Author Archive for Olga

Seeking an Audience

Published
by
Olga
on April 28, 2008
in Audience, Peer Review and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

  A couple of weeks ago I showed a draft of my dissertation proposal to my advisor for the first time.  I knew that the argument was not solid yet, but also felt that I needed feedback at this point of my writing process.  So, I struggled to let go of my initial plan to hand in a polished and brilliant prospectus and met with him.  After long reading and writing sessions in the library, I was happy to learn that the argument I had been building actually made sense. I also learned that I needed to create and discuss this working draft to be able to see the full complexity of the argument that is yet to emerge.  There will be other drafts, I’m sure, and what seems to be an interesting research question now will keep evolving as I write. Yes, I’m naming one of the obvious WAC notions here — (re)writing is a way of making knowledge.  All this reminded me of my mentor’s advice: show students your piece of writing in progress with all the arrows, crossings, and notes; they need to see how messy writing is for all thinkers, even those who have more authority in the classroom. 

As I am proceeding to work on my prospectus, I see a need for multiple readers and interlocutors who, I selfishly admit, will help me dig out all the threads and connect them into a coherent whole.  Another truism surely, but I think all writers including our students deserve a responsive audience.  BLSI Fellows and Writing Center Consultants are happy to be that audience, but students who come to workshops and tutoring sessions are usually those who want to raise their grades or who are simply referred by their professors.  What can we do to encourage strong writers and speakers to seek an active audience while they’re formulaing their ideas?

How and when do we begin learning about plagiarism? Why don’t we always learn?

Published
by
Olga
on April 4, 2008
in Literacy and Plagiarism
. 2 Comments

In the past several months I’ve been a volunteer tutor for an eighth grader whose homework assignments often involve looking up terms and concepts on Wikipedia or Dictionary.com.  For her most recent project she needs to provide visual images to illustrate her points; these images are also found online.  While working on her project, my student often has an IM window open on her screen; she clicks on it every time I turn away.  The computer screen thus becomes a single entity containing the private chat and information resources. 

Why am I surprised when she is reluctant to reference her sources then? And, how do you reference 50 images from Google that are glued to index cards?  

Knowing about Business in a Business School

Published
by
Olga
on March 21, 2008
in Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs) and Writing Across the Curriculum
. 2 Comments

We often hear instructors complain about Baruch students’ narrow orientation toward business. I think a couple of years ago it became a requirement for all Baruch students to take a certain number of liberal arts courses. And of course on different occasions we all have given students explanations of these courses’ immense significance in their education. Personally, for quite a while I would be terrified every time students tried to relate business concepts to their readings or writing topics; my mind would go blank when I heard of such concepts as “equity loans” or “mortgage backed securities.” Hardly anyone can ignore current economic troubles, and I found myself in the alien world of the business discourse this week, as I was trying to establish some connection between contemporary world and classical literature. I saw every one of my nine students make immediate eye contact with me rather than with their computer screens. The energy level in the class boosted and the discussion got lively. I’m never again throwing out the Business section of NYT.

Finding New Contexts for the CPE Exam

Published
by
Olga
on February 15, 2008
in Faculty Development, Literacy, Resources, Uncategorized and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Is there room for the CPE exam in humanities and social sciences classrooms? Should there be room?

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

Assigning Journal Writing

Published
by
Olga
on December 18, 2007
in Low-Stakes Writing, Process and Writing Instruction
. 2 Comments

 In my freshman composition class, my instructor required that we fill up a certain number of pages in our journals by the end of the semester.  He specified that we could write “Don’t Read” across the pages with things of very private nature.  Once I taught a composition class to a group of older students who had been out of college for a long time and froze every time they needed to write a paper. I thought it would be useful for them to keep a daily journal for a couple of weeks at least.  And, yes, I did something I probably wouldn’t do now - I said they could write “Don’t Read” over certain pages.  The things I did get to read revealed great thinkers and writers.  Many who were against journal writing at first continued writing in their journals till the end of the semester.  They shared personal, not necessarily private things; they shared things that could be easily put in and add tremendous depth to their essays.  Journal writing became a great extension of the writing they produced in class, not an appendix to it. 

I think journal writing can be a great learning tool and not just in a composition classroom.  We know that many professors do not see the value in encouraging students to relate their personal experiences to the readings.  And, journal writing is certainly not a common practice outside of the composition program.  But it is no news that the making of new meaning is always connected to the previously gained knowledge and experience, to the things that go on in the students’ lives currently.  Why not let our students make that connection not always on the spot in the classroom, but in their personal writing space? 

