Teaching Essay Writing in the Post-Truth College

[Guest]

On Lies, Bias, and Fake News

It's only been in the last few years that I've found it difficult to help my developing writers feel comfortable with previously understood concepts like: facts, news, lies, bias, etc.

My freshman writing classes are not necessarily political in nature, but in some ways our lives all brush up against political notions from time to time, especially when we share opinions and use outside sources to support them in the assignments and essays we write.

For example, there was a news story on both Fox News and CNN last week about vaping. Both organizations talked about the same study, had the same "facts," and offered their viewers the same general warning about third-party vaping paraphernalia. I don't imagine that anyone watching either would have been harmed by the reporting; I don't believe anyone would have been misled. The news was real, true as far as experts (the CDC in Atlanta) could attest to. You could put it in an essay.

But later that same week I watched the same two news organizations on another story. In this story, a public figure was shown on one network, saying, "I never did XYZ, and the people who said I did are the ones who are guilty and need to be taken down." That same network then had a panel of people from newspapers and magazines and they said things like, "Well, of course he [the public figure] would never do XYZ. Anyone saying the opposite is 'fake news' and probably treasonous."

Later, on the other network, I saw a video of the exact same public figure saying, "Of course I did XYZ! And I'll do it again when I want. Anyone trying to stop me is treasonous."

What do we do with that? What's true? They both exist. Some people likely "believe" something of what they saw or read or heard. But can they both be real? Is one news organization right and the other wrong? As the old saw goes, "Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your lying eyes!"

I have found that in politically partisan issues, my writers struggle mightily to find sources that a mainstream audience will accept and find unbiased. And, helping them get to that stage is my primary goal during the course of a semester.

Yesterday, I overheard someone in my class say, "Well anything in the New York Times is literally a lie." Well, actually, no. I checked it out. They have the date correct on the front page. The business page showed NASDAQ and Dow Jones indexes that matched the financials reported everywhere else. Articles about all kinds and manner of things were not lies at all.

In a highly charged political atmosphere like we find ourselves in the #fakenews era, we sometimes use shorthand. "The left are crazy." "The right are crazy." "All liberals want gang members to run for Senate." "All conservatives want to shoot asylum seekers in the legs to slow them down."

So no, the New York Times is not literally all lies. And neither is Fox News or Breitbart or MSNBC. There are parts of all newspapers and news sources that are "opinion-based" or "editorial." The most common understanding of this concept has been part of the history of journalism and the free press. There have always been editorial sections, places where writers and editors expressed carefully weighed and supported opinions about the state of the world, whether it be the whole planet, or just the town of Dundee, Oregon. Then the "op-ed" section was born, letters submitted and published by readers who were opposing the editors and their points of view on certain issues.

This was the way it was for hundreds of years.. With the advent of online commenting in our digital age, commenting and replying to established news sources has exploded in size. No longer does one have to sit down with pen and paper and write a reasonable account that the newspaper will present in opposition. Now you can fill a day writing about your opinion on Yahoo! Comments or Inside Higher Ed.

And many of these online mini-essays are lucid, interesting, thoughtful, etc. But many of them also are not. Some come from people that probably who are seeking attention, or trolling, or maybe even damaged. The worst shouldn't be left alone with sharp objects or electricity.

Whichever of my students said that everything in the New York Times is literally a lie, really didn't even mean that. What the person undoubtedly meant is that the editors and opinion writers for that news organization tend to support one side of political thought over another, and in fact that is valid - as it is for nearly every magazine or newspaper that covers the same world of stories. We all probably could name left-leaning and right-leaning radio, TV, newspaper, websites, writers, reporters, presenters, etc.

What makes this hard is that you can never find what is completely true or real in the absence of other viewpoints. I urge writers to read widely and consider multiple viewpoints on any argumentative text they choose to write. Without that depth, none of us could ever have sufficient perspective. If you are born and live in a house that has blue paint on the walls of every room, that does NOT mean that every wall in the world is blue. Or that they AREN'T. You can't know without visiting some other houses.

Of course we have things we believe. And I'm not asking my writers to think like me or anyone else. I've had thousands of students and their own collections of truths, lies, and biases over 35 years in the classroom. The ones I've hoped to reward are not the ones I agree with personally. The writer that writes elegantly and passionately about an issue to the right audience, using appropriate and credible support, always wins.

