1. We Write Because We Care: Developing Your Writerly Identity

by Glenn Lester, Sydney Doyle, Taylor Lucas, and Alison Overcash

Author’s Overview — Many college students write for one reason and one reason only: to complete a class assignment. But students who subscribe to this view of writing—writing as merely a means to an end, a tool to achieve a grade—are seriously limiting themselves. In this chapter, a writing teacher and three recently graduated writers argue that writing can be used as a tool to build personal agency, develop resilience, and achieve social goals. In doing so, we introduce you to a variety of concepts that you can use to construct your writerly identity. Ultimately, we ask you to reconsider the role of writing in your life, and invite you to take that first, radical step of calling yourself a “real” writer.

2. The Inspired Writer vs The Real Writer

by Sarah Allen

Author’s Overview — I work to dispel the myth of the “inspired writer” (the figure who generates perfect prose without the frustrated process of revision or failure) and to tell the truth about the writing process as I and many of my colleagues and students experience it. I find that a good writer is not an inspired genius but a navigator—among ideas, words, readers, etc. To help student writers, I share what tricks I’ve learned in navigating on the page—e.g. imitating other successful writings and finding good readers.

3. Storytelling, Narration and the “Who I Am” Story

by Catherine Ramsdell

Author’s Overview — This chapter focuses on the importance of storytelling to successful personal and professional communication in the 21st century. Because narration transcends experience, and because stories “can be found anywhere from a movie theatre to a corporate boardroom, everyone should know how to tell a good story.” While the chapter covers some theoretical aspects of narration, it will also help you show students how to create a “Who I Am” story and give them the opportunity to craft their own stories.

4. I Need You to Say “I”: Why First Person Is Important in College Writing

by Kate McKinney Maddalena

Author’s Overview — In this essay, I argue against the common misconception that “I” has no place in formal writing. I discuss many theoretical and rhetorical ways (objectivity and intellectual integrity, and clarity and organization, respectively) in which first person, used prudently, can improve written argument. I then show some examples of academic prose that illustrate the rhetorical concepts I’ve described. Finally, I list some hypothetical writing tasks where “I” might work and warn against some where it won’t.

5. Workin’ Languages: Who We Are Matters in Our Writing

by Sara P. Alvarez, Amy J. Wan, and Eunjeong Lee

Author’s Overview — The steady increase of movements of people around the world has transformed the face, potential, and expectations of the US writing classroom. These intersecting shifts have also contributed to critical discussions about how writing educators should integrate students’ linguistic diversity and ways of knowing into literacy instruction. This chapter’s central premise is to share with students how the work that they already do with languages has great value. Specifically, the chapter introduces terms, concepts, and strategies to support students in identifying how their own multilingual workin’ of languages contribute to the making of academic writing. Our goal is to support students in recognizing the value of their own language practices and to provide strategies that students can use to rethink their own relationships with writing. Orienting practices around translingualism and envisioning students’ language work as that of “language architects” creates opportunities to uplift, value, and sustain students’ rich language practices, as well as ways to critically understand their academic writing experiences.

6. Changing Your Mindset About Revision

by L. Lennie Irvin

Author’s Overview — Many freshmen enter college with a one-draft writing process where revision means tidying up errors and then submitting the final product. This chapter is about changing your thinking about revision as a foundation for changing your practice of revision. The chapter explores the false concepts about writing and revision and replaces them with new mental models of the revision process. Specifically, it details the big picture concept that writing is an inquiry process where we discover what we mean as we write it: through revision, we discover ways to get what we mean closer to what we say and what we say closer to what we mean. Writing is ultimately about thinking and developing our thinking, and one-shot drafts cut short this growth in our thinking and the development of a piece of writing. With this new mindset of writing as an inquiry process in mind, the chapter presents four practices to guide your new approach to the writing process: follow a three-draft sequence to write your papers, always get feedback, reflect between drafts to set revision goals, and save editing for last.

7. What Are We Being Graded On?

by Jeremy Levine

Author’s Overview — Grades are an (often) unmentioned but all-powerful force in the writing classroom. We know that grades mean a great deal to students, motivating many of their decisions in the classroom. But because grading is uncomfortable and inexact work, we rarely discuss it openly in class — a silence that can leave students in the dark about the standards toward which they should write. This essay is a guide to that imprecision; it seeks to lay out for students the different considerations that go into a grading policy so that they can read assignments and rubrics with a more discerning eye. In showing students the many ways that grading standards shift across writing situations, this essay will help students adjust to new and even unclear sets of standards as well as equip students to assess their own writing on terms other than grades.