Writing
Given some of our conversations yesterday, I thought I’d say more about expectations for your projects. I’m pretty sure you all understand this already, but let’s make sure. The guidelines I wrote in 481 hold, for the most part:
Publishable essays have the following qualities:
- Strong analysis: demonstrate a line of reasoning about a topic; write an argument, not just a list of facts or a summary of the thought of others;
- Copious evidence: use multiple well-considered quotations, examples, and other source material to make your argument;
- Adequate development: extend your analysis beyond the obvious or well-known, offering new insights about the stylistic concepts you engage;
- Articulation: connect your work to others in English studies and/or other discourses;
- Relevance: select a topic and focus relevant for English studies, or explain why a particular approach to style is valuable;
- Originality: avoid rehashing other workâfind a new perspective, approach, synthesis, or application of existing ideas;
- Conventional style: Use your MLA Style Manual to ensure your format is conventional.
A few tweaks:
- The least important of these criteria is originality. As Nan said yesterday, “filling in” your knowledge of writing studies is a core goal of this independent study. So if you find yourself working through a wide range of material on your topic, don’t be worried; that work is important not only for the short term (building your knowledge base) but proves useful in situations where showing broad support is required. For example, a writing program administrator might need to explain decisions to a chair or dean; no need for originality there, but rather showing good antecedents for your thinking.
- Make the form meet your needs and your audience, especially if you are working with content presented online. You need not write the proverbial 20 page paper; annotated lessons, pedagogical guides designed for practical use, or other forms are fine as long as the criteria above are met. I am happy to discuss alternative formats with anyone.
- Finally, let’s continue to use this space to share. We can use the weblog to share documents, web addresses, excerpts, or all of the above. And I will happily support use of my wiki or other spaces. Just let me know.
Questions &c. below.
July 11th, 2008 12:51
Bradley, I appreciate your explanation of “tweaking” our projects. The more I write, the more I seem to be basically compiling lots of expert info, which is probably apparent to those who have been around writing studies for many years, but it’s all news to me. I’m not sure if I have a great new angle on writing center pedagogy, but I’m definitely beginning to fill in the blanks about how they would work ideally and how they do and could fit into a university system. I’m looking at this project more as a foundation for my thesis later than a breakthrough in composition pedagogy. Will that work?
By the way, I just heard about the recent $50,000 grant for the Western Writing Center. I figure at my current rate of pay and weekly input of hours in the WC, that amount could sustain my salary for 5,000 hours, 500 weeks, or roughly 14 years. Like I said–a nice supplement to my Social Security.
July 14th, 2008 11:21
Well, to be frank, this stuff is new for far too many people in the field—and far too many fail to keep up with it as well. So I’m excited to see the work y’all are doing.
Yes, good news; here’s a link. http://www.wiu.edu/newsrelease.sphp?release_id=6509
The writing studies faculty are kicking around some ideas for how to spend the money, and using it as a seed for more funding is definitely the idea (that is, “Look what we can do!”). That underscores the importance of the tutors in many ways.
July 15th, 2008 11:29
Thanks for the guidelines and the email response about my “draft.” I’m back from my conference in Nashville, where I was able to better nail down many of my nebulous ideas. The project is now taking a more formal shape, though I lost a lot when my computer died last night.
I’m at the school getting ready for an English meeting, but I’ll be back on and blogging again ASAP.
July 27th, 2008 16:20
[...] I’ve finished working through all of your drafts (though I am waiting for Katie to do a little more before providing extensive commentary), and I’m very pleased with the work I’m seeing. Some thoughts, given the criteria I posted earlier: [...]