From Expressive to Transactional Writing:
A “Walk-Through” Exercise
Randall Martoccia
Department of English
Among the many writing problems students confront, one of the most common is a poor concept
of paper structure. Students are often aware of their problems with structure but have received
little instruction in organizing—aside from high-school lessons on the five-paragraph essay. By
the way, college teachers tend to despise blind adherence to this form, believing it does to
thought what the bonsai technique does to trees. Most college students find out early in their
college career how little use the five-paragraph form is when dealing with more complex papers.
In a poll I conducted just before a paper deadline last year, students voted that “paper structure”
was their area of greatest concern. “Paper structure” even edged out “writing concisely” and
“avoiding plagiarism.” Poor conception of structure manifests itself in many ways: paragraphs
are wildly unfocused, having a different topic in each sentence; introductory material shows up
too late; and related information winds up in different paragraphs. One especially nagging
problem is the tendency of writers of research papers to organize their essays according to
sources rather than topics. The exercise described here addresses this organizational problem.
When conducting research in preparation for writing research papers, students often become
overwhelmed with the information they find. Many of them also procrastinate, leaving
themselves no choice but to skip steps in the writing process. Skipping the planning and
organizational steps of the process can be crippling for students. The problem I mentioned
earlier—structuring according to sources not topics—is a result of students missing the step
between note-taking and drafting. Using an exercise that simulates this step—call it the
categorizing of information—can be an effective way to address the problems caused by lack of
thoughtful categorizing.
This categorizing activity addresses what John C. Bean calls Data Dump writing. Here Bean
describes this kind of writing: “Data dump writing […] has no discernable structure. It reveals a
student overwhelmed with information and uncertain what to do with it” (23). While one could
argue that papers organized according to sources do have a kind of structure to them, “dumping”
seems a suitable label for this kind of writing since it ignores the conceptual relationships
between ideas. According to Bean, Jean Piaget would likely consider source-structured writing a
result of concrete-operational reasoning. Students who reason in this way may be able to
organize information in simplistic ways, but they tend not to think abstractly (Bean 24-25).
Other students who might be able to recognize the underlying relationships between ideas in
their research do not always give themselves the opportunity to so. Technology enables students
to cut-and-paste information straight from a source into their paper. By doing so, students skip
the note-taking step in the research-paper process. “By not taking notes,” Bean writes, “students
are less apt to reflect on their reading or make decisions in advance about what is or is not
important” (204). Moreover, the note-taking and the categorizing stages work together to reveal
what is or is not related. When these steps are skipped and similarities are ignored, superficially
related ideas may end up in the same paragraph while more closely related ideas may be at
opposite ends of the paper.
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The activity described below is meant to simulate the categorizing step in the writing process
that immediately follows note-taking—but is often passed over due to students’ increased use of
technology. The handout consists of paraphrases and quotations from an actual paper. I
essentially disassembled an MLA-formatted paper and re-sorted the information according to the
sources. In the paper, of course, the information was arranged according to topics. The purpose
of presenting the information organized by source is to present students with a mass of facts,
quotations, and ideas—a clump of material similar to what they soon will be dealing with as their
research progresses. At some point their notes will be organized according to sources.
Here’s the handout:
_____________
Pretend that below are the notes you’ve taken—including paraphrases and quotations—
while researching your paper. Currently the info is in the order you’ve found it. Your job
today is to categorize the information according to topics and sub-topics.
On Thanksgiving weekend in 1999, John and Carole Hall were killed when a Naval
midshipman crashed into their parked car (Stockwell B8).
The driver said, “When I looked up from the cell phone I was dialing, I was three feet
from the car and had no time to stop” (qtd. in Stockwell B8)
_______________________________
The midshipman was charged with vehicular manslaughter for deaths of John and Carole
Hall (Layton C1).
