A note on group work and my expectations.

This morning I wrote a student a note about their group work, and I wanted the class to read it, because it captures my expectations of students in 111 and how group work fits into process thinking and process writing. Find the note below:

Do remember: you are in a *freshman* writing class, and you are just learning to work in groups. If you were already each a perfect group member, you wouldn't need to learn these skills. The need to learn to think objectively about one's self as a group member is one reason I create the space for it to happen in my freshman courses. In short, I am very impressed when a group has a rocky start, meets and figures out some solutions to their problems, implements these solutions, and then writes about the results. Rinse and repeat. This process of making improvements--figuring out a problem, figuring out a possible solution, implementing the solution, reviewing the solution, refining the solution based on your review, rinsing and repeating, and them moving on to the next problem which will help you improve--is what process thinking is about, that is, doing as well as you can and then getting better rather than trying to be perfect the first time around. Fail joyfully and take failure as part of the process which allows you to learn. Any time and effort you spend beating yourself up is wasted effort.

By the way, go back and reread the above and spend some time thinking about it. If you can get your head around what I am saying, then you are a lot further along toward understanding process.

--Steve

Clarification of the Writing Assignments for this week.

One of your fellow authors wrote with the following question:

I'm so confused about what exactly the assignments are for this week. I have reread the blog at least 4 times and I'm still not clear about the assignments. After reading the postings done my different individuals it seems that everyone is doing different things. Please help me to understand what I should be working on.

Below find my response. I hope it helps clarify the writing assignments for this week.

To complete the assignments this week you need to understand the distinction between a claim and how it is developed.

A claim is simply a statement you make or an opinion you offer that you want your audience to believe.

Academic arguments almost always have two parts, a claim and good reasons for your audience to believe your claim. These good reasons usually consist of some combination of clarification of exactly what you mean by your claim, facts, evidence, an analogy, an example, a list of examples, or an illustration.

OK. If you are with me so far, let's talk about this week's assignment. In it you are to go into the group assessments and the two new rhetorical analysis produced by your group/group members this past week. Your job is to identify a few places where a claim could be improved and to suggest a tactic or two on how to better develop the claims which are there. The main way I've pointed to for improving claims is making them less vague. The main way I've pointed to help develop or back up a claim is by providing examples, facts, or supporting evidence.

What each author will end up with is a set of comments on their group assessments and on their new rhetorical analysis. Use this set of comments to produce a revised draft of your group assessment and rhetorical analysis. Do the revisions of first drafts in new files you create using google documents. Share these files with your group. Once shared, your group is to help you proofread your new drafts, and you are then to "turn these drafts in" by sharing them with me.

Does this help? If not, write with specific questions.

Steve

FYI: George Carlin and Writing

If you don't know who George Carlin is, you have missed out on one of the more hilarious comics of the past forty years. He passed away this week at the age of 71. His work is thought provoking, often vulgar, sometimes irreligious, and usually plays with language. He never apologized for his work at comic and author, so I won't either. His passion for others doing better in the world had a very sharp edge.

In any event, the following excerpts on how Carlin regarded himself as a writer just crossed my inbox. I like reading other authors, especially when they talk about how they use writing and improve their craft. It is one means I use to keep my own craft growing and improving. In any event, as growing authors yourselves, I wanted to pass this along to you:

Psychology Today [Notice: The names of magazines and books appear in italics. In the text of an email, they are surrounded by underscrores, like this: _Psychology Today_.] had planned a short, back page, 350-word interview with George Carlin, but given his death, Jay Dixit, the interviewer, posted longer excerpts on his blog. Carlin talks about a lot of things: the craft of comedy, the anatomy of a joke, the nature of language, and very often about the nature of writing--for him--and how he came to see writing in his work and how he came to think of himself as a writer.

Below are some excerpts followed by a URL to the full piece. Note: Read the full piece before sending students to it; there's profanity and some crude humor, as you can imagine, which might not play well in all quarters. But if your students are mature enough to work through that, there's a lot to be gleaned about learning, writing, and language.

So if I write something down, some observation-I see something on television that reminds me of something I wanted to say already-the first time I write it, the first time I hear it, it makes an impression.

The first time I write it down, it makes a second impression, a deeper path. Every time I look at that piece of paper, until I file it in my file, each time, the path gets a little richer and deeper so that these things are all in there.

Now at this age, I have a network of knowledge and data and observations and feelings and values and evaluations I have in me that do things automatically. And then when I sit down to consciously write, that's when I bring the craftsmanship. That's when I pull everything together and say, how I can best express that?

