Aubrey Plourde's blog

Show Students Your Own Work

Aubrey Plourde — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 19:30:53 +0000

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Aubri Plourde

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The best thing I did last semester was to show my students some of my own shitty writing. Previously, I had avoiding putting up any of my own work, not out of some kind of fear of student reactions, but because I didn't want to make the class all about me.

Still, about halfway through last semester, I got the impression my students were feeling all downtrodden and dismal about their writing. I wanted them to see that even though we grade "final" drafts, none of us, their teachers, think about writing purely in terms of product, either.

I'm a big fan of Anne Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts," like Rhiannon, and of Theodore Cheney's Getting the Words Right. Cheney's book has been invaluable for teaching revision. So often, I lacked a vocabulary or even examples for the kinds of changes I wanted my students to make. Cheney provides all of that and more.

Several years ago, I performed an exercise Cheney suggests, which is to reduce the redundancies and weak constructions in my writing. I wanted my students to see that clarity is ruined by extraneous words. So, I sent them a few paragraphs of Cheney's prose, and I met them in class with a PowerPoint full of my own shitty paragraphs.

The first one went like this:

Original (164 words)

This advice, found in a letter Sarah Orne Jewett wrote to Willa Cather in 1908, defines Jewett’s purpose and style as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover from male to female, but the piece of advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” suggests self-sufficiency and capability, both in the general sense and on the specific part of women in love. Jewett’s reference to a woman’s capability to love in a “protecting way,” a way most often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women could love in a traditionally masculine manner. However, the implication of a woman that both protects and nurtures (“[cares] enough”) implies that a woman may not only love as a man loves but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s resulting work shows women performing both gender roles not in a muddled androgynous manner, but as stronger, more well-rounded women.

The following slide held a screen shot of my self-comments, labeling each instance of wordiness: redundancy, repetition, weak construction, unnecessary modifiers, and so on. I walked them through each instance, reading the sentence aloud and poking fun at myself and my undergraduate writing.

The revised version slide looked like this:

Revised (119 words)

This advice, written to Willa Cather in 1908, describes Jewett as an author. The quotation followed Jewett’s suggestion that Cather change the sex of a dying woman’s lover to female, but the advice designed for Cather’s story also applies to Jewett’s fiction. The phrase “done it as yourself” reveals the self-sufficiency and capability of women in love. Jewett’s reference to women loving in a “protecting way,” often assigned to men, illuminates her belief that women can love in traditionally masculine ways. The idea that women simultaneously protect and nurture (“[care] enough”) implies that women not only love as men love but can love simultaneously as both genders. Jewett’s work shows women performing gender roles not halfway, but androgynously.

No brilliance here, but the content isn't important so much as the sentence-level revisions. It also modeled a thesis statement that isn't a graduate-level argument, but is of upper-division undergraduate level.

I was struck, upon receiving my evaluations, that many of my students expressed their enthusiasm for seeing my own writing. I probably would have forgotten about it, honestly, but as I think back at their revision goals, I do think modeling revision for them worked far better than talking to them about revision. It feels uncomfortable, sure. You'll never catch me showing them part of a dissertation. And there's always this fear that they'll go, "She's not that good..." Ultimately, though, it cost me very little to humanize myself--a smill victory--and to demystify the process of writing for them--a much bigger one.

Because I Can't Help Myself: Using Canvas Discussion to Practice Style and Grammar

Aubrey Plourde — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:18:33 +0000

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Aubri Plourde

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Ohio University Department of Linguistics

When I began teaching E316K, I was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find that by and large, my students couldn’t write well. Sure, there were a few outliers who turned in clear, dynamic prose; overall, though, I could be administered a vaccine for redundant sentences and clunky syntax. Often, I’d catch myself wondering, “Who let you get this far without teaching you how to write?”

I realize this is an unfair question. Even in the moment, I knew enough about the teaching requirements of basic writing courses to know that there is just not enough time. By the time they even get to higher education, they’ve forgotten subjects and verbs, let alone participial phrases and nominal clauses or, more ambitiously, style.

If I had world enough and time, if there were room on my syllabus, I would teach them grammar along with the skills of argument. I wish with painful naiveté to teach them how to build and rearrange syntax, instead of “just” ethos, logos, and pathos. The truth is that more often than note, I’m working triage. If I can get my students to write a solid thesis, I will consider myself successful.

And perhaps that’s okay. I spent most of September in turmoil over the wealth of things I wanted to teach them. I realize this is a very immature mentality, one isolated from the long-term realities of only being able to teach a single syllabus at a time. Still, I’m going with it, because, for now, I still care when I read redundancies.

So, although I did finally give up on teaching the basics of infinitives, I have also worked in what seems, so far, to be a reasonable compromise. First, I did provide a series of links and PowerPoints to basic grammatical concepts, and I administered a take-home pretest (ungraded) to help students diagnose themselves. So much for one weekend.

The results were predictably dismal, but not quite as depressing as I’d feared. At least now I know what must be explained (subject-verb agreement, introductory subordinate clauses, comma rules) and what is better left to English majors (verbals, sentence modifiers). Since then, I’ve found a better way to take attendance. While I’ve used “bell work” or basic activities before, I’ve had a hard time integrating them as useful concepts rather than as busywork. It took some adjusting, but I’ve got my students accustomed to the new routine. It goes like this:

Instead of heading right to the center of the classroom upon arrival, they choose their individual computers, logging into Canvas immediately. Nothing fancy—just a discussion board. At the beginning of every class, I’ve posted some kind of prompt, generally related to an overarching stylistic goal. So, for example, this week, we focused on weak construction and redundancy. (I’m pushing for clarity.) The prompt asked students to spot the redundancies in three statements and to revise a fourth for clarity and rhythm:

Label

The submarine fired at the cruiser at a distance of ten thousand meters.

He falsely misrepresented the situation.

The troops advanced forward on the outer Falklands today.

Revise

His brother, who is a student at law school, loves to bring up controversial topics that everyone has a different opinion about.

Sometimes, I simply ask the students to point out the weak construction or redundancy, such as with these statements:

“The reason is because…”

“Due to the fact that…”

“a number of”

“in regard to”

“despite the fact that”

“in the very near future”

“cancel out”

“disappear from sight”

Other times, I ask them to syntactically copy a sentence to get practice recognizing the different parts of speech and how they function.

The routine is that they sign onto Canvas, fill out the discussion post (I require them to post before they can see others’ replies), and do a tiny bit of thinking about style or cosmetics before we begin the agenda for the day. It enables me to count attendance later as I look through responses, and I think they like the feedback.

I’m still working out some knots with this practice, and yes, sometimes it takes longer than I would like it to—although I do think it helps students who get paralyzed when writing to loosen up and get something out. For now, though, I’ve set up mini bites of grammatical, syntactical, or stylistic information to introduce through exercises. Using Canvas’s discussion board is nothing revolutionary, of course, but since we don’t have automatic attendance enabled anyway, and since revising at the sentence level is something they seem not to have considered, I’ll keep doing this for a while—even just to make myself feel like we’re collectively making their writing clearer.