Writing in the Disciplines Knowledge Base

At this point, I don’t know how much experience you’ve had teaching writing. I’m going to assume that you don’t have a lot of experience or you’ve not done it in a discipline-specific context. If you are comfortable teaching writing, and just want a plan for a particular kind of paper, then skip this section and click on the paper you’d like to teach.

If you’re still here, then below you’ll find a list of ways to think about or think through writing assignments. I’m going to assume discipline-specific writing, whatever discipline that might be for you. The list below is not intended to help you think about general academic writing, per se, or developmental writing or blog writing or tweeting. (If you’d like a more “meta” treatment of how to think about teaching writing, then add the essay “What’s the Challenge? Using Form-Meaning-Use to diagnose and design writing assignments” to your reading list.)  

What type of papers do you want to grade?

• By “type”, we mean “genre” — research report, case study, review paper, legal brief, etc.
  • What kind of papers do practitioners in your field read most often? For example, clinical medical folks read review-type papers a lot (e.g., systematic reviews and clinical guidelines).
    • Students respond well to producing work that looks like the real publications in their discipline, even though they realize their content is less sophisticated. Thus, genre can serve as a source of motivation.
  • Now, weird as this question may seem:  How will you know the students have accomplished the task you named above? What signals or format do you expect the paper to have (e.g., subheadings, a certain kind of title, in-text citations, a certain citation style, specific kinds of vocabulary, figures w/captions, etc)?
    • These are the cues we use as readers to recognize a particular kind of paper. For some reason, we tend to leave these specifications off writing assignments despite the fact that we learned these ourselves through experience. No one emerges from the womb (or even high school) understanding that a review paper requires topical subheadings or it isn’t a review paper. We learn how to dress our writing just like we learn how to dress for work. You do students a huge favor when you explicitly tell them this stuff, at the same time making your life as a grader much easier.
  • Tip: find a paper in your field that will model what you want students to do. Good models have two critical features:
    • First, the content is accessible to your students — in other words, don’t go for the most complicated or even most current research — go for something that students can easily understand. The reason is that you don’t want students to struggle with the content so much that they cannot see the structure of the paper.
      • For example, in the medical sciences, we use telehealth studies a lot because it is easy for students to understand the intervention itself (text messaging, video conferencing, etc). They can focus on structure and function of text b/c they are not lost in content.
    • Second, the paper is written in the form you want — this may seem obvious, but it’s one of those tricky things b/c in real life, successful writing varies. Find a model where you don’t have to constantly explain variation.
      • For undergraduates, we recommend organization/document designs that are “classic” and that we know work; we know they work because we can find publications that match them exactly and we can explain variation in terms of their features (e.g., the IMRD research report). For more advanced students, you can include variations, too, but having a basic model will save time and sanity.

What goal/s do you want the writing to accomplish? In other words, what student learning outcomes are you going for?

• Express the big idea first. Just like writing your own work, if you’re going to require a writing assignment in a class, you have to be able to express what the assignment should accomplish. This isn’t in terms of content — it should be the “why” of the kind of writing you will have the students do.
  • I want students to show they can work through an open-ended situation like a physicist would.
• Try reverse engineering this. Start with what you want students to be able to do  For example, “Students will write a 6 page proposal with 4 requisite parts: Significance/Aim, Lit Review, Plan, Bibliography/Resources”. Then state what outcomes this assignment should accomplish — use verbs! Bloom’s Taxonomy of Measurable Verbs can help, as can the SLO language required at your institution.
  • Make it discipline-specific — and don’t worry about sounding like a typical SLO — just make a statement about what you’d like the assignment to accomplish.
    • “The proposal should show that students understand the kinds of questions we ask in physics and the methods by which we answer questions. I’d like to see a reasonable understanding of limitations but also some creativity”.
• Now, we get to the fun part! Given your answer, what are the skills students will need to accomplish these goals? For instance, if you expect a literature review with correct citation use, then students have to know how to find relevant articles, read that article correctly, formulate a discipline-specific point of view, locate the specific information they need (according to that POV), and add that information into the text, either as a specific rhetorical point or synthesized with similar information. And of course, they have to learn search skills, not to mention explicit training in a particular citation style.  