And then as you write, you find more, 'cause the mind is looking for further connections. And these things just flow into your head and you write them. And the writing is the really wonderful part. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job is to just notice them and bring them to life.

This was a really important distinction for me to notice-it happened way after the fact. I'm a writer. I think of myself as a writer. First of all, I'm an entertainer; I'm in the vulgar arts. I travel around talking and saying things and entertaining, but it's in service of my art and it's informed by that. So I get to write for two destinations. The
writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

And computers changed my life, the fact that you can move text as easily as you can move text, and say, "Wait a minute, these two things belong together, these two things go together, page 2 and page 5: similar ideas, put 'em together!" But the person who is most a part of me is the performer, is the standup, the guy who says, "Hey look at me, listen to this!" I do that because that's what I do, I love doing it.

http://tinyurl.com/5o6g8y


Enjoy or not. Your choice, but there's a lot to learn from every author. --Steve

FYI: Do you know where your apostrophes are?

My wife, Nancy, just sent me this tidbit (shown below) about a missing apostrophe on a public sign. I am not one to bemoan the failure of grammar in publication. After all, languages change, and I am the last one who should talk. I write thousands of words everyday. Unless it is vital my grammar be spot on, I decided long ago to forgo precision for clarity and quality; so, all I go for is a reasonable degree of precision.

However, searching for typos and non-standard grammar in public writing is both fun and healthy for students learning how to develop their editorial eyes; so, here is another possibility for extra credit. If you can identify a spelling or grammar error on a local public sign or newspaper, and you share it with the class using the email list, I will give you up to five points extra credit. 1/2 point per incident you report, and the 1/2 point goes to the first person to report an incident. I will also consider extra credit for pointing to places where humorous misunderstandings happen because of a spelling or grammatical mistake. [One of the favorite cartoons shows a big dog dragging a paperboy into a house. The owner is saying, "No. No, I meant, "Get the paper, comma, boy." {I said I was an English nerd.}]

Hint: Folks love to use "it's"--short for "it is"--when they try to show precession, as in, "its roof." There is also a local editor who just cannot seem to figure out that when two sentences are combined using a conjunction--as in, "and," "but" or "or"--one needs to use a comma before the conjunction. For example,

The sentences, 1) "He is going swimming." ; and, 2) "She went to the mall," can be combined as follows:

"He is going swimming, but she went to the mall."

Notice how the comma takes the place of the period at the end of the first sentence, the conjunction "but" is used as a logical bridge between the two sentences, and the capital beginning the second sentence is changed to lower case. The editor in question lets the following run-on construction through all the time:

"He is going swimming but she went to the mall."

What is surprising about the editor's oversight is that this is an easy error to catch. If an author is prone to writing run-on sentences, you get them used to looking specially at conjunctions and asking their selves, "Is this conjunction combining two sentences?" If it is, you teach them to add the comma, and the problem is fixed. Even a city editor should know this one.

Good luck hunting.

Steve
.
There's a traffic sign at the end of the street where I live. It reads:

Please drive carefully, for our childrens sake

It's an official sign of the Department of Transportation. I imagine there are thousands of these reflective blue signs around the state of Washington.

These signs may not be necessary now. Children don't play outside anymore. There are more than enough Nintendos and Hanna Montanas and Facebooks these days to keep them busy. But that's not why I mentioned the sign.

We're missing something here. A little squiggly mark.

We may be missing an apostrophe here but, over all, the universe's apostrophe store stays in equilibrium. We don't put them where they belong, and we add them where they don't. Many a grocery store display signs such as:

Apple's $3 per pound

There's even a term for the gratuitous inclusion of these marks: greengrocer's apostrophe.

Sometimes we are not sure whether an apostrophe is needed, so we simply add one, as if considering pillars to support a roof. "Well, let's add one here; it may not be needed, but it's there if necessary, and in any case it's not hurting anything."

FYI: Reynolds Students to Begin Using Gmail

I meant to mention this last week, but truth is, I forgot. In any event, I have heard that starting in the fall, the Virginia Community College system will begin moving student email accounts over the google mail; so, the time you've invested learning to use gmail this semester will pay you back even more. I've also been asked to teach some in-services on how to use gmail and other online google applications to my colleagues at Reynolds. Cool.

Steve

Overview of the Week: Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June.

