Tuesday, March 9, 2010

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Why use a handbook?

College instructors are justly concerned about textbook costs for students who may be financially struggling. We’re all trying to teach as well as possible, with as little financial burden to our students. That’s only right. One thing I’m hearing is debates about the value of *not* adopting a handbook in writing courses, on the premise that students can find answers to questions about grammar and documentation online. That’s a great idea. But it’s a great idea, I believe, only for students who know what the questions are and who are motivated to find answers to them. That would certainly describe most graduate students, advanced undergraduates, English majors, and the like. It wouldn’t actually describe me; I still turn to authoritative hardcopy references (which now include my own handbook!) for such information. But I recognize and respect that it describes... [Read more]

Hidden challenges in source selection

At the beginning of fall term I presented some of the Citation Project research to Writing teachers in my own department, and as the semester has unfolded, I’ve had a number of opportunites to work through those same materials in webinar conversations with teachers at other institutions. The research I’ve shared in these presentations illustrates how students’ desire to use condensed, factual sources creates an array of problems as they try to write from those sources: Stylistically, it’s very hard to summarize or even paraphrase someone else’s summary of factual material. Instead, students in our study have had to resort to extensive patchwriting–copying closely from the source but with some changes–or to unmarked direct copying. In the Citation Project research, we usually find that these textual appropriations are cited, but it’s often hard... [Read more]

About those videos

The McGraw team has put a couple sets of videos online. Some of these were taken in a studio, using a script I had written in which I talk about Writing Matters. Some were taken during a keynote speech I made at Bridgewater State College for the Massachusetts CONNECT conference last spring; those are on the video link on this blog. It was a neat experience, doing the studio shoot. Made me feel like a movie star for a day; it was just fun. Seeing the film online is another matter: I’m just not used to watching film of me. So I watched it all through, each segment of each set; took a deep breath; and said, “Well, that’s done.” But today a friend called to say that colleagues in her program are using the Bridgewater film in class, to help explain to their students what patchwriting is and why they’re asking their students to write summaries of sources. That shifts... [Read more]

The best endorsement

I’m sitting on pins and needles, waiting to receive the published copy of Writing Matters. I can’t wait! Meanwhile, I am beta-testing select chapters in my own first-year writing course. We’ve worked with the chapters on avoiding plagiarism and organizing an essay, for example, and those class sessions have gone well. I also devoted part of a class session to using hyphens. I explained to the class that hyphen use is not an issue that most faculty mark up a paper for, but that correct hyphen use is a mark of advanced literacy. I said that if when student writers use hyphens correctly, vanguard readers notice, and their esteem of the writer rises. Correct hyphen use, I said, is a small but not insignificant way of enhancing one’s writerly ethos. So we spent about half an hour on hyphen use, working through the explanations in Chapter 57 of Writing Matters. (My students... [Read more]

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