RWS280 Responding to Academic Texts & Connecting to Ones Writing Project 4 Project #4: Responding to Academic Texts & Connecting to One’s Writing Context

RWS280 Responding to Academic Texts & Connecting to Ones Writing Project 4 Project #4: Responding to Academic Texts & Connecting to One’s Writing Context: One of the main components to RWS 280 is to not only improve your writing abilities, but to also give you an opportunity to reflect on your past writing and potential future with writing. For the previous assignments, you have explored claims, evidence, audience, and rhetorical strategies in both academic texts and a documentary. Now, you will read a series of academic articles that deal with writing. After reading each article, your job is to choose three, and respond to the claims each writer makes. Then, you will need to position yourself within their argument and claims. Where do you fit in? How do you relate? How does your experience with writing connect to what they are claiming? Do you identify with any of the evidence they use? How can the writer’s experience help inform you of what you can do with your writing moving forward? Goals: Read various academic texts, take extensive notes on overall argument, claims, evidence, and rhetorical strategiesDraw connections between the texts, noting where they offer similar/different claims, pieces of evidence, and/or rhetorical strategies Put the three “in conversation” and begin to draw connections between the texts and your experiences with writing Develop an essay between 5-6 pages _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Guidelines: Intro: strong hook, background context on your experience with writing, introduce authors & texts, road map of your essay, thesis Body (within each body paragraph): provide an account of an author’s central argument and their position in terms of how they view writing and/or the writing process describe some of the claims the author uses, provide interpretation and analysis of how these claims work, and explain the impact of these decisions in relation to the author’s purpose draw connections between the claims or evidence used to your own experience with writing evaluate how effectively or ineffectively the author’s claims/evidence/or rhetorical strategies work based on your past or future writing goals Conclusion: offer a conclusion that is not merely repetitive, but instead offers insight into the significance of your writing process; how you will use writing moving forward; what potential writing you may do in your career, etc. MLA 8 Works Cited __________________________________________________________________________________ Evaluation Criteria: ComprehensionDevelopmentDetails/analyzes chosen texts thoroughly and thoughtfullyWriter thoroughly address elements of the argument, including author, context, audience, purpose, claims, and evidence.Analysis of rhetorical strategies is thorough OrganizationExpression/Mechanics/Grammar ____________________________________________________________________________________________ SLOs: Develop an effective process of reading for comprehension Develop an effective writing process—including prewriting, drafting, revision, and self-evaluation Analyze the elements of academic texts—particularly argument, HOW TO
RESPOND TO
TEXTS
RW S 2 8 0
After reading the various texts about
writing, you will need to be able to
“respond” to their claims, evidence, or
rhetorical strategy.
Meaning, you will need to come up with
ways to not only address what’s in the texts,
but a way to reflect on your own writing
experience.
Use the following information to help you
begin to build your body paragraphs.
YOUR GOAL:
THEY SAY/I SAY
• Chapter Four “Yes / No / Okay, But”
– Three Ways to Respond
– Agree
– Disagree
– Combination of agree & disagree
•
•
•
•
Begin with statements like:
“I agree that______,”
“I disagree that_______,” or
“I agree that________, but I cannot agree that________.”
THESIS
• When formulating a thesis, you will want to do so in response to
what others “may say”
• Meaning, your thesis would look something like this:
– “Although some students argue that writing is not important to them,
there are many ways that writing will come up in my career.”
• See how the writer is already nodding to the “opposing view,” but still maintaining
their own position on the topic?
DISAGREE—AND EXPLAIN WHY
• Need to not only assert that you disagree with a certain position
– ALSO NEED TO OFFER PERSUASIVE REASONS WHY
– To move from “opinion” to “position” or “analysis,” you need to give
reasons to support what you say (59)
– Examples: because the author’s argument fails to take relevant factor’s into
account; because it is based on faulty or incomplete evidence; because the
argument makes questionable assumptions of the audience; it uses flawed
logic, etc.
– If you disagree with a writer’s claim or evidence, you can use your own experience
as evidence against.
DISAGREEING TEMPLATES
“X’s claim that ______ rests upon assumptions that ______.”
