O Academic Writing and Research! O gentle Academic Writing and Research!
Nature's soft nurse, how I have frighted thee.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Ahh, negativity, or My Extremely Opportunistic, Half-Assed Freshman Year

In the spirit of full disclosure, I had to read this whole book last semester, and I have serious problems with it.
First off, I have no idea how this book ever got past NAU's IRB.
There was something about having to conceal the name of the university and the author (Rebekah Nathan). But the author was outed by The New York Sun, and that was picked up by USA Today before the book came out. The author's real name is Cathy Small (NAU Faculty page)
Nathan (before she was revealed as Small) said she would never be able to speak publicly in relation to the book, but according to her NAU faculty page "Dr. Small is spending this year speaking at more than 30 different universities and national conferences about how to apply the results of her ethnographic findings while she focuses on teaching her own students the connections between ethnography, policy, and public practice. "
Oh, and she's getting paid for it.
And she sells a boat load of copies to universities as required reading (as if students need someone to tell them what being a student is like).
She also sells tons of copies to professors and administrators hoping to gain some insight into the mysterious freshman animal.
You'd think they could, perhaps, talk to the freshmen?
There are a few interesting points brought up by Small, but nothing that the average observant person wouldn't gain from being on a college campus or communicating to students.
Her research is also inherently flawed and unethical. She failed to get releases from most of her subjects. She audited all of her classes the first semester and didn't even take classes the second semester. She lived in an upper class dorm, not a freshman dorm.
At one point she stalks a minority student in the cafeteria, following her around the room, and across campus to her dorm, then commenting on how the student didn't sit down in the cafeteria with others.
Perhaps because there was a strange old white woman following her taking notes.
I wonder if anyone reads Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture a similar project undertaken in the late 70s and early 80s at Rutgers by Michael Moffatt, an anthropology professor (Who used his real name at all times).
Probably not.
But, I guess this at least gets the "conversation" going and makes out-of-touch administrators and faculty, who, like Small, fail to recognize their own university's buildings if not entering from the parking lot side, think of students as...
Well, I don't know. I was going to say people rather than caricatures, but I'm not sure Small's book paints these students as people.

Mac, Cheese and Elbow noodles, or : "Just what the student needs to hear" and "Socrates, man of the people."

"just as often we see that a student needs praise and support rather than a tough grade, even for her weak performance, if she is really to prosper as a student and a person-if we are really to nurture her fragile investment in her studies."
-Elbow
I don't know. I'm never a fan of undeserved praise. If the student writes an awful draft or paper, giving them praise for it isn't doing them any favors. Now support, that's a different issue, but why are support and a tough grade at all exclusive?
I see grades not in the negative, "post-modern" "post-structuralist" "post-whatever-you-got" new age, "why do we have to evaluate things?" light. I think grades offer a student feedback in a way, at least with freshman, that all the conferences and comments and praise and support and hand holding in the world will never do. You can argue that that's because the system has told them to value grades over hand holding, fine. But the system is there. We can't change it. So I think we should use it.
Grade hard. Grade accurately. Tell the students why they got the grade they did and how they can improve. Give them support, and praise, but be sure not to hold their hands, because that's sexual harassment.
P.S.
"Look at Socrates and Christ as archetypal good teachers-archetypal in being so paradoxical. They are extreme on the one hand in their impulse to share with everyone and to support all learners."
-Elbow
Does Rhetoric have a different Socrates? Is this like Dr. Socrates that teaches at penn state or something? 'Cause the Athenian Socrates had no "impulse to share with everyone and to support all learners." Maybe all Athenian land owning men. So like a few hundred people.

Advice Column #1

Remember: Once the genie is out of the bottle you've got Robin Williams on your hands.

