Fall 2022 Post 04: My Grading Process

Many students find my grading process confusing, so I'll explain both how and why I grade academic essays as I do (this is my thesis, which identifies in one sentence my reader, my topic, and my purpose for writing. That's highly efficient and works really well for blog posts, which are usually short.). Moreover, if I explain myself, then more of you will make better grades (this sentence identifies the response I want from my reader). That makes me look good. Win-win.

And by the way, despite the cute image at the top of this post, I don't grade papers with a red pen. I don't grade papers, at all. I grade electronic documents. I gave up printed papers a decade ago.

First, I'll explain how I grade.

• I scan your academic essay online for the basics: correct handling of the assignment, proper MLA formatting, standard academic English, and a clear thesis that addresses the assignment.
• If I find issues with the basics, then I stop grading your document until you fix the basics. I make one comment about each issue that I see, and I return the document to you with a grade of 2 out of 100 on a grading rubric. 
• Note that I make only one comment per issue. I do NOT identify every instance of a comma problem, for instance, or a faulty subject/verb agreement. Rather, I point out that your essay has at least one instance of each kind of issue. It's up to you to find and fix the rest of the errors. I you can't do that by yourself, then you must seek help. However, I do not edit your document. I cannot both edit and grade your document, as I would be grading my own work.
• Often, I will suggest a rewrite to the text if I'm fairly clear about what your essay is trying to communicate. To accept the suggested rewrite (you usually should unless I've misunderstood what you were trying to say), then click the blue checkmark in the comment box in the right-hand margin.
• I will almost always leave an explanation of each issue in a comment box. You should read and understand the explanation before you resolve it. If you don't understand my comment, then ask me. Don't ignore it. Comments take time, and I don't make them frivolously.
• When I have finished making comments, I will share a grading rubric with you with a brief explanation in different categories about your document and with a grade. You can view this rubric, but you cannot edit it.
• At this point of dealing with basic issues, I will usually tell you to visit the Writing Center (WC) or the Student Support Center (SSC) online for help. You'll find the Writing Center here. You can schedule an appointment in the SSC here. This is NOT optional. If I advise you to visit the WC or SSC, then I will not regrade your document until I receive a notice that you have visited. I'm stubborn about this, and I reason this way: you've just demonstrated to me that you can't manage the basics of the essay by yourself; therefore, you need help with editing your essay. I cannot edit your essay and grade it, too. However, I will always answer your questions about specific issues in your essays. So ask.
• If I find few or no issues with MLA or academic language, or if you have visited the WC or SSC and resolved your basic issues, then I continue grading your document. I review your document according to several categories listed in my grading rubric:
  
  
  
• The Assignment: I check to see if your document meets the requirements of the assignment, including length, format, assigned topic, reader, and so forth. This is an initial show stopper. If your document does not address the assignment, then I stop grading until you fix it, usually with outside help such as the Writing Center or Student Support Center.
• The Reader: I check to see if your document clearly identifies or implies a reader, identifies the response expected of the reader, and provides resources and arguments that encourage the reader to respond appropriately.
• The Writer: I check if your document clearly identifies or implies your purpose for writing and uses an authoritative voice appropriate to the reader, your purpose, and the context.
• The Thesis: I check if your document has a clear thesis, usually in the first paragraph or two, that is appropriate to the assignment. This is also a show-stopper. If I don't find an appropriate thesis, I stop grading until you fix it, usually with outside help.
• The Information: I check if your document provides sufficient, relevant, authoritative information to support your thesis. I also note if you support your claims with solid sources.
• The Arrangement: I check if your information is arranged clearly so that a reasonable, intelligent, and diligent reader can follow your argument and arrive at your conclusion, even if they are not convinced by it.
• The Academic Language: I check if your document uses standard, academic English. This is a show stopper. If I find enough language issues that I have trouble understanding what you are trying to communicate, then I quit grading until you fix the issues, usually with outside help such as the Writing Center.
• MLA Formatting: I check if your document uses MLA formatting and style. This is a show stopper. If I find enough MLA issues, then I quit grading until you fix the issues, usually with outside help such as the Writing Center.
• Each time I grade your document, I share a grading rubric that lists the points earned in each category with each iteration. Sometimes I will add quick suggestions for improving or compliments for doing particularly well.
• You may continue to rewrite your document until the last day of classes or until you are either tired of rewriting it or happy with your grade. I will regrade your document each time you send me a Gmail asking me to regrade it. Do not assume that I will regrade your document just because you've made some changes. You must notify me through Gmail.
• Your grade will only go up, never down, and you get the new grade, not some average of all past scores. It is definitely to your advantage to rewrite as often as you can, as soon as you can.

