Audience

The audience I would like to reach with my paper is primarily prospective English teachers. I think that many education students are uncomfortable with grammar, as evidenced by the course requirements at UWM. As these students approach their new classrooms, this discomfort will manifest itself in how they decide to teach grammar. Some of them actually hate grammar as much as their students.

I would like to offer them evidence that there are effective ways to teach grammar, so that as they begin to formulate lesson plans they can match the skills they want to teach with the population they will serve. Hopefully with a workable strategy for teaching grammar in place they will feel less intimidated by the mechanisms of it.

I think that the examples I provide and the reasons for them will help potential teachers to feel more justified in their reasons for teaching grammar they way they do, and in accessing the tools they need to use them. Instead of viewing grammar as a tedious chore that they have to figure out how to sneak into their lessons, I want them to see grammar as a useful, wonderful thing that will help them reach their students and make them not only better writers but better communicators in general. I want, in essence, to detoxify grammar.

Steps to get there:

Explaining what grammar really is
Providing ways of looking at it so that they can find themselves in the paper
Explaining the different ways it can be taught, and the reasons for them

Bean Assignment

Tom and Peg

Introduction to the Lesson:

Most readers don't differentiate approaches to reading when they change genres or texts. How would you read a science textbook differently than a poem? (discuss)

The reading of a science text requires analysis of factual data, but poetry requires an analysis of meaning.  To effectively read anything requires an understanding of the context, the audience, the author's biases, and your own personal limitations of understanding.

Before you read the following poem, briefly research the background of the author. Why might he have chosen to write about this topic?

Are there any aspects or terms in the poem that you don't understand?

What do you think the author means? Find a line or two within the poem that you think is relevant to the title.

Take some notes. Pick four lines of the poem and write your thoughts about the imagery, metaphors, or poetic techniques.

How would you read this differently if it was a science lesson about snow?

RLW Assigment

Peg and Brian's RLW Lesson

Overview/Lesson Introduction

Normally when we read, we read for analysis rather than technique. As you read the following piece, change your perspective from analyst to writer. What techniques does the author use and why? Mike Bunn suggested that readers should read as architects, examining how things are constructed.

Therefore, as you examine the piece, look for some choices the author made as he wrote. For example, what is the structure of the poem. Is a sonnet, haiku, or something else? (class discussion)

Now identify five additional techniques the author used.

Identify the purpose of the poem. Why is he writing?

Identify the audience for the poem? Does it include you?

How effective is the language? Does it communicate what you intended?

Would you use the same techniques to write about this topic?

Write a five verse poem on the same topic (poetry) to show why or why not, using his techniques if you agree, or your own if you do not.

Drifting in Drafting

In the course of revising my draft and living my life I encountered an incredibly lucid new source that completely changed my thinking on my topic. As I struggled to incorporate his thoughts and quotations into the framework of what I already had, I initially thought I needed to chuck the whole paper and start over. But as I ripped and wrenched my way through it I discovered a frightening reality - the same arguments I had made on one side could, with very few modifications in the framing and using the exact same quotes, support exactly the opposite. It was like seeing a single Biblical text used to love and hate the same group of people by diametrically opposed theologians. It shouldn't have worked but it did.

So my third/fourth/fifth/sixth draft which now exists as my "third draft" on paper is done. It still needs a lot of work to smooth out some rough edges (like the title), but for the moment it is closer to saying what I now want to say.

I am thankful for the revision process because it is helping me to really think through a topic that matters to me, and hopefully I will be able to clearly state a perspective that I can live with by the time I call it done.