Given the answers above, what other writing-related support (practice) should you incorporate?

• This is called “scaffolding” — scaffolding entails the deliberate planning of a complex task by identifying the sub-tasks, then providing instruction in each. Scaffolding helps students achieve effective writing by building the skills that lead to an end product.  Properly scaffolded writing assignments will turn out student texts that you don’t hate to grade. (Well, at least it increases the likelihood!)
• Continuing the example regarding lit reviews, you’ll need supporting assignments, starting with so-called “low risk” assignments and moving to higher risk assignments.
  • A low risk assignment is controlled by the teacher, has a clear process and clear correct answers, and can serve as a model for the basics.
    • In our lit review example, a low-risk assignment is a class analysis of a published article examining how the article is structured, what each part of the article contributes (i.e., the function of the introduction, method, results, etc), how citations are formatted, and what they mean in the contexts in which they are used. Basic stylistic conventions are easy to point out here: does your field use direct quotations? If so, how are they cited? If not, how are sources used by writers and what does citation mean? What is language use like?
    • Essentially, you’re teaching the literacy-related knowledge you take for granted. This is NOT basic information, and even the smartest students will appreciate that you took the time to establish this level of meta-knowledge. It also establishes a common vocabulary for talking about texts which will make your life much easier during Q/A time and when providing feedback.
  • Higher risk assignments require more independent and creative-analytical work on the part of the student. Higher risk assignments are critical to developing competence, but the sequence needs to be from low (controlled) to high (independent). You are not condescending to students when you create tightly controlled assignments; you are communicating that you know that not everything is already known to them by providing a foundation to build upon, then a path to progress.
    • a higher risk but still controlled assignment is to provide students excerpts from 3-4 articles and ask them to write a short paragraph using the information and citing correctly. Students can then compare with one another…and find that 25 people, using the same limited information (even if a very specific format is required, e.g. “write an extended definition”) will still churn out 25 independent versions that are not plagiarisms of each other despite being on the same topic/readings.
    • the highest risk assignment is that final paper that students write on their own for a grade. They will SOOO appreciate that you taught them HOW to write on the way to finishing that paper. You will be much happier with the result…be selfish here: teach students to write the prose you wish to read.

Plot the timeline.

• This is “sequencing”, the chronological ordering of the whole process, from introducing the project to the scaffolding assignments.
  • Sometimes, scaffolding skills are not obviously sequential or in a clear cause-effect relationship. For example, you can practice how to read a research article or write a correctly cited extended definition (a synthesis skill) before, during or after students find sources on their own.
  • Some skills are obviously sequential — for example, if students must use sources, you’ll need to schedule training for library searching before you schedule analysis, synthesis, drafting, and peer review.
  • Initially, just sketch out the amount of time you think students will need. As a quick guess, allot at least a week for each major skill — a 5-10 page, well-researched paper takes at least 6 weeks to write! If you pace the work by breaking it down into tasks, your students will produce better work with less stress. And you’ve modeled how to break a project into its component parts — a critical transferable skill.

 

Scaffolding and Sequencing — a mini teaching schedule

• Start with the big idea — the genre and its purpose / the template for the text
• Move to the “story” — how does the genre communicate information? What kinds of information?
  • Think in terms of “Beginning — Middle — End” → all papers have this basic structure
• Include an accounting of sources being used
  • Define what counts as an acceptable source
  • Assign an annotated bibliography — schedule its completion over 2-3 weeks
• Outline parts to the paper
  • Be kind: provide templates/models as a guide. The worst that can happen is that students follow it exactly and you receive a standard, well-organized paper.
• Draft by sections for peer review — first one part and then another — consider starting in the middle since often the Intro has to be revised to match the middle. Time each draft about a week apart.
• Draft the whole for peer review or for a required appointment at your institution’s writing center
• Be agonizingly specific about how you want it formatted

 

Reality Check: Are you being fair with your expectations?

