February 2000 Guest Column:
Strategies for Incorporating and Evaluating Student Writing in Your Classes -by Tim Melley, English Department
From the Howe Professor, Kate Ronald:

I am pleased to introduce a "guest columnist" on the Howe Writing Initiative Web site -- my colleague in the English Department, Professor Tim Melley. Last year, Tim participated in the Senior Scholars Program, where faculty from across the University come together to talk about issues in teaching. As is so often the case here in the SBA, one of the major issues for discussion became concern over the quality of students' writing. Since he was the English teacher, much of this complaint and concern, especially about the burden of reading and responding to writing was directed at Tim. In fact, the group asked him to prepare a presentation on how to handle writing in their classes. When Tim showed it to me, I immediately thought of our work in SBA to incorporate and improve the quality of student writing across the curriculum. So, I asked Tim for permission to broaden his audience to include the faculty in SBA, who struggle with these issues so valiantly.

I think you'll find Tim's observations keen, sensible, and provocative, and his advice imaginative, manageable, and pedagogically sound. He speaks to many of the issues raised in our Fall workshop on "Reading Student Writing Quickly and Effectively." I encourage you to pay particular attention not only to his detailed advice about managing the paper load, but also to his assumptions about writing, assumptions I thoroughly endorse. I thought it might be a nice idea for you all to hear it from someone else besides me for a change. If you'd like to respond to this column, I'd be happy to pass along your comments to Tim.

Thanks.

Strategies for Incorporating and Evaluating Student Writing in Your Classes
- by Tim Melley, English Department

Last year, as part of an effort to revise its first year composition offerings, the Miami University English department held a series of focus groups so that faculty from other departments could help us make our courses better serve their needs. During these meetings, many instructors voiced reluctance to incorporate writing into their own classes. Teaching writing not only seemed demanding, but also seemed to require a specialized knowledge that participants felt they lacked. Frequently, faculty said they did not know what to do with a piece of student writing and that while they could recognize poor writing, they lacked the training to respond to it and evaluate it effectively. This article outlines practical strategies for solving those problems and for incorporating student writing in courses across the curriculum.

Assumptions about Writing

I want to begin by stating four assumptions I will be making about writing. These assumptions underpin all the advice to follow and yet they are not widely held. Indeed, if our focus groups are accurate index, they run counter to the assumptions of most faculty.

1. There is no such thing as "good writing" outside a specific writing context. Of course, competence in the use of English prose is not discipline-specific, and readers can readily recognize the difference between lucid and less-than-lucid prose. Yet the value of a specific piece of writing can change dramatically from one community to another. These changes depend heavily on the rhetorical elements of writing, especially audience and purpose. That is, the value of a piece of writing depends upon the context in which that writing has a use. For most of us in the academy, the context of our writing and our students' writing is specified by our disciplines, which make assumptions about the uses of writing.

Contexts are also provided by professions, by employers, and by particular writing situations. Hence, the kind of writing that is judged "good" in a philosophy class is likely to be different from the writing required in an engineering report. The kind of prose praised by a lawyer is likely to be different from that used in an interoffice memo at Procter and Gamble. Imagine, for instance, the following opening to a laboratory report: "As the sun set softly across the western hills, Phil gave me a knowing glance. It was too late to turn back. I picked up the beaker and pipetted 5 milliliters of sulfuric acid into the solution." While it might be lauded in a creative writing class, it's not going to be popular with natural sciences professors.

2. Faculty in all disciplines are experts in writing. More exactly, as a working scholar and college instructor, you are an expert in the rhetorical situations provided by your discipline or profession. Most of us, moreover, are writers. We use writing as the primary means of communicating our research to others in our field. We, better than any "expert in writing," know how to communicate in a way valuable to others in our areas of expertise. While writing (rhetoric and composition, technical writing, and creative writing) are fields of study within English, and while some disciplines are based heavily on the analysis of texts, faculty from those disciplines are not well equipped to teach students how to write for the particular purposes specified by other disciplines. In short, the rhetorical elements of communication are best taught within specific disciplines.

3. No one outside your field will be as effective as you in teaching students to write within your field. This proposition follows from the first two. While English instructors can teach students to write with clarity and can give them practice in expressing themselves, such instruction will always take place within its own rhetorical contexts and those contexts will be distinct from (even opposed to) the contexts you might demand. In the sciences, for instance, the passive voice is favored. In English, it is often labeled erroneous. In English, using the first person is acceptable; in disciplines that stress objectivity, it is an error.

4. Becoming a better teacher of writing within your discipline means becoming more self-conscious about what you yourself have already learned about writing and communicating that knowledge to your students. Yes, there has been a great deal of research on the teaching of writing, and yes, the teaching of writing is a specialized field of study. Yet, you do not need special training to help college students improve the writing they do for your courses.

Assignment Design

Because the rhetorical categories of audience and purpose provide the context in which students write, and because good writing cannot be good in a vacuum, good student writing begins with a good assignment. Consider the following when designing an assignment:

1. Give students an assignment sheet that clearly explains the piece of writing you seek.

2. Who is the audience for the writing? (Should it be directed at you, at other students, at the readers of Time magazine, at Plato, at the editors of a professional, peer-edited journal, the CEO of a company, or some other imaginary audience?)