The judge was unable to issue a guilty verdict. He found the defendant guilty of negligent
driving and imposed a $500 fine (Layton C1)
Two years after the accident, the county where the accident happened passed a law
forbidding cell phone use while driving (Layton C2)
State legislators are beginning to receive public pressure to pass anti-cell-phone laws.
“It’s definitely an issue that is gaining steam around the country,” says Matt Sundeen of
the National Conference of State Legislatures (qtd. in Layton C9).
The first town to restrict use of handheld phones was Brooklyn, Ohio (Layton C9).
Frances Bents, an expert on the relation between cell phones and accidents, estimates that
between 450 and 1,000 crashes a year have some connection to cell phone use (Layton
C9).
_______________________________
In Georgia, a young woman distracted by her cell phone ran down and killed a two-yearold. Her sentence was ninety days in boot camp and five hundred hours of community
service (Ippolito J1).
_______________________________
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A New England Journal of Medicine study concluded that a driver using a cell phone was
four times as likely to get into a collision as a driver not using a cell phone (Redelmeier
and Tibshirani 456)
_______________________________
On November 7, 1999, two-year-old Morgan Pena was killed by a driver distracted by
his cell phone (Besthoff).
On November 14, 1999 corrections officer Shannon Smith was killed by a woman
distracted by her cell phone (Besthoff).
_______________________________
John Violanti of the Rochester Institute of Technology found a nine fold increase in the
risk of a fatality if a phone was being used and a doubled risk simply when a phone was
present in a vehicle (522-523).
_______________________________
In a survey done by Farmers Insurance Group, 87% of those polled said that cell phones
affect a driver’s ability, and 40% reported having close calls with drivers distracted by
phones.
Lon Anderson of the American Automobile Association asserts, “In many states, there is
momentum building to pass laws” (qtd. in Farmer Insurance Group).
______________________________
Morgan’s mother, Patti Pena, reports that the driver “ran a stop sign at 45 mph,
broadsided my vehicle and killed Morgan as she sat in her car seat.
The driver who killed Morgan Lee Pena received two tickets and a $50 fine and retained
his driving privileges (Pena).
_______________________________
In Suffolk County, New York, it is illegal for drivers to use a handheld phone for
anything but an emergency call (Haughney A8).
_______________________________
As of December 2000, twenty countries were restricting use of cell phones in moving
vehicles (Sundeen 8).
_______________________________
Currently, no state has a law forbidding people from using cell phones while driving
(Smith 7).
******
The exercise consists of three parts:
(1) First, students find and group similar information. They are asked to identify
the paper’s topics. This part takes 15-20 minutes. Each student works alone.
(2) Next, I stand in front of the board and ask the students to list the topics one by
one. Volunteers call these topics out to me, and I write them down. We also
identify the different items from the handout that belong under each topic.
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(3) I then ask them to consider what would be the most logical order for these topics.
We discuss the potential strengths and weaknesses of different ways of putting the
paper together.
The paper from which these notes were pulled is in Diana Hacker’s The Bedford Handbook—the
textbook my students use. After the exercise is over, I invite students to read the original paper
and compare their reassembled version to it. You can find the paper online at
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/bedhandbook7enew/Player/Pages/Frameset.aspx.
An admitted limitation of this assignment is the amount of class time it requires. While the
nature of composition classes allows much time to different stages of the writing process, a
teacher of a typical writing-intensive class likely does not have such a luxury. Also, the handout
may not address each professor’s most pressing areas of concern related to writing. However,
one can easily modify the assignment by disassembling a more applicable paper and crafting the
activity to meet those concerns.
Many aspects of the writing process—such as, sentence construction and paragraph
development—can be simulated in a disassemble/reassemble kind of exercise. “Walk-through”
activities can be used in relation to any writing assignment. Bean describes these activities in
Chapter 12 of Engaging Ideas (specifically, on 213-4). In these kinds of activities, students are
exposed to the situations that they’ll be going through in their own papers. Simulations and
“walk-throughs” have such great potential because students get to practice without the pressure
of being graded.
References
Bean, J. C. (2001). Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical
Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.