The world is a lot more interesting when multiple views unlock and make sense of things. Ignoring other perspectives in favor of one dimensional thinking - just watching one channel, or just living in blue rooms - makes it unlikely we can maximize the utility of our writing. If you don't support arguments with credible support, part of your readership will always think it's "fake news."

:mod edit: per user request
(retired this month!!)

[Henri de Tonti]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

It's a waste of time. Stop it.

[Caracal]

On Lies, Bias, and Fake News

The most common understanding of this concept has been part of the history of journalism and the free press. There have always been editorial sections, places where writers and editors expressed carefully weighed and supported opinions about the state of the world, whether it be the whole planet, or just the town of Dundee, Oregon. Then the "op-ed" section was born, letters submitted and published by readers who were opposing the editors and their points of view on certain issues.

This was the way it was for hundreds of years..

Actually this isn't true. The version of journalism you're describing really developed in the second half of the 19th century. I'm not a specialist, so if anyone is, feel free to chime in, but my understanding is that the modern concept of journalism really developed out of large concentrated urban populations. This allowed newspaper magnates like Hearst and Pulitzer to sell papers at very cheap prices and make money doing it. Newspapers almost never made money in the United States before that. They existed because they were bankrolled by somebody, usually political parties, to advocate for some point of view and there wasn't some clear division between the editorial side of the paper and the news part.

Really the model of the newspaper you describe lasted for about 125 years or so until the internet really changed the models that underpinned the whole thing, but there was nothing timeless or sacred about it. I'd make the same argument about the whole idea of facts and truth. None of these are timeless concepts which have suddenly come under siege...

[spork]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

It's a waste of time. Stop it.

I find this very interesting. I'm pretty ignorant of writing terminology and my usual go-to expert on the subject is temporarily several thousand miles away. I found this definition of expository writing. Looks to me like expository writing includes the exercises in argumentative writing that I assign, where I tell students to choose one of a very limited number of positions that I specify, state the position (i.e., "thesis") they choose at the beginning, and build an argument in support of that position using evidence from readings (that I also specify). This is not the five-paragraph K-12 essay though, which I tell students every semester is a terrible and pointless form of writing. I tell them that, for example, stating their argument at the beginning informs whoever is reading their writing about the purpose of the writing (the "purpose, role of author, audience" principle). I also believe that sloppy writing indicates sloppy thinking.

I'm curious -- can you tell me how one is supposed to get students to engage in the good habits you identify when many of them don't know what an argument supported by evidence is, don't know what primary sources are or aren't capable of using them, etc.? For example, I once assigned students the task of comparing methods used by scholars from different fields and how these methods affected the validity of the scholars' conclusions -- i.e., which scholar had the strongest argument and why. As usual, I provided the readings. Nothing inordinately complex. I was stumped by what students wrote -- nothing made sense. Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.

With students like these, I really don't know how to teach "good" writing.

[Henri de Tonti]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

It's a waste of time. Stop it.

I find this very interesting. I'm pretty ignorant of writing terminology and my usual go-to expert on the subject is temporarily several thousand miles away. I found this definition of expository writing. Looks to me like expository writing includes the exercises in argumentative writing that I assign, where I tell students to choose one of a very limited number of positions that I specify, state the position (i.e., "thesis") they choose at the beginning, and build an argument in support of that position using evidence from readings (that I also specify). This is not the five-paragraph K-12 essay though, which I tell students every semester is a terrible and pointless form of writing. I tell them that, for example, stating their argument at the beginning informs whoever is reading their writing about the purpose of the writing (the "purpose, role of author, audience" principle). I also believe that sloppy writing indicates sloppy thinking.

I'm curious -- can you tell me how one is supposed to get students to engage in the good habits you identify when many of them don't know what an argument supported by evidence is, don't know what primary sources are or aren't capable of using them, etc.? For example, I once assigned students the task of comparing methods used by scholars from different fields and how these methods affected the validity of the scholars' conclusions -- i.e., which scholar had the strongest argument and why. As usual, I provided the readings. Nothing inordinately complex. I was stumped by what students wrote -- nothing made sense. Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.


With students like these, I really don't know how to teach "good" writing.

I tell students to choose one of a very limited number of positions that I specify, state the position (i.e., "thesis") they choose at the beginning, and build an argument in support of that position using evidence from readings (that I also specify).