So why do I grade like this? Because you learn more and better if I do. Nothing clarifies your learning objectives like a failing grade.

First, grading is a process — just like writing. I don't believe in one and done, which is what many of you are most likely used to. The way I grade can be a long process, and most teachers don't want to go through it, but I believe it's the best way to learn how to write. Grading is a dance, sometimes a long dance, as you and I seek a happy meeting ground. I'm looking for a near perfect paper, and you are looking for a near perfect grade. This will likely mean that we will have several grading sessions for each document. This means that most of you are nowhere near done with Doc1.

Second, I have high expectations. I have to read your essays, so I want good essays. I'm old and I don't have enough time left to waste on poor writing. You must rise to my standards; I won't fall to yours.

Third, I don't want to overwhelm you with feedback. Too much feedback at one time can be demoralizing. So I deal first with the simple aspects of writing: the parameters of the assignment, MLA and standard academic English, and a clear thesis. The rules are fairly clear and consistent, so you either do them correctly or you don't. If you do them, we move forward. If you don't, we stop and fix them, right now.

I don't start with MLA and standard English because they are the most important parts of writing. They are not. Rather, they are the necessary grounds of good academic writing. Most of you like texting because it's so free and loose — or so you believe — but texting has its rules, too, and if you violate them, then you don't communicate well. Let's say that, because I'm free to text however I like, I send you the following text message:

browac4amd. wfm.

Of course, this text message likely makes no sense to you until I interpret: "Be right over with a check for a million dollars. Wait for me." My incomprehensible text message illustrates that even texting requires rules and organization if we are to communicate through it. Academic writing requires certain kinds of rules and organization appropriate to the academic context, just as texting does. Following those rules and structures gains you entrance to the conversation. Think of appropriate format and language as appropriate dress for a job interview. Probably, you don't normally wear a tie, but you might wear one to your job interview, not because the tie makes you smarter or a more capable employee, but because it gets you in the door. Appropriate language and MLA formatting are like dressing appropriately for the occasion. If you want to be a nurse, eventually you will have to learn to dress like a nurse and quit dressing like your high school buddies. Similarly, you'll have to learn to communicate like a nurse and quit communicating like your high school text buddies. The first hospital administrator that you text WTF? to will have you in front of the human resources disciplinary board before you leave work that day. If you want to converse with professional people, then you must learn to converse in professional language — not your high school textese. There is nothing wrong with text language, unless you are using it for an academic audience.

Finally, I use grades — mostly bad ones — to spur you to rewrite your document. For instance, if I just take a few points off for your MLA, or even drop you a letter grade, then many of you will just accept the lower grade, figuring a slightly higher grade is not worth the effort. So I give you a grade you can't accept, a 2. You really do have to fix it or fail the class. I demand that you show up and do the work. I won't accept less.

I could go on, but I suspect many of you have already stopped reading. If you have questions, ask below. If you have no questions, just tell me that you understand. If you have complaints, definitely leave those below. If I don't have a good answer, then I'll probably change my grading process.

Summer 2022 Post 7: Writing Takes Time

One of the most difficult tasks I have in my composition classes is helping my students accept that writing is a process that unfolds over an extended amount of time. Students don't like that "extended amount of time" part. I understand that. They all want to be one-draft wonders. Students are busy, they have much to do in a short amount of time, and they just want to get the document finished, off their computer screen, and onto the teacher's computer screen.

I wish it worked that way, but it usually doesn't.

