Tag Archives: creative-writing

Student Blogs

Bean and Elbow Discuss Criticism

In his piece, “Writing Comments on Student Papers”, John Bean highlights the lack of compassion many educators have for the vulnerability in writing. This lack of protection for the individuality correlates to students not feeling connected to their own voices in their writing, and perhaps why so many students struggle to sit down and write in the first place.

Although an educator’s intentions may not be cruel, even simple short messages can come off as cryptic and rude when read from the perspective of a student who feels vulnerable about their writing. The mindset a teacher has while trying to revise a stack of a hundred student papers, and the perspective of a student who’s just handed in the paper they spent a week on, are very different.

Bean’s study points out that students prefer “mitigating” comments, or comments that both highlight what they’ve done well, as well as how they can improve their work. These mitigation comments paired with “rubric scores revealing criteria based judgments” is one of Bean’s suggested methods for combining the writing teacher’s dual roles of “coach” and “judge”. Although, Bean’s favorite method for this is allowing rewrites.

I found John Bean’s delegation of the two roles of a writing teacher to be akin to Elbow’s separation of evaluation and judgment. The coach is the evaluator, pointing out where a student can do better and giving helpful tips, and the judgments obviously come from the judge. Both educators focus on the idea that writing teachers should emphasize uplifting and helping their students through consistent, specific, and well-delivered criticism, rather than weighing them down with unspecific and unhelpful grades.

All being said, this is all the result of our perception of the education system as a “machine” of sorts, a manufacturing tool for Humans. The Human mind cannot be manufactured, and it cannot be put into a system in which it’s judged based on the same criteria as every other mind. What is this perfect brain we’re all being held to the standard of? I’d love to meet the “standard person”, the one who all of our tests are based off of, the A student. Are they capable of drawing, writing poetry, singing, making things with their hands, carpentry, there are a million skills in this world. What is the current education system preparing students for if it’s not brainwash?

Student Blogs

The Revision Cycle

Most modern models of the writing process are linear. They are commonly based on traditional rhetorical models, which was originally an oratory art, “based on the irreversibility of speech” (Sommers).

Revision is not possible in speech (hence its irreversibility). Thus, the art of revision is lost in modern writing pedagogies. In Nancy Sommers’ research in “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”, Sommers defines revision as “a sequence of changes in a composition- changes which are initiated by cues and occur continually throughout the writing of a work.”

This definition highlights the ever-presence of revision during and forever-after the creation of a piece of writing. Sommers identifies 4 ‘Revision Operations’: deletion, substitution, addition, and reordering; as well as 4 ‘Levels of Changes’: word, phrase, sentence, and theme. Utilizing these identifiers in conjunction with a ‘Scale of Concerns’, Sommers identified how the revision process unfolded between multiple forms of writing and multiple drafts.

After digesting the material provided by the student writers, Sommers identified that students main concerns in the revision process included vocabulary and repetition, at least the concerns that the students themselves were able to identify. These results determined that the students were incapable of perceiving revision as a process, rather than a linear step.

Sommers says, “the incongruities between intention and execution, governs both writing and meaning.” I think this calls into question the degradation of the original intention in every step of revision. A part of me believes that the way your thought was captured the first time was beautiful in its own right, and that first version should be preserved.

Of course, I believe that there will always be a better way to phrase our thoughts, a smarter way to communicate our intentions, but the first draft will always be holy to me. It was hard to learn how to mark it up- take things out, move them around, massage my ideas into place.

That highlights to me that the learned process of revision is another way for the world to bleed into the formation of art- when it may have been more beautiful in its original form, simply for the fact that it was so uniquely formed and crafted by you. It hasn’t yet felt the marring touch of the rest of the world’s thoughts, or the way the rest of the world tells you to think.

Student Blogs

Philosophizing on Writing Pedagogy

Peter Elbow and Donald M. Murray love writing. Much like I love writing, and most of you love writing (don’t say I don’t know my audience). It takes someone who loves writing to understand how to teach it this well. You have to have an itching desire to spread what brings you joy.