I meet a lot of faculty who say “these students don’t write like college students!” and I want to ask where those expectations come from. None of us has been reading the “developmental or “pre-professional” literature in our fields because it doesn’t exist! Our training and expectations are based on the published literature.  We read what has been produced by experienced academics and massaged by editors. Thus, no one writes “like a college student” except college students. No one writes like a graduate student except graduate students. The complaint about college writing willfully ignores the developmental arc every academic writer must follow.  If you’re expecting a freshman to write like a senior, or a senior to write like a grad student, or your graduate students to write like professionals, then you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed. By all means, set high standards and expect good performance, but plan to do the work to get students to that point.

• Contrary to what it seems sometimes, most students really do want to perform decently — maybe not like you perform: after all, you’re an academic. You chose this. The work is truly way easier for you. Even if you feel like you struggle to write, you are ahead of the game given your natural talents in the same way a gifted athlete is ahead of the curve when learning a new sport.

Surviving a Writing Assignment

• If you scaffold the assignment, it is much easier to grade
  • final papers are better
  • you’re familiar with student topics
• Create some kind of grading rubric
  • doesn’t have to assign points b/c a paper can fail on any particular part, but overall, the rubric helps direct what you want to see in the writing — setting criteria and expectations makes it easier for you to grade final drafts
• Most students are not writing for publication, so looking for perfect papers is not an ideal goal
  • Keep in mind that you don’t personally like every published paper you read, but that paper did make it into a journal and is being used by scholars — students will exhibit the same kind of stylistic variation.
  • If publication is the goal, terrific! Use only the published literature as examples — and, to plagiarize The Martian, peer review the shit out of this! Seriously, it’s probably the single best activity for a writer because it makes the audience REAL.
• A word or many — actually, a short rant — about Mechanics (grammar, punctuation, etc.)
  • Mechanics can increase or damage both credibility and comprehensibility. A single comma splice or fragment — while annoying — does not ruin the reader’s chance of understanding a document. Frequent errors usually hurt credibility more than comprehensibility, though there is a threshold effect here: too many errors, even when they don’t truly interfere with comprehensibility, create a reading experience that is intolerably uncomfortable → which means the paper has failed based on mechanics.
    • You will have to decide how much of a grammar stickler you wish to be, but I would suggest a more reasonable approach to mechanics is better for both grader and students. If you really need all the sentences to be perfect, then mandate student visits to a writing studio or editor — this is especially true if you have second language students.
  • To put this bluntly: Get over personal preferences regarding style. You might prefer a certain writing style, but that doesn’t mean other styles don’t succeed at the task; it just means you don’t like them as much.
    • A linguistic definition of Style: an emergent property of discourse whereby a writer’s choices regarding sentence structure, vocabulary, and idiom create a pattern that allows the reader to predict likely writing choices, increasing the reader’s “comfort” or confidence with the text.
      • Note this definition has nothing to say about beauty. “Style” is about cognition first: is there enough consistency in the writer’s choices to produce comprehensibility? Does the writer make language choices that match discipline-specific conventions?
      • Given the statement above, students can make style errors that impact credibility, such as using adjectives/adverbs incorrectly or writing in the wrong grammatical voice. These should be corrected because they violate genre expectations.
    • Style impacts pleasure, an aesthetic reaction. It does not necessarily impact comprehensibility. You may not like long sentences, but if they are clear, well-formed, and work well in the context of the paragraph, then aesthetic preferences are trivial.
      • Ethically, I believe your job as a composition instructor is to help the student maximize communicative success given the style they naturally write in. Don’t punish people b/c you don’t like their “style” — instead, delight in people whose style you enjoy.
      • Still, getting past our own preferences is a process. We respond to writing first from our most familiar spot: our own style. Regardless of whether you are an instructor in a composition class, a research professor who wants to include writing, or an instructor writhing beneath the weight of administrative edict, you will need to see writing broadly, not beautifully. Praise with positive feedback the student crafting delightful sentences. Use emojis! Sling about superlatives! But do not punish the person who “merely” writes competent prose. That is an admirable feat in and of itself.