Here comes the fall term!

In just a month, classes will start, so I’m thinking now about how to structure my first-year writing course (FYC). I’ve always taught summary as part of my writing courses–in everything from first-year writing to graduate courses. It’s important, I think, because it’s a way of thinking critically about a text. If you can summarize it, you understand it. And if you can summarize it in fresh words, not just “patchwriting” (plugging in a few synonyms or making surface changes to the grammar), you can write about the text without just having to copy from it. So summary is a way of understanding a text and engaging with it.

One of the things we’re learning in the Citation Project, though, is that undergraduate students need more. They need to learn the value of complex texts, rather than searching for the simplest, most condensed ones.

And then there are all the complexities offered by online access to text. The overwhelming volume of online texts for practically any topic a student might research can lead to the student’s seeing them as all equal. They all become a hierarchical sequence in a results page from a Google search. Students today are presented with new challenges in information literacy, and teaching them how to figure out the provenance of a text accessed online is crucial. Even questions like “Who is the author of this text?” can be murky for an inexperienced researcher.

All these issues are in my mind as I think about how to structure my FYC course for fall term. I’d be very interested in knowing what sorts of issues other instructors are thinking about: What else is important for us to be taking up in our undergraduate writing classes?