Promoting low stakes writing in classrooms in order to supplement high stakes writing is an excellent way to teach the writing process and allow students to build the confidence for high stakes assignments. My concern is that everyone who has been involved with the writing and revision of this theory has probably loved writing, or at the very least pedagogy.

I would like to look at this theory from the perspective of someone who hates writing; I want to see this idea from the perspective of a students who hates school.

When Elbow asserts that the ability to convey understanding is of equal importance to the understanding itself, I may argue that I can convey my knowledge, just not in writing. Or, that according to Vershawn Ashanti Young, I do not need practice in conveying my ideas how the system has deemed they are supposed to be written out.

Then I stop in my tracks, and realize I have lost sight of my perspective, because no student that truly hates writing references Young to explain why.

Peter Elbow broaches the concept that speaking feels lower stakes than writing. Students do it constantly, at recess, at lunch, in class- it’s a challenge for them not to talk. Speaking feels lower stakes because we are not openly evaluated when speaking. In fact, you have to watch the other person closely if you want to pick up on how they’re truly reacting to what you’ve said.

Writing is permanent, and expressionless. Not in the sense that nothing is expressed, but that there are not gestures, or facial features, or intonation to express tone and emotion. All of that has to come through in rhetorical technique and grammatical choices.

But, just because nobody can use a red pen to show you where you’re “wrong” in your speech, or how you could change it to improve your communication, does not mean that you are not using rhetorical techniques to be perceived a certain way. That also means that everyone uses rhetorical analysis on a daily basis in order to perceive one another. Yes, I know, terrifying. Rhetoric is simply unspoken in the physical world, as opposed to the written world.

With a recorded thought you can go back and re-analyze, re-read, and the thought stays the same. There is no shifting language, the idea cannot be forgotten, misconstrued or warped by the passage of time. The spoken word is subject to the human memory, which is heavily impacted by perspective and time. Anyone can lie about anything, there’s no proof to go back to.

All writing is high-stakes is you consider it’s permanence, and that is why many struggle to force themselves to do it. It feels unnatural in comparison to talking to a friend. I think to expand on this idea I would ask about where the boundaries of low stakes writing are. Is texting low stakes writing? If so, I think incorporating written communication between friends into the classroom could do a great job of encouraging students to enjoy low stakes writing.

This also leads us to the question of what “good” writing is, and if “academically correct” and “good” being synonymous has some classist and racist undertones. Peter Elbow draws attention to the line between the importance of understanding and the importance of being able to convey your understanding, but I would argue that most can convey their understanding. They simply may not be able to record their understanding in a way you deem intelligent or respectable.

But I’ll save that for Vershawn Ashanti Young.

Student Blogs

Week 3 Writing as a Process, and High Stakes and Low Stakes Writing

a road that has a bunch of trees on it

On Peter Elbow:

As I read Elbow’s article, one quote that stood out to me was: “Low stakes writing helps students involve themselves more in the ideas
or subject matter of a course. It helps them find their own language for the
issues of the course; they stumble into their own analogies and metaphors for
academic concepts.” I thought about my students and how I am trying to incorporate more low stakes writing in my lessons. I’ve found that even when I give a low-stakes writing prompt, questions like:

“Is this for a grade?”

“How long does it have to be?”

“Does spelling count?”

always seem to surface. I can almost always see the student’s face light up when I tell them not to worry right now about those things, as long as they answer the prompt/ question as best as they can, with as much detail as they can. I find that the result of this writing provides a glimpse into how a student is thinking about that concept or prompt more than when they were concerned with the grade, length, or spelling.

On Donald Murray:

I can definitely get behind the notion of teaching writing as a process and not a product. I have found the system of “prewrite, write, rewrite” to be taught in a linear way, and I don’t feel this process is completely linear. As we think, and then put words on the page or screen, are we not always in some state of revision?

I’ve also found that this quote holds true for most things: “you don’t learn a process by talking about it, but by doing it.” Hopefully the practice of this revisionist process leads to better products(writing), so I guess the positive way to see this is that we can only get better the more we do it 🙂