3. What is the genre of the piece? (Is it a "standard" academic essay? A memo? A report?)

4. What is purpose of the piece? (Is it to communicate information from class? To practice a particular kind of thinking or knowledge? To simulate the activities of a professional in your field? More basically, is it to synthesize, to analyze, or to create?)

5. What should be the relation between assertion and support in the paper? (Should it make claims based on logic, on emotional appeals, or on forms of authority grounded in specific procedures? Do the students know those procedures (i.e. how to cite a text, how to distinguish reliable and unreliable sources, how to construct a poll, etc.?) To put it differently, what counts as evidence in your field?

6. If the piece of writing is "creative," "flexible," or "open-ended," consider specifying the constraints within which such flexibility should be exercised. Also consider specifying the range of possible responses.

7. Give students your criteria for evaluation. What will you most value in this piece of writing and why? How much will you value each of its elements? 8. Give students examples of an excellent response to the assignment.

9. Give students examples of a weak response. (Use an anonymous sample from an earlier class, or create your own.)

10. Seize the authority to evaluate your students' writing. Instructors outside the English Department sometimes report that they feel a lack of authority when it comes to teaching writing, or that their students do not respect their authority. By creating an assignment with clear evaluative priorities, you articulate the qualities that constitute good writing in your field. In doing so, you put students on notice that you are an expert about writing in your discipline.

11. Teach the assignment. An assignment is the first step in a communication with students. Listening to student questions about the assignment may help you to clarify it or revise it for future classes. Explaining the purpose of the assignment will probably help you further refine it.

Responding to Student Writing

Create a rubric for evaluation. Specify the qualities of an A paper, a B paper, and so on. Articulate the range of possible qualities that might place a paper in a given range. For instance, in a course where written argumentation is very important, a C paper might be technically perfect, but lacking a clear or persuasive argument. Alternatively, it might contain the seeds of compelling argument but with no support. Or it might have the beginnings of a decent argument in highly garbled and confusing prose. Rubrics are difficult to develop because they force us to specify the complex array of criteria that we normally process unconsciously when reading. But creating a clear rubric will remove much of the feeling that evaluating papers is an arbitrary or purely "subjective" exercise.

Respond and reward students according to your rubric. If mechanical exactitude is required by the rhetorical situation (i.e. the students are writing a mock job search document), then reward those whose prose is technically flawless and punish those with unacceptable errors. If a complex argument is most important, change the reward structure accordingly, and so on.

Give students a mix of positive and negative feedback. Students are used to hearing what they've done wrong. But just as often they are ignorant about what they've done well. Students benefit greatly from knowing that you recognize their successes; by giving them positive feedback (especially if they've tried something new and succeeded) you reinforce their best tendencies.

More is often less. Circling every mechanical, rhetorical, and evidentiary error in a paper can be self-defeating. Students are often overwhelmed by such commentary and become so discouraged that they do not even read your comments -- this after you have invested considerable time in making them. Consider focusing on one or two major issues -- things that the student can reasonably expect to improve on a revision or on the next paper.

Make Writing Part of Your Course Content

Follow up by Xeroxing and distributing excellent papers. If you wish to encourage creativity, Xerox and distribute very different but equally strong responses to the same assignment. Mediocre students often stop complaining when they see what some of their peers are producing.

Make student writing a "course text" in your classes. This can be done via peer review or by "publishing" student prose and making it the subject of discussion. If students are debating something, Xerox opposing arguments for discussion. If they are solving a problem, Xerox different solutions. (You should consider removing the students' names from papers you circulate.) Nothing makes students care about their writing more than having a large responsive audience about whom they care.

Develop a "culture of writing" in your classes. Talk about pieces of writing that students are reading. Explain why they are impressive or less-than-impressive. By making writing part of your regular conversation, you create a climate in which good writing matters and in which your authority to evaluate writing is enhanced.

Time Saving Strategies (or, How to Do Any of This and Still Have a Life)

Front-load your investment in writing. In other words, the more time you spend on assignment design and rubrics, the less time you will need to spend commenting on papers, listening to complaints, and teaching students what you want.

Begin with reasonable assumptions about student writing. If you expect students to come to your class writing lucid, crisp, precise prose, you will be disappointed -- and you may spend extra time responding to student writing

Determine your priorities in teaching writing. Even in a writing-intensive course, you probably cannot teach students how to
(1) develop a sophisticated historical argument, (2) incorporate secondary sources into their histories, (3) develop good introductions to their essays, and (4) rid their prose of mechanical errors. Decide what is most important to you and set a reasonable goal that students can accomplish. Ration your comments. Ideally, every piece of student writing should receive a clear and complex response. But we don't live in an ideal world, and many students benefit more from a brief, straightforward response. Consider pointing out one or two strengths and one or two areas for improvement.

When teaching students to write and revise drafts of their work, use the peer review workshop method to allow students to work on drafts of a paper. Within a carefully designed environment, students can provide each other with invaluable feedback on their work as they work together to produce a final draft that will please you. (You only need to read and comment on the final draft.)

Designate some writing assignments for minimal comments (check/check+/check-). Less formal writing assignments that are primarily to check student reading or to provide comments or questions for class do not need elaborate feedback.

Note symptomatic problems as you read papers, and then discuss these problems in front of the class when you return the papers. This saves you from making separate comments on every paper.

Have reasonable expectations about your own effort in teaching writing. Teaching writing is extremely labor intensive. It may take several semesters or even years to develop a system for teaching and evaluating student writing.