Trained in literature departments for the humanistic interpretation of texts, we had a lot to learn. Some of it we learned by direct instruction and some by studying methodological texts. The rest we learn as we go along, through trial and error.

Now we’ve gathered thousands of student texts from 16 U.S. colleges. (Our website says 15, but as soon as we can catch our breath, we need to update it; a 16th college came on board this summer, bringing their own researchers with them!) This summer a whole team of people is finding sources, reading student papers and their sources, and coding the relationships between the students’ citations and the sources they cite. That’s the fieldwork. We have a small grant that allows us to pay a few graduate students this summer, but for most of us this is volunteer work, scholarship to which we feel ineluctably drawn.

Sandra Jamieson and I are tracking, compiling, processing, and analyzing the results of the fieldwork. That’s the lab work. The first three of these–tracking, compiling, and processing–are my job this summer. And it *is* drudgery! I am amazed by how many hours and how much concentration it takes to do this “lab” work.

Yet it is exciting drudgery. As the movement of data among researchers is tracked, marked-up papers are PDFed and stored in accessible online folders, and spreadsheets are assembled with data for the SPSS database, I unavoidably feel excited. We are moving toward a goal, and the goal is one that we all count as very important. We expect to produce the kind of results that can profoundly aid teachers and curriculum-builders. We are too much in the throes of the fieldwork and lab work right now to see that light ahead of us, but we know it’s there. And it keeps me moving through “the drudgery of the lab.” Now I have a better understanding of how scientists are motivated, and why they find their work rewarding.

Feeding on a culture-wide fear of uncontrolled, incomprehensible technology run amok, and encouraging a suspicion of, a disdain for, even a hatred of students, these stories do us no good at all. Instead, they encourage us to use automated assessment of writing and to cease assigning out-of-class writing. Such measures will indeed assuage our fear that we are being duped by our students: how can they dupe us if we’re expecting, asking, so very little of them?

I try to keep my expectations high for my students. I try to work with them as they write, helping them expand their thinking and open their minds about the topic they’ve chosen (or that I’ve assigned). How can I do that work if I’m only assigning in-class writing? I recognize–because I experience it myself–that teachers’ workloads are rising exponentially, making it ever harder for us to do what we once considered minimally acceptable quality of teaching. That does not, however, mean that it’s game over for us. Yet the New York Times, and all those other media outlets recycling sensationalistic old stories to fill a page and sell copy, are telling us that precise thing. They are selling despair.

I’m tired of reading these stories. None of them has anything new to add to the old script, except that each one uses a new, local example. In the case of “Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name),” the “new, local example” is the testimony of a friend of the writer, someone who claims that plagiarism is “turning him into a cop.” Notice that it’s the plagiarism that’s the agent here; the teacher is the hapless, pitiable victim. And in the case of “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery,” the new, local example is the testing center at the University of Central Florida, which the writer, incredibly, describes as “the frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating.” We are cops, we are locked in battle, we are in a dangerous place known as a frontier.

We can do better than this, my friends. And so can the New York Times.

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 many others.

Those “many others” do not, for the most part, include my own students in first-year comp. For most of them, writing is an empty ceremony that they reluctantly perform on the command of their instructors. They work hard at figuring out what the instructor wants and how to deliver it with the least effort. In saying that, I am not disparaging my very earnest and likable students; I’m just saying that their goals in a college classroom are different from mine. It’s my job to figure out how to bridge the gap. Expecting or demanding that they go online to find answers to arcane questions that they do not themselves care about or fully understand seems to me a form of denying the gap rather than bridging it.

For me, bridging the gap means not only adopting a hardcopy handbook but using it in class. After the end of the term, my students will no longer have regular access to me when they write, and they will no longer have me to motivate them to care. What they will still have, if I’ve done my job well, is a handbook that they feel comfortable with and that they won’t sell back for a lousy ten bucks at the end of the term.

So bridging the gap means I have my students buy a hardcopy handbook, bring it to class, and use it in class in a variety of ways. They get comfortable with it, they come to value it, they keep it, they use it. That’s the goal. And that seems to me a very responsible thing for me to do. It may cost my students some money, but if I’ve chosen the book well, for its price and for its quality, I have done them the great favor of educating them, getting them more involved in writing, moving them toward being confident writers, and providing them with an ongoing writing tutor (the handbook) that I have used my writerly expertise to choose with care.

Clearly, then, one of the tasks for writing instruction is to help students find good reference sources. Many instructors excoriate Wikipedia as a poor research source. What we should not lose sight of, though, is the problems of other general reference sources. The Encyclopedia Brittanica is a fine collection, but it offers only the most rudimentary introduction to a topic. Our students will benefit enormously if they learn how to search their library’s online and physical holdings for specialized reference sources such as the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition or the Dictionary of Classical Mythology–sources that treat the topic in greater depth and that may also overview the debates about the topic.

Our early insights from the Citation Project research prompt me, as a teacher, to be much more energetic and specific with my students about why reference sources must be the beginning, not the objective, of critical research; otherwise, they may be dooming themselves to patchwritten, flimsy arguments.