“Email is a medium of bad writing”

Published
by
Olga
on November 26, 2007
in Audience, E-mail, Uncategorized and Writing Instruction
. 1 Comment

I came across Janet Malcolm’s interesting review of David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home.  The title for this post comes from that review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20571.  I haven’t seen the book itself, but, according to Malcolm, the two authors raise a few questions that relate very much not only to our shared (I hope) paranoia of misaddressing an email, but also to the nature of email as a communication practice.  To name just a few points the authors make:

1. “On email, people aren’t quite themselves.  They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous.  Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature” (qtd. in Malcolm).

2.  When you accidentally send an email containing negative comments about a person to that very person, do not use email to express your apology. “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” authors suggest.

3.  “If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed.  Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties” (qtd. in Malcolm).  Malcolm then summarizes the authors’ suggestion to deal with this impersonal aspect of email —  ”a program of unrelenting niceness.  Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling face icons) wherever possible.’”

But exclamation points are really just shortcuts, which we must take because we simply can’t afford to do otherwise with the heavy volume of emails every day, the authors and Malcolm suggest.  Does email then propel weak writing?  At the end of her review, Malcolm poses a related question about young users of email: “Will their childish babbling evolve into decent writing?  Does writing a lot lead to writing well?”  My sense is if we write badly and do so often, we may lose or have a hard time acquiring the skills for writing well. 

With the tremendous number of electronic mediums for communication, perhaps we take shortcuts much too often, and so do our students.  Is there a way to discourage shortcuts or simply bad writing using the very medium that promotes it? Next time I teach composition, I will probably create prompts that would encourage students to correspond via email. Afterwards, in class the sender and the recipient can share their perceptions of the e-mail’s tone.  I think this use of a familiar and favorite medium might be a good way to help beginning writers develop a sense of audience, grow more sensitive to their choice of tone, and perhaps become stronger writers, and not just on email.

Revision Workshop

Published
by
Olga
on November 9, 2007
in Faculty Development, Peer Review, Resources and Revision
. 0 Comments

 On November 30th, Cheryl Smith and I will be giving a revision workshop at the CUNY’s WAC meeting.  The description of the workshop is pasted below.  We were thinking about distributing a bibliography of current research on the subject.  We’re just beginning to put it together and would welcome any suggestions.  

Working with the Draft: Techniques for Helping Students Revise

WAC practitioners traditionally argue that the best way to use writing effectively in our teaching is to scaffold assignments, moving from low stakes (or informal) free-writing and pre-writing to more high stakes drafting and revising of essays.  But once students have completed their first drafts of an essay assignment, how can we use those drafts as a teaching tool?  A teacher’s careful comments can certainly guide students in their revision process, but relying on this single technique may not always help students develop as self-sufficient, powerful, and active writers.  How can we help them understand the most fundamental element of writing-revision-and grow as confident and careful readers of their own and their peers’ work?  The session will take participants through a variety of student-centered draft revision activities that can be used in courses across disciplines. 

Writing In/Across Disciplines

Published
by
Olga
on October 26, 2007
in Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing Instruction
. 0 Comments

Last week I attended a workshop on writing within disciplines led by Peter Gray and Mark McBeth at our CUNY WAC meeting. Together we thought about the forms of writing in various discourse communities and their differences when it comes to the issues of composition, organization, research/ register/voice/conventions, and formatting. Figuring out to what discipline a particular writing model belonged created no difficulty for the audience of academic professionals, but all of us agreed that it would not be an equally easy task for the beginning academic writers. What can writing instructors and fellows do to help this community of learners find meaning in the intimidating world of academic discourse(s)? Which aspects of writing are indeed discipline specific and which can be easily carried over from one discipline to another? As was emphasized in the workshop, instructors can show and explain models of a particular writing form they expect their students to produce and help students in the process of writing by giving them a list of guidelines or grading rubric for the assignment.
This workshop made me think about a couple of conversations we’ve had in our Great Works team about the possibility of running workshops for a group of students working in different fields. Writing Center’s workshops are organized precisely in this way, and, as Jody mentioned, it would be great to get together and think about effective strategies. I also thought about my own experience teaching a graduate seminar/workshop called Effective Academic Writing, which at first was really as daunting as it sounds, but as we began looking at writing models from different fields, it became clear that very similar criteria are used when we evaluate papers from such unlike disciplines as biochemistry and art history. This is not to say that we should not carefully study and introduce students to conventions specific to their fields of study. However, it is often the case that major paper components, e.g., thesis and evidence, are present in papers across disciplines only in different forms. It can be indeed enriching for students from these different fields to get together and receive feedback from each other; this way they can learn about original and unthought-of in their fields ways to present or articulate a piece of material.

Both as an instructor in that class and a graduate student/writer, I found one valuable article that pinpoints a few very specific Dos and Don’ts for academic writers. They really make sense regardless of the discourse community we are writing for: Gerald Graff, “Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty” PMLA. Vol. 115, No. 5. (Oct., 2000), pp. 1041-1052. It can be easily found on JSTOR.
Let me just quote my favorite “DO”:  “Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese—you sometimes need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in the vernacular as well. You’ll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is), and you’re led to new perceptions.”