“I disagree with X’s view that _______ because as recent
research shows, _________.”
“X contradicts herself. On one hand she argues, _________.
On the other hand, she also says ___________.”
“By focusing on _________, X overlooks the deeper
problem of ___________.”
AGREE—WITH A DIFFERENCE
• Need to push beyond just claiming that you “agree”
• Important to bring new insight into a piece of evidence that you agree with or
how that evidence from the author helps advance your own position
• Can:
– Add additional evidence unnoticed by the author you agree with
– May add in personal experience (credibility) that helps illustrate the evidence
made by the author
– Analyzing unknown implications of the evidence
AGREEING TEMPLATES
“X is surely right about _______ because, as she may not be aware, recent studies
have shown that ______.” (SYNTHESIZE WITH THE OTHER “AGREEING” TEXT)
“X’s theory of __________ is extremely useful because it sheds light on the
difficult problem of ________.”
“In order to simplify X’s evidence, it is important to note _________.”
“X’s evidence is important in understanding the larger implications of ________
because __________.”
AGREE & DISAGREE SIMULTANEOUSLY
• When poisoning yourself in the argument, you want your reader to understand
explicitly which part you agree or disagree with and why.
• Helpful phrasing are:
– On the one hand I agree that_________. On the other hand, I disagree that
_______.
– Yes, but __________. No, but ________.
“Though I concede that _____, I still insist that
___________”
“X is right that ________, but she seems to be on more
dubious ground when she claims that _________ .”
“While X is not effective when using __________ as
evidence, she is truly effective when using ________.”
Whereas X provides insufficient evidence that
___________,Y and Z’s evidence that _______ and
__________ convinces me that ___________ instead.”
TEMPLATES
Published on Inside Higher Ed
(https://www.insidehighered.com)
Home > What We Learn When Our Writing ‘Fails’
What We Learn When Our Writing ‘Fails’
Submitted by John Warner on June 28, 2018 – 9:40pm
Blog: Just Visiting [1]
Yesterday I had a blog post crash and burn just as I thought I was bringing it in
for a landing.
Notions that barely get off the ground before proving to be not post-worthy are
pretty common. For every five published posts, I’ve probably started two
others that didn’t get much past a couple of paragraphs.
But this one was already over 1,200 words, wrapping up towards a conclusion
after which I’d go looking for places to pare back to a more reasonable length,
when I realized it just wasn’t working, I’d be embarrassed if I put it into the
world in anything like its present form, and I’d be better off scrapping it and
starting over.
It happens.
I had a couple of lines I liked that I knew I wanted to work in: “Education is too
important to be left exclusively to economists,” and “Students must be viewed
as more than little bundles of potential capital.” Those give a sense of the
point I was trying to work towards.
I wanted to tie those ideas to the recently released Rand Corporation report
about the Gates Foundation’s failed Effective Teacher Initiative, which had me
working backwards to the famous study by Raj Chetty (et al.) arguing that
Value-Added Modeling (VAM) could predict which teachers would ultimately
boost student incomes, which bopped me over to President Obama’s 2012
State of the Union where he favorably cited Chetty’s research, which provided
an initial impetus for the Gates Foundation approach to teacher evaluation,
which sent me back to questioning the rationale for thinking that the best
approach to improving teachers was to focus on weeding out the small
percentage of bad ones, which got me back on how performance on
standardized tests (the basis for Chetty’s VAM) was a lousy proxy for
learning…
…and you’re probably getting a good sense for why the thing disintegrated
right before my eyes. It was all too much.
Thing is, in the process of trying to make this puppy fly, but then seeing it
nosedive into the ground, I learned a lot. I know much more about ValueAdded Modeling. I have a better understanding of the Gates Foundation
teacher evaluation approach, both why they might have believed something
like this could work, as well as what I think are some obvious red flags that
should’ve signaled they were destined for failure to begin with.
I’m smarter on this stuff than I was before. I don’t have a blog post to publish,
but them’s the breaks sometimes.
-I believe in writing as a process of discovery, something I’ve tried to put
central in the classroom.
I have a number of writing mantras for students on this front:
• Writing is a way to figure out what you know, but didn’t yet know how to
say.
