More Thoughts on Expressive and Collaborative Writing In First-Year Composition Classes

 The private vision of the writer, as James A. Berlin called it in his article "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories", should at least be encouraged more in first-year writing because of its overall importance in any field of writing. There still must be some subjective opinion hid into even the most objective literature reviews, which makes the composition itself seem less like vomited jargon on a page and more like a cohesive text that the composition writer can in fact write for himself or herself. Vomited jargon on a piece of paper, as I have colorfully put it, looks intellectual but does not really read that well with the teacher or any peer reviewers. Vomited jargon on a piece of paper, as I have colorfully put it, looks intellectual but does not really read that well with the teacher or any peer reviewers. The vomited jargon will be written semi-consciously to make the analysis of text sound at least important, with words grabbed from a thesaurus, while limiting any outer collaboration with a teacher, fellow students, or any form of audience who will read that given material. Meanwhile, a more cohesive text becomes more readable to teachers and peers alike, giving the thesis or argument more room for evaluation.
    So when the writer in question can learn to have an expressive writing voice, collaborative expressive writing at its best possible form can give him or her a better understanding of how their audience can be their fellow students as well as their teachers. Even though a writer’s piece is his or her own work, he or she must become aware of the audience who will read the text that he or she has prepared. The individual audience for a first draft will be the ones who will ultimately tell the writer what the paper’s strengths and weaknesses are so far, and how the writer can amend the weaknesses. In this way and many other ways, the audience (being, of course, fellow students and the teacher) can help the writer generate and evaluate a critical or creative paper. Secondly, considering individual audience members are also essential for a writer to know how his or her paper must be written. In a way, the writers who undergo this practice can be seen to collaborate themselves with the audience by “diving into” their classroom peers’ critiques as well as the teacher’s critiques. If a writer is writing a journal article for scholars, the paper must be in a professional and formal tone to appeal to and collaborate with the scholars and readers of that journal. If the article is for a newspaper or general audiences, the paper can have an informal tone to figuratively collaborate the more casual reader in producing a voice that can make sense to about anyone. However, the writer cannot develop an expressive voice for a general article and a completely different expressive voice for a scholarly journal article. As far as expressive writing is concerned, a writer’s voice is unique to the writer and should not be divided into two half-voices (one professional and the other casual). Dividing a writer’s voice into two different voices would make each voice sound half as effective. Only a strong and unique writing voice can be able to effectively carry an argument, which could be further established by a specially collaborative-expressive type of composition class.

Essay Topic- Expressive Collaboration in First-Year Composition

 I underlined my thesis for the argument, which is sort of cobbled together from my blog's arguments on expressive writing. Don't worry, most of the recycled concepts are about a third of the paper right now, and are going to be revised greatly. 2/3 of the essay are basically expansions and additions to some of the ideas that I pushed forward for most of the semester and in my writing philosophy.

First-year writing is one of the most polarizing English subjects for students everywhere: Either you hate it or you love it. That, or you need it for a credit fulfillment of some sort. The freshman English classes that I have mainly experienced, however, tend to be more of an assembly line series of classes where assistant teachers just go around and give people this distant sort of teaching advice that does not really give the teacher a chance to really connect with the students’ writing in any way. A common trend also boils down where students are taught basic essay and rhetoric principles without understanding how they apply to the type of writing that students want to do, which to me doesn’t make the students any closer to mastering rhetoric or any part of their writing in general. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the bare bones process of most FYC classes instead makes them mechanically write down important sounding essays that they think that teachers and scholars will want to read or to hear. There needs to be more of a collaborative relationship where the teacher can teach students to expressively use rhetoric and essay writing while also learning something from the students. I am not saying that first-year composition should have more teachers be softer with their students and be more maternal towards them. I am instead arguing that Freshman English classes would greatly improve if the teaching of expressive writing through collaborative methods were more widely expanded in the scholarly world of rhetoric. That way, composition students could rely less on sounding important and just write the kind of composed arguments that said students, their peers, and their teachers would all want to read. All the while, students could maintain a persuasive professionalism due to the established collaborative and expressive respect between teachers and students.
    I understand that some first-year writing courses adopt a sort of collaborative or Socratic method of teaching. Indiana University Bloomington’s first-year writing program includes a good example of post-process writing where the student’s voice as a writer is emphasized. Yet many freshman composition courses, like the ones I took when I was enrolled in Texas Tech in 2010, tend to have a part-time instructor who give basic lessons on composition while groups of graduate students grade papers submitted online. While basic lessons on composition do usually open students’ eyes to the concepts and procedures of composition writing in general, they don’t really encourage students to develop a unique writing voice that can appeal to masses beyond the classroom. By collaborating with a student or diving in to understand a student, even a part-time instructor can get better work out of students by meeting with them to discuss strengths and weaknesses of each student’s writing style. Each student has a strong suit related to general writing that he or she should learn along with the teacher, which I feel can be best strengthened with the collaborative-expressive writing process that I have coined and invented for the sake of my argument. For the remainder of the article, ergo, I will further discuss how my invented process can tie with improving audience understanding and writing voices. During this discussion, I will try to take into consideration the benefits that expressive writing has over any other established process theories of writing, including post-process writing. I will subsequently discuss how teachers can establish consensus with general groups of composition students and their growing underlives and vice versa, while taking note of writings by scholars like Mina Shaugnessy.