This week you are going to be working on the revision stage of the writing process. If you remember from last week, the writing process is divided into five steps:

1. Prewriting.
2. Drafting.
3. Revision.
4. Proofreading.
5. Review.

We're working our way backwards through the stages of the writing process. As we have done so, you've gained some experience with proofreading, and this week you continue to develop these skills as you learn to make two of the most essential kinds of revision. In the process, you will learn how to improve how you present your claims or opinions and how to support them once you've offered them. One of the essential features of professional writing and speaking, is a connection between how you are perceived professionally, the quality of your opinions, and how thoroughly you can back up and support your opinions. Once you have figured out what you want your writing to do and who your audiences is, you have to figure out what you want your audience to believe (your opinions) and how you are going to explain your opinions (development). Why? Because good, successful writing is writing where you audience comes to share, understand, or--hopefully-act on the opinions you present them. Finally, you will learn that good critical thinking is characterized by a combination of specific, useful opinions which are nuanced, supported, and fully backed up. Along the way, you'll gain some pointers on how to make your own academic reading process more active and easier, and on how to succeed in the class by focusing on process instead of product.

Spend some time thinking this week of the process I am forcing you to use in producing the messages you write for the class. It is a good process, and I want you to try it out, but good writing isn't ridgid, it's flexible, and a good writer learns not only process writing but how to adpat process writing to their own style. Notice I am getting you to draft, revise to improve specific aspects of your writing, and then getting you to proofread. Also notice the underlying assumptions I bring to this process: 1) most good writing should be revised; and, 2) most good useful writing is nuanced, clear, and well developed. Remember, I am defining good writing as writing which accomplishes the author's purpose. Think about these assumptions. Do you agree with them? Notice as well that the writing process I am teaching you is based on the underlying assumptions behind Kaizen, that is: 1) if one employs a good process, a good product will result; 2) if one improves process, a better product will result; 3) small continuous improvements result in sustainable, obtainable change; and, finally, 4) small changes accumulate and promote substantive change. {Look up the words you don't know.} Think about these assumptions. Do you agree with them? How can you apply them in to your writing and to your life? Do you want to? I'll provide extra credit to those who participate this week in a disscussion on the class email list--eng111summer2008reynolds@googlegroups.com--about their take on these assumptions and questions.

As always, write with questions.

Steve

Second Writing Assignment for Week of Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June.

If the first writing assignment for the week went well, when you look back through the text you have written over the past week, you should see a lot of advice on how to improve the claims you are making and places where you could better develop your claims. More important, your own ability to notice these places in your own writing should be improving.

Here is what you are to do for your second writing assignment this week:

1. Read through the advice you received in the first writing assingment.
2. Create a new google document called something like: "Revision 2, Group Assessment" or "Revision 2, Two New Rhetorical Analysis." Copy your old draft into this new document.
2. Revise your first draft (in the new document) based on the advice you have received.
3. Read back through your revised draft and see if there are places which weren't noted where you should revise your claims/opinions or development. Make these revisions.
4. Proofread your work once again using two of the methods you learned last week. In one pass, use the method which worked best for you last week. In a second pass, use a new proofreading method. Remember, one of the most effective proofreading methods is to have someone else (a group member?) proofread your work.
5. At the bottom of your revised drafts, make sure to note which proofreading methods you used and how effective or helpful you found them. Do this through comparing and contrasting the methods you use.
6. Again, at the bottom of your revised draft, summarize the changes you made and how these changes improved your draft.
6. Make sure to share your revised draft with me and your group.

As always, write with questions.

Writing Assignment One: Week of Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June

This week you are working on how to revise your work. To revise well, you have to notice specific aspects of your messages which could be better crafted so as to improve your ethos and help your audience understand what you are trying to say--your logos. In my two previous posts, I discussed how to judge the quality of the opinions an author offers and how to notice places where these opinions could be more fully developed. In this writing assignment, you will be looking for places in your group's work where they could improve how they present their claims or more fully develop or support their opinions. Here is what I want you to do:

1. Share your group assessment and two new rhetorical analysis with your group using google documents.
2. Read my posts on "Revising Claims" and on "Revising to Develop."
3. Visit each member of your group's work over the past week. In each document, try to identify two places where how a claim/opinion is made could be improved and where a claim/opinion could be more fully developed.
4. Offer advice on how to improve claims/opinions and development in your color of text, and make sure to sign your work with something akin to "--Steve." Of course, you may encounter a text where the claims are crystal clear and adequately specific and where every claim is fully and completely developed. If so, compliment the author on their work, but think long and hard before doing so. Remember, an editor's value is largely related to their ability to notice aspects of the authors work which can be improved, and one of the mottoes for the class is: "Texts can always be improved." You are practicing the skill of looking for these places, and you are helping the author by offering advice. Having said this, sometimes a text is just blessed good.