I try to explain this "extended amount of time" by dividing writing into two parts: first, writing for yourself (learning) and then writing for others (communicating). Our Doc1 can help me illustrate these two phases and explain why writing takes so much time.

The Doc1 assignment asks you to write about an academic issue that you have experienced in college. Some of you chose procrastination as your issue, so I'll use that topic in this post. Unless you are already an expert in why college students procrastinate, then you had to do some research to learn something about procrastination among college students. This means that you used writing to search for data, take notes, and assemble that information into a document that started to make sense. If you didn't do all that writing, then you likely had nothing of value to bring to your readers, other college students who also struggle with procrastination. Writing is first and foremost one of the best tools we have for learning academic material. If you can write it, then you probably know it.

Unfortunately, learning takes time, and we all learn unequally. That's a drag. Some students read quickly and absorb information quickly. Good for them. It's a gift from God, like being able to play the piano without training. We all know someone who can do it, and most of us know that we can't. Most of us learn slowly. I do. But the point is that you have to learn something that is of value for your reader, and that learning takes time — usually more time than you have. Too bad. You have to do it anyway, or your writing will never be very good, and you will be of no use to your reader. That may not matter much to you in college, but it will kill you when you are employed. If you bring no value to your customers and colleagues, then they will move on from you — usually sooner rather than later.

Bringing value as a writer means that you are bringing some knowledge, some information, that is current, relevant, authoritative, and purposeful (remember the CRAP test?). And remember: if your reader already knows it, then it ain't information. It's just chatter. Chatter is okay in social texting, but not for customers and colleagues. For them, you must always bring value. You should always write from a position of relative knowledge: you should know more about the topic than your reader does. If you don't know more than the reader, then be quiet, and let your reader talk. We all know how obnoxious it is to listen to someone go on and on about a topic that they know less about than we do. Don't be the writer who does that.

However, this writing from a position of relative knowledge is actually a big problem in the college classroom because usually you are writing to the teacher about something they know more about than you do — say, World War II or programming in C++. They've been studying World War II or C++ for years, and you for just a couple of weeks. It's awkward to write to readers who know more about a topic than you do, but most teachers ask you to do this because they want to check if you've learned anything about world history or computer programming, for instance. Teachers want you to demonstrate that you have learned something, and that learning also takes time. Get over it. It's why you're in college: to learn new stuff. If you already knew this stuff, then you wouldn't need to be here.

Depending on the assignment and your preparation, learning what you want to say can take the most time. Most of you managed this part of the Doc1 assignment fairly well: you learned something, and you laid out what you learned in your document. But too many of you overlooked the second phase of writing: communicating for a given reader. Knowing your stuff is great, but it's useless to the rest of us if you can't communicate it. We've all had teachers who really knew their stuff but couldn't communicate it in a way that students could understand. You didn't like that, did you? Then don't do that to your readers. 

I assign a reader for you (in the case of Doc1, college students who share your academic issue) in part so that you won't write to me. I'm a grader, not a reader, and those are very different roles. Don't confuse them — ever.

Most of you managed to identify your topic adequately in your introduction, but too many of you did not identify your reader or what value you were bringing to that reader. This is unfortunate, because all good writers can shift from thinking about what they know to thinking about what their readers need to know. Those are not the same things, though they can involve the same information. For instance, for Doc1, you should say something like:

College students often struggle with procrastination, but fortunately, experts have identified two (or 3 or 5) strategies for coping with this damaging habit.

You have to frame your essay right up front for your readers; otherwise, they won't know what you're writing about. You frame your essay by identifying the writer, the reader, the subject, and the text. This is exactly what emails do in their standard header: 

• From: You, a Fellow College Student
• To: College Students Who Struggle with Procrastination, and
• Subject: How to Manage Procrastination in College.

Of course, you don't want to be quite as plain as email in your academic essays. You should strive for a more elegant and engaging introduction, but you should still provide the same basic information: who is talking to whom about what and why. You must frame the conversation for your reader so that they can understand who you are and why you are talking to them. And that takes time.