Read All About It

John Bean’s analysis of reading skills offers insights as to why college students struggle with reading. He suggests that the skill set needed often remains undeveloped because bright students can get by without needing it, and less skilled readers are simply overwhelmed. Teachers are partially to blame for creating an unending circle of support for students who don’t do the reading by providing what they need in lectures, which they have to do because students have learned they can count on it.  Bean asserts that most college students don’t know how to differentiate their reading levels based on the task at hand, are unfamiliar with structural contexts, don’t engage with the author or the argument or don’t have the cultural or grammatical background they need to understand the text. Bean presents strategies for teachers to use to overcome these issues, such as having students prepare for interactive class activities that require them to read and apply the text before they come to class, avoiding superficial quizzes, opening up dialogues about exactly how to read difficult texts, based on personal experiences, teaching students to look up what they don’t know, developing a critical eye to see what the paper says and what it does by saying it, developing a critical eye for bias, assessing cultural codes, and to play the “believing and doubting game” – approaching the text dialectically, and taking copious notes all over the text not just anemically highlighting in yellow.

Mike Bunn’s approach to reading skills is an interactive one as well, but his approach is experiential vs. academic skill acquisition. He suggests analyzing the techniques of a text to determine how it was written, and why, so that the skills used in that piece could be applied later to a writer’s own work. He uses the metaphor of looking at reading not as finished work but as an architectural structure, and taking it apart metaphorically down to the nuts, bots and boards. He invites readers to analyze writing techniques bit by bit as they read – why is a particular sentence phrased a certain way, why did the writer open with a quote, etc. Readers should determine the audience the writer is writing for, and why a piece was written; the genre or type of writing it is; and if it is applicable to future writing assignments. All the techniques the writer uses should be analyzed for effectiveness and stored for future use as a reader reads, and reading should be intensively annotated in the margins and with additional notes. That is a point Bean makes as well. By reading in this way, Bean suggests that readers develop an arsenal of writing weaponry to use for future writing endeavors.

I found Bean’s approach far more useful to understand how and why students have trouble with deep reading, and given my experiences as an observer of student reading technique, as well as my own struggles with psychology research paper analysis (my nemesis this semester), I found some of his suggestions both apt and useful. Not much of what either author said felt particularly “new” to me, instead it seemed more like a clarification and elaboration of realities with which I was already familiar.  Something about Bean’s way of writing really irritated me, although I agreed somewhat with his premise I had a hard time taking him seriously. I think an intense focus on reading as a writer could actually make a struggling student less, not more effective as a reader. I thought Bean’s approach was more systematic and useful. I also found it incredibly entertaining to discover that Bean’s “Believing and Doubting Game” is essentially the assignment I wrote for our last class. So that answers what I might use from the readings! I think that much of what Bean has to say is very useful, and could be adapted from a college to a high school level. 

Insights on Grammar and Writing from a Teacher in the Trenches

Fritz Rauch

Homestead High School English Teacher for 24 years

“My students and I need to share a common language as we discuss writing - a terminology to ascertain what is effective and what is not. What determines if a sentence sounds right, or accomplishes what we want it to do? How do we discuss the elements of a sentence and how they interact? If a sentence is incomplete, a clause dangling, a fragment freestanding – how do we talk about why it doesn’t work? The answer is grammar. It gives us a place to start in understanding language and how it works. If you speak Russian and I speak French, it will be very hard to communicate ideas. For some of my students, comprehension of the English language and how it works is just as difficult as that. Grammar gives us both the terminology and commonality in language that we need to talk about writing, literature, and the other concepts of my English classroom."

"I teach English and I coach football. I can’t send my players into the game without a fundamental understanding of the rules and how the game is played. The same is true for my students as they learn to write. It is up to me as a teacher to give them the foundational structures they need to effectively play the game that we call writing."

"There are philosophies of teaching and there are students in my classroom. The intersection of those two realities determines how I teach."

"As a teacher I have goals for my students, and grammar is one of the tools I use to give them the proficiencies they need before they are released to the next threshold of their lives."

"My teaching has to match the student populace I am serving. For my freshmen, that generally means skill and drill. I introduce basic grammatical concepts that we use later as they write or read in the classroom. For my seniors, the process is reversed. As they express their thoughts in writing, I only intervene with grammar instruction when there is a clear lapse in skills that interferes with their abilities to communicate effectively." 

