Blogging Pedagogy - style

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

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

Author:

Aubri Plourde

Image Credit:

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.

Rhetorical Figure of the Day: Introducing Classical Rhetorical Figures in the Modern Classroom

Deb Streusand — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 18:23:28 +0000

Author:

Deb Streusand

Image Credit:

StaffordGregoire. Original image is here.

As a PhD student new to UT, I came to my teaching at the Department of Rhetoric and Writing with a knowledge of rhetoric derived from my experience at Mary Baldwin College's Shakespeare and Performance program. Professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught MFA students about the classical rhetorical figures Shakespeare would have learned in grammar school. We studied their role in Shakespeare's text and explored how actors can make use of them in performance. I quickly discovered that this type of rhetoric was not on the curriculum for RHE 306, but I thought my students might benefit from some exposure to it all the same.

I decided to turn it into a sort of warm-up, the “rhetorical figure of the day,” before we launched into discussing the rhetoric of modern controversies. (This exercise would come right after my “morning question,” in which I asked the students something about themselves that was also related to RHE 306’s topic of consumer culture, like “what is your favorite possession?” or “what would you do with a million dollars?”)

I told my students upfront that the rhetorical figure of the day wasn’t something they were going to be tested on or that they needed to memorize. I would be teaching them these things because I thought it was important: I believed it would be valuable for them to recognize the use of these tools in a text or, even better, learn how to employ the figures themselves.

From my students’ perspective, this is what the rhetorical figure of the day looks like on the projector:

Anaphora Slide final.png

I uploaded each figure to the class website, so that the students could refer back to it whenever they wanted. At first, I would select one example from a famous speech and one from a literary text, so that the students could get an idea of the different contexts in which these figures appear. I wrote the definitions myself, but also consulted Richard Lanham's A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms and Gideon O. Burton’s Silva Rhetoricae.

For the first two weeks, “rhetorical figure time” went like this:

-Student 1 reads Example 1

-Instructor reads the definition and explains it

-Student 2 reads Example 2

-Instructor attempts to explain what the rhetorical figure is used for and what it does.

Rhetoric is no exact science, however, and so I use “attempts” advisedly. I found it difficult to explain what I thought the rhetorical figures did and how they accomplished it, so I decided to ask the students what they thought instead. After the second student finished reading the above example from Richard III, I asked, “so, what effect do you think the anaphora has here?” I thought I might be faced with silence, but two students jumped in quickly. “It hammers it into your head when they repeat it like that,” said one. And then, oh joy of joys for my nerdy heart: “this is one of my favorites,” said another, “because you start to expect a kind of peak, when they get to the end of the repetition.”

Having the students discuss the effect of the rhetorical figure worked better, but I still felt I could do more to engage those who weren’t speaking up. Chatting with my fellow instructors, I noted the success they’d had getting students’ attention through the use of videos. I started looking around for videos and music that used rhetorical figures. On American Rhetoric, I found some examples from movies I knew my students would be familiar with:

Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

Video of Lion King Be Prepared 1080p HD

“My teeth and ambition are bared. Be prepared!”

--The Lion King's Scar shows off his zeugma (2:56)

Wizard of Oz

Video of Wizard of Oz

“You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe.”

--The Wizard of Oz is also a wizard at isocolon (3:42)

I showed my students clips from these movies in the place of Example 1, and then led a brief discussion as before. What I found was that when playing a bit from a movie, even a short clip, it’s almost impossible to study a single rhetorical figure in isolation. Scar uses three more rhetorical figures in the two lines surrounding the quote above, and the Wizard has a great bit of rhetoric coming up right after the moment I chose. I tried to pause the clip after the part I was interested in, but if I came in even a few seconds late with the pause button, there was already more rhetoric coming our way. I tried to use these accidents to convey to my students how much rhetoric surrounds us all the time.

Meanwhile, my “morning question” exercise was running out of steam, as I struggled to come up with new questions that both had to do with consumer culture and would allow my students to share something about themselves. So, I decided to change up the morning routine by having one student at a time bring in a favorite piece of rhetoric for each day. I started by giving them the St. Crispian’s Day speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, reading it to them and telling them what I liked about its rhetoric. I hit a snag with the next class because the student I thought had volunteered wasn’t prepared, but then it turned out that another student had gotten excited and had his all ready to go. He had printed out the “Wear Sunscreen” advice column by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune for us, and he showed us a YouTube video of the song “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen),” a Baz Luhrmann remix of the column read aloud and the Rozalla song “Everybody’s Free (to Feel Good).” He didn’t use the exact language of the rhetorical figures, but he did talk about the juxtaposition between the serious and the comic in the text, and how the alternation between long, complex phrases and single verbs of advice heightened that contrast. The class discussed the effect of putting the music underneath the words of the text.

