Writing to Learn: Strategies for Assigning and Responding to Writing Across the Disciplines : New Directions for Teaching and Learning (J-B TL Single Issue Teaching and Learning)

Rating:
Summary: Composition and Hegemony
Review: I have found that the recommended rhetoric for essay end comments to students has either stifled me utterly, or has forced me into totally ridiculous phraseology: e.g., rampantly using passive voice, anthropomorphizing the essay, etc. It's a surreally euphemistic form of writing. The feigned disinterest of the rhetoric of marginalia is totally bizarre; it disconnects any sense of agency between the student who writes and the document s/he writes. The document just becomes this miraculated text, finding its way into the world without any sense of its being created. (I think that this is in fact evidence of a subtle obtrusion of the convictions underwriting many of the tenets of PoMo victim politics into composition pedagogy.) The paper just is. Holding the student accountable for his paper seems like some kind of affront to the student's dignity, despite the fact that I've labored mightily to make my margin and end comments as oblique and impersonal as possible. When in fact the mollycoddling presumes the dignity of an independent sentient being who already doesn't exist. But, paradoxically enough, in our narcissistic society no one feels empowered to produce anything difficult unless s/he feels that it is personally demanded. Everything has to be personal or else s/he doesn't care.

Why, then, is evaluating quality of thought verboten? Am I always already some sort of fraud, invested with an arbitrary and ill-defined authority? Is my ethos as an instructor determined more by my ability to "info-tain" than to educate? I suppose that composition students are used to everything seeming like ads, as though directed solely at them, and their lives thus become the baseline for what is meaningful. They are used to everything in their lives apparently pandering to them. All discourse seems to single them out as special, but classroom discourse doesn't, so the students tune it out, behave as though it can't be significant-it belongs to the denatured discourse that their essay belongs to, produced by and for no one. They are defiantly and professedly complacent, and thus make themselves spectators of their own lives. But they are duped into thinking that this passivity has allowed them to penetrate what they see as the obfuscative tendency of academic discourse, and thus made them hipper, savvier. Ignorance passes as a kind of criticism, a critical practice.

Best to teach students how to write cover letters, the only document that they will feel truly invested in.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely helpful for those designing writing curricula
Review: Socrinelli and Elbow's collection has been extremely helpful to me in designing writing syllabi and workshops. Elbow's essays on the necessity of "low-stakes and high-stakes" writing in class, and on grading those differing assingments, is practical and useful, as is Fulwiler's article on using letters in class. Other contributers (Fishman, Young, Hodges and Lunsford in particular) offer concrete ideas on responding to student writing, techniques for integrating writing into curricula, and more context for writing-instensive classes. It's a wonderful collection--extremely useful and (surprise! surprise!) clearly written and engaging.