Reflection: Pam's Cool Assignment

I thought that Pam's approach to language analysis was helpful in terms of thinking about my word choices. Also, as I think about it now, it helped me to think about student vernacular and how that might translate into the teaching of writing - and the associated grammar. The thing that made that happen in Pam's assignment was translation (which I had a lot of fun with). I think when we work with a variety of dialects different from our own we sometimes forget how very foreign the things we take for granted in our speech are to others. I'm not sure how much I can use that insight in my current project, but it certainly will impact how I teach.

I thought the tone and approach to the assignment were inviting and appropriate. There was just enough explanation to get into the work without knowing too much - so that I could make discoveries for myself. Sometimes assignments are overworked and too much information slants the work or is just confusing. Pam came up with just the right amount.  That is an important thing for me to remember in the future.

In terms of moving forward on my paper, I'm not sure where I will use what I just learned, or even if I can. Certainly it will shape the tone of my response, but I'm not sure I have a specific new tool I can use. However, as I told Pam, stretching my brain, playing with language and having fun seems like it is good for something!

Assignment Reflection: Bryan's Color Coded Analysis

I am a highly visual person, and the direction to clearly identify the two aspects of my paper in opposing colors was extremely helpful. It is often hard to get a sense of balance between evidence and ideas unless you have it chunked off into large block quotes. Sorting them out so visually made it immediately apparent where my paper was going, and the balance was something I had been worrying about. I thought it was a great tool, and I will use it in the future.

As far as the tone and organization of the assignment, I felt intrigued and comfortable with it, which is one of the reasons I chose it. In other words, it was challenging without being intimidating. It made me think about the paper in a new way. I will definitely borrow the same approach with my students at some point in their drafting process.

I learned from this assignment that I need to edit down some of my quotes. I had suspected it needed to be done, and now I have the visual evidence of exactly that.

Say Cheese! My Trial Assignment for You

Diabolically Dialectic

In his article "Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins," David Bartholomea quotes Ann Bertoff, citing her assertion that writing "is understood as a nonlinear, dialectical process in which the writer continually circles back, reviewing and rewriting: certainly the way to learn to do that is to practice doing just that." 

The Free Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary defines dialectical in terms of dialect: "discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation; specifically : the Socratic techniques of exposing false beliefs and eliciting truth." 

Therefore, it is time to engage in a discourse - a dialogue - with your paper, to ferret out your truths, but it will require some creativity and imagination to do so.

To help get you started, I would like you to imagine a sassy counter-opinion to whatever it is you have to say.  Give your dialectical dueler a personality, some attitude, and get ready to engage that character in some fierce argumentation. He or she doesn't believe a thing you have to say and is not going to be nice about it.

(If you are a somber sort of a person and would really rather not deal with sass, you may design a witty, dry professorial sort to argue with instead. Or anyone, really.)

Now, one paragraph at a time, imagine someone countering what you have to say. You can paraphrase what your paragraph is about, pick a topic sentence, or just one thought that summarizes the main argument of that paragraph. Now imagine the argument your sassy, dialectic foil would present to counter it.  

For example, in my first paragraph I wrote: Grammar evokes strong emotions. 

My sassy counterpoint disagrees. Grammar Gorilla says "grammar is as dry as old toast." How will I prove she is wrong? What arguments or evidence do I have to refute her claim?

Continue through your paper, one paragraph at a time, summarizing your primary argument within that paragraph and then entering into a dialogue with an imaginary and very sassy (or erudite) someone who disagrees with you. Can you refute a contrary view? If you have already written in a counter view, then your foil has to support it and you get to contradict him or her. Read things aloud if it helps. It's a good way to truly dialogue with your work.

If you have paragraphs that are strictly examples (as I do in my paper), your foil can be confused. "I don't get it."  Have you explained your concept thoroughly - so that your audience is able to fully grasp your information? Can you clarify it further? Your ability to succinctly summarize a paragraph's main point "conversationally" will help you know if you have clearly expressed your point - or not.

