"They teach that in school now?"

Eating Chinese food with my husband and a friend, I encountered a woman who wanted to talk to us. She was a bit strange, asking if we knew her son and asking me my age. When she asked what I did for a living, I told her I taught writing. She responded, "They teach that in school now?"

I suppose she must have misunderstood me.

"I didn't know you knew so much about writing"

A few days ago my husband and I were hanging out with a friend who asked us to look over a proposal he was writing. It seemed well-structured, but we went thru it line by line for style and grammar issues. After we got home, my husband said to me, "I didn't know you knew so much about writing."

Of course, he knows that I'm getting my master's in writing and that I teach writing. And I've read over his essays since before we were dating. I had no grand insights about our friend's proposal. I helped him revise a list to have parallel structure (which is complicated if one is a bit hazy on what constitutes a noun).

I might think that it was a handle on the "rules" of writing that caused my husband to observe that I knew stuff. But when I suggest guidelines for use in his own essays, he usually points out successful writers who don't follow the rules. Perhaps "rules" seem like knowledge--so long as someone else has to follow them.

I'm a Grade Inflator

Looking over my students' final grades, I see clearly that they're inflated. Most students are a full letter grade higher than what I feel they should be. I gave them too high of grades on their papers, and now they have too high of grades for the class.

I know I set the bar lower this semester than last semester, because I just wasn't getting the quality I hoped for. There were a few excellent papers, but a lot of C and D quality work that I gave B's and C's instead. I wanted to encourage them. I hate giving a D to a paper that looks like someone worked hard on. I hate giving a C when the paper has no obvious defects other than being really boring. And I hate not having a single paper in the stack which clearly deserves an A.

I try to be positive when I grade. I try not to concentrate on little things like punctuation or awkward wording. I look for that excellent paper that I can honestly enjoy reading. And I don't always find it.

I guess, in the end, the important question is How does grade inflation affect my students? Does getting an A or B in my class make them think they don't need to keep working on their writing? I don't think so, because many of my students' reflective essays commented on how this class made them realize they weren't quite as good as they thought they were. Hopefully the comments and conferences made as much impact as the actual grades, so that even if they think they're pretty good writers already, they have some idea of their strengths and weaknesses in the future. If they continue taking courses which force them to write, hopefully the practice will help them improve. Hopefully even if they didn't master all the skills from my course that I'd hoped they would, when a professor writes "choppy" on a paper in their future, they might vaguely remember that that one teacher said "choppy" means to connect your sentences with words like "although," "because," and "for example." And so writing will at least be conquerable if not conquered.

Why Is It Easy for Me but Not Them?

I really just don't get it. I don't get why a B student would plagiarize 90% of his paper, even after participating in both workshops. Inadequate paraphrase is one thing. I probably did it myself when I didn't realize it. But copying and pasting entire websites into your paper with only a few sentences actually in your own words? How is a B student that desperate? If you don't have time to do the work, can't you at least write something crappy and short in your own words? At least you'd pass the course then. I've turned in papers several pages under the minimum, turned in papers I felt were C or even D quality because I was tired of writing. But I'd never dream of fleshing out a paper with Ctrl+v.

Teaching and tutoring make me realize that writing was a lot easier for me than it was for a lot of people. In peer review workshops, I used to assume that the upperclassmen knew something I didn't, so if they didn't use much evidence to back up their claims, I actually thought I must have been overdoing it. I stopped using so much textual evidence. It never occurred to me that maybe I got better grades than they did.

I never had to be told not to "drop" quotations in without a signal phrase--at least, I never remember being told. Yet I find this is very difficult for many of my students and common among even upperclassmen in the writing center. I almost always rather easily grasped the goals of the assignment, whereas this is a major hangup for students in all majors visiting the writing center.

I want to get into people's heads, to be able to sympathize. I understand using imprecise pronouns or not being good at paragraphing, because I still work at those things. But there are some things that to me seem so obvious that I never thought of them as even needing to be taught. And I can teach them, but I can't sympathize. I can only go through the motions of explaining in a way that I hope will facilitate my students' understanding.

Using Myers-Brigg to Teach Writing: Part 1

I just read "Personality and Individual Writing Processes" by George H. Jensen and John K. DiTiberio. I really should have read it before making my final blog post for English 620, as it relates importantly to my own teaching philosophy.

I'm splitting this post into two parts because I have entirely too much to say. Part 1 is just going to be me analyzing myself and part 2 is going to be me applying type theory to teaching writing. At least, that's the current plan. I have a tendency to become dissatisfied with my initial choices in organization.

All right, first, I don't like thinking of the four dimensions (Introversion/Extraversion, Intuition/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, Judging/Perceiving) as functining independently. Jensen and DiTiberio, though they point out the problem in doing so (296), do so throughout the entire paper. I also disagree with the way they present "interaction"--as a simple hierarchy--but I understand the limitations of the scope of their paper.

I do not believe that Introversion/Extraversion and Judging/Perceiving are "functions"--I don't believe that they are ways of approaching the world or the self. Rather, I believe that they are ways of using the actual functions, Thinking/Feeling and Intuition/Sensing. Hence, I think it's problematic to speak of a "judging" way of writing.

