[Teaching_Composition] Academic Discourse

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:26:13 -0700

You folks are awesome. This idea of flexibility and versatility is why I love composition. To me, at a basic level, writing is writing is writing. Only the circumstances and conventions change and there are so many varied circumstances that the best we can do is clue our students in to the idea that they need to learn the possible rhetorical responses to all kinds of situations and how to adapt. In the courses I teach, we address all kinds of writing situations beyond the essay and the responses I get from former students indicates that they appreciate the variety and usefulness of what they learn.

Learning from all of you is also why I like this listserve. For instance, I really like that plus-one idea. Others of you have given me good ideas as well that I try to put into practice, as well as looking up books and articles you folks mention. So, thank you.

Right now a colleague and I are putting together a documentary featuring our university's students and graduates and the many different kinds of writing they are doing as students and in their daily lives after they graduate. So far we have lined up students who used letters of application and resumes they wrote in class to get internships and scholarships and jobs, as well as papers they have to write for other classes. We have a housewife who suddenly found herself on the board of her children's charter school with the task of writing the charter. We also have engineers, business people, celebrities, computer people, politicians, lawyers, a judge, translators, and film people and others. The idea is to show the practical benefits of learning to write well to motivate our advanced writing students, although we're thinking of adding a segment to show to freshman comp students to motivate them to take the advanced comp classes before they're seniors.

One of the areas I've become interested in lately is writing as a change agent on the individual and societal level. I'm sure all of you have had students write papers that seemed to come from some gut level indicating the need for catharsis or awareness of a greater societal problem. From what I've been able to find out from studying the uses of writing in cognitive behavior therapy and neuroscience, what written and read language do to the brain is powerful stuff in effecting changes in behavior. It seems to me we could add that kind of writing to our composition classes as well. Has anyone done that in their classes?

Laura Card, PhD
English Department
Brigham  Young University

-----Original Message-----
From: "Thelin,William" <wthelin@uakron.edu>
To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:40:23 -0500
Subject: RE: [Teaching_Composition] Academic Discourse

The way I have worded this in our outcomes statement here at Akron is
that we are teaching rhetorical principles or concepts that students
then can take with them to future writing tasks, whether in college or
elsewhere.  Following the WPA Outcomes Statement, I also included an
outcome of "versatility," which seems to parallel what Linda is saying
about promoting "flexibility" in writers.  I'm glad to see this strand
appear.  One of the problems I have with Graff and Birkenstein's very
popular They Say, I Say is that what we call "academic writing"
(something I don't think really exists in any pure form) is privileged
at the expense of rhetorical situations dependent on an understanding of
audience and purpose.  We're replacing writing with formulas based on a
type of discourse, as Russ suggests, that doesn't translate well in
real-world situations.

Bill

________________________________

From: teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com
[mailto:teaching_composition-admin@mailman.eppg.com] On Behalf Of Linda
Adler-Kassner
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 8:14 AM
To: teaching_composition@mailman.eppg.com
Subject: Re: [Teaching_Composition] Academic Discourse

Just to second or third or fourth Rich's and Russ's comments: I think we
do students - and our profession -  a service when we help them realize
(as we all do) that while we can't "prepare" them for a specific _kind_
(/genre) of writing, we can help them develop _flexibility as writers._
After all, we can't know every genre. But we can know how to help
students develop the strategies they need to analyze audience
expectations; develop a variety of writing strategies and think about
when, where, and why to use them; know how to develop even more
strategies; make conscious choices.... After all, that's what writers
do.

-Linda

On Nov 20, 2006, at 9:25 PM, Russ Hunt wrote:

Like Rich Haswell,

	I'm happy to see someone questioning the focus on "academic
writing" in the current college-writing curriculum, and questioning it
in the

	interest of the kinds of writing students will do after college.

We need to bear in mind, too, that we can't anticipate what those kinds
of writing will be, and even if we could we probably couldn't "teach"
them. A book which makes a similar argument to Anne Beaufort's _Writing
in the Real World_, but with piles of real-world empirical evidence, is
_Worlds Apart_, by Aviva Freedman, Patrick Dias, Anthony Pare and Peter
Medway. They followed writers moving out of pre-professional programs of
various kinds and into professions. Their work convinces me that the
best I can hope for is to help students learn how to figure out and
adapt to the new genres they'll encounter in whatever they do. One thng
we can be sure of, though: the classroom essay almost certainly won't be
one of them (even if they become academics).

-- Russ

Russell Hunt

Department of English

St. Thomas University

http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/

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----

Linda Adler-Kassner, Ph.D.

Director of First-Year Writing

Associate Professor

Department of English Language and Literature

Eastern Michigan University

612 Pray-Harrold

Ypsilanti, MI 48197

734.487.0148 (o) 734.483.9744 (fax)

http://www.emich.edu/english/fycomp/