Writing Teachers Gather Round

[lunabee34]

I know a lot of my flist is in academia, and zulu and I have been talking about teaching and teaching writing specifically, and I decided to host a post about teaching writing.

So, if you teach or have taught writing at any age level, what are some of the strategies you use? Specific assignments? General thoughts about writing instruction?

If you have ever been a student of writing, what are some things your teachers did that worked? Failed abysmally? General thoughts about learning/teaching writing?

Recs for books, essays, or websites also appreciated.

Please feel free to share this around.

I'll put my thoughts in comments rather than the top-level post.

Comments

Re: Writing with your students

[lunabee34]

I usually start off my writing classes with a few weeks that are about the reading process, the writing process, and modes of development (largely because between bookstore fuckups and the way federal financial aid works now, we can't rely on our students having books the first day of classes or even the first week of class; I've learned to build in activities to start with that don't require the book).

So first, we talk about how to read successfully, active reading strategies, etc. I ask them to write about a time they had something to read that was difficult, why it was difficult, and what they did to help make it easier.

Then I list on the board all the things they come up with and we talk about them, and I bring up anything they may have forgotten (like breaking large tasks down into smaller ones, etc).

Then we talk about the writing process, and I ask them to write about their writing process, the steps they take from being given an assignment to turning it in. Most of them say roughly the same things which is fine. We talk about how the process is recursive, etc. Usually several people write about procrastination, and that's a great jumping off point for a discussion of how procrastination can be motivating but also limiting.

I only have my students write narrative and argumentative essays. I used to do a bunch more of the modes of writing (when I first started teaching, I think I had them write five different modes!), so now I have a day where I briefly talk about each mode (here's what process analysis writing is, some key words that help you identify it when you encounter it in your reading, now take the next 7 minutes and write a five sentence process analysis paragraph about a task you do on a daily basis; or a comparison contrast paragraph about what you do for fun vs what your parents do for fun). The students share (me too!) and after they read, I point out the signal words they've used (like because for cause and effect or sensory words for description).

Re: Writing with your students

[zulu]

We mostly do argumentative but I believe there's also a departmental research requirement as well. So that's compare-contrast and evaluative at the same time. (So-and-so said this, other person said that, my point of view is...) I think I'm going to entirely overhaul my research assignment, though. I was having the students do an annotated bibliography for articles they found themselves and...they were finding things, really interesting things even, but stuff that was going way over their heads. I think I'm going to pre-select some non-peer-reviewed articles and then see how they use them in their essays. Time to experiment.

Re: Writing with your students

[lunabee34]

I hate annotated bibliographies. Hate them. I hated doing them as a student and hate grading them as a prof, so I never assign them.

Our 1101 has a research component, but I just make their final argumentative essay a research essay; they have to have a certain number of scholarly sources to back up their ideas.

1102 is literature based, and also requires at least one essay to be a research essay. What I have done before is have something like what you're talking about. Every student has to find one scholarly article about one of the short stories we're reading; they have to link it on the communal discussion board, they have to provide the correct MLA citation for it, and they have to write a short summary of it. This way, students have a small pool of articles they can go ahead and choose from instead of starting their research from scratch.