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 my attention from thinking how peculiar it is to see video of oneself online, to thinking about how many good pedagogical uses can be made of such video.

So not only is Writing Matters out, ready to be distributed as desk copies and ready to be used in the classroom, but so are those videos. And after my friend’s call today, I’m feeling not just the odd sensation of seeing myself on film, but the happy notion that not only Writing Matters but the video are doing good pedagogical work.

And that’s what it’s all about. I expected to have Writing Matters do good work; the videos are a bonus, the handiwork of the great team at McGraw, some of whose pictures are in the Gallery on this blog. Thanks, y’all.

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 were wildly impressed, by the way, that I had written a 57-chapter book. That was a funny part of the conversation.) We did some of the exercises collaboratively, and then they checked their own work in progress for hyphen use. They seemed mildly interested and engaged in all this, and then class ended and off they went.

Then yesterday I was conferencing with one of the students, and as she packed up her paper and got up to leave, she said, “I really liked that chapter on hyphens; that was really useful. Do you have a chapter on semicolons? I want to know how to use those better.”

As you might imagine, I have happily sent her the PDF for the semicolons chapter.

Many colleagues have conducted enormously helpful and supportive reviews of Writing Matters; the book simply would not be what it is without all that help. And the words of praise have made this writer very happy.

And now I have my first student endorsement. That makes yesterday a special day.

As the site explains, we have a report of the preliminary research that will be published in Writing and Pedagogy. Yet the website feels even more of a milestone. We’ve come far enough that we’re able to explain the project with enough specificity and brevity that a website is possible, and that’s a huge accomplishment.

As the website also explains, there are a number of people involved in the research. Sandra and I are the principal researchers, the ones responsible for the overall design and momentum. But lots of people are already involved, as contributing coders of text, as site hosts, and as leaders of ancillary inquiry.

More to come! Check out the site, and let us know what you think.

I did a brief presentation on some preliminary insights from the research team of the Citation Project. We haven’t done any statistical analyses yet, but as we code students’ papers, we see again and again that they are writing from isolated sentences in their sources, rather than from the whole source. We’re also seeing wide-ranging difficulties in citing online sources, and we’re realizing afresh how challenging that job is. When I was an undergraduate writer, I worked with books, journals, magazines, and newspapers. Period. Identifying author, title, and publisher was uncomplicated. That is not the case today, and not only does it complicate citation, but more importantly, it further removes inexperienced student writers from any sort of relationship with their sources. The sources too easily become undifferentiated masses of information. Hence students seek the most concise, information-laden sources. Then they struggle to produce an argument from the data they’ve collected. It takes an expert to develop critical insights from data; new scholars need other scholars’ perspectives as a way of getting into the complex issues that underlie the data.

As the day’s conversations unfolded, I busily took notes on my PDA. One of my favorite moments was when someone mentioned a research assignment developed by a colleague (who I think was Chris Madden-Feikes): “researching the researcher.” As I understand it, students do some preliminary research; identify an important source for their inquiry; and then research the author of that source. That’s a terrific idea, one that speaks to what we’re discovering in Citation Project research. A “researching the researcher” assignment will definitely be in my syllabus when next I teach our WRT 205; it’s a great way to press students to notice who the author is and to explore her background, context, and previous publications.

That was in the 80s, when one-on-one conferencing was new and when the Diederich scale was still commonly used for evaluating students’ written texts.

Lots has changed since then, including me. Every time I teach introductory writing, I change my syllabus and my methods. If I ever become complacent about how I’m teaching, I’ll know it’s time to quit. But there are constants—individual conferences and peer review, for example.

This semester, however, I’ll be returning to a model that I only used in that externally imposed syllabus in the early 80s: a workshop day every week. I’m teaching intro writing on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule this fall, and every Thursday will be a workshop day. Some of these Thursdays will be in-class peer review. Some will be online peer review, conducted through the amazing peer review system that Paul Banks and his colleagues at McGraw-Hill have designed for their Connect program. Some will be face-to-face individual and small-group conferences with me. Some will be online conferences with me, probably through something as simple as a chat program. And some will be written dialogues, on the model that my partner developed for a WAC component in his Western Civ-ish courses at Colgate, where he provides a prompt for critical and creative thinking on a thorny philosophical problem; the students write a one-page answer; he responds to that; they respond to his response; and so forth. How the conversation unfolds depends on each student. In some cases my partner winds up talking about baseball with the student; in other cases, Plato. The idea is the written conversation, not some “end” that he has foreordained.

Regardless of what activity I choose in any given Thursday, what will be interesting for me this fall will be to have 50% of the class contact time devoted to workshopping. Over the past few years I’ve moved away from my earlier immersion in process pedagogy and more toward an in-class dialogic model. But the last time I taught intro comp, I felt as if my dialogic model had become too top-down: there was too much of me telling rather than students figuring out. So now I’m swinging back to 50% workshopping. It will definitely give me some deja vu.