This is part of the problem. We are teaching them to fix the evidence around a pre-specified position rather than deriving a position or conclusion from the evidence. It's supposed to be an exercise, but students don't see that; they take it as the preferred model of reasoning in general, or the preferred model outside the natural sciences (for those who take degrees in the natural sciences). The result is the acceptance of what Caracal rightly deplores.

These kinds of exercises aren't new, and extend over into the realm of debate. It was part of a gentleman's training in rhetoric, whereby they were to develop a facile ability to argue any position at any time while simultaneously being drilled in a specific, "correct," worldview. We have otherwise moved on from that model of education, but some of these exercises remain.

Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.

This is what we need to be teaching them, and a good reason why writing across the curriculum is a good idea. Students should be getting exercise in writing in their disciplinary classes, and not have that tasked farmed out to the English, Writing, or other departments.

[spork]

I get what you're saying about rhetoric. Yes, I want students to develop the rhetorical skill of being able to craft a concise, logical, evidence-based argument, in the hopes that this will act as a baby step toward becoming better thinkers.

But I'm still not clear on how to teach the students I encounter -- typically ~ 30 to 34 students out of a 35-student class -- how to independently derive a conclusion from evidence when they don't know what constitutes sound evidence and don't know how to organize that evidence to effectively communicate a conclusion. They want to be told what they need to memorize because they assume there is "one right answer." Students who don't know what the purpose or format of a memo is don't want to engage in the scientific method.

[Henri de Tonti]

I get what you're saying about rhetoric. Yes, I want students to develop the rhetorical skill of being able to craft a concise, logical, evidence-based argument, in the hopes that this will act as a baby step toward becoming better thinkers.

But I'm still not clear on how to teach the students I encounter -- typically ~ 30 to 34 students out of a 35-student class -- how to independently derive a conclusion from evidence when they don't know what constitutes sound evidence and don't know how to organize that evidence to effectively communicate a conclusion. They want to be told what they need to memorize because they assume there is "one right answer." Students who don't know what the purpose or format of a memo is don't want to engage in the scientific method.

Yeah, this is the tough part. They see the world in binary terms: either there is "one right answer" or all possible answers are equal. They don't get that some answers can be better supported by data than others and still fall short of being the "one right answer".

[spork]

So in reality the situation is hopeless?

[Caracal]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

It's a waste of time. Stop it.

I find this very interesting. I'm pretty ignorant of writing terminology and my usual go-to expert on the subject is temporarily several thousand miles away. I found this definition of expository writing. Looks to me like expository writing includes the exercises in argumentative writing that I assign, where I tell students to choose one of a very limited number of positions that I specify, state the position (i.e., "thesis") they choose at the beginning, and build an argument in support of that position using evidence from readings (that I also specify). This is not the five-paragraph K-12 essay though, which I tell students every semester is a terrible and pointless form of writing. I tell them that, for example, stating their argument at the beginning informs whoever is reading their writing about the purpose of the writing (the "purpose, role of author, audience" principle). I also believe that sloppy writing indicates sloppy thinking.

I'm curious -- can you tell me how one is supposed to get students to engage in the good habits you identify when many of them don't know what an argument supported by evidence is, don't know what primary sources are or aren't capable of using them, etc.? For example, I once assigned students the task of comparing methods used by scholars from different fields and how these methods affected the validity of the scholars' conclusions -- i.e., which scholar had the strongest argument and why. As usual, I provided the readings. Nothing inordinately complex. I was stumped by what students wrote -- nothing made sense. Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.

With students like these, I really don't know how to teach "good" writing.

I'm really confused by this whole discussion. The reasons our students are our students is because they have things they need to learn from us. There are some things like basic literacy, or reading comprehension that are very difficult to teach in college, but knowledge production, engaging with scholarship, methods, this is exactly what students should be learning in a college class. Our job is to teach them these things. I'm also deeply confused by the critique of expository writing. Expository writing is just writing that makes an argument. Argument is at the heart of just about all academic enterprises. The only way to engage with scholarship and not just see it as static, is to learn how to make arguments.

The way I learned how to teach writing was to teach students how to engage with scholarship through writing and revision. The first essay involved reading some primary source and then some scholarly article on that source. The prompt asked students to relate some particular part of the primary source to the argument of the secondary source. For the second essay, students looked at a primary source and then read two secondary sources with differing positions on the primary source. Then they wrote about which argument they thought was better supported by the primary source. The third assignment was more complex and gave them more latitude in terms of the argument they made etc etc.