As I was arranging my next volunteer, a student who hadn’t spoken much suddenly cut in: “I think you said this in the first class, but…why this rhetoric stuff? I mean, I’m never going to use this, so why?” In a movie, I would have had a perfect, inspiring speech ready to go. In reality, I said something like this: “well, that’s a valid question, and I can see why you would think you wouldn’t use it. But these rhetorical figures really do help to persuade people when you’re making an argument, whether you’re trying to get funding for something that you care about, or asking your boss for a raise, any time you want to persuade someone. The reason the figures have such weird Greek names is because people have been using them to convince other people for more than two thousand years. So you may not see it right now, and as I said, it’s a very valid question, but you may end up using these, and if you do, you’ll have an advantage.” If I were writing the movie script for that moment, I might make my answer a bit less financially focused and a bit more idealistic, but at the same time, I think choosing those practical examples might have actually made an impact on my skeptical student. We’ll see when she brings in her favorite piece of rhetoric!

This coming week’s rhetorical figure media samples will come from hip-hop songs, thanks to my Mary Baldwin colleague Angelina LaBarre’s MLitt thesis, “Entering the Educational Cypher: Hip-Hop and Shakespeare in the Classroom.” Future weeks will feature standup comedy and advertising. I’m having great fun with the process of expanding my library of rhetorical figure examples, because I’m still finding new places where rhetoric is hiding. I can’t wait to see what my students bring in over the next few weeks.

Benefits of Paper Workshops

Stephanie Odom — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:13:10 +0000

Author:

Stephanie Odom

Image Credit:

DigiDreamGrafix.com

This spring I’ve been teaching RHE 310: Intermediate Expository Prose for the second time. The first time I taught it was two years ago, so I had plenty of time in between to think of ways to improve upon my first effort. I love teaching this class. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach a class like it in my new job, but I will definitely try to work in the practice of in-class paper workshops in future classes. Workshops are a cornerstone of RHE 310, and in this post, I’d like to describe how I run workshops, what I think works well, and what I will change in the future.

First, a little context about the class is in order. RHE 310 is a class about style. Instructors (usually graduate students) teach the class in many different ways, but practicing the prose style and genre conventions of a number of types of writing is usually the norm. When I was first planning how I would teach the course, I wanted the students to be able to select the type of writing they wanted to master. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable selecting styles for the whole class since I didn’t want to make pronouncements about what style/s of writing were superior to others and didn’t want to spend time on genres and styles that were uninteresting or unimportant to students. (I have since come around to re-thinking that stance and would feel more comfortable teaching a range of pre-selected styles now.) So, in my class, each student selects a prose model that they admire and the assignments give them opportunities to analyze and imitate that model. The range of models students have chosen has been incredible, as have their creative imitations.

As I said, workshopping is a key part of this course. The first time I taught it, the requirement was that everyone submit writing--any writing--for the class to comment on. Many students submitted imitations of their prose model. These models included magazine writing, sports reporting, technical guides, academic philosophy and film articles, and many more. But in that first attempt, I didn’t require students to provide an example or of describe the writing style they were going for, and that made our workshops ineffective at times. Students would offer advice based on what their general understanding of “good style” was, and the writer being workshopped would reply that their choices were justified based on the type of writing they were practicing. The students would shrug and trust that the writer was correct.

This time around, I changed the workshop submission template to give students a space to describe and/or provide an example of their prose model, which could be the main one they were working with that semester or anything else. Having the opportunity for students to read high quality examples of that type of writing has made our workshops more effective. During the workshop, when someone has a question about whether the writer’s choices are appropriate, it’s easy to turn to the target prose and analyze it to see whether the more experienced author made that choice. For example, we’ve talked a lot about pronoun usage and what that means in terms of rhetorical distance. If the student writer makes I-statements and someone asks if that is an appropriate choice (sometimes invoking the “I heard you should never use ‘I’ in papers” rule), we revisit the target prose and see if that author used the first person pronoun. This is one of several analysis and imitation techniques I’m able to model during workshops.

Other such techniques that I hope they internalize and take with them include reading prose out loud, making a reverse outline of their or another writer’s text, getting a thought down in rough form and playing with the style later, and just generally getting others’ input about clarity and style. I’m lucky that the students in this semester’s class are respectful and forthright, so I don’t need to do a lot of delicate balancing of egos or communication styles. Especially in the early part of the semester, students were nervous about getting their writing critiqued, but that feeling has subsided after seeing how their peers are not dismissive, rude, or totally off-base in their comments.

In this class, I love how these workshops expose students to a wide range of writing styles, some of which they will themselves write someday but others that they won’t. The range gives us the chance to see how writing varies and how what’s “wrong” in one rhetorical situation is “right” in another one. For example, one student wrote a reflective essay about a baseball game that he wanted to publish as a sports column. His style is casual and blunt, two qualities that you often see in sports writing. We talked about how in his case, it was acceptable to use slang words and even profanity in story telling, and how he created dramatic interest by using a series of short simple sentences, whereas in other workshops, we had worked with the writers to combine simple sentences into more complex ones to lend a more sophisticated tone. We’ve seen how in science writing, the passive voice is standard and appropriate, but in personal statements, we want to see more first-person pronouns. It’s also been helpful for writers to get feedback about where their readers want to see more evidence, what they think the argument was, and how they personally responded to the piece.