As most of you have learned by now, one of the things I need as your grader is impeccable MLA formatting. I gave you a well formatted template, and too many of you didn't follow it; thus, you didn't get the response from me that you wanted. Yes, I know that extreme attention to MLA formatting rules takes time. It's tedious. Do it anyway. Your Little Seagull Handbook has a whole section devoted to MLA, and you'll find wonderful guides on Purdue OWL, the best online site for managing your academic documents. Mastering MLA (or APA) takes time, but you have to do it. By the way, a small handful of you get the MLA mostly right on your first draft. That means you've already spent the time in some other class to learn it, while the rest of you have to spend the time in this class.

Writing a good blog post takes time. I've written hundreds of blog posts, and I've gotten quicker at it, but it still takes me time. I accept that. If you accept that good writing takes time, then you will become a better writer.

Fall 2021: Keep Writing

Blogging seems to work for my students, judging by their responses to the Post 14 prompt to "explore the effects of class blogging on your own writing and the writing of your classmates." Perhaps some students are blowing smoke when they say they enjoyed blogging, but I don't think so. Enough students say that blogging doesn't do much for them to convince me that most are giving an honest response. Plus, I've been reading them for almost three months now, and I have faith in most of my bloggers.

With blogging on my mind, I was pleased to read Josh Bernoff's post "What did you learn today? And would you blog it?" in which he talks about writing in general, but blogging specifically, as one of the very best tools for learning. You should read his post.

First, he talks about how to come up with new ideas to sustain a life of writing a blog post five times a week, which he does. He lists six sources that he uses to get his ideas for 260 blog posts a year:

• Reflect on any milestones in your life and what you learned from them. Birthdays count.
• Reflect on something you just read that made you think differently. You do read, don't you? If you want to be a lifelong learner, then you read -- new stuff.
• Reflect on something you witnessed or became aware of that is wrong and should be corrected. If you see nothing wrong in the world, then you might not be looking.
• Reflect on something you witnessed or became aware of that is right and should be promoted. If you see nothing right in the world, then you are definitely not looking.
• Reflect on any experience that you think would elicit support, sympathy, or appreciation from others.
• Reflect on any experience that you think would amuse or entertain others.

Regardless of the topic of your blog, looking into these six areas of your life can lead you to plenty to write about, so go for it. I mostly blog about things that I've read. Writing is how I process my reading and make it my own.

Why do this much writing? To grow, to learn. Bernoff says:

Learning is growth.
Thinking about what you learned creates more growth.
Writing about what you learned forces you to think harder about it, and how it fits into your worldview, and how you would explain it — which creates still more growth.

So writing is learning first. We usually think of writing as communicating, but you have to learn something before you communicate -- or at least, you should. Few things in life are more agonizing than listening to or reading someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. It's why I sometimes become frustrated with students who submit essays before they've learned something worth writing. I'm old enough to realize that I'm not going to finish reading all the good stuff that I want to read, so when I have to read writing devoid of meaning or learning, then I can become cranky. I know it's part of my job, but still ... Fortunately, every term I have students who learn something worth saying and who put in the effort to say it well. I'm very thankful for those students. They save my job and maybe my life.

Bernoff concludes his post by encouraging his readers to try writing regularly. He promises them that they will learn and grow into better, more interesting, more useful people. I know that he is correct. And a blog is a fine platform for regular writing. A blog with readers can help keep you on track with your writing.

Of course, there are other ways to learn, but writing is a damn good way. It works for me. I know lots of things because I write. You can write, too.

Summer 2021: Post 5: Complexity and Education

Many of my students are initially frustrated with my approach to education, so I thought I should explain it. Learning is a willingness to change, to move beyond what you already know and can do. When you move beyond what you already know, then you enter the complexity zone of life where things are more open-ended, uncertain, and unpredictable. Generally, students don't like working in the complexity zone, as they prefer to work in the simple, predictable zone where they can guarantee a good grade. Sorry, but that ain't education. Education is when you leave a class different than you came in, and that can be difficult.