The basic idea is that you teach students through writing and revision how to engage with scholarship and make arguments supported by evidence. Now, I'm describing a freshman writing course where the entire goal is to teach writing. Obviously, in upper level courses, you couldn't do all this because you are supposed to be teaching about a subject, not just writing. However, I do think you can in more limited ways teach them how to understand and engage with scholarship.

[Henri de Tonti]

So in reality the situation is hopeless?

My position is that we shouldn't be reinforcing either of the binaries through writing assignments. What is being taught in secondary and undergraduate classes tends to do so. I remember having to break out of that mindset as an early grad student, I see it in the undergraduate students I teach, and the grad students I teach (who are from all over the world, so the model has spread), so I fear that is what undergraduate students are left with when they get their degrees.

So for example, in a class I teach that in part addresses the process of writing an MA thesis, we had several meetings where we discussed formulating the question that is to be the center of a thesis and importantly a thesis proposal. I emphasize ad nauseam that a thesis (and any scholarly writing) is about asking questions, then analyzing a pot of data using a methodology to attempt to answer that question. One goes where the data analysis leads. The method may not work well, the data may not provide clear answers to the question, or provide answers that are not anticipated, and that this uncertainty must be baked into the proposal.

Hand goes up: "Where does a thesis statement fit into this?"

Head/desk

[dr_codex]

So in reality the situation is hopeless?

My position is that we shouldn't be reinforcing either of the binaries through writing assignments. What is being taught in secondary and undergraduate classes tends to do so. I remember having to break out of that mindset as an early grad student, I see it in the undergraduate students I teach, and the grad students I teach (who are from all over the world, so the model has spread), so I fear that is what undergraduate students are left with when they get their degrees.

So for example, in a class I teach that in part addresses the process of writing an MA thesis, we had several meetings where we discussed formulating the question that is to be the center of a thesis and importantly a thesis proposal. I emphasize ad nauseam that a thesis (and any scholarly writing) is about asking questions, then analyzing a pot of data using a methodology to attempt to answer that question. One goes where the data analysis leads. The method may not work well, the data may not provide clear answers to the question, or provide answers that are not anticipated, and that this uncertainty must be baked into the proposal.

Hand goes up: "Where does a thesis statement fit into this?"

Head/desk

[A few decades of teaching composition speaking here...]

Students often think that the process of writing is identical to the product. They do this in part because some kinds of essay (especially the dreaded "personal experience" ones) encourage stream-of-consciousness association of ideas. Montaigne could pull that off, but it's hard to get a lot of milage out of "When I look at pictures of cats on social media", unless the whole thing is an exercise in stringing grammatical sentences together. As, of course, it too often is.

So, students start writing an introduction, which the various models say should have a thesis statement at the end of paragraph one or two. If they don't already have their results, they either: 1) get stuck, which at least demonstrates that they know something has gone wrong; or, 2) plow ahead with their pre-formulated phrases and convictions.

I have astounded students with the suggestion that they write their introductions last. Some have said "That's Cheating!" I have also passed along my tip for essay responses on exams, which is to leave a blank space at the end of the last paragraph -- that pesky "thesis" -- and only write it once the points have been exposited. I aced my college exams largely due to this trick, because tired and beaten-down TA's were delighted to come across something that not only looked like having a point, but asserted (correctly or not) that the point was actually going to be argued in the blue book pages to come. To my knowledge, not one of my students has ever adopted this practice, but part of its function is that the reader never knows; maybe the better students have quietly adopted the strategy.

One thing that shaped my own pre-writing and writing was that I learned to do it longhand, and with a typewriter. There were PC's around during my secondary and collegiate education, but their word processors weren't much better than those typewriters that could save a few sentences at a time (some of you may remember them), and I could touch-type faster than my dot matrix printer could laboriously churn out its fanfold mess. As a result, I did a lot of prewriting, to the point that I wouldn't "start" the essay without knowing pretty much exactly where it was going. After that, it was pretty much one draft and some proofreading.

(That worked until grad school, and especially my dissertation, which by definition was too big, complicated, and mutable to keep in an outline. I had to relearn how to write, and it was slow going. A story for another time.)

