I’m always surprised by how many writers and teachers of writing vehemently believe that the passive voice is wrong, in the same way that, say, subject-verb agreement errors are wrong.

If you’ve never considered this before, consider it now: style books are political. Moreover, they are personal and biased, based on the writer’s own predilections for language.

If I ruled the universe, students would not use style books to learn to write. They may read them in order to obtain an appreciation, however, of the opinions of other writers. To read about writing is a beautiful thing. What students would use to learn how to write would be great writing. (They would read Tristam Shandy.) Reading great writing is what teaches great writing.

And great writing is full of the passive voice; it breaks all the rules prescribed by handbooks on style.

I came across two things, however, that I couldn’t throw away because without such tactile evidence, I’m not sure anyone would believe me.

(I also just want to preface this with a statement on my views on plagiarism. I am not a witch-hunter or blood-hound when it comes to plagiarism. I do not fail my students. I do not give them F’s. I do not take plagiarism personally. Many of my students were students who needed a second chance in life, and I was happy to help them and not hold them back. I always gave them opportunities to correct their wrongs. In the second example below, however, the student adamantly denied having done anything wrong and chose not to redo his paper. I did fail that paper, but I didn’t fail him for the semester.)

The first item that I was unable to toss out was an essay on how to make Kool-Aid. That’s right. I was teaching a very basic composition class, and it was my first semester teaching. I hadn’t quite learned yet that there are ways to curb plagiarism in assignment design. My assignment was really bad–I simply asked my students to write an essay that explained how to do something, anything. One student, who was probably the worst student I had–he never came to class and didn’t seem to know how to write a complete sentence–turned in this marvelous gem. I, of course, handed it back to him with a print-out from the website stapled to his paper.

After class, he came up to me to say sorry, that he had written a paper, but he asked his cousin to type it up for him. She somehow ended up typing this Kool-Aid essay word for word.

My absolute favorite was from a student who wrote this letter to me when I stapled a copy of his source to his paper:

This letter is in regards to a paper I wrote on energy. Professor, I was very stunned and taken aback after being notified by you, that two lines in my paper should have been quoted from an already printed article. If I was aware that it was already in another article, I assure you, that I would have sited it. I am genuinely in shock and am having the most difficult time believing that lines that I sat and wrote on my own could have already been written up by some else. Ironically, I had not even seen the article, prior to your printing it out for me, and did not even visit the site the article is to be found on. To add to my dismay, my original sentences were, ‘As Congress ponders how the country can steer clear of a power disaster like the one that has affected California, many people consider that only science-fiction can offer a long-term solution–a resolution in which discoveries in hypothetical physics would lead to an innovative energy-producing expertise. The fuel for this technology, as they envision it, would be copiously accessible, secure, economical and uncontaminated.’ After I had revised it, I had changed a few words around and unbeknownst to me, it became the same words as Mr. Travis Norsen’s.[sic]

What gems do you have hiding in your filing cabinet?

I have no idea what language this is. This language seems to have its own rules and method of meaning, but it’s not one I want to learn or be around. It makes me angry.

What makes me more angry is hearing my neighbor’s rather lame attempts to play guitar when I’m trying to work in my office. I just blast my Glenn Gould. I figure that hearing real music might help him play real music. My other neighbor, on the other hand, is a professional pianist; I don’t mind hearing him at all. I welcome it.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind overhearing conversation if it were real conversation.

In so many classrooms, so many students raise their seemingly enthusiastic hands to say, “Uh, miss, do you like really want like our thesis to like you know be like that because in my like other class you know with my other professor you know like that would be like my professor like you know wanted the thesis to like be to the point like you know and that thesis is like you know what I’m saying?”

No, I have no idea what you’re saying.

Instead of interpreting this non-language, we should ask the student to clarify and speak intelligently.

My ancient Greek professor banned the expression “okay” in class. Expressions I would ban: so like yeah, you know, like, so like, yeah, but miss (why “miss” and not “Professor so-and-so?”), you know what I’m saying, and I was like so like.

