1. Many writers would rather have a root canal than consult a handbook. I’ve been teaching writing for 31 years, always using a handbook for composition class. How many times have I said to the class, “Bring your handbooks tomorrow,” and maybe a third of them do. Then I say, gamely, “Open your handbook to page 37.” About ten percent of those who have the handbook with them simply sit there, without opening it!

2. Many successful writers consult a handbook regularly. Most of you do, I’m betting. I do.

3. Few inexperienced writers know how to use a handbook. See #1 above. They not only don’t know how to use it, they don’t think they can or don’t think it’s worth their while to. Today I listened to a first-time TA say, “How can I ever find anything in this handbook?” She asked this while waving the book. The closed book. Others at her table opened the book and showed her how to use the index at the beginning and end of it. “Inexperienced writers” doesn’t just mean first-year composition students; it can also mean “experienced writers who aren’t experienced with the whole range of writing tools.” A closed handbook is of very little use to a writer.

4. Teaching the use of a handbook imparts a lifelong writing skill. The Purdue Owl is great, and it’s one of many excellent online resources. But a good handbook provides more than rules; it provides discussions, perspectives, contexts, explanations. It sets a tone that says, “There’s a lot you need to know about writing, and you can get there.” And if you know how to use a handbook and you don’t sell it back for a lousy ten bucks, you always have a place to turn for answers and options.

5. Making students use a handbook is not the same as teaching them how to use it on their own. Assigning exercises or readings in a handbook may get students to open the book, and it may familiarize them with the particular principles in that assignment. But it doesn’t necessarily teach them how to use it. (As soon as I can, I’ll post a list of pedagogical techniques that I use in my own classes for doing that very thing.)

6. Students may be more willing to use a handbook when they see it as a dialogic tool, not a repository of sovereign rules. See #4 above. Having something that does convey rules is very useful, indeed. But college composition students may be put off by what they see as restrictive rules. More students may be receptive to it when the handbook acts as a coach, makes it clear that what is “right” depends on what Edbauer (see #7 below) calls the “affective ecology,” and brings the users into the decision-making process rather than making them recipients and performers of other people’s decisions.

7. Using audience and purpose as the basis of handbook use can help students understand why the contents of the handbook matter. To me, one of the most horrifying things about too many handbooks (at least those of my pedagogical past–I’m hoping not so many today) is the presentation of rules as transcendent and immutable. Every “rule” of writing is, in contrast, dependent upon its rhetorical situation. (And for a terrific treatment of rhetorical situation, see Jenny Edbauer’s “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies” in the 2005 Rhetoric Society Quarterly.) Edbauer complicates the notions of audience and purpose–and the larger category of rhetorical situation–in productive ways. A handbook can’t do what Edbauer does; handbooks and scholarly articles are different genres. But it’s enormously useful for instructors to use handbooks to introduce composition students to rhetorical concepts and for those instructors themselves to have the more sophisticated understanding that scholarship like Edbauer’s generates.

8. Handbooks are most useful (and most often used) when writers engage them in a spirit of curiosity, exploration, and dialogue–not because their instructor told them they’d made an error and the handbook would tell them how to fix it. Though error-fixing is a fine thing, it doesn’t pull students toward the craft of writing. Curiosity, exploration, and dialogue do, and writers’ experience of those traits can be extended to their use of handbooks.

9. Adopting a common handbook for all sections of composition (and literature, linguistics, rhetoric?) emphasizes the importance of the book and encourages students to keep it rather than sell it back. There are pros and cons to this principle. It’s true that handbooks are different from each other. (If you’re hearing people saying, “They’re all the same,” you’re listening to people who aren’t looking beyond the general organization. Look at tone, depth, and range of presentation, and you’ll find a lot of variety. You may even find that some are much more carefully written and edited than are others.) Given their difference from each other, some handbooks are going to suit certain teaching styles better than others. It’s true, too, that instructors become familiar with a particular handbook, like a particular handbook, and take it pretty hard when administration insists on their using a different one. I’ve also had the experience of being in a program that mass-adopted a handbook for reasons other than the quality of the handbook, and we teachers were stuck with a dog. But with all this said, I think the balance is in favor of mass adoption. First, students shouldn’t have the expense of buying two different handbooks, one for Comp 1 and another for Comp 2. Ours is not an economy in which such practices are tolerable. Second, if students are having to buy one handbook after another, they learn that a handbook is better sold than treasured. Third, a handbook adoption shouldn’t be an empty gesture; it should signify the instructors’ intention to engage it seriously in the classroom. When all the instructors are using the same handbook, the writing program has the possibility of sharing pedagogical tips and techniques related to the handbook that they have chosen.

10. Persuading other departments to adopt the handbook in their courses—even just as a “recommended” text—further emphasizes to students the importance of the book. We did this when I was the WPA at TCU. The English department made a mass handbook adoption, and then I wrote to every department chair, informing them of our decision and suggesting that they might want to list the handbook as at least a recommended text on their own syllabi, as a way of emphasizing its importance and encouraging students to use it. Then the publisher’s representative sent an exam copy to every department chair. It wasn’t long before a healthy number of courses across the curriculum had that handbook on their syllabus. I was especially pleased when a dance instructor adopted it!

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.

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.

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.

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?