The word processing functions that have most changed my writing are better footnote managers, and Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+Z. The ability to move chunks of text around without redrafting the whole text is a blessing, but it does have some disadvantages. The worst of these, as others have been discussing on the various plagiarism threads, is that it's way too easy to paste large chunks of somebody else's words. Along those lines, it also leads to quoting too much; when I had to type out all of the lines, I was much less likely to quote thirty lines of Prufrock at a time. Cut-'n-paste also leaves its traces in those weird fused sentences, when something has gone badly wrong in revision that wasn't caught in proofreading.

Holding up model essays isn't going to solve this problem, because what students need to learn (or relearn) is how to rethink the whole process. Consider lab reports. If students are evaluated in large part on getting the "right" results, the clever clogs are going to look up what the answer is supposed to be, and retcon the data to support it. (The even cleverer ones are going to include variation within the margins of error and measurement.) They will have learned almost nothing about the physical world, and nothing about how scientific inquiry actually works.

A great deal of college writing is bad because the lab conditions are artificial. I used to tell my Comp 101 students that almost any text could be fruitfully analyzed. (I stopped telling them that because what the wrote in their evaluations was that the course readings had no coherence; a story for another time.) Spork's "methods" assignment is exactly the kind of discipline-driven work that for which writing assignments are ideal. Indeed, I think what Spork's example reveals is exactly the kind of gap in the curriculum that desperately needs filling. Indeed, it's what Assessment* is supposed to do. ("Hey -- our students don't have a grasp on methods and approaches in our discipline. That's a problem!") A lifetime ago, I taught "Poetics", which was effectively the gateway course for English majors; many of the students didn't love the course, but it gave them a grounding in theory, method, and disciplinary norms that follow-on courses could take as a given. In part, such a course opened up for student what could count as evidence, something that is not self-evident and is much debated, at least in my field. Writing Across the Disciplines or Writing in the Disciplines are one way to get students thinking about all of these issues, but they won't work if we've all thrown in the towel.

[Caracal]

My position is that we shouldn't be reinforcing either of the binaries through writing assignments. What is being taught in secondary and undergraduate classes tends to do so. I remember having to break out of that mindset as an early grad student, I see it in the undergraduate students I teach, and the grad students I teach (who are from all over the world, so the model has spread), so I fear that is what undergraduate students are left with when they get their degrees.

So for example, in a class I teach that in part addresses the process of writing an MA thesis, we had several meetings where we discussed formulating the question that is to be the center of a thesis and importantly a thesis proposal. I emphasize ad nauseam that a thesis (and any scholarly writing) is about asking questions, then analyzing a pot of data using a methodology to attempt to answer that question. One goes where the data analysis leads. The method may not work well, the data may not provide clear answers to the question, or provide answers that are not anticipated, and that this uncertainty must be baked into the proposal.

Hand goes up: "Where does a thesis statement fit into this?"

Head/desk

I think what you are identifying is that these students haven't developed more complex models of argument. I don't have any familiarity with MA theses in the sciences, but I assume that you do expect students to have a paragraph or two near the beginning of the the proposal where they succinctly explain what questions they plan to ask. That's basically a grown up version of the thesis statement. I'm also assuming that a major part of the proposal is about putting this question within the context of other scholarly work. That's still a form of argument.

When you try to teach undergrads writing, the biggest problem is that they tend to have a hard time figuring out how to say anything. They tend to see knowledge as just something that exists and they need to summarize, which is obviously pointless. That's why writing classes usually have prompts which teach students how to have an argument that engages with scholarship using evidence. This is an artificial exercise, because it has to be. When I taught writing I tried to progress from more artificial to less artificial, more complex sorts of assignments and arguments as the class progressed. However, the idea is that students are going to learn how to make clear, strong arguments backed by evidence in an intro writing course and then take those skills into other classes where they learn how to do more complex things.

A masters student asking about a thesis statement has failed to internalize the ideas involved in argument. It would be like someone who still sounded out all the words when they read. It is a method of learning how to read, but one you have to move beyond as you progress.

[Guest]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.  It's a waste of time. Stop it.

Well said. Had I stopped teaching it though, my employers would have stopped paying my giant comp salary. And I would suggest, with softness, that your suggestion would be difficult in the real world, what with thousands of expository writing sections due to start up in the next couple of weeks.

[spork]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

[. . .]

[. . .]