I think you get my point.

Teaching effective oral communication should start at the most basic level. Don’t encourage students because they are asking questions; encourage them to ask intelligent questions intelligently. Don’t interpret them; force them to clarify.

When I hear a student complain that a class is boring, I think of John Berryman’s lines in Dream Song number 14: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”

When I was in grade school, there was after-school training for competitions with other district schools.  If you won, you went on to regional competition, and if you won at that level, you advanced to state.  One of the activities I trained in when I was eight was a storytelling competition.  The task wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to retell a story that you would have just been told.  This training forced me to listen, to etch details in my mind, knowing that I would have to retell them.  When this became easy, I began to interpret what I heard, to make connections, to go above and beyond the surface of what was presented.  (I think this is why I didn’t do well in these competitions–even at a young age, I wasn’t keen on merely summarizing; I wanted to provide literary criticism as well.)

Somewhere along the way, (I don’t know when) I became a terrible listener.  I’ll sometimes just slip into daydreams when I’m at a literary reading.  I have to prompt myself to listen.  I have to concentrate.  When someone reads something aloud to me, I invariably begin to go elsewhere unless I try really, really hard to stay there in the passage.  I retain better when I look at the text, and I don’t think this is a good thing.  It’s probably something that starting happening by my being immersed in classrooms that coupled aural and visual instruction in the belief that children learn better this way.  I think it’s hurt me.

We let our students read aloud things that are beautiful, that should not be read aloud by fumbling, untrained students–Shakespeare for example.  (No wonder our students have a hard time listening!)  Why don’t we let them listen to trained actors on tape?  Or on an MP3 player?  I recently saw a news clip that showed MP3 players being used in public school classrooms.  I have reservations about a gadget, however, that allows us to pause and resume, allowing us the safety of getting lazy, of drifting off.

Perhaps students are bored because they aren’t listening or don’t know how to listen.  They’re elsewhere.  Perhaps they have no inner resources, or perhaps they have too many inner resources.

We train our students to be articulate, eloquent speakers, but are we training them to be alert, contemplative listeners?

Instructors oftentimes think that Writing Centers are “sanitizing centers” or “correctness centers” or (gasp!) “proofreading centers.” Instructors will oftentimes send students there in the belief that the student will turn in a “readable” paper. When the paper is turned in and there are grammatical errors, instructors will conclude, quite mistakenly, that the tutors at the Center are inept.

Students, unfamiliar with Writing Center pedagogy, think that their errors will be corrected for them. I can still see quite clearly the very shocked faces I would get from my tutees when I would tell them, “Let’s just work on your thesis. After we get a good thesis, you’ll go home and rewrite your paper from it.” “But I want to work on my grammar,” the student would say, “because it’s due in fifteen minutes.”

There is a strange culture in our classrooms that equates correctness with success; the culture of Writing Centers equates improving over time and self-efficiency as routes to success. When we tell our students that an error-free paper will earn them an A, we forsake critical thinking, creativity, and eloquence.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXK8Z79NOBk[/youtube]

Disclaimer: The views stated here are not the views of any Writing Center at any institution. The views are of the author’s and the author’s alone.

What is missing in all of this best! writing are academic essays.   We want our students to write well; we want them to write better; we want them to write best!, but we don’t provide any models for them to emulate.  When I was studying poetry, I learned more from trying to emulate poets than I did from reading criticism; similarly, during my undergraduate years, when I couldn’t break out of my A- philosophy paper slump–you see, I wanted to write the best! philosophy papers–I very shyly, but slyly, asked a classmate who was getting As if I could see her papers.  The A’s started pouring in for me.

Without best! models to work from, I really don’t know how we expect our students to write.  After all, the writing that they are reading isn’t the type of writing we want them to write.  This is very confusing.  Calculus students have examples in their textbooks that guide them to problem solve; writing students don’t have this step-by-step guidance.  Even in a class where personal essays are read, we don’t want for students to write in this essayistic mode.  (We occlude the true meaning of essay when we talk about essays.)  I’ve never assigned reading in a composition course that looked anything like the writing I needed for my students to write.  I say “needed” because what my department wanted and what I would have liked to have read were, unfortunately, two very different things.