Reading for Second Writing Assignment: Week of Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June: Revising Claims

In my last post, I discussed the need to revise one's draft by noticing places where one makes a claim or offers an opinion, but one does not back what is said. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about how to revise claims.

Claims are opinions. They are statements you want your audience to believe. The quality of your claims goes a long way toward establishing your ethos with an audience. What do I mean by quality?

Claims come in two flavors, general and vague or specific and detailed. A vague claim is often a signal to a trained reader that the author has not taken the time to fully develop their thinking about their topic. Look at these three claims:

a. "Driving in Richmond sucks."
b. "Drivers in Richmond are less than polite."
c. "Drivers in Richmond think of themselves first and other drivers second. They drive aggressively and, in their haste to get where they are going quickly, they waste gas and make the driving more dangerous than it has to be."

Notice the truth of a claim has little to do with how precisely it states an author's thinking. All three of the claims above may be true, but what you are looking for is how developed and specific the claim is. Notice claim A is vague. There is a lot of information remaining in the author's mind, and his or her conception of poor driving may be vastly different than that of the audience. In a similar manner, claim B is more precise than claim A, but there is a lot of information hiding in the phrase, "less than polite." To be fully effective as a claim, it needs to be more specific. Now notice claim C is more specific and detailed than claims A or B. More important from a writers perspective, the audience of claim C has a more specific idea--a kind of road map--of how the writing which will follow will likely develop. This is the real test of a specific and useful claim, that is, can the audience tell what the author is thinking with some precision, and does the claim provide clues as to what topics the author will develop to back up their claim? If you can answer, "Yes," to both questions, chances are you've written a fairly good, useful, detailed, non-vague claim.

Now, why is this important? The short version? You are judged not only by how well you can back up what you claim but also by the quality of your claim. To return to the example of the engineer giving advice on which steel to use in constructing a bridge, there is a world of difference between saying, "We should us steel," and "We should use a steel with an index of flexibility X, a hardness of Y, and a carbon content of Z." If two different authors were to offer these claims, which one would have the greater ethos with you. Think about the question, because just as you judge the quality of the claims made by others, they are judging the quality of yours.

In the last post I discussed the fact that teachers and professionals value the quality of a writer/student's ability to think critically over almost everything else. One of the markers of quality thinking is how specific one's claims are. The upshot? Make specific, useful claims and develop your claims fully, and people are more likely to give you ethos. The ethos you gain will translate into higher grades and, more importantly, more money, more respect, and more people willing to listen to what you have to offer.

Steve

Reading for the Week: How to Get More from Reading the Blog

In reviewing your assessments of how you are doing in the class, I saw one from a returning student who was having some difficulty reading and getting all the information from the blog. Here is my advice to her:

Spread the reading over two or three days. Skim it one day to pick up the basic assignments and ideas which will be covered and come back and read for nuance. I assume students are reading the posts as if they were reading a text book, that is, taking notes on new terms or changes to old ones, on connections between old and new ideas, and on specific assignments or chances to practice, and on questions they might have. I am also assuming students are reading the blogs more than once, because I'm packing individual posts fairly densely with information. Finally, I am hoping (but not assuming) students are discussing their questions with their group and bringing questions their group can't resolve to me.

Here is a link on a method which may help you to read more actively and get more from the kind of academic, intensive reading you need to do for the blog:

http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Reading/Reading%20Strategies/interactivenotebook.htm

[The above is a good active reading tactic to adapt to the reading you do online. You can set your reading notebook beside your computer and take notes as you read. I especially like the note/response format the divided notebook method imposes. There are a host of studies showing it produced a more comprehensive understanding of what one reads, all while allowing the reader to isolate questions they may have. ]

For a list of other active reading tactics, not all of which will work with online reading, look here:

http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Reading/Reading%20Strategies/reading%20strategies%20index.htm

[These active reading tactics were developed for a K-12 teacher audience, but--in general--they work well for academic, college reading as well, especially at the freshman level. Most students entering college don't consciously read academic texts differently than they do other reading, and to succeed, they need to learn both that they have to read textbooks differently and how to do so.]

As always, write with questions.

Steve

Reading for First Writing Assignment: Week of Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June: Revising to Develop

Most of us have received the cryptic comment from an English teacher: "Develop" or "Develop this idea more fully." English teachers make this comment often, because we get paid to teach students how to fully develop their thinking and writing. In fact, teachers in general spend a lot of time talking among ourselves about "teaching critical thinking, reading, and writing skills." It's one of the many tasks with which industry and government charges us. More important from your viewpoint as a student, learning the trick of demonstrate what you think by backing up your opinions will result in much, much higher grade much earlier in your student and professional career.

