REFRAMING ATTITUDES
TOWARD STUDENT
WORK
Teaching
Writing as a
Process
FAMILIAR REFRAINS
 “Why can’t these #&*@% students just write one #&*@%
correct sentence?”
 “I had three instances of plagiarism on my last essay.”
 “Look at this ridiculous/hilarious/bizarre/depressing thing my
student wrote!”
I STARTED TO ASK MYSELF
 “Why can’t these #&*@% students just write one #&*@%
correct sentence?”
 “I had three instances of plagiarism on my last essay.”
 “Look at this ridiculous/hilarious/bizarre/depressing thing my
student wrote!”
 How can I design assignments better so that my students
write their best sentences/don’t feel compelled to
plagiarize/produce work they can show of f rather than work I
can make fun of?
 How can I teach students to write in a manner that is
consistent with my own writing practices?
DAVID BARTHOLOMAE,
“THE STUDY OF ERROR”:
 “[English teachers] have not read as we have been trained to
read, with a particular interest in the way an individual style
confronts and violates convention. We have read, rather, as
policemen, examiners, gate -keepers. The teacher who is
unable to make sense of out a seemingly bizarre piece of
student writing is often the same teacher who can give an
elaborate explanation of the ‘meaning’ of a story by Donald
Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings. If we learn to treat
the language of basic writing as language and assume, as we
do when writers violate our expectations in more conventional
ways, that the unconventional features in the writing are
evidence of intention and that they are, therefore,
meaningful, then we can chart systematic choices, individual
strategies, and characteristic processes of thought” (255).
DAVID BARTHOLOMAE,
“THE STUDY OF ERROR”:
 “By charting an analyzing a writer’s errors, we can begin in
our instruction with what a writer does, rather than with what
he fails to do.”
 Even the weakest English students will do way more right on
their papers than they will do wrong
 Our students can write. They communicate in writing all the
time. It’s when they have to write about concepts they don’t
understand, and have the pressure of writing nine dif ferent
things for nine dif ferent classes in a week that they put
forward work that is not demonstrative of their best.
READING STUDENT WORK
 Think of how dif ferently you read a student’s essay vs. how
you would read a draft of an essay for a colleague
 For colleague: you’d make global comments about content,
of fer suggestions, talk about what you liked, of fer
constructive criticism
 For a student: You may circle every grammatical error, and
focus on what the student does wrong
 We want our students to feel like they’re integral parts of a
network of thinkers
 But in our comments, we often find ourselves justifying why
marks were taken of f. This seems antithetical to our goals
MIKE ROSE,
“THE LANGUAGE OF EXCLUSION”
 “Mina Shaughnessy got us to see that even the most error ridden prose arises from the confrontation of the
inexperienced student writers with the complex linguistic and
rhetorical expectations of the academy. She reminded us that
to properly teach writing to such students is to understand
‘the intelligence of their mistakes.’ She told us to interpret
errors rather than circle them, and to guide these students,
gradually and with wisdom, to be more capable participants
within the world of these conventions” (357 -358)
BUT
 Okay, students’ mistakes are intelligent mistakes. But they’re
still mistakes. How do you not take of f grades for mistakes?
 Don’t grade everything with the same criteria. Design some
parts of the assignment to reward “mistakes” (aka,
thinking/trying/taking chances)
LARRY WEINSTEIN,
“HONORING STUDENT THINKING”
 “The mind’s best work tends, if anything to be messier than
normal. But students do not generally know these things”
(25).
 “We need to honor the student as a thinker —to af firm her
membership in the same species that includes all the experts”
(26).
 Here’s where process work/revision/drafting/scaffolding
comes in
NANCY SOMMERS, “REVISION STRATEGIES OF
STUDENT WRITERS AND EXPERIENCED ADULT
WRITERS”
 “It is a sense of writing as discovery —a repeated process of
beginning over again, starting out new —that…students [fail] to
have” (387).
ELLIOT H. SHAPIRO, “WHY I DON’T
GRADE PAPERS”
 “I would like my students to think about writing as a process
through which they discover ideas and communicate them to
other people…It is hard to discover, to explore, to take risks, if
the goal of your paper is to receive a grade” (3).
 “I believe my students have ideas to communicate, ideas
which are worthy of interest, ideas which may teach me
something, ideas which they can probably communicate more
ef fectively if they are encouraged to work at it” (3 -4).
 “For me, thinking of what I do as ‘reading’ rather than
‘grading’ or ‘correcting’ makes what I do infinitely more
pleasant” (4).
 “I want [students] to feel free to experiment, to take risks, to
make mistakes, to write for the sake of writing” (5).
JOHN C. BEAN, ENGAGING IDEAS, CHAPTER 7:
“INFORMAL, EXPLORATORY WRITING
ACTIVITIES”
 “Try to incorporate students’ exploratory writing directly into
the texture of your course” (124).
 “Because exploratory writing is generally done without
concern for organization, sentence structure, spelling, or
mechanics, some instructors feel that this kind of writing
simply encourages students to practice all the bad habits they
already have…This objection…seems based on a faulty
analogy between writing and some sphere of human behavior
where sloppiness is a moral error…rather than a
developmental stage in a process…Exploratory writing is
messy because thought is messy” (124 -125).
 Students can be “rewarded for the process of thinking, rather
than [just] for the end product itself” (127).
 “The instructor…needs only to read the formal paper; he or
she can give ‘process credit’ to the student simply for doing
the [exploratory] tasks” (139).
FIRST ESSAY PROCESS FOR 102 CLASS





In class:
Brainstorming:
Rough draft:
Responding to corrected rough draft:
Lab revision session:
 Total class time spend working on
Brainstorming/drafting/revising
1
4
1
2
hour
hours
hour
hours
8+ hours
+ The opportunity to see me in my of fice with rough draft
+ They had to complete the final draft at home (around 4 hours)
OBSERVATIONS/FEEDBACK I’VE GOTTEN
FROM STUDENTS
 Takes away the fear of making mistakes
 Students are scared to write. Many suf fer from a lack of
confidence (“I’m not a good writer,” “I’m not good at English”)
 This process allows them to get useful feedback early in the
process.
 This mimics my own process for writing
 I can read the early parts of the process very quickly, and
of fer useful, constructive feedback.
 By not worrying about grammar early in the process, and
putting the onus on the student to hand in something that is
polished, I find the grammar on the final drafts is much, much
better.
 When students have confidence in what they are writing, a lot
of the grammar takes care of itself.
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION,
ESSAY #1
 Brainstorm/1 st draft/revision =
 Final draft =
10%
15%
 Total
25%
 I feel like I can be more demanding on final drafts, because
 A) I’ve given them so much class time and ef fort to improve
their drafts
 B) If they’ve done all the process work, the grade for their
essay as a whole can be substantially higher than the grade
for their final drafts
 C) If students do the work, they get very good grades
 D) If a students get bad grades, it’s almost certainly because
they did not work hard enough
GEORGE SAUNDERS
 “To me, the process of writing is just reading what I've written
and—like running your hand over one of those mod glass
stovetops to find where the heat is —looking for where the
energy is in the prose, then going in the direction of that. It's
an exercise in being open to whatever is there .”