In the interest of space, I’ll briefly list here other practices that I’ve found facilitate productive discussion and some that I’ll change in the future.

What is working:

Having writers upload their papers to our class wiki 24 hours before their workshop (by 9:30 a.m. on Monday for a Tuesday class) to give classmates time to comment.
Asking everyone to post at least one positive and one constructive comment on the wiki before class to prime them for participating.
Distributing printed copies of the paper even though we can all read it on the projector. This is not necessarily for the writer’s benefit since receiving 18 marked-up copies of their writing can be overwhelming, but it’s been great for keeping everyone else more engaged with the writing.
Speaking with each student about their participation during our midterm conference and letting them know if I want them to participate more or give others a chance to speak, and what I think their strengths as a participant are.

What I will likely change:

Spending 20 minutes instead of 30 minutes on each student to give us more time to analyze and imitate at least one additional type of writing as a class.
Requiring everyone to revise their writing based on our feedback so that the stakes are higher and they practice weighing conflicting comments against each other.
Practicing close line editing techniques, though this is a maybe. Some students are doing this anyway and I’d like to be more involved in what they are suggesting, but I would rather they practice minimal marking and ask questions for clarification instead of making changes to the papers. Depending on the goals of the course I’m teaching, I may or may not encourage line editing.

Learning how to run a writing workshop is a valuable skill for anyone who will be teaching composition, and it requires practice and being open to change. It focuses the class on student writing instead of polished professional writing, it opens up the writing process for discussion, it teaches students that getting feedback on their writing is not going to kill them, and it lets them see how different readers react in different ways and that that’s ok. I will definitely be using this pedagogical tool in future classes and I hope my description of it here gives others some ideas about how to use it in their classes, too.

William Strunk and the Human Brain

Patrick Schultz — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:41:55 +0000

Author:

Patrick Schultz

Image Credit:

Via the Website of Joseph Harris's Writing 20

If there is one piece of advice that all usage guide writers seem to agree on, it is that good writing is clear and concise. A good writer makes the reader’s life easy. Rules from “Use the active voice” to “Avoid preposition stranding” are put in place because they supposedly achieve simplicity and ease comprehension. In "The Elements of Style, for instance, William Strunk describes the active voice as “more direct” than the passive and writes that it “produces brevity”. This intuitively makes sense--the reversal of agent and patient seems confusing--but is a passive construction really harder to process for the reader? Studies in language cognition have investigated this and similar issues in some detail.

Frazier et al.’s (1984) reading study, for instance, finds that readers are able to process passivized sentences faster than active sentences. Ferreira (2003) suggest that this somewhat puzzling finding only applies to a certain type of passive sentence - the ones that Strunk approves of as well: “This rule does not, of course, mean that the writer should entirely discard the passive voice, which is frequently convenient and sometimes necessary. […] The need of making a particular word the subject of the sentence will often […] determine which voice is to be used” (18). In their study, Frazier et al. also find that sentence reading time depended significantly on the context the sentence appears in: combinations of active and passive voice (Mary kicked the ball and the Frisbee was thrown by John) really puzzle readers and slow down sentence processing. The effects of this kind of parallelism, they argue, can be found with other grammatical constructions as well. Strunk makes a similar point when he demands that “expressions similar in content and function be outwardly similar” (26).

Carrithers and Bever’s (1984) theory of reading comprehension also suggests that clauses in the passive voice should be processed faster than their active counterparts. Their eye-tracking study does not, however, produce any data to back this up. But they do present some other variables that influence text comprehension: They find, for example, that word length is the most important predictor of processing time. Short words are parsed much faster than long ones (time/letter). The easiest way to make a text accessible is therefore to choose short words over longer synonyms (usually Germanic over Romance words).

Carrithers and Bever also find that readers slow down significantly towards the end of a sentence. This, according to Carrither, suggests that the reader's brain is busy parsing the beginning of the sentence; the reader therefore pays less attention to words at the end of a sentence (e.g. is less likely to notice that they are misspelled). Strunk’s rule to “place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end” (32) might therefore not always be the best advice to give.

This somewhat random assortment of findings illustrates that the advice given in usage guides like “The Elements of Style” is to some extent supported by empirical research; it also shows, however, that these are rules of thumb that cannot do justice to the complexity of the reading task.

Works Cited:

Carrithers, Caroline and Thomas G. Bever. 1984. "Eye-fixation Patterns during reading confirm theories of language comprehension". Cognitive Science 8.

Ferreira, Fernanda. 2003. "The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences". Cognitive Psychology 47.

Frazier, Lyn at al. 1984. "Parallel structure: A source of facilitation in sentence comprehension". Memory and Cognition 12.5.