Whenever I get a particularly creative or top-notch piece of student writing, I always ask the student for a “clean” copy of the piece for my “brag file.”  The student is always flattered and always happy to comply.  When showing these works to future students, I just black out (or, if you prefer, white out) the names of the students.  After a few semesters, you will have enough best! student writing to compile your very own Best Academic Essays.  You could, if you wanted, have these writings made into a course packet each year instead of making photocopies yourself.

I often find that it is best! to go over these best! essays in class.  That way, your students will know what you value and what they should too.   I can’t promise that you’ll get the best! essays with this method, but you will get better essays; I do believe that better is better than what you would have gotten had you not given your students best! models from which to work.

Composition 101 has long been regarded, almost without question, as the “required writing course.” Yet, students don’t really learn how to think more critically in these courses and therefore continue to churn out, in all of their coures, poorly written essays with lukewarm thoughts and little substance.

Creative writing courses, on the other hand, are regarded as “electives”–courses that only “artistic” types take or, mistakenly, a way to get an easy A. The creative writing course, however, seems to strive towards effective communication, analysis, argument and thesis development, critical thinking, eloquence, articulation, and correct writing.

In a typical creative writing class, students will read difficult works of fiction and poetry. They will be asked to discuss the most minor details of these works and be able to back up any statement they make with not only textual references but also with interpretive skills that may call on what they have read before.

Additionally, students will “workshop” their classmates’ writings, applying the same critical and analytical skills that they will have gained by reading and discussing published works of literature, both contemporary and canonical.

(During a typical workshop, the student whose work is being discussed is not allowed to speak until the end, at which time she may ask questions. I find, however, that most students want to defend their writings or say, “This is what my writing means,” a practice that I discourage.)

A good creative writing teacher will not allow her students to merely say, “I really liked this” or “I didn’t like this.” Students must say why. The writing workshop is an exercise in close reading and critical commentary. I make my students read and comment directly on their classmates’ writing before the workshop. They must come to the class prepared to speak. The workshop, therefore, requires that students both write and orally communicate their thoughts.

And I don’t let anyone hide. In a typical workshop, a student will have articulated his or her thoughts an average of five times. If four workshops are conducted in a two hour class, each student will have spoken 20 times.

There certainly are enough MFA in Creative Writing graduates to fill the demands of the writing curriculum at American colleges, but I can already hear the cries of our composition-rhetoric colleagues protesting that creative writing is not a critical or academically rigorous discipline. I read more during my two-years as a MFA student than I have as my four years as Ph.D. student in English. A typical Tuesday assignment (for Thursday’s class) from my creative writing professor was: read George Steiner’s After Babel, Robert Lowell’s Imitations, Stanley Burnshaw’s The Poem Itself; find a poem and translate it in the three modes of translation according to Steiner; find three different translations of Dante’s Inferno and report back on which translation is more effective and why based on content and prosody (prosody being my professor’s seemingly harmless way of saying “every poetic device,” so you had better scan the poems before coming to class because you might be asked about how a certain trochee affected the poem); and email, by Wednesday midnight, a three-page essay on one poet in The Poem Itself and how you might read this poet according to After Babel.

On Thursday, we would discuss all of this and more. We would read and analyze our classmate’s translations. We would have to eloquently articulate our thoughts and integrate, into our conversation, our readings throughout the semester.

We polished our poems before we photocopied them for our professor and classmates. We went over them endlessly, revising and perfecting, taking into account the comments of our teacher and classmates and our own developing artistic and critical sensibilities. We questioned our revision choices; sometimes we went back to our original plans. But we were revising, and we were revising in a way that was intended to please us, not to get a higher grade.

For us, revising was high stakes: it was on a level that was critical, personal, artistic. The revisions we made seemed to change the world, or our places in that world. It seems to me that this is the way writing, critical thinking, and communicating ought to be taught.