I believe that people learn when they first recognize that they don't know something and then they rearrange themselves — make internal physical and mental changes — in response to what they don't know. I believe all living systems — maybe all systems — can learn. For instance, slime mold can recognize food or danger (say, an acid solution) and then rearrange itself to move toward or away from the food or danger. This is rather simple learning, but it illustrates the behavior that we humans do on a more sophisticated level, though we also do plenty of learning on this simple level, as well. For instance, we learn to recognize foreign viruses and to eliminate them from our bodies, and we do this unconsciously through our immune system, but the principle is the same: recognize an anomaly and respond appropriately.

Our narrow range of vision

Learning implies certain capabilities within the system that is learning: first, a system must be capable of recognizing an anomaly, an issue that it should avoid, seek, or correct. Many simpler creatures such as slime mold do this rather automatically and within a very limited scope using a very limited sensory apparatus. We humans can sense so much more with our more sophisticated sensory apparatus, but we also have significant blind spots. For instance, we see only a narrow range of the available light spectrum. Most of us — including me — don't know how much we can't see and don't know.

However, even if we are physically capable of seeing something new, we also have to be willing to look. So in class, the first order of business is convincing students that they don't know something that they really need to know. At the beginning of my classes, I ask students to do lots of technical, time-related tasks such as sending me a Gmail or setting up a blog to see who can do it and who can't. I congratulate those who can and give them a good grade. I help those who can't and often give them a poor grade to motivate them. Typically, about 25-30% of the class reachea Week 3 with a 100% score, meaning that they were able to complete all tasks on-time with almost no instruction or encouragement from me. Good for them. The rest of the class struggles — a few with technical issues, most with time management issues. I try to address those issues, and it works for most students. Usually by midterm, almost all of my students are on track and capable of doing the class work on time. Most have raised their scores to a passing level. However, a handful of students decide the class isn't for them and drop it. This is typical.

I think this approach works, but it is stressful on those students who struggle to figure it out. Most of them receive some zeroes and have to scramble to fix them. In slime mold terms, they move too close to the acid bath and then have to scramble to get away. I'm sorry they have to do that, but the process seems to work for most students. First, try something, and then students either figure it out and feel good about themselves, or fail and figure out what they have to learn. If they are willing, then they will learn.

I learned this technique from coaching recreational soccer to kids. Performance first, then instruction. For instance, if I want to teach a group of six-year-olds how to make an instep pass, first I have them try the pass to see who can and who can't do it. I praise those who can, and I work with those who can't, often using those who can as exemplars and motivators for the others. People learn well from their peers. Soon, most everyone on the team can execute an instep pass. If I give instruction first, then those who can already do it are bored, and those who can't do it don't understand what I'm lecturing about. Failure clarifies the issue for them so that they can learn it. If they really want to.

And this brings me to a second capability for learning: desire. The issue is that too many students don't care if they don't know what I'm teaching. The slime mold, for instance, has real desire for learning how to avoid an acid bath, but my students have very little motivation for learning how to format an academic paper in MLA 8 format. This is a particularly difficult issue for a teacher to deal with. If a student is genuinely not interested in learning academic writing, then I have very few tools for motivating them. Of course, I can motivate through grades, and I do that, but I think grades are a rather poor motivator. I'm always looking for better ways to motivate students. For instance, I try using engaging essay assignments that ask students to research and write about issues that, I hope, have value for them. Sometimes it works, but I'm looking for more and better ways to teach.

Finally, learning requires the ability to change mentally, physically, socially, spiritually, and more. A student must willing and able to move beyond what they already know. Not everyone is willing to do that. In fact, as we get older, we seem to become less and less willing to change in significant ways. Real learning is more than just remembering a few facts about the War of 1812 for next week's test. Real learning is about changing how you see the world and yourself in the world. For instance, learning to be a nurse means changing the way you walk and talk from how you walk and talk now to how nurses walk and talk. If you don't believe that becoming a nurse (or a computer specialist, or a biologist, or an historian) will change you, then you do not understand education. If you can't change, you can't learn.

The desire and ability to change is actually rather easy for babies and children who don't have many expectations of the world to begin with and are quite flexible mentally and physically. We olders must contend with hardening of the arteries, concepts, and worldviews. Babies see everyone around them walking and talking, and by golly, they desire to walk and talk, too. They then start the most difficult and most significant learning that any of us ever do: to walk and talk like humans. And they fail over and over until they finally get it more or less right. And almost all of them succeed, even without teachers, schools, and grades.