In the Socratic tradition of dialectic, you are exposing your truths, or lack thereof. You should be able to convince your counterpart that you have valid things to say. Basically you are reading your paper aloud, in conversation with an imaginary other, critical self, finding your weak points, which often show up more clearly when you vocalize them.

If you start to run out of time in our half-hour assignment, just look at the paragraphs you think are critical to your paper (the one containing your thesis, for example) or paragraphs you think (or have been told) might be weak.

Try posting some of your arguments and counter-arguments, or further clarifications if you made them. Where you able to support your arguments? Did your dialectical dual divine some truths in what you have written? Did your paper stand up to the scathing review, or did your foil poke giant holes in it? 

Did you have fun? I hope so. Class dismissed.

Revision Plan

I have a multi-tiered revision plan for my paper, which hopefully I will get a chance to play with during the spring break that is becoming a marathon of academic assignments. The most important concern I have right now for the paper is based on a determination of audience. Who am I writing this paper for - and why?

Therefore I want to tear into the paper and give it some real teeth, starting with these three suggestions:

Plan A.

Imagine yourself to be the most die-hard prescriptivist possible and then re-read your paper. What in your writing might provide a crack in the shield of the prescriptivist?

Plan B. 

Imagine then a slightly more amenable audience, readers who are on the descriptivist/prescriptivist fence—or who don’t know about this distinction to begin with. Re-read your paper while asking whether you have given them reason enough to bend toward the approaches you recommend.

Plan C.

What will someone who already agrees with you about how grammar should be taught take from your writing?

Plan X.
Also, the title is horrible. Hopefully a sense of audience will help me to come up with a more relevant version. 

Plan YZ
I have requested a meeting with my son's grammar teachers to discuss how and why they teach what I think is prescriptive grammar. 

And it still needs some grammar oomphing, stylistic tweaking, and general mucking with. That will come with reading it over and over again. As always.

Thinking Toward A Revision Plan

I had been feeling pretty much done with my paper from a first draft point of view, just considering some tweaking, some playing around with examples, some minor revisions. Ironically I received peer feedback on my paper last week that echoed a life-long criticism of my work "your words are too long and complex, I didn't get it." In the past I have blown those off, and given my inadequacies in my grad level class where EVERYONE speaks and writes in similarly huge and far more esoteric language, I was amused. But I think it is important to communicate effectively to  my audience, and now four students in this class have said the same thing, so I am looking at that again. Who exactly IS my audience? Who do I want to convince? I am also very intrigued by suggestions to write it to a die hard prescriptivist, and two other points of view. So I am planning to rip it up (figuratively) and play with it some more. Also, Hannelore gave me a new resource during class last week that I might want to incorporate into my paper.

And now the questions:

• Am I clear about my argument? Can I state it as a thesis statement? Yep, here it is: Therefore, what is important to teach is not a set of rules that students view as obscure and irrelevant, and thus have no intrinsic desire to assimilate into their linguistic repertoire; instead, students need to gain an increasing appreciation for the power that using the mechanisms of grammar brings to their discourse. 

• Does my writing offer well-supported and accurate evidence for each of my claims? If anything I have too much evidence, and could trim up, perhaps through paraphrasing, some of my quotes.
• Is my writing fair and respectful toward the differing positions one could take on my arguments? I need to explore the prescriptivist argument more, since I have discovered it continues to be employed (ineffectively, I might add).
• Will my readers understand the purpose of each paragraph? I think so, actually.
• Can I say why my paragraphs are ordered as they are? Can I describe the steps of my argument? I have shifted the paragraphs around a few times already, so I am comfortable with them as they are. they progress through my argument in a way I think is effective.
• Will my writing engage readers? The audience piece is still something I am tweaking. I need to figure out, really, why anyone but a grammar geek would care about this, and if I am writing to grammar geeks, what do I have to say.
• Does my introduction engage readers with my argument and initial concerns? I think it does. I also think that the quote I used evokes some of the emotion people attack to what others consider "silly grammar."
• Have I given appropriate stylistic emphasis to the main parts of my arguments? Yes, with examples and "they say, I say".
• Do my transitions help readers move from one paragraph to the next? Yes, they do. My paper has good grammar techniques (I hope!)
• Does my conclusion sum up my argument and end memorably for readers? I think it sums it up well - I'm not sure how memorable it is.

