Success with in-class writing

July 18, 2006 By 4 Comments

Earlier this summer I taught a class where I used in-class writing assignments extensively and was surprised by how effective it was as a pedagogical tool. 

Each day I brought in a list of questions for students, although they were free to write about whatever they wanted as long as it somehow related to our readings.  Most of their responses showed thoughful engagement with the texts and it was enormously helpful for me to read what they wrote.  It provided immediate feedback on the kinds of things that they liked as well as on what they were not getting.  I also had students bring in their own questions and asked them to talk about why they wanted to address that issue.  In this way, the writing assignments helped shape class discusssion.

The questions I gave them were helpful in a number of ways.  Writing them helped me prepare for class in general and it consistently reinforced to students the ways in which I wanted them to be reading and thinking.  But I think the biggest success of the in-class writing was demonstrated at exam time where they had to write four essays.  The class was very nervous and disgruntled about having to take an exam, but in the end most of them did extraordinarily well.  I think this is because they had been writing off the top of their heads about the material on regular basis, which reinforced their knowledge and their thought.

So, I know that most people reading this blog are already well aware of the benefits of this type of assignment, and in a way I am preaching to the converted.  However, I couldn’t resist sharing my success and encouraging educators to continue to integrate in-class writing into their pedagogy.

Filed Under: Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Low-Stakes Writing

Can an Essay a Day Keep One’s Life from Decay?

December 9, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Can writing have any therapeutic effects? As I am researching on ”literature and science,” a scientific research on the use of language fascinates me–it makes me consider writing from a seemingly unrelated context. A study which was allegedly “the first to test the effects on medical conditions of the writing exercise” appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was reported in “Can an Essay a Day Keep Asthma or Arthristis at Bay?” in The New York Times (April 14, 1999: A21). The results of the research show that “writing about traumatic experiences measurably improves the health of some patients suffering from chronic asthma or rheumatoid arthritis,” so reported Erica Goode in the Times.

What I find most interesting is a comment Goode makes in the opening of her article, that the study powerfully demonstrates “how intimately mind and body are linked” and writing serves a big purpose in their interactions. According to the study, the asthma patients in the experimental group were instructed to write about their “deepest thoughts and feelings’” about traumatic experience, while those in the control group wrote down their daily plans, for 20 minutes per day and three days in a row. Reseachers found that

. . . of the 70 patients who wrote about traumatic events, 47.1 percent showed significant improvement in their health at the end of four months, 48.6 percent showed no change and 4.3 percent got worse. In the control group, 24.3 percent showed improvement, 54.1 percent showed no change and 2.6 percent got worse.

It was further noted by the researchers that many patients whose conditions “might have been expected to worsen” unexpectedly improved after writing about stressful experiences.

Four-month length … is about one semester in school. Are we able to observe some sort of ”healing” or improvements in our students, even though we definitely are not treating them as ”patients”?

However we want to ”treat” our students and writing, the implications of the study seem to me to be many-fold. In terms of pedagogy, it makes me re-consider that teaching composition may need to be perceived and designed in a more realistic, human context. That writing is able to change one’s life and it’s just that I have yet to find a way to effect that change. And I imagine that the consideration may also help us guage the level of our attention to and concentration on mechanical and rhetorical aspects more effectively. That is, all kinds of reading assignment and writing exercises will serve a certain purpose that we set forth initially, be it a healing, organizing one’s life, elevating one’s soul, writing for writing’s sake, etc.

On the contrary, after reading this research and writing this blog, I also wonder when do (or will) I transfer the attempt to organize ideas in an essay to actual actions of organizing my life in general? Can I organize my life as the way I organize my writing, to have a thesis? Or better yet, will I have to, since a paper is a paper, life is life? In any event, will the moral of this study be: the more we write, the longer we will live? What would the poet John Keats have to say?

Filed Under: Language, Low-Stakes Writing

Speaking of Low-Stakes Writing . . .

November 15, 2005 By 3 Comments

Michael Leddy’s entry on How to Email a Professor made me think of when, way back when I was teaching, I somewhat irritatedly clamped down on how students emailed me. After the first few “hey prof,” “im ur student,” or “IM CONFUSED. HOW DO YOU CALCULATE GDP PLEASE HELP ME” volleys of the semester, I’d come to class and insist to students that I was not their chat buddy and that therefore their emails should reflect our professional relationship. While they did not need to overdo the formalities, at a minimum they had to sign their emails (haironfire@xxxx.com leaves no way of identifying the student, let alone course and section) and attempt to use proper punctuation and grammar. Students might as well use emailing professors as a dress rehearsal for future workplace communication, where they might be more harshly judged. Whether or not the course is a CIC, students can practice trying to carefully phrase questions, articulate positions, and apply common rules of courtesy. Having professors set minimum email standards seems like a low-cost way of getting students into the habit of thinking about what they write. What do others think of this?

Filed Under: Low-Stakes Writing, Technology
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