I learned that the United States has fallen behind in internet speed–we’re worse than 10th place when it comes to delivering content. All the marvels and miracles of the internet, such as conferencing with medical specialists and virtual classrooms, require fiber-optic internet connections, which phone companies promised to build in the 1990s and never did.

Now these very same phone companies want to charge internet sites a fee that determines how quickly their pages load. This means that if your blogging site can’t afford the fee, your site may never load. In the same way that the channels on TV and radio and cable are owned by a handful of corporations, so too might the internet be owned by a few corporations, thus censoring free speech and commerce.

The work that we do as educators is already so pushed into the margins of commercial America. How much more invisible will a non-neutral net cause us to be? I can see helpful sites, such as the OWL at Purdue, the Dante Project, or our very own cac.ophony getting pushed into the “slow lane” of a non-neutral internet. These phone companies are, I kid you not, trying to convince us that the internet has “lanes of traffic.”

For more information on net neutrality and how it affects us, please go to Save the Internet.com.

Our attempts to come up with a “Student Top Ten” seemed to center on grading and what faculty could do to ensure that students weren’t being graded unfairly. There was also much talk about what faculty could do to help students discuss their grades with students more openly.

To dismiss any talk of grading while thinking of academic integrity, I asked why students are not valuing learning for learning’s sake, but the discussion circled back to grading. Perhaps it was my idyllic undergraduate years, spent amid the Blue Ridge mountains and lilac and dogwood trees, studying philosophy and liberal arts, that fostered a false sense of how others view learning. I always thought of learning as discovery, risk-taking, and creative thinking, but it seems as if some think of it as gaining an unfair advantage or finding ways to ensure an “A” in the class.

When I taught composition, I would always remind my students that grades were never assigned, but rather they were earned. I would be happy to talk to them about their strengths and weaknesses, but I would never discuss grades.

Grading, it seems, isn’t going to be done away with, at least not in the CUNY system. Given this, what might be some items to include in a Student Top Ten? How can we talk about academic integrity without circling back to grading?

The same tools that make it easy to locate sources of plagiarized texts, however, are the same tools that are making it easier for students to plagiarize. Some papers are even constructed by cutting and pasting information from internet sites, and in extreme cases, the student will keep the original html formatting in their papers, not bothering to change the font, color, or line spacing of the lifted material. The internet is also a host to companies that will offer to write or sell papers to students.

In my discussions with faculty members, I try not to spend too much time discussing plagiarism for two reasons. First, plagiarism is not going to go away, and I would rather that faculty walk away from my sessions with ideas of how to make their classroom and teaching more innovative. Second, I think that how we deal with plagiarism is oftentimes touchy and personal–there’s a taboo surrounding the measures that one could take and the measures that one actually takes when confronting or not confronting a student who is inadequate in the area of attribution.

I feel strongly, however, that not confronting a plagiarist will ultimately thwart the student’s ability to develop crucial communication and critical thinking skills.

My method of dealing with plagiarism isn’t the best, I’m sure, and it’s certainly not fool-proof; however, I’ve so often been asked how I go about confronting inadequate attribution that I feel compelled to list my steps here.

1.) Don’t take it personally. The student is not throwing your teaching back in your face, as it were. The student might be suffering from feelings of inadequacy, fear of writing, fear of English, or other feelings that we, in our capacity of instructors, aren’t able to relate to. Of course, the student might also just be trying to get an easy way out of an assignment or just waited until the last minute, only to discover that the work involved in the assignment was too much for one all-nighter.

2.) Don’t spend your time commenting or marking up a paper that you suspect is plagiarized. It’s a good idea to hand back the plagiarized paper with the rest of the class’s papers with a little note. What you want to say is up to you, but I find it best not to use the “P” word.