I usually identify as an INTJ, but that's more than simply being introverted/intuitive/thinking/judging. Instead, let's divide it into the functions and how they are used (in order):
Introverted intuition
Extraverted thinking
Introverted sensing
Extraverted feeling

Major disclaimer: That's not the "proper" INTJ personality profile, it's my personality profile.

You see, it doesn't simply matter what order the functions come in. It's not that I go around prefering to using introverted intuition. I actually hate to use that function--in extraverted contexts. The direction of the functions is crucial.

For example, my husband is an INTP (again with a slightly rearranged profile). So we have the same preferences but in different directions:
Introverted thinking
Extraverted intuition
Introverted feeling
Extraverted sensing

As an extraverted thinker, I have to talk out every decision. I have to reason out loud why one brand of salsa is preferable to another, which annoys my husband, an introverted thinker. On the other hand, he is much better at theorizing in extraverted contexts, having extraverted intuition, where in an extraverted situation I stick closely to analysis, as an extraverted thinker.

I think the theory has a lot more predictive value when you think contextually. Preferences have a lot to do with the situation. Everyone is able to use each function (T/F/N/S) (though their fourth function usually causes or results from anxiety). But we often almost lack the ability to use a function in the opposite direction from our preference.


Work Cited

Jensen, George H., and John K. DiTiberio. "Personality and Individual Writing Processes." College Composition and Communication 35.3 (1984): 285-300.

Imitating Identity

Robert Brooke argues that imitation is a viable way of learning to write well not because students internalize forms, but because they identify with writers they respect. Students want to write like a specific writer, and they follow the person as a model, not the person's works.

True, the works are usually the only way that they know the person, unless they are imitating a classroom teacher. But it does seem reasonable that social creatures find it more intuitive to model their writing identities after another writing identity than to model their behavior after a written product.

I'm not convinced, however, by Brooke's case studies. He seems to be testing the students, not the pedagogy. For instance, of a student who disliked the text for the class Brooke says, "As a reader and writer, Clark seemed unable to handle the kind of thinking about experience Laurence's book provided" (29). I see. Clark is mentally handicapped; that's why he wasn't as excited about the course as Brooke expected. It might have been more fair to cast the sentence in terms of the pedagogy's failure than of Clark's.

Brooke's conclusion is not entirely prepared for. For the entire paper he's insisted that building an identity based on a successful writer is an effective way to become a good writer. But in the end he says that "the teacher, no matter how exciting a model she presents, just isn't in control of the identity the student will develop" (38), using the fact that the method wasn't as successful as he had hoped to justify giving instructors the job of molding students' identities.

Works Cited

Brooke, Robert. "Modeling a Writer's Identity: Reading and Imitation in the Writing Classroom." College Composition and Communication 39.1 (1988): 23-41.

Balancing Expression with Structure

One of my students interviewed me a few weeks ago for another class. She asked me what one thing I’d tell freshmen. I told her that freshman needed to know that they have good ideas. My students might not always have brilliant ideas, but they always have something worth saying. They can’t write like scholars until they think like scholars. And scholars don’t think “I wonder what my professor wants my to say.” They consider their audience, but they write with the mantle of authority.

This week two of my students handed in papers with entire plagiarized paragraphs, and a third with plagiarized sentences. I had hoped that if I showed I believed in them they would take responsibility. I don’t know to what extent the plagiarism was intentional. But either way, it shows that my teaching philosophy isn’t fool-proof.

How do I know that they plagiarized if I showed trust in them? You’d better believe it was painful to get up and walk over to the computer to plug a student’s sentence into Google when my suspicion was based on the quality of the writing.

Either my students didn’t care that I trusted them or they didn’t believe that I cared about their ideas.

I sound like an expressivist. I want my students to use their unique subjectivity to tell the truth as they understand it. Although I like expressivism, I don’t know that it adequately describes my feelings about writing.

I believe that expressivism doesn’t work for all writers. I happen to find Peter Elbow’s methods helpful, but Muriel Harris cinched it for me--some people write just fine when they start with outlines and write every sentence carefully. Others don’t. So I can’t just teach them how to get in touch with themselves through writing. And I’m teaching academic writing. My course is designed to help students in future courses. So I owe it to my students to help them learn to write for teachers, not just for themselves.

I have tools to offer my students. I help them learn how magically topic sentences work to help your reader follow your argument. I can show them how important it is to keep lifeless words out of sentences. I can even give them outlines for how to structure their papers. I don’t think an expressivist would do that. But I don’t force my students to follow strict guidelines for how to write a paper. If they can come up with another way that works, I accept that. I rejoice at that. I write comments on their papers about how well they’ve expressed their subjectivity.

I don’t think that models suppress creativity. If I use models as tools while encouraging students to make their own way, I give them a starting place. Creative genius can be found when writers twist models to serve their own purposes or when they use readerly expectations to trick an audience. Even if there is mystery behind good writing, there are still tricks of the trade worth teaching. On the other hand, even if good writing is based in following conventions, playing by the rules too strictly without an attempt at creativity won’t result in something worth reading.