No Picture

I think we teach composition, because there is a definite need for incoming students to learn the skill of effective persuasive writing. I’ve worked with many high school students on essay writing, and the one trend that I’ve seen, is that these students generally perceive writing as an exercise in academia, not an exercise in communication. There are certainly many reasons for this, not the least of which is the movement of our culture from print to video. The problem, however, lies in the fact that once they exit academia and join the world at large, there is both a requirement and expectation for these adults to be able to communicate effectively by writing. Whereas in school, communication between peers was achieved verbally (hanging out, recess) and in close quarters, communication between peers in business often adopts a formal tone and occurs over long distances. It is my belief that a successful 106 course will both teach the ways of writing well and the importance of it as a skillset.
This is not a criticism of academic writing or academia. It’s just that academic writing is often a very formalized form of communication. But it is only one form of formal writing. The majority of our students will not become academics. It is unfair of us to expect them to conform to a certain kind of writing form, one that likely will not help them in their future careers. This is why I decided to change my syllabus for this semester. I wanted the focus of their learning to be on the necessity of writing, and not on the instruction of academic form.

prompt answer - why take/teach 106?

Purdue is most definitely a career-driven university.  Students, mostly from Indiana, some from very rural areas, come to this school to temporarily leave their small hometowns and earn a degree, in order to have a career that would allow them to leave their towns permanently.  These students are very practical.  They see college as a necessary step they must take to begin their professional lives.  Most of my students last semester were engineering majors, or biology/chemistry majors, or vet techs, or here for some other “vocational” line of study.  They registered for English 106 because they knew they had to pass the class to graduate.

There was a kind of unspoken understanding the whole semester – my students knew they were sitting in my classroom every day so they could get a passing grade and go on to become chemical engineers.  They also knew, at the same time, that I was sitting at the front of the classroom every day so that my tuition would be covered while I spent three years to study and write poetry.  There were never any illusions about “enrichment” or “personal growth” or “transformation” through the practice of writing.  We were as practical-minded about 106 as every student here is about why they’re at Purdue in the first place.

Nevertheless, we all recognized that something useful could come out our time together.  I really only had one goal in teaching the class – to make my students fully understand that all writing is done purposefully, including their own.  I really stressed that the class was a close study of rhetoric, and we spent a lot of time talking about different strategies and appeals authors use.  I think that after a semester my students (somewhat) got these concepts, and could see how and why they employ these strategies and appeals themselves.  I think they walked away from the class thinking a little more critically about the writing they read every day (for pleasure, for school, etc.), which I think is part of the reason why 106 is required in college.  Some of them wrote better at the end of the semester, compared to the beginning.  Maybe half of them.

The end.

Writing and Speech

Writing is the expression of ideas through words on the page. In my experience, many beginning writers often feel that writing is simply the transition of speech onto the page, that the laws of writing are the same as that of speech. But experienced writers understand that this is not true. What sounds intelligent and intelligible in conversation often sounds the opposite when written down. For example, “this is interesting because…” is often a devise used in speech to express, in earnest, why something is intriguing and worth pursuit. However, when a statement such as this is written down, experienced writers understand that such a statement could be construed as being intellectually lazy.

As teachers of writing, I believe that perhaps our goal is to teach the rules of writing, and how they are different from that of speech. When reading our students’ papers, we have to pick out and let them know that while a certain sentence or paragraph might work in some other context (such as in conversation or when giving an oral speech), the same does not translate to writing. These rules are what we need to teach beginning students of writing.

Why Composition is Taught by Graduate Students

Back in the late 1800's, the good ol' boys at Harvard decided that incoming freshman did not have the basic writing skills to cut it at Cambridge, and so they created the coursework that later became Freshman Composition. The idea of Composition as remediation persisted well into the 20th century, and the rise of open-enrollment universities in recent decades only cemented the notion that Composition is a way of offering poorly prepared students a chance to catch up on their skills so that they can participate in academia. In my opinion, there have been three results:

1. Many in academia blame high school teachers for failing to prepare students for college.
2. Many in academia believe Freshman Composition is a class that does not require an instructor with substantial teaching experience.
3. Many in academia believe that it's okay to staff Composition classrooms with inexperienced graduate students and poorly paid adjuncts.

Something to think about next time you open up your paycheck.

Why Teach Composition?