3.) Always give the student the benefit of the doubt. I always tell myself to assume that the student just didn’t know better, even if the paper is an article on the internet. I ask the student to talk to me after class or during office hours, and I go over citation and attribution with them personally. Some of us might feel that we don’t want to deal with the situation, that sending the student to the Writing Center for a lesson in attribution would be less awkward, but having this lesson straight from the instructor is really the best way to let to student know about the seriousness of the issue. Besides, the student has already been caught, as it were, and probably doesn’t want to face someone else–it’s embarrassing and shameful.

4.) In some cases, when I am able to find the source of the plagiarism on-line, and depending on the case, I will staple the print-outs to the student’s paper with a note that says, “Sally, could you please go through your paper and properly attribute what you’ve written here and then resubmit it? I’ve printed out the sources to make it easier for you to cite the websites in your paper and the web addresses in your Works Cited page. I think you’ve chosen a good topic, but I’m interesting in seeing what YOU think here.”

5.) If a student does it twice, well, then I might consider the measures that I could take, but students, I find, generally don’t do it again.

I think that we can apply Calvino’s “preliminary condition” in the classroom. It may be easier to think of Calvino’s “preliminary condition” alongside something that Nancy Sommers writes about in “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” She writes that “experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence and whose expectations influence their revision process. They have abstracted the standards of a reader and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator–a collaborator who has yet to love their work.” Just as a writer of literature must first invent an “I” who is, according to Calvino, the author of the work, a successful writer, according to Sommers, imagines (or invents) a critical “I” to shape the work into an effective piece of writing.

Students in literature courses will inevitably encounter religious texts and be asked to write on them or do some comparative work. They are often hesitant to engage in this work, so close are they to their personal selves, the personal “I.”

I once had a student in an out-of-class workshop say that she couldn’t write on religious texts; she was afraid that her writing might be deemed offensive, that she might say “the wrong thing.” One student in an in-class workshop said that he hoped he wouldn’t have to do a presentation on a piece of writing as controversial as a 17th-century sermon. His impulses were to blame the sermon for outcomes in history rather than reading the sermon as a piece of literature.

Instead of having our students write unimaginative and often weak theses, I’m wondering if we should instead be trying to help them invent an “I,” a critical collaborator with which to think through and write, an “I” that can help them to author critical essays without the personal “I” impressing itself needlessly into the work. Perhaps the “preliminary condition” of any literature course should be the invention of this “I.”

Baruch is fortunate to have “smart classrooms” equipped with computers, an overhead projector, an opaque projector, microphones, speakers, and white boards that slide and layer over one another, making it possible to for instructors to write, write, write, and refer back to what they have written without fear of having to erase for lack of writing space.  Some of us may not think of white boards as “technology,” but after having taught at a college campus with blackboards and nothing else to offer in the way of teaching aids (hardly a piece of chalk could be found), I have learned that whiteboards are technology.

I have found, however, that some instructors don’t use the tools in their “smart classrooms.”  Many instructors did not even know that they had an opaque projector or what could be accomplished with an opaque projector.  When my colleagues and I set it up for them and project a piece of student writing onto the white board and have the class workshop a thesis, the instructor is invariably amazed at having discovered a new, simpler, more effective way to model thesis revision for the class.

In these smart classrooms, where the technology looms like a scary storm cloud overheard in the form of a projector and the computer console sits like a large, strange beast in the corner, I find that students are stealthily text-messaging under their backpacks, in their laps, inside their purses, under their textbooks, and yes, sometimes in plain view.

Students turn to us for help with assignments, but very rarely do we turn to them for help.  They know technology, and they know it intuitively.  I might spend 10 minutes trying to set up an opaque projector if I’ve never used one before, but I bet a student, who has also never used one before, could set one up in thirty seconds.

My Shakespeare professor eventually asked for help.  The video was inserted in the VCR, the play button was pushed, the TV was turned on and set to the correct input channel, and the video played.  Falstaff laughed and drank and jostled about.  I wonder how arcane we must seem to our students when we hesitate over using the computer in the classroom or simply avoid using the projector because we are afraid of what are, after all, just buttons and wires.  What are students not seeing because of an instructor’s fear of technology?  Rather than being afraid, we should turn to those who so often turn to us.

