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.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the eighteen student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

Do check out this new journal. With the field of writing studies growing at its current rate, the discipline needs new venues for scholarly publication. Here’s one, and I can testify to its rigorous, thorough peer review system. Very promising.