Where Writing Begins

David Bartholomae’s approach to writing in “Writing Assignments: Where Writing Begins” entirely shifts the paradigm of writing instruction. In fact he begins with a quote from Edward Said that states that writing should evolve from the unknown, in a student-based construct that excludes a teacher – a process that is autodidactic. As Bartholomae outlines what that writing process might look like, he essentially discards all conventional approaches to writing about “an assigned topic” and instead suggests that students essentially come up with their own within the discipline they are studying, that there is no such thing as a subject at the outset of the process, and that students need to define their own in the course of conscious and critical writing and thinking, based on a discourse that evolves from their known parameters to a translation thereof.  Bartholomae says that the subject of a written exercise needs to be interfered with, opened up, and set out in a discourse that is not closed.  It is not a reservoir but an opening dam – one thing leading to another in a succession of discoveries as students work to find something to say, spending enough time with a subject to sort it all out.

The process is non-linear as students write, read, revise, talk about it, read, revise…and so on, until the work expresses something that has meaning for the writer/reader. Teachers are not mystical, magical keepers of the secret keys – they are interferers and disruptors in the process, keeping the students thinking and looking at their work through different lenses, actively engaged in the processes of discovery and investigations of effective discourse. There is no weekly test of “Did you learn this technique? Write an essay and prove it?” but instead an organically alive investigative process involving student, teacher, and the entire classroom.

Some of Bartholomae’s principles of assignment writing are:

•  First: if assignments are invitations for students to enter into discourses that are not their own, they must lead students through successive approximations, and not necessarily linearly. 
• Second: A change in one’s conception of the world involves not only a change in what one encounters, but also in how one translates it. Students develop their own means of interpreting their experiences. Writing experiences should be generative experiences.
• Third: individual assignments should be part of a larger, group project
• Fourth: students need to imagine a subject as a discourse, a set of conventional available utterances within which they can locate utterances of their own. The subject is imagined as a discourse one can enter, and not as a thing that carries with it experiences or ideas that can be communicated.

One sentence summation:

Bartholomae sees student writers as inventors of their own discourse, exploring the disciplines at hand (from works of literature to scientific discoveries) and then interpreting what they experience through a system of individualized utterances that evolve into a personally meaningful dialogue which engages both writer and reader.

Reflection/Application:

Bartholomae shifts the paradigm of writing instruction so dramatically that I think most students and teachers would fall off. The assignments he suggests would indeed, I think, develop better writers, but they require an abandonment of most of the conventions that teachers and students have learned to navigate through years and years of work. To assimilate the techniques, and most importantly, the thinking processes would be time-consuming and frustrating for most teachers, and would bewilder most students.  However, I think that through a slow introduction of changed ways of looking at the writing process  - through an initial freedom to find a meaningful starting point in a text, for example (as he does with his Bleak Hill model), students and teachers could develop more innovative ways of approaching their writing. The most significant perspective I got from the reading (and I spent a lot of it very confused) was the need to approach writing as a reader, going back over what I have said again and again to ascertain if it is really what I want to say – reworking it and revising it again and again until it is truly my own discourse. I also found his disintegrative approach to “topics” interesting – negating the thesis approach to papers entirely, and changing the writing process from a persuasive argument to an open-ended conversation.