Making the Process Work

Published
by
Olga
on October 12, 2007
in Blogs and Blogging, Cross-Cultural Communication, ESL, Low-Stakes Writing and Process
. 2 Comments

Inspired in many ways by Luke’s post, I asked students in my Great Works tutorial whether they would want to share their thoughts and questions on our Blackboard discussion board.  To my slight surprise (this class is already very demanding of their time - they come to the 90-minute tutorial every week and often attend the Writing Center) they overwhelmingly agreed.  I see that despite the product-oriented writing instruction or perhaps because of it, students long for a safe space to share their thoughts in.  They really seem to understand the need for a process to take place before any product can be put out.  For this reason, I think it’s a great idea to have the tutorial in the first place, as it provides plenty of room for that process to develop.  In a similar way, the Writing Center with its “I Write” campaign, which seeks to give student writers a sense of empowerment, is also a comfortable Baruch venue where academic professionals serve as facilitators not judges of their writing efforts.

  I hope that Blackboard discussions would be valuable for my group of Great Works students.  Some of them need a lot of support in language areas, and they are the ones who would probably benefit most from these online discussions.  However, I’m afraid they would also be the least forthcoming participants.  Can those of you who have experience initiating blogs suggest ways to reach out to most diffident participants? 

How Can We Best Support ESL and Remedial Students?

Published
by
Olga
on September 24, 2007
in ESL, Language and Literacy
. 5 Comments

I was an undergraduate student at Queens College in the late 1990s when remedial instruction was eliminated in four-year CUNY colleges.  One measure to alleviate the rigidity of the new policy was Prelude to Success, the program that allowed students needing remediation to be conditionally admitted to four-year schools.  These students’ determination to succeed in their first crucial semester at Queens was truly admirable.  Working closely with such students, I saw a vast majority of them, ESL or not, successfully exiting remediation and becoming full-time students at Queens. 

At Baruch, ESL students receive strong support in handling the curriculum of English and literature courses.  There are now several sections of Composition and Intro. to Literature courses (2100 and 2150) designed specifically for ESL students who attend a one-hour tutorial every week as a part of their class.  It was interesting and extremely rewarding for me to lead these tutorials as a Writing Center Consultant last semester.  This current semester I learned about the existence of 2800 “T” (Great Works of Literature with a Tutorial).  In fact, a big part of my Writing Fellow work now is 1 ½ - hour weekly meetings with 2800 “T” students.  Even though the population of this class can hardly be called ESL - there has been a registration glitch, and many students who don’t need the tutorial rushed to get into this section because it was open.  In my next post(s), I’ll gladly share my difficulties and pleasures in leading this unusual tutorial.  For now, I want to dwell on the place of ESL students in classes across disciplines. 

Transfer students from foreign schools who “fall through the cracks” and enroll in regular English and other courses with intensive reading and writing; freshmen who struggle in exhausting summer Immersion classes; continuing students who are making gradual progress in learning English - they all find their way into classrooms where they want to “sound American” and eliminate all grammar problems that prevent them from succeeding academically and socially.  They may be afraid to speak in class; they may want to get rid of their accents in speech and writing; they often simplify their thoughts because they can’t find the right words to articulate the full complexity of their thinking. They receive papers with many corrections and sadly agree that they don’t deserve to get above “B” because their “grammar is bad.” They run to the Writing Center or SACC for help, often hoping to get their papers cleaned up and polished.  They are used to hearing “Could you say that again?” or “I’m not sure I understand what you mean by ….”. 

Whether we set out to teach these students in our classrooms or lead workshops for them, we can’t overlook these interconnected issues.   I hope we can all exchange some constructive approaches to dealing with ESL writers and speakers.  I just want to share a few strategies that I found particularly useful: finding and praising a strong point in the writer’s/speaker’s thinking, resisting the urge to eliminate original formulations that do not “sound American,” and finally helping students see that the abundance of red marks in their papers does not mean that they make an abundant number of mistakes — it simply means they make a few recurrent ones. In my work as a tutor, I found it very useful to use a particular color for each type of error.  This way the student knew that he/she had 2 or 3 problem areas and not 20 or 30. 

One particular article has been especially helpful in my work with ESL students: “Editing Line by Line” by Cynthia Linville (ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors.  Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2004.  84-93.).  Linville explains that there are “[s]ix error types that are treatable and are often frequent or serious in ESL college compositions”; these include subject-verb agreement, verb tense, verb form, singular/plural noun endings, word form, sentence structure.  When we focus on what’s treatable and teachable, we will help students to learn English more efficiently, build their confidence and preserve their unique voices.