Comp II, Unit 1: Deepening the Writing Process
Objective: Develop more nuanced approaches to reading, inventing, researching, drafting, reviewing, and revising.
These readings have been selected and sequenced so as to offer students alternative perspectives on the writing process. The intention is to guide them through these new ideas from beginning to end—starting with altering how they read and ending with using reflection to revise—and to have students immediately apply each concept to a writing project throughout the unit, preferably one that offers lots of leeway to choose their own audience, purpose, etc.
Instructors can use the overview descriptions below (written by the authors themselves) to help decide which chapters might best fit your students’ needs.
How to Read Like a Writer
by Mike Bunn
Overview — Learning to “read like a writer” can be a great benefit to students. As teachers of writing know, a term goes by too quickly, and there is much to cover. This chapter, however, suggests ways students can improve their interaction with text by reading like writers from the start of a course. Students will find this chapter useful for expanding their writing strategies by helping them learn to identify key moments in texts, moments when the author uses an innovative technique, which they might employ in their own writing. Detailed steps and comments, incorporating the voices of numerous students, will assist you in teaching students how to practice the habit of reading like a writer.
The Complexity of Simplicity: Invention Potentials for Writing Students
by Colin Charlton
Overview — Students struggle with getting started on writing projects. In this chapter, you will find innovative invention strategies explained and modeled, based on student experiences. By including questions to prompt thinking as well as writing, and student examples, this chapter can help you show students how to transform their uncertainty about finding a writing topic into an opportunity to make new connections between texts, people, and ideas.
Annoying Ways People Use Sources
by Kyle D. Stedman
Overview — The word annoying in the title of this chapter draws attention to the rhetorical nature of a writer’s choices when citing sources, emphasizing that readers may feel emotions like annoyance (or worse) when authors fail to cite in the ways expected by the audience. This chapter humorously describes poor decisions that academic writers can make when incorporating outside sources into their texts. You can help your students avoid “annoying” rhetorical behaviors with this chapter, a brief primer on citation conventions for the Modern Language Association style. Students will enjoy reading about each “annoyance,” illustrated through positive and negative examples designed to show both the most common ways that writers make these mistakes and practical ways to fix them.
Introduction to Primary Research: Observations, Surveys, and Interviews
by Dana Lynn Driscoll
Overview — Research projects where students are asked to gather first-hand data are a common occurrence in first year writing courses (FYC). However, FYC students may struggle with the ethical and practical issues of collecting, analyzing, and writing about survey results, interviews, and observations. This chapter introduces definitions of research from an interdisciplinary perspective, examines ethical considerations, and compares the research process to the writing process. The chapter concludes with information about writing from primary research, including integrating research and creating visuals. Two student examples–a nutrition observation/survey project and a agricultural and biological engineering interview project–are provided to give students concrete examples.
How to Write Meaningful Peer Response Praise
by Ron DePeter
Overview — Praise is an important element of peer and teacher feedback—it can, to quote Donald Daiker, “lift the hearts, as well as the pens” of student authors—but substantive praise is one of the most challenging modes of feedback to compose (112). How can writing instructors move student responders beyond standard comments such as “Great paper!” or “I liked it” or “Good details”? This chapter is a guide for students in composition classes, and aims to help them understand the importance of giving and receiving detailed, conversational praise; it presents scenarios for conceptualizing how to write praise, provides sample student writing excerpts that invite students to practice writing praise, offers and analyzes examples of different types of student-authored praise comments, and provides an array of approaches to writing praise comments.
Reflective Writing and the Revision Process: What Were You Thinking?
by Sandra Giles
Overview — This essay explains to students that reflective writing involves their thinking about their own thinking. They may be asked to reflect about their audience and purpose for a piece of writing. They may write about their invention, drafting, revision, and editing processes. They may self-assess or evaluate their writing, learning, and development as writers. These activities help cement learning. They also help writers gain more insight into and control over composing and revising processes by helping them gain critical distance and by providing a mechanism for them to do the re-thinking and re-seeing that effective revision requires. The article gives examples of student reflective writing, explains how they function in a student’s learning, and gives scholarly support for why these kinds of activities are effective.