I'm curious -- can you tell me how one is supposed to get students to engage in the good habits you identify when many of them don't know what an argument supported by evidence is, don't know what primary sources are or aren't capable of using them, etc.? For example, I once assigned students the task of comparing methods used by scholars from different fields and how these methods affected the validity of the scholars' conclusions -- i.e., which scholar had the strongest argument and why. As usual, I provided the readings. Nothing inordinately complex. I was stumped by what students wrote -- nothing made sense. Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.

With students like these, I really don't know how to teach "good" writing.

[. . .]

The basic idea is that you teach students through writing and revision how to engage with scholarship and make arguments supported by evidence. Now, I'm describing a freshman writing course where the entire goal is to teach writing. Obviously, in upper level courses, you couldn't do all this because you are supposed to be teaching about a subject, not just writing. However, I do think you can in more limited ways teach them how to understand and engage with scholarship.

So I'm now looking for advice on incorporating "revision" into graded assignments in a way that 1) students perceive as "revision" and 2) doesn't increase my workload. My standard writing assignment is "Write a page that responds 'yes' or 'no' to this question. State your argument in the first sentence. Defend your argument using evidence taken from the reading assignment." I'll have about two dozen of these assignments in a course, graded on a three-point rubric -- organized as specified, sources of evidence cited correctly, and correct spelling/grammar/etc. Assignment is due before class; in class there is discussion. Students who do badly on the first few assignments can simply read my comment, look at the rubric, and change -- i.e., revise -- what they do next time. But students don't think of the system in terms of "I have twenty-four opportunities to improve by changing what I do."

[dr_codex]

If you weren't retiring, I would say the answer is to stop teaching expository essay writing. But I'll say it anyway.

Expository essay writing is a superficial, artificial exercise that teaches bad habits (taking concepts for granted, structuring explanations as competitions between starkly divergent positions at best; at worst, encouraging students to rummage around for arguments that arrive at positions they favor) rather than good habits (examining one's own assumptions; finding primary data, and evaluating that data methodically with an open mind as to what it tells you; understanding the nuanced differences among methods, types of data, and ways of evaluating and drawing conclusions from data). If you don't want students engaging with lots of noise, don't make then engage in an exercise that immerses them in noise.

[. . .]

[. . .]

I'm curious -- can you tell me how one is supposed to get students to engage in the good habits you identify when many of them don't know what an argument supported by evidence is, don't know what primary sources are or aren't capable of using them, etc.? For example, I once assigned students the task of comparing methods used by scholars from different fields and how these methods affected the validity of the scholars' conclusions -- i.e., which scholar had the strongest argument and why. As usual, I provided the readings. Nothing inordinately complex. I was stumped by what students wrote -- nothing made sense. Then I figured out the problem: students didn't know what "methods" meant, as in they didn't understand that an archival historian analyzes documents while an archaeologist analyzes material artifacts. From the students' perspective, knowledge just happens, and it's something to memorize, not evaluate.

With students like these, I really don't know how to teach "good" writing.

[. . .]

The basic idea is that you teach students through writing and revision how to engage with scholarship and make arguments supported by evidence. Now, I'm describing a freshman writing course where the entire goal is to teach writing. Obviously, in upper level courses, you couldn't do all this because you are supposed to be teaching about a subject, not just writing. However, I do think you can in more limited ways teach them how to understand and engage with scholarship.

So I'm now looking for advice on incorporating "revision" into graded assignments in a way that 1) students perceive as "revision" and 2) doesn't increase my workload. My standard writing assignment is "Write a page that responds 'yes' or 'no' to this question. State your argument in the first sentence. Defend your argument using evidence taken from the reading assignment." I'll have about two dozen of these assignments in a course, graded on a three-point rubric -- organized as specified, sources of evidence cited correctly, and correct spelling/grammar/etc. Assignment is due before class; in class there is discussion. Students who do badly on the first few assignments can simply read my comment, look at the rubric, and change -- i.e., revise -- what they do next time. But students don't think of the system in terms of "I have twenty-four opportunities to improve by changing what I do."

The obvious next step, in an expository writing class, would be to have the next iteration involve working up the one-pager into a two-pager, using both the rubric and points raised in the discussion. Or, do the same thing but require that they answer the other way. The endgame is to have a piece of writing the makes points backed by evidence, includes other perspectives, and anticipates and counters opposing arguments.

Yes, it will be an additional round of grading, unless it replaces another existing assignment.