My Philosophy for Teaching Writing
For me, the goal of writing instruction at the college level is to equip students with the analytical, critical thinking, and composition skills necessary to effectively communicate in our democratic and corporate culture. In order to achieve this goal, I take a multifaceted and flexible approach to writing instruction that encourages metacognitive (and hence transferrable) methods of textual analysis, makes use of texts grounded in students’ discourse communities and rhetorical situations, and provides specific feedback leading to revision rather than mere copyediting.
I believe composition courses are useful and effective when they teach conscious analysis that can be used in our democratic and corporate culture. To this end, I always engage my students in genre analysis to get them used to the features of specific texts: essays, speeches, press releases, films, and so on. By recognizing the rhetorical strategies used to create these texts, students not only develop a bank of rhetorical strategies for their own writing but also become conscious of how the messages of others are created and delivered. When students know how to break down a message with conscious steps, they are able to use these steps to become informed, active, and critical individuals who can excel as college students, employees, and citizens.
For this type of analysis to be productive, however, the texts students work with must be grounded in students’ discourse communities. When students write essays they care about or write reports that can be used by members of their community, they begin to recognize the products that composition courses help them create. This sense of creating a product is essential in our culture in which technology has given everyone, not just experts, the opportunity to create marketable commodities—whether these commodities are texts, images, or ideas themselves.
Of course, these strategies for creating meaningful writing in the classroom depend on specific, critical feedback to develop students’ writing skills and continually challenge their ideas. To help achieve these goals, I think it’s important to layer feedback—that is, to use some visual indicator to differentiate feedback on ideas, form, style, and grammar. When the feedback is divided into discrete chunks, students become more conscious of the various parts of their writing, which goes back to the idea of metacognition and the transference of analytical skills. The feedback also needs to be mitigated so as to encourage—but not deceive—the student. Open communication about the feedback (instructor to student and student to student) also needs to be encouraged. Combined, these strategies create an environment conducive to what I call “real” revision where ideas are re-analyzed, re-worked, and re-organized, rather than merely rehashed with a few grammar corrections.
These three approaches to writing instruction are not exhaustive, and they obviously work best when combined with other forms of writing instruction such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and grammar. Nevertheless, for me, they provide the best avenue for achieving what I believe to be the fundamental purpose of a composition course: to develop transferable critical reading and writing skills.
I believe composition courses are useful and effective when they teach conscious analysis that can be used in our democratic and corporate culture. To this end, I always engage my students in genre analysis to get them used to the features of specific texts: essays, speeches, press releases, films, and so on. By recognizing the rhetorical strategies used to create these texts, students not only develop a bank of rhetorical strategies for their own writing but also become conscious of how the messages of others are created and delivered. When students know how to break down a message with conscious steps, they are able to use these steps to become informed, active, and critical individuals who can excel as college students, employees, and citizens.
For this type of analysis to be productive, however, the texts students work with must be grounded in students’ discourse communities. When students write essays they care about or write reports that can be used by members of their community, they begin to recognize the products that composition courses help them create. This sense of creating a product is essential in our culture in which technology has given everyone, not just experts, the opportunity to create marketable commodities—whether these commodities are texts, images, or ideas themselves.
Of course, these strategies for creating meaningful writing in the classroom depend on specific, critical feedback to develop students’ writing skills and continually challenge their ideas. To help achieve these goals, I think it’s important to layer feedback—that is, to use some visual indicator to differentiate feedback on ideas, form, style, and grammar. When the feedback is divided into discrete chunks, students become more conscious of the various parts of their writing, which goes back to the idea of metacognition and the transference of analytical skills. The feedback also needs to be mitigated so as to encourage—but not deceive—the student. Open communication about the feedback (instructor to student and student to student) also needs to be encouraged. Combined, these strategies create an environment conducive to what I call “real” revision where ideas are re-analyzed, re-worked, and re-organized, rather than merely rehashed with a few grammar corrections.
These three approaches to writing instruction are not exhaustive, and they obviously work best when combined with other forms of writing instruction such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and grammar. Nevertheless, for me, they provide the best avenue for achieving what I believe to be the fundamental purpose of a composition course: to develop transferable critical reading and writing skills.