You, too, can learn to write academic documents if I help you move out of your comfort zone and give you room to fail first. We'll fix it when we know what to fix.

Tell me what you think of this approach to learning how to write effective academic essays.

Summer 2021: Post 2 - Overcoming Writer's Block

All writers suffer from writer's block from time to time. Sometimes they are just procrastinating, and they call it writer's block to keep from dealing with it, but often, they really can't think of anything to write.

I have the same issue, but fortunately, I've learned some strategies for dealing with writer's block. For instance, I want to write a blog post along with the class each week. So what do I write? First, I do not want to write about your assigned post this week: the rhetorical situation of Doc1. Why? Because when a teacher speaks or writes about something in the class, then the conversation tends to stop. Students are very reluctant to contest anything a teacher says — as if we are speaking the Gospel — and I want you students to discuss the rhetorical situation without me dominating the conversation. So that's out.

What else can I write about?

Fortunately, I have lots of possibilities, and they all come from my rhetorical situation: I'm a teacher of college composition, my readers are students of college composition, our general shared subject is academic writing, and my text is this blog post. I can drill down from just about any of those four areas and come up with lots of things to write about. For instance, I know that your rough draft is due next week in time for our first peer review, so most of you are writing furiously to get several hundred words before then. I've looked at the papers you've shared with me, and a number of you haven't written much yet. Perhaps you don't know what to write. Perhaps you have writer's block. Well, I can say something about that. So I will, because I think it might help you. And there's one of the first strategies for dealing with writer's block: shifting away from thinking about content to thinking about what I want to do for my reader.

Josh Bernoff, the blogger that I follow, wrote a fine post entitled "The two words that (nearly) always cure writer's block" in which he talks about this shift as a technique for kickstarting your writing. He describes the method this way: 

Sit at your keyboard. Open a new document. Visualize somebody in your audience — somebody who really needs to hear what you have to say. 

Now type this: 

Look, stupid. 

Then start typing what comes into your mind next. What do they really need to hear? What do you want to unload? What do people just not understand? 

Keep going as long as you can. Build arguments. Make good points. Support your evidence. Show that stupid (actually, ignorant) person what you know, what they really need to know. 

Based on my experience, this will unblock the blocked. It doesn’t generate the most beautiful, well organized prose, but it does shake loose things worth saying.

Why does it work? Because you quit thinking so much about the content of your essay, and it's the content that likely has you frozen. Instead, you are now thinking about your reader, and a reader almost always tells you what you should write. Imagine you are sitting with a good friend who is also struggling with the same academic problem that afflicts you — say, procrastination. You know your friend procrastinates, and you know it affects their grades and makes them anxious. You'd like to help them, so what do you say?

You might help them understand why they procrastinate in the first place, but you also want to give them hope that they can deal with their own habits of procrastination. You might want to mention some specific methods and techniques that have been shown to work in managing procrastination. Those are all things that might help improve your friend's life. That's worth doing.

But what if you don't really know what causes procrastination? Then you haven't learned enough about the problem to be of any real benefit to your friend. So don't say anything — you'll probably just make it worse for them — and take time to learn something of real value that you can bring back to your friend. In other words, do some research.

Start your research by asking what you'd like to tell your friend. Want to tell them what causes procrastination? Then find out. And get the good stuff. Get information from the people who've done their own homework and know what they are talking about. Find the authoritative information that will be useful to your friend.

Take notes. Taking notes starts your writing, and it helps you remember more precisely what the experts are saying about procrastination. Now you're writing. Your essay is almost done.

So how did I overcome my brief paralysis about what to write in this post? By thinking about you, my readers. I've been teaching writing for more than forty years, so I have plenty of content. Content is seldom my problem. Rather, my problem is figuring out what value I can bring to my readers at this moment. I noted that some of you don't have much in your essays, so I decided to write about writer's block. Of course, some of you have already completed your essay, so this post doesn't address your immediate needs, but that's okay. You'll have writers' block soon enough. I hope you remember this post.