What do we mean by "critical thinking, reading, and writing," and why does everyone make such a big deal about students learning the skill?" We want you to be able to zero in on essential aspects of whatever you are reading and thinking about; and, to understand the world, you need to be able to know which aspects of a problem are essential and which can be ignored. How do you know which aspects of a text or subject is critical or essential? You get taught, and you learn through error and trail and experience.

For instance, this semester you've been learning to think critically about communication and to pull out essential aspects of communication situations. The critical or essential aspects you've been taught to notice and analyze are things like the author's goals, the audience's needs, and noise. Through practice, you've learned to think critically--to think more fully and to notice more--about how an author uses the three appeals to craft their messages. Every profession has a set of such ways to break down their area of study. They call these "ways to break down or things a professional is expected to notice" a rubric or paradigm.

For instance, one History rubric or paradigm is to look at past events, trying to isolate critical figures, causes, and actions and fit them into a coherent narrative of what caused what in the past. Historians train history students to fit each figure and action into a chronology and to notice similarities and differences between the past and the present, all to predict the future. Literary analysis trains students to use an interpretive rubic in which they notice and analyze imagery, genre, period, author's biography, and symbolology. As with all critical thinking rubrics, the idea is to train students to notice and analyze speicific things in a piece of literature to gain a fuller, more critical understanding of what the iterature as a whole means. Health care has its own rubrics, as does law enforcement, and every other profession.

However, while different disciples and professions differ in what they think of as essential or critical to the texts they study, all academic disciplines and professions share one thing in common in terms of how to present one's insights to others. What is this one essential characteristic you have to learn to be considered a professional? You have to learn to back up your opinions. That's the whole secret to success in the professional world. Let me say this again, so you can sear it into your mind: "Western trained professionals back up their opinions." To be considered a professional or to participate fully in academic discourse (read: to get good grades in college), you *must* learn not only to offer a valid opinion but to back it up with evidence, examples, illustrations, and/or clarification of your thinking.

The upshot? English teachers spend a lot of time harping on development, and students spend a lot of time saying, "I just like to say what I want to say without a lot of BS." It's not BS. What is often lacking from student writing is the backup half of the necessary pairing of opinion/claim + warrants/reasons your audience should believe your opinion. In short, to sound like a professional, you have to do more than sound like a confident, well informed author(ity), you have to be willing and able to back up your claims and opinions. When you don't do so, people suspect your claims as being "just an opinion" rather than a well reasoned, professional opinion.

Let me offer you an illustration. Recently, a student sent me a glowing assessment of their group in which he said:

"My assumptions that we would all learn from one another is correct. [By the way, 'assumptions (plural) are correct' would be proper usage.] I have learned a wealth of information from everyone in this team."

In these two sentences he made two claims: 1) "my assumptions are correct" and 2) "I have learned a wealth of information from everyone." Notice, however, he presented his claims without doing anything *but* making the claims. He didn't go on to develop them with examples, illustrations, or clarification of exactly what he means. He leaves it up to the auduience--in this case me--to fill in the gaps. Those trained in critical thinking are trained to regard claims offered without supporting information with suspicion. Why? Because people are lazy, and while they may have very good reasons for holing their stated opinion, when it comes to a professional opinion--"We should use steel X to made this bridge."--other professionals need more than just a bald opinion, they need good reasons to believe.

When students have difficulty developing papers, it is usually a signal they haven't been trained in the need to give more than just a bald option; and, they miss golden opportunities to fully explain explain their thinking *and* to gain ethos by using a structure which marks them as speaking to an academic audience. For instance, the author of the sentences above could clarify what he meant by "assumptions" by providing his audience with a list of the major assumptions he made in regards to his group. He could explain more fully what he meant by "a wealth of information" by providing a couple of examples or illustrations, and he could make brownie points (that is, improve his group member's ethos as students in the eyes of his professor) by linking specific lessons he had learned to specific team members' names. You get the idea:

claim + support = a demonstration of fully developed critical thinking + signals a way of presenting yourself as an educated professional

Learn how to recognize opportunities to back up your claims with support, and not only will your grades improve, you will find people mysterisouly giving creedence to what you say. Try it. It works.

What does all this have to do with process writing and revision? Well, you remember that revision comes after one has produced a draft and before proofreading. When you revise, you are looking at places where you can craft a better message by making changes to deep level meaning. One of the aspects of a draft you should train yourself to look for--at least in academic writing--is a lack of development. To notice where a piece needs development, you have to train yourself to notice where someone has made a claim or offered and opinion without backing it up.