In The Activity of Writing, Alexander Reid offered a point not yet mentioned in any other essays which really helped me finalize my brainstorming for one of the final writing projects in my course draft. I really admire his move to assist students in finding their “affinity space.” Although I really crave the first type he describes Sirc’s account of how “students sat in the dark, burned incense and listened to Steppenwolf,” (199) the reality is that I also want to keep my job. Thus, his point about how “passionate affinity spaces update such practices by engaging the contemporary digital network to facilitate student learning and communication,” (199) really reminds me that students should not be made to write for the sake of writing but to engage them in writing that can “shift students away from their typical habits of seeking to be finished with writing” (201). Luckily, the course will be afforded the technology and online availability to make all of this occur.
As I was planning out the last marking period of my syllabus draft, I sought to have students write a unique piece applicable to their planned career path. All I had so far were two assignments named “Writing in My Discipline” and “Career Writing,” and to be honest, all I had was a vision that at this point in the course, students would be ready write meaningful pieces to bridge their writing affinity to their career affinity. For example I imagined a Biochemical Engineering major writing an email to an employee of Gore (or a similar company) to gain partnership, followed by a correspondence of the type of writing involved in their daily work. The student would then go on to compose this lab report or whatever it came to be followed by a metacognitive reflection on the process and systems used to write the piece.
However, this all seemed to need the affinity space mentioned by Reid so when I arrived at his Article and Magazine Project, all of the loose ends came together. Students could write one more piece only with the audience of their peers as the main focus. Reid notes this difference as he states, “However, magazine article writers, editors, and publishers realize they have to compete for their readers’ attention” (204). In relation to that point, these articles, written about the technical types of writing in a variety of majors would then be used to “produce an online magazine with images and related media” (204). Instead of using volunteers as the magazine editors, it would be a collective effort to form committees in the class with input and ownership for individual aspects of the project. If the final product lived up to my expectation, it would be worthy of a link on our school’s website.
Reid’s anecdote about fiction writing workshops really sums up what I don’t want students to come away from the course with as “all too often stories end with characters suddenly dying or realizing that ‘it was all a dream’” (201). This, too, is analogous to what I want students to leave the class with: not a means to an end, but a means where they understand that “when writing is successful, writers respond with writing; when it is a failure, they respond with writing” (202).
Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, and Ronald F. Lunsford. First-year Composition: From Theory to Practice. , 2014. Print.
E688: Seminar in Teaching Composition 
I agree that helping students to understand that they are never really “done” with writing is important. No matter where students go they must write for work or life in general: a credit card dispute, a letter to a company that required some serious feedback, letters or emails to family members, goal statements, job-related self-assessments, work order descriptions, policy rules, and so on, and that is after college’s academic writing requirements. Students must feel comfortable in their own words and know that struggling with those words will bring forth even greater strength. Working on a class-project where each contributes to the whole will reinforce that sense of writing with a purpose, just as it does in the “real” world. And if published on the website because it “passes” the “administrative editors,” the project would create for many their first “published” piece that is shared with an audience beyond the teacher. No in-class essay assignment could create that sense of accomplishment.
My only concern of one assignment involved “a Biochemical Engineering major writing an email to an employee of Gore (or a similar company) to gain partnership” because such an email would have to come from such a place of knowledge and context and evidence that much of the writing would seem to be just “wish” writing, nearly impossible to write with a sense of authority. I do believe that writing must come from the sense of authority, that one “knows” about what one is writing, to produce “real” writing assignments. A bio-chemical engineering major, however, may research one of Gore’s products, its history and purpose, its marketing, and its future to the company to explore ways in which Gore products might continue to serve its public. Such a focus would show an awareness of an engineering major, an in-depth knowledge of an engineered product, and why writing might be used to share “new” ideas to the company (a possible reason for promotion).
Your thematic focus seems to be on careers and writing within careers, an excellent focus for students who have no clue what careers go with what majors. (At least I know that I and many of my friends were clueless in college about careers.) Most students go to college with a vague sense of purpose other than to graduate and then find a job, which would explain why so many students change their majors in college. Discovering and exploring careers with their peers in a writing class offers them opportunities to reflect on future choices because as you said, no matter what career they choose, the need to write will follow them.
Dear Tim,
Okay, so now I’m getting annoyed at WordPress. I wrote a bunch of comments on Wednesday, and thought I had posted them, but now I’ve discovered that they seemed to have vanished, literally, into the ether!
But what I recall writing to you was: I’m glad to see you once again make strong use of your reading to devise an interesting assignment for your course. Specifically, you’ve seen how embedding your “career” assignments into Reid’s “magazine” project will offer students a chance to make their writing less of an exercise and more an act of meaningful communication. Related to this goal, I think that Mary Kay offers you excellent advice in suggesting that students write for the immediate audience of their classmates, rather than a more removed (and perhaps fictional) audience of a business executive.
I look forward to working with you on the actual written forms of these assignments next week!
Joe
I also seek to eliminate my students’ desires to simply be finished writing. I have seen far too many times the essay that seems to fall off a cliff as it concludes. My creative writers are not at all permitted to end a piece by waking up from a dream or have the main character die, but they are in the class because they are writers. When it comes to students who compose because they have to, not because they want to, the situation changes drastically. My perspective, however, allows me to remember being in that stage. I know the feeling well. Ideally, what would eliminate that need to wrap-wrap-it-up-because-I’m-sick-of-it is more time. Our students are busy, seemingly busier than we were when we attended high school. More time to work helps quite a bit. More conferences with suggestions about how to fine tune the train of thought help. I think of it like coaching, and I often use this analogy with my students. Would Coach allow that kind of finish? Would Coach allow you to say, “I’m tired of doing this”? Quite a few students understand that point of view because, in all honesty, they admire their coaches more than they admire their English teachers. They are in the sport because they want to be there. They are in English class because they have to be there. When I work like a coach and try the one-on-one encouragement, I see different results. I see that you have conferencing built into your syllabus. I hope you will come across as a coach because, after all, you are.