Chances are that you have taught, are teaching, or will teach a course that requires writing. In every course, there may be one or two students that fit this profile of the “natural” writer. The disjunction occurs when the “natural” writer is now the teacher of writing and believes that every student must be a “natural” writer as well.

To avoid this disjunction, I think a simple task that teachers can do from time to time is role-play: put yourself in your students’ shoes. Doing this with other faculty members, perhaps in a development seminar, while focusing on a specific objective (syllabus or assignment design, understanding a thesis statement, unraveling a work of literature) would be ideal. This is easier said than done, however. Many college instructors would rather, believe it or not, grade papers than role-play as their students. What can be an enlightening experience oftentimes is seen as a silly and sometimes torturous exercise. Many instructors simply cannot role-play as their students; they are unable to put themselves in their students’ shoes not out of shyness or lack of dramatic training, but out of a total disconnect from who their students are and what their students’ experiences are.

In order to most effectively teach students, I think we need to know or at least try to know who they are. We may have many divisions between ourselves and our students–knowledge, age, interests–but role-playing helps us to at least try to imagine who they are. Knowing who they are helps us to know how to close other gaps such as assignment design and what our students produce in response to our assignments, our comments and their revised assignments, our discussion questions and their responses. As unnatural as it may feel to imagine how our students, the majority of which aren’t “natural” writers, receive our teaching, role-playing might be one of the simplest and most effective ways to see how small changes in our teaching can lead to better results.

Everyday, I must obsessively check two email accounts and, time permitting, I check six other email accounts. I say “must” because if I didn’t check these accounts frequently, the amount of email will reach an overwhelming magnitude. Each account has a purpose, and each account seems to be swimming in its own madness that doesn’t have a method. If only there were a show that promised to help me organize my web and computer clutter.

When we think about technology and Writing Across the Curriculum or Communication Intensive Instruction, we try to think of creative ways to infuse communication instruction with technology. We turn to blogs and email lists and discussion groups and services such as BlackBoard. Every addition adds to the bulk of our email inboxes and the sites we bookmark and visit everyday. With more technology comes more reading, more viewing, more commenting, more time in front of our computers, less time doing work that is–and, yes, this still exists–paper-based.

When I was teaching composition, I once got a paper from a student that was written entirely in the language of text messaging. Another student of mine tried desperately all semester to use her Sidekick in class by hiding it in her purse. She even tried to convince me that it was her electronic dictionary. At the CUNY WAC orientation in September, someone suggested that we get students to use more technology in the classroom by asking them to do an assignment in the form of a text message. I thought to myself: My students didn’t need help with using technology in the classroom–they needed help knowing when to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate uses of technology, how to organize their technology, how to streamline their technology, and how to keep technology from keeping them from non-technology based work that they still have to do.

I’m assuming that these students will grow up to be professionals, will enter into a life that demands eight or more email accounts, subscription lists, discussion groups, and more web-based services that have yet to be invented.

Technology has given us the tools to be creative in communication intensive instruction, but it hasn’t necessarily given us the tools to make our lives easier.

When I was teaching composition, I was told that integrating my students into academic life was part of my job; I was told that because the instructor is in many ways a liaison between the student and the college, I had to help them become academically responsible, even if this meant helping them learn simple things such as why they shouldn’t sleep in class, why they should come to class, why they should take notes, where they should go when they have a problem with registration or financial aid. At some colleges, there are services or orientation events that help students learn these skills.

I’m not advocating that we use less technology. As much as I bemoan the state of my inboxes, I love checking my email. I’m just thinking that sometime between getting my first email account and today, I missed a step.
If we ask our students and instructors to use more technology, to use technology creatively, to make technology-based communication part of the curriculum, do we also have a responsibility to provide them with skills to help them become more “technologically responsible?” Does the state of our inboxes affect our mental states? Would our academic lives be easier if our inboxes, bookmarks, and other technology-based communications were organized? What would a technology “De-Clutter Plan” look like?