I can envision modifying some of his approaches to use in a high school classroom – the journal writer turned reader, for example, is a great way to introduce revision and writing perspectives, and the construction of a new, more relevant discourse could be an exciting approach to a difficult text.  Bartholomae conceded that discourses have codes that teachers need to help students discover and apply, that those things do not occur naturally. I would include grammar among these, and weave that into the explorations.

In terms of my own writing, the timing is of this discussion is very interesting. I have a graduate level paper due, which I need to start writing during the break, and I had a conversation with my graduate peers this week in class – with an instructor watching silently – about the techniques and expectations of graduate level writing.  Everyone in the seminar had incredibly helpful advice on how to shift my own discourse from undergrad to graduate level. It was a process of discovery for all of us.

The Composing Process - Reflection

I began this class with a fairly firm grip on a sense of my own writing, and with expectations far from the realities I discovered in my first run through the syllabus. I know I have a lot to learn about writing (which will be ever thus), but I thought I had the basics down. WRONG. Like almost all of my homebred education, I came into writing with a sense of it based on successful osmosis. I really couldn't tell anyone boo about how to write, I just "knew." Just like I just "knew" how to do a PHEOC, or holistic math. I never really thought about teaching someone who doesn't love books as much as I do, as much as my family does - and thus has learned how to write essentially by reading. We breed good writers in my neck of the north woods because we spend our lives immersed in books. I momentarily forgot that, shockingly, everyone isn't like me.

What all that rambling means is that in all likelihood I needed to learn the basics of writing far more than anyone else in the class. I needed to know where to begin to teach someone who is NOT like me to write. Therefore even though I had a sense of invention, arrangement, style and delivery, I had no idea how to teach it. I was aware of the basic steps, without some of the terminology, but I was far from understanding it well enough to direct someone else through the process, or fine tune it to the needs of a class. Now I feel like I at least have a start at it, though I have an incredibly long way to go.

Conceptually, the process starts with a big unformed lumpy blob of literary clay, waiting for an idea of what to do with it. So as artists of the written word, we brainstorm ideas for our lump, and start to imagine what it could become. We draw up some ideas, toss them around a bit, and see if they might stick. We poke around a little in our literary lump with prewriting, free-writing, playing with words and ideas until we start to envision our message. We do a little research to see what might be made with our literary lump, and how it might transform.

And then the formation begins. First we rough it out in very crude form, arranging our ideas into physical manifestation. It has come from the tossing around in our heads and rough sketches to starting to become something. But what techniques will we use? Will we throw it on a pottery wheel, cut it away with a molding knife, shape it freehand, add other materials? What elements of style will shape our literary sculpture? Will rhetorical form will it take? How will it look as we begin to craft it – to draft our ideas into a rough sense of form? What will make it appeal most to our audience when we deliver it?

The same steps that must be taken by an artist sculpting clay have comparable forms in writing. Ideas must evolve through analysis, augmentation and experimentation into a written form. In the course of teaching it each step needs to be taken one at a time, introduced playfully but effectively so that it makes sense without intimidating inexperienced writers. I like the clay analogy because who is afraid of clay? The language inexperienced writers already know is the mud that builds a pie, and becomes clay and then a sculpture – crafting from the known into the unknown with techniques and options explored along the way.

I could write a very specific list of all the things that we have learned and all the ways that I will teach them, but instead I wanted to focus on the theory of lesson delivery rather than the nuts and bolts delivery. That is yet to come, but I have a much better sense of it now.

The reading and discussions have shaped my opinions about what is “right” and “wrong” in teaching writing, and I have learned that there are many routes to offer and take to writing success.

My own writing has shifted into more deliberate purpose. In some ways my audience has widened, at least in terms of my academic writing. I am currently doing way more revising than I have ever done in my life in an attempt to play with the form, the function (as in who I write it to) and the message itself. My academic writing until now has been essentially a process of ascertaining what will please the professor (or teacher) and delivering it. In my writing for work I know what will please my audience, and I write it, even though it often bores me due to what I cannot write (but that’s a story for another day!). In my academic writing I am trying to take a few more risks – at least in this class!