I think the simplest answer to this question is: to advance students' understanding of writing. There are two views of teaching comp, in my understanding of it--from one view, comp is a requirement and will help students learn academic writing, so that they will be able to APPLY that to other courses (presumably the heart of their education), or to their major fields. The other, second view, is the one I subscribe to--that is you can't learn how to write unless you read a great deal and write a great deal about what you read, and receive thorough feedback on your writing. In other words, comp is a field in itself that is not given its' due, it is a legit course like a course in social anthropology, or the psychology of stereotypes etc. It is important in itself for what it has to provide students. When my sister taught undergrad comp at UC Berkeley for 8 years, she taught a novel a week. Berkeley is literature heavy, just as Purdue seems to be rhetoric heavy. However, the rhetoric provided in textbooks such as the Allyn & Bacon book teach lightweight, high-school rhetoric. It seems to be up to the creativity and effort of the instructor to make those materials practical and workable, and at times I feel that we underestimate what the students are capable of. In my brief experience at Purdue, Indiana undergrads are just as proud to be here as people in California are proud to be a CAL or UCLA. Many Purdue students are coming from AP H.S. courses that are above the textbooks we use. Some of the students in comp are seniors whose critical thinking abilities soar above what some of our materials can provide. I like to think that I teach composition so that students can be brought into the world of studying English (comp is an English course), literature, and critical writing at a first-tier university level. In my limited understanding of how comp is taught at Purdue, students are far less challenged than they are at other similarly ranked universities. To digress, Purdue has one of the best engineering programs, and several of my students from last semester are engineering majors--so I can only imagine that their standards of academic study and their notions of the university dropped drastically after taking 106. I believe that we teach composition because it is as important as any class (and many classes at Purdue are highly complex, difficult, and challenging); I also believe that the highest level of the study of literature and writing is still an important part of the college curriculum. Perhaps coming from an older generation, I feel that the study of literature and writing is a pillar of a university education, and that any college education would be impoverished without a deeper understanding of literature and writing. Comp should be taught to not only improve students' grammar and understanding of the difference between appeals to logic and emotion; comp should be taught so that students could be exposed to great books and learn, from thinking about these texts critically, how to take their intellectual and composition abilities to a more sophisticated place.

Why do we teach composition? (I'm sick, so I apologize if this is overly cynical)

Linchpin!

Well, (I think) it stems from left over 19th century education where all university (college) students were instructed in classically Graeco-Romanesque subjects. I think composition survived mostly as because it guaranteed graduate teaching positions and financial longevity for English departments which otherwise struggle to prove their worth to increasingly bottom line oriented administrations.

The university/administration/other departments continue to live with comp as a requirement because they expect it to produce students who can write essay tests, lab reports, resumes, etc., etc., etc.

(Some) English/Rhet-Comp/Instructors teach it because they view it as a one-stop shop to drop some knowledge on unsuspecting freshmen. Critical thinking, composition, cultural studies, technological literacy, t-shirt design, literature, audio/video editing all fall under someone’s definition of comp.

I think I teach composition to try and give my students the basic tools for communicating their ideas clearly and effectively (mostly) in the university setting. For me this is mostly about the written word, but I’m struggling to achieve a balance between technological instruction and composition instruction.

Academic Writing

THE PURPOSE OF ACADEMIC WRITING

I think the basic premise of academic writing is, as the word academic suggests, writing in an academic context to an academic audience in an academic style. We expect students to go beyond what they have learned at high school and get them more into the scholarly writing that a college requires. Academic writing courses offered at the college level do not only serve for writing only for that particular composition class but it is also a skill that students use in their own departments when they are required to write an essay, conduct a research or prepare a presentation.

As any composition approach aims, academic writing, too, aims to get students to organize their thoughts on a given subject in order to communicate their ideas to their intended audience more effectively, using sound argumentations, reliable evidence and a persuasive style.

In contrast to other types of writing, academic writing deals with facts that are supported by verifiable data that you can gather from various sources. Therefore, we also expect students to acquire the library skills so that they can access and gather data from a variety of credible sources.

Teaching composition at a college level requires students to reexamine issues that they will soon wrestle with as new adults, as voters and consumers and citizens and practitioners of world religions and windsurfers and gamblers, through writing.

Through writing, in our case academic writing, students are pushed to not only think, but explain the logic behind their beliefs. They thus become better aware of how their ideas function, or more interestingly, discover the holes in the logic behind their beliefs, and revise them.

They will (hopefully) become more articulate, but also more curious. If nothing else, they will learn more about themselves and the way others think about the same societal issues. The gamblers will learn something from the Buddhists and the Buddhists will learn something from the windsurfers.