Post 6: Texting vs. Academic Writing

I was intrigued by your posts about the differences between texting and academic writing, and I want to add some points of clarification to what you have said.

But first, I want to point you to a few excellent posts that, first, illustrate what I'm looking for in a blog post and, second, will teach you something. Luke Maloney-Grimes offers up the best description of the problem with documenting sources in academic documents by imagining what our texting would be like if we had to document our sources. The post is funny, engaging, and insightful and well worth reading. Then, Robert McKenzie explains why texting is so much easier than academic writing. Again, this is insightful writing that will teach you something worth reading. Finally, Madisen Mitchell challenges all of us to step up our game by writing beyond our comfort zone (texting, for most of us). This is basically what this class is attempting to do for you: get you to move beyond the familiar to learn something new.

I've been so impressed with the posts you have been writing, and I thank you for the serious efforts. It's paying off.

Now, what about comparing texting to writing academic documents? First, I want to go on record by saying that texting IS a form of writing, and it is by far the most common form of writing ever devised by humankind. Actually, no other form of writing even comes close. The most reliable data that I could find says that, as of 2017, the world was sending over 8 trillion messages a year (Portio Research). The math majors in the class know that this is an astronomical sum. The human race is writing its collective tail off. No generation has ever written this much, and we have genuinely entered a new stage of human development. 

Still, texting isn't the form of writing that gets you through college, and that's why all of you are here. So why is texting so preferable to you? Because it's more comfortable. Texting is like having coffee with your family or friends. You can wear your old jeans and a raggedy tee-shirt or stay in your pajamas. Academic writing, on the other hand, is like a job interview for a job that you really want. You should dress up, shake hands, avoid four-letter words (imagine how awkward it would be if you were to offer to shake your spouse's hand over morning coffee).

Does a suit and tie make you smarter? a better potential employee? No. But it recognizes the formality required to negotiate and navigate relationships between people who don't know each other very well. We rely on conventional cues and customs to make our first meetings with new people go well, but this formality is a bit awkward if we try to maintain it for too long. MLA and APA are the conventional cues and customs that academia uses to formalize communications among scholars. We scholars don't use formal citations when we are talking over coffee in the snack bar, but we do use them when we are making formal presentations or writing formal documents. We want you new scholars to do the same.

Some of you say in your posts that you prefer texting because it is so loose, casual, and formless. For instance, Ms. Mitchell says, "Texting is easier than academic writing because it doesn’t have to have any structure." But this isn't quite so. Texting has a definite structure and order. It has its own grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and if you violate the rules, then people will not understand your texts. All of you have received texts that you couldn't understand, and often, it was because the text broke the rules of texting. The rules for academic writing are indeed different than for texting, but both have rules. Communication depends on structure. Structureless texts are nonsensical.

But perhaps the biggest difference between texting and academic writing is the context: the reader, writer, and subjects. Usually, we text to people we already know about issues we already know something about. This means, for instance, that when I text my son: Jason says no, I can be brief because my son already knows who Jason is and the question that Jason is answering. Think of how much context — the background story — I would have to supply one of you if I were to text you that my nephew Jason is not joining us for Christmas this year because the tickets to the Bahamas are too expensive. Context is critical to understanding, and academic writing requires much more context building than most people are used to supplying. 

So of course texting is easier, but only if you are texting to the right people about the right issues. Imagine how confusing this blog post would be if you did not already share some context with me: I'm a writing teacher, you're a writing student, and I'm discussing your seventh class blog posts. I would have to give my son lots of back story and context for him to fully understand this post, which most of you already understand.

Finally, Ms. Flanders says:

Writing for academic purposes is often put off until it seems like an almost impossible task. With so many rules to follow, it becomes a struggle to feel free as a writer, instead you feel trapped in a cage.

I insist that any kind of writing — texting included — is a kind of cage. It has to be. Think about it: a text is trapped into a tiny little screen in the palm of your hand with exchanges bouncing back and forth from one side of the phone to the other, and don't dare confuse the sides. My stuff is on the right, their stuff on the left. Mine is blue background, theirs is gray. Don't change it, or you get confused and annoyed. So texting doesn't feel like a cage because you are accustomed to it — you do it every day.

