questions before, so I’m not sure about what new insight I’m asking and to which they’re responding. In the first class meeting, we begin discussing the fifth assignment, a longer documented essay to investigate a research question that’s of compelling individual interest to each student. We spend the first third of the course doing an extended adaptation of Peter Elbow’s looping exercise, starting with answering a questionnaire that I prepare, then sharing ideas, text-on-texting on sheets with each student’s proposed research question, followed by re-sculpting questions, alongside various focused free-writes (FFWs) such as imaginary interviews and predictions and guesses about where to find evidence that will help answer the question. After students settle on their research questions, we share oral and written progress reports, drafts, research dilemmas, and the reminder that as students expand their knowledge bases about their questions, their new knowledge may show them additional necessary re-sculptings of their research questions—an inevitable part of the process. Regular sharpening of the focus tool—the research question—is another lesson.
Recently I added the activity to FFW “if you shared your research discoveries in some form other than an academic paper, what form would you choose?” Students choose making a documentary, writing an op-ed article, choreographing a dance, running for public office—a variety of communication options. To investigate a question of compelling individual interest and discover new knowledge is likely to lead to the desire to share—and an academic research paper is so not the only option…it is the option we focus on in this course, but tumblr’s seven dashboard options (text, chat, video, photo, quote, link, audio) is a handy list of additional ideas.
I have additional lessons and hopes, of course, small and large scale, and opportunities arise to sprinkle my hopes into class time more or less emphatically. I always hope that students experience success and learn something they value, find the process of researching and writing easier and more enjoyable, and have sufficient writing time to make their papers focused, convincing, and polished enough to invite readers to care about their discoveries.
