Week 5: First Drafts and Workshop

Your first draft of the materials for your  E110 course is due on Tuesday, 7/08, at 11:59 pm.

Here’s how I explain what I mean by a draft when I’m working with undergraduates:

A draft is an open and approximate version of the piece you want to write. It is not simply a set of notes, or an intro, or outline, or ideas toward an essay . . . Rather, it is an attempt to write the actual thing, the essay itself, even while knowing that you are not yet quite in a position to write that thing, that you still have more work to do.

An analogy might be to a sketch or study that an artist makes of a painting, or a demo that a musician makes of a song. The attempt in each case  is to offer a sense of what the final version might look or sound like—even if all the details haven’t been worked out or filled in, and even if key parts of the piece are still open to change. I’m hesitant to use the metaphor of a rough draft, since that can suggest something hastily or sloppily done, but in a sense that is what you want to do—to rough out your essay, put together an approximate version of it as a whole, so that you can then later go back to reshape, develop, and refine it.

So that’s what I want you to try to do for next week—to create a first, working version of your essay, something that gets at what you think you want to say, but that is still open to change and revision.

Substitute course materials for essay, and you pretty much have your assignment for next week. But while I’d like you to begin to sketch out your course as whole—its writing projects, its readings, its basic shape and pace—I’d advise you not to get too lost in the weeds of scheduling and policy details. Focus instead on drafting a good version of  an About section, in which you describe the aims of your course, and of a Plan in which you offer a quick sense of how the course will unfold over time—its narrative arc, as it were.  And then see if you can list the main Writing assignments for the course. If you can come up with solid versions of those three sections, you’ll be off to a strong start in your planning.

You can refer to this website as a kind of template for your course, and you may also want to look at two other versions of E110 I taught last year, in the Fall 2013 and Spring 2014 semesters. I’m also attaching syllabi from my UD colleagues Christine Cucciarre and Stephanie Kerschbaum—who both do an excellent job, I think, of setting a friendly tone and rigorous set of expectations for the work they will be doing with students.

I will send the three of you an email with the subject line: First Drafts. When you’re ready, please hit Reply All and attach your course materials, saved as a single Word document. (Or if you’re working online, just send us a URL.) That way we will all have copies of one another’s work.

We will workshop your course materials on Wednesday, 7/09, from 2:30-4:30 pm, in my office at 134 Memorial. I think we will probably use all two hours. Please come with a print-out of all three drafts, and if at all possible, try to scan the materials posted by your colleagues. I’ll explain the form the workshop will take when we meet together.

Don’t hesitate to email me if you have any questions. I look forward to seeing how your plans for your courses take shape. Good luck!

 

R2: Anne Marie

Even though each of the four authors had his or her own perspective on the structure and function of the ideal writing course, there were some common threads. I was intrigued by the literacy autobiography assignment discussed by both Chris Anson and Suresh Canagarajah. In thinking back on my own memories of how I learned to read and write, I am dismayed to realize that I don’t have very vivid recollections of my early experiences with either form of literacy. I wonder if my inability to recall such important milestones can be attributed to a half a century of time since they would have occurred and whether or not my future senior students would have difficulty with that assignment. One of my favorite activities to do with my four-year-old granddaughter is to read books to her. I also make up original stories for her, and she has just recently started to make up her own stories as well. Hopefully helping Grace to form early literacy memories will make up for my own lack of memories.

Another common idea supported by Chris Anson and Douglas Hess is varying the genres for the topic and/or research based assignments. I agree with Anson’s comment that allowing students to choose the mode and audience for their writing is more likely to give them a larger repertoire of writing skills that will more closely align with real work writing tasks. I often include a variety of genres for creative writing assignments for my students. For example, for a creative response to our study of Macbeth, my students wrote one of the following: an additional scene, two diary entries from the point of view of a character, a letter from one character to another, or a newspaper article which included an interview of one of the characters. However, I have never even considered the possibility of providing multiple genre options for research assignments. This is definitely an idea that I hope to utilize in my own E110 course.

I also hope to consider some of the practices discussed by Asao Inoue. In particular, I was impressed by the author’s practice of having the students aid in the construction of the assessment rubrics. I always use rubrics to assess major writing assignments and I think that having the students play a part in the actual construction of the rubrics would give them a deeper appreciation of the writing process. I also liked the idea of students writing an overall assessment letter to each of their peers in their small writing group. I feel that it is important for students to have authentic audiences and to receive positive, constructive feedback from a variety of sources.

I am looking forward to reading the other articles to gather even more ideas for possible components of my own course.

(Posted for Anne Marie by Joe)

To Do: Weeks 3 & 4

First, thanks for your thoughtful readings of Rewriting and your interesting extensions of my work in it! I very much enjoyed reading and participating in our first exchange.

We move in the coming week to First-Year Composition: From Theory to Practice (FYC). Please read the first four chapters (Anson, Canagarjah, Hesse, Inoue) and write a response in which you ruminate about a move or practice that you think might prove useful in your own teaching of E110.  On the Responses page of this site, I suggest that

you do one of two things in responding to each batch of four essays: (1) Link two or more of the pieces in order to identify a shared technique or insight you want to use in your own teaching, or (2) identify a distinctive move made by one of the writers that you’d like to adopt in designing or teaching your course.

Use R2 as your category and again think of three or four good tags for your post. R2 is due at 11:59 next Tues, 6/24, and comments are due at 11:59 on Thurs, 6/26.

For week four, the assignment is essentially the same, just adding the next four pieces in FYC (Matthieu, Redd, Reid, Shipka) to the mix. As we move into July, though, you will want to start thinking seriously about the structure of your E110 course and the documents you will need to create it. A first draft of those materials is due on Tues, 7/08.

To Do

1. Tues, 6/24, 11:59 pm: Read FYC, pp. 3–110. Post R2 to this site.
2. Thurs, 6/26, 11:59 pm: Post comments to R2s.
3. Tues, 7/01, 11:59 pm: Read FYC, pp. 111–235. Post R3 to this site.
4. Thurs, 7/03, 11:59 pm: Post comments to R3s.

 

 

To Do: Weeks 1 & 2

1. Mon, 6/16: Create a WordPress.com account. Email me the address you used in setting up that account. I will then invite you to be an Author on this site.
2. Mon, 6/16, 2:00 pm: Dan, Katrina, and Joe meet  in 134 Memorial. Please read through the materials on this site and as much of Rewriting as possible.
3. Tues, 6/17, 11:59 pm: Post Response 1 to this site.
4. Thurs, 6/19, 11:59 pm: Post Comments 1 to this site.
5. Mon, 6/23, 11:00 am: Anne Marie and Joe meet in 134 Memorial.