And that brings me to my concluding point: if you want to be comfortable with the constraints of academic writing, then do some every day. It's the only way to learn how to write anything.

Summer 2020 Post 2: Getting Ideas for Posts and Papers

We are exploring the early phases of writing in which we are casting about to discover what we want to say. I have given you some ideas, and the posts, articles, essays, and videos that I've shared with you offer lots more ideas. But I have another method to share with you today, and I'm actually using this method now to write this post. Let me explain:

When I saw on my schedule that it was time for me to write my blog post for this class, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to talk about. I was finished tweaking your Assessment 8 (yes, they are all done), and so my mind was full of stuff that we will discuss at the end of this term — not now. So to procrastinate (yes, all of us procrastinate), I decided to check my Gmail, and I saw this link to a blog post by Stephen Downes, a Canadian educator whom I've been following for almost 20 years now. To procrastinate just a bit more, I followed the link down the rabbit hole to find just the article that I wanted to share with you this morning. Wow.

Downes' post is entitled (take note as Downes writes pretty good titles) "Where Do Blog Post Ideas Come From?" Can you already guess what his article is about? Of course you can. So learn something here: titles for blog posts and chemistry research papers are important. They are like the big red X on a treasure map. They point to whatever message or value your reader is supposed to take away from reading your document, from following the winding path through your maze of words. After reading your document, your reader should be able to look back at the title and say, "Yeah, I got that." If they add, "And it was worth it," then that's even better.

Downes wrote this post in response to a question from one of his blog readers who is also trying to write a blog, just as you are doing in this class: 

Do you have any advice on how to come up with blog post ideas? I recently launched an informational website, so far I have around 40 articles and I'm already finding it difficult to come up with ideas that aren't just a regurgitation of something else I already discussed in another article.

Appropriately, Downes uses a standard response pattern of question/answer to organize his post. He starts with the question and then he answers it. This is easy for his readers to follow and for him to write. We will talk more in the term about organization patterns, but the lesson now is to see how a skillful writer does it. If he wants his readers to find the X, the message in his document, then he has to start where they are (in this case, clueless about how to get ideas for blog posts) and then lead them turn by turn to the X (in this case, with some ideas about how a prolific blogger gets ideas for his thousands of posts — really, thousands). He sets up the question and gives the answer. Simple and very effective.

I could stop here, but I really haven't told you yet how I'm using Downes' post to write my own post, though you may be seeing hints of it already.

For me, Downes' advice boils down to paying attention and taking notes. Downes connects to lots of people and ideas, and he keeps notes about what he sees — lots of his blog posts are his notes about something that he's read or some conversation that he's had with an interesting person (see his post "The TRUST Principles for digital repositories"). He then gives a six phase heuristic for processing all these information flows that he calls the "critical literacies":

I link things together. This is what can be called the 'idoru' phase of the work - the intuitive perceiving of patterns of phenomena (and like anything 'intuitive', it takes practice, a lot of practice). Over the years I've identified six major forms (which I call the critical literacies): 

1. evidence of similarities, rules, patterns, regularities
2. patterns of meaning, truth, valuation
3. uses and applications of things, affordances 
4. influences of frames, contexts, environments 
5. cognitive applications, such as explanation, inference, definitions 
6. patterns of change, including cycles, exponential change, tipping points

So not only is Downes constantly alert to the information flows that he has set up for himself and constantly taking notes about what he observes, he is also constantly massaging that information and looking for new connections, new meanings. These new connections and meanings allow him to write things that are from time-to-time of value to his readers. For instance, I do not find all of his posts of value. His post about "The TRUST Principles" does not directly affect me just now — or I don't see the effects — so I did not pay it much attention other than to use it as an example in this post. No writer always writes something of value for every reader (snarky aside: only your mother sees ultimate value in everything you write, but she doesn't grade your papers).

This approach to writing takes a lifetime to master. I'm still working on it. I read a post from an information flow that I attend to regularly and made a connection between that info and my need to communicate with you today. Hence, this post.