• You should know something at the end of writing the essay that you
didn’t know at the beginning.
• If you haven’t been surprised during the writing process, you’re probably
not done.
I have more, but they all circle essentially the same idea, that the kind of
thinking writing requires stands a pretty good chance of reorienting one’s
knowledge, beliefs, and even on occasion, deeper things like values. Writing is
a great way to teach oneself something new, which may in turn be something
new for the audience.
That much of the writing we ask students to do – particularly prior to college –
values conformity and compliance rather than curiosity and discovery is a real
problem in my book. It’s one of the things that keeps students from
accomplishing as much as we’d wish once they’re in college. It’s difficult to
shift from an attitude of, “Show me how much you’ve retained of what you’ve
been told,” to “Show me something that others haven’t thought of in precisely
this way before.”
I tell students that as writers they should view themselves as “unique
intelligences,” that is if they go into the writing process aiming for discovery,
because there is no one else in the world who has had their particular set of
experiences, they will likely create something new, something worth hearing.
You should see the looks on the students’ faces when they achieve this. It is
probably the thing I miss most about teaching. In conferences I’d ask “what
have you learned?” and students could tell me. What is the goal of all this
business if not this?
But sometimes, reasonably often in fact, what they’ve learned doesn’t
coalesce into a piece of writing that works. Sometimes they experience exactly
what happened to me with yesterday’s blog post, more is bitten off than can
be successfully chewed within the time frame available for gnawing.
There’s a conundrum here. For students to learn as much as possible from a
particular assignment, it’s best if they’re operating at the fringes of their own
abilities and understanding. I want them to imagine a reach that is likely
beyond their grasp.
On the other hand, the structure of school often punishes those noble
attempts. It’s much better to play it safe, and indeed, if you talk to students,
you’ll find how many of them are coolly calculating about what kind of effort is
required to maximize outcomes as defined by grades, rather than considering
how much they “learned.”[1] [2]
When deadlines come, something must be cobbled together, no matter what. I
think this sometimes prevents students from maximizing their learning.
All of this had me thinking about the potential to institute something I’m going
to call the “parachute clause.”
The parachute clause would come into play when a student is working on a
piece of writing and they realize – as I did with this blog post – that the thing
just isn’t going to work. The nose of the plane points to the ground, the
altimeter starts spinning so fast it looks like something out of a cartoon, and
left with no choice, the student jumps free, pulling the ripcord on a parachute
to get to the ground safely.
In practical terms, I envision the student turning in the “failed” piece of writing
along with a reflection of what they think went wrong, combined with a
discussion of what they learned in the process of creating this “failure.” Under
the right circumstances, the students could even share this writing with the
class as we collaborate on approaches which may resurrect the idea and give
it new life.
Rather than forcing students to flog an essay that’s doomed to crash, why not
let them step back, reflect, and take ownership of what they have experienced
and learned in the process?
It makes sense in my head, anyway.
Since I don’t have access to a classroom or students anymore, maybe
someone can pick up the mantle, and let me know if it works.
[1] [3] So many students I’ve worked with in first-year writing courses have
internalized a view where a piece of writing is almost explicitly a kind of bluff
meant to fool a reader into believing the writer knows something. They very
much see it as a game.
Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/what-we-learn-when-ourwriting-fails
Links
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/what-we-learn-when-our-writingfails#_ftn1
[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/what-we-learn-when-our-writingfails#_ftnref
George Saunders: what
writers really do when they
write
www.theguardian.com
14 mins read
A
series of instincts, thousands of tiny adjustments, hundreds
of drafts … What is the mysterious process writers go
through to get an idea on to the page?
Master of a universe … Illustration by Yann Kebbi for
Review.
1
Many years ago, during a visit to Washington DC, my wife’s cousin
pointed out to us a crypt on a hill and mentioned that, in 1862, while
Abraham Lincoln was president, his beloved son, Willie, died, and
was temporarily interred in that crypt, and that the grief-stricken
Lincoln had, according to the newspapers of the day, entered the
crypt “on several occasions” to hold the boy’s body. An image
spontaneously leapt into my mind – a melding of the Lincoln
Memorial and the Pietà. I carried that image around for the next 20odd years, too scared to try something that seemed so profound, and
then finally, in 2012, noticing that I wasn’t getting any younger, not
wanting to be the guy whose own gravestone would read “Afraid to
Embark on Scary Artistic Project He Desperately Longed to Attempt”,
decided to take a run at it, in exploratory fashion, no commitments.
My novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is the result of that attempt, and now I
find myself in the familiar writerly fix of trying to talk about that
process as if I were in control of it.
We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he “wanted to
express”, and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into
some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about
having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and
more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.
2
A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan
acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge,
near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a
certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why
is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan
notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s
gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan
has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little
Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.
What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little
domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to
change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan
didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say
that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no
accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”
He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and
before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.
An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing
one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists
know this. According to Donald Barthelme: “The writer is that person
who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do.” Gerald
Stern put it this way: “If you start out to write a poem about two dogs
fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking – then you
wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.” Einstein, always the smartypants, outdid them both: “No worthy problem is ever solved in the
plane of its original conception.”
How, then, to proceed? My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in
my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side
(“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a
first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”).
Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so
as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive,
iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the
prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat),
through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly
turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of
incremental adjustments.
The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it
better like this? Or like this?
The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this
laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I
am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic,
with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.
And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than
usual.
3
Revising by the method described is a form of increasing the ambient
intelligence of a piece of writing. This, in turn, communicates a sense
of respect for your reader. As text is revised, it becomes more specific
and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less
hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading. It loses its ability to create a
propagandistic fog. Falsehoods get squeezed out of it, lazy assertions
stand up, naked and blushing, and rush out of the room.
Is any of this relevant to our current political moment?
Hoo, boy.
When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps
somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped
impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more
specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob
snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his
dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much,
especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes
because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because
I wanted it to be less lame.
But it is more compassionate. Bob has gone from “pure asshole” to
“grieving widower, so overcome with grief that he has behaved
ungraciously to a young person, to whom, normally, he would have
been nice”. Bob has changed. He started out a cartoon, on which we
could heap scorn, but now he is closer to “me, on a different day”.
How was this done? Via pursuit of specificity. I turned my attention
to Bob and, under the pressure of trying not to suck, my prose moved
in the direction of specificity, and in the process my gaze became
more loving toward him (ie, more gentle, nuanced, complex), and
you, dear reader, witnessing my gaze become more loving, might
have found your own gaze becoming slightly more loving, and
together (the two of us, assisted by that imaginary grouch) reminded
ourselves that it is possible for one’s gaze to become more loving.
Or we could just stick with “Bob was an asshole,” and post it, and
wait for the “likes”, and for the pro-Bob forces to rally, and the antibarista trolls to anonymously weigh in – but, meanwhile, there’s poor
Bob, grieving and misunderstood, and there’s our poor abused
barista, feeling crappy and not exactly knowing why, incrementally
more convinced that the world is irrationally cruel.
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Illustration by Yann Kebbi for Review
4
What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already
done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, but
mostly we’re adjusting that which is already there. The writer
revises, the painter touches up, the director edits, the musician
overdubs. I write, “Jane came into the room and sat down on the blue
couch,” read that, wince, cross out “came into the room” and “down”
and “blue” (Why does she have to come into the room? Can someone
sit UP on a couch? Why do we care if it’s blue?) and the sentence
becomes “Jane sat on the couch – ” and suddenly, it’s better
(Hemingwayesque, even!), although … why is it meaningful for Jane
to sit on a couch? Do we really need that? And soon we have arrived,
simply, at “Jane”, which at least doesn’t suck, and has the virtue of
brevity.
But why did I make those changes? On what basis?
On the basis that, if it’s better this new way for me, over here, now, it
will be better for you, later, over there, when you read it. When I pull
on this rope here, you lurch forward over there.
This is a hopeful notion, because it implies that our minds are built on
common architecture – that whatever is present in me might also be
present in you. “I” might be a 19th-century Russian count, “you” a
part-time Walmart clerk in 2017, in Boise, Idaho, but when you start
crying at the end of my (Tolstoy’s) story “Ma…
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