On Writing Well: Guiding students

"Writing floats on a sea of talk."

––James Britton, 1970

 

A colleague back at UMaine wrote the other day asking for advice. She's a research professor not a writing teacher, so her observations and questions aren't unusual. Here's her email request:  

Dear Rich

 I hope you are enjoying yourself in your new retirement status! How I envy you! I hope to follow in not too many years.

  I'm reaching out because I'm struggling to read my students' papers this semester. I feel desperate. My hair is turning gray. My blood pressure is rising. Their papers and comp exams are getting worse and worse each year. And it's not just students from our College, but others from across the campus who are in my graduate research methods courses. This summer two students I'm helping to advise failed to pass their comp exams and are redoing them--twice or thrice. It's not just poor grammar, punctuation and lack of proofreading, but students don't seem to know how to structure their papers in a logical and effective way and paragraphs cover many topics and run on for a page or more! I thought high schools taught how to structure and write a basic essay. And certainly, these students should have written a few papers in college! This is a much bigger problem that some faculty have started to share and discuss, and not something that an occasional trip to the writing center could fix.

  Some students are asking for guidance on how to improve their writing. I give them very specific feedback on their writing, but I'm not sure what to recommend for reading or online writing courses. I feel that what they need most is a good, short, basic book on advice and examples on how to write well--just writing in general, not specifically writing dissertations or in academic style. Do you know of anything I could recommend? 

  Any ideas would be welcome!  Thank you!

JF

I spent time thinking about JF's questions during the evening, and the next morning I framed up my response:

Oh, Janet, I feel your pain. Welcome to the world of writing teachers. Good to hear from you, though I'm sorry to hear your students are struggling. Here's the truth: nothing I'll write below will surprise you.

Surprise, surprise: There isn't a single book that will help all writers. If someone struggles with generating first drafts, we ask them to keep a writer's notebook and to journal daily. (As you know, all writers, like researchers, should keep notebooks.) Many writers use books that prompt writing like Monica Wood's The Pocket Muse.  If someone is struggling with clarity, paragraphing, sentence variety, developing conclusions... they might turn to a book like Zinsser's On Writing Well.  

I supply my writing students with resources and teach them how to use these resources to help them grind through their writing projects draft after draft after draft. A favorite resource of mine is the National Writing Project's Resource Guide for Teaching Writing. I know, your students aren't teaching writing, but the activities within these pages are helpful. But will this help you and your students immediately?  Unh-unh. 

The key to success for most writers, including your student-writers, is found by looking closely at effective writers' habits of mind and habits of practice. Here are two that I believe are crucial: 

1. Most writers belong to writing groups. Many writers have writing partners or editors (not copyeditors but Editors... these editors writing coaches). Ultimately, writers should share their writing through talk with knowledgeable others. (Yes, that's wicked time consuming.) I learned this truth in the 1980s and created a student-staffed writing center at my high school because, as I wrote in my 1997 book, Room 109, "I cannot be the primary editor of my 120 students when they are writing 20 papers a year." You can't either, Janet. 

(A favorite quotation from my 1991 grad school writing mentor, James Britton: "Writing floats on a sea of talk." Mr. Britton was 81 years old at the time I sat in his classroom at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English. He, Dixie Goswami, and Michael Armstrong changed my teaching life.)   

My written notes on papers aren't as helpful as a good conversation about a manuscript. We teachers don't have time for that kind of conversation. Writing center staffers are trained to guide these conversations... my editor of 40 years, Anne Wood, guided my writing through conversations and, of course, letters and notes on the manuscript. (She liked calling me a "dolt" every so often.) But the most important practice between Anne-the-editor and me-the-writer? Our ongoing, time-consuming talk. There's no way around this and all classes need to find ways to help students institute this kind of practice. Talk is the foundation of writing across the curriculum and writing center pedagogy. 

2. Read and examine mentor texts. Writing a literature review? Read, write, and talk about a lot of them. Writing a dissertation? Read, write, and talk about them. (I know this isn't news to you.) 

So, my advice, Janet: help students organize their writing lives. You may even have to send students to the UMaine Writing Center. Make sure they have a writing group or an Editor to guide their thinking and their talk. Your role as a writing coach is to help your students organize their academic writing lives. 

That's what I got today. Hope you're well. I'm off to climb a mountain!

Rich