The Stylish Stylistic Stylings of Style (Learning Objectives)

    If I ever had to answer what learning objectives in this class would ever be helpful in my future career and my life as a whole, it would probably be either the stylistic information presentation objective. That last thing sounds very robotic, so I'll just sum them up as knowledge of style. I feel that any kind of style applies to any sort of work. You need an effective writing style to carry your literary structure, you need an effective teaching style to carry the structures of your class, and you need to at least have a tighter composition style when it comes to writing for any style that you need to write down. Research papers, blog posts like this one, informal presentations, formal presentations, and so on; It doesn't matter what format those are in as long as you have a nice style to wrap things up and tie them in a bow. I'm already showing an odd style by using a hyperbole in that last sentence, so that just goes to show anyone how effective a writing style can grab people's attention and keep your college students from thinking about lunch and naked versions of their opposite sex (I must be equal opportunity).
    Stylistic presentation is essential to me because it keeps a speaker or writer from rambling on and on and on and on and on and on and on until eternity. If you keep rambling, you don't hook and reel your audience in, and then barely anyone ends up listening to or reading you. Stylistic presentation, if done right, helps you collaborate with other people and gives your argument a better focus than it originally did when you were just rambling on and on. That sort of presentation also helps you experiment a bit and see what you're doing well and what you're doing wrong. Style in any type of field, especially collaboration with others, helps you appeal to the logos, ethos, and pathos of your audience, resulting in a more effective presentation of any form under the sun without sounding too rambly or too mechanical. Stylistic presentation is essential to any teacher or creative writer because you need to appeal in some way to an audience. It doesn't matter which audience, as long as your stylistic presentation gains any audience's undivided attention. By learning stylistic presentation under formal or informal procedures, I've gained a better understanding on how style affects my research papers and my weird scribblings of fiction in general. This class that I've been taking for about three months now has sort of showed me that every essay, PowerPoint presentation, or podcast has this solid structure to it that knowledge of style can mold into a more understandable procedure with a better appeal. Stylistic presentation, overall, is awareness of how to appeal or to collaborate with an audience in general while knowing exactly when to begin and when to end your argument. If there's a better learning objective to this class that appeals to creative and critical writing, then I'm pretty sure someone will comment about it.

When A Syllabus of Failure Has Failed

Identify where you think students may fail in an assignment in your syllabus, and how you will use that as a teachable moment by design. 

Nobody likes to admit where a student could botch up an assignment in a flawless or next to flawless syllabus, but there are chances where one assignment can rise above the others and be completely horrible to students who work on it for the first time. The assignment that I think that most students would struggle with the most is the Rhetorical Analysis, for a number of reasons. One reason being that students wouldn't be able to tell what an example of a good rhetorical argument is in any form of media. They'd probably be too fixated on another assignment in the class, or another class in general. They could pick any number of rhetorical arguments from a TV news show or a video game or any work of fiction without understanding what they're trying to find, meaning that my assignment as it stands has no real scope to it. A student could try to pass off Bill Pullman's speech from the movie "Independence Day" (you know, the one where he's saying "We will not go quietly into that good night" and so on) and try to over-read a rabble-rousing speech from a fictional movie, and not understanding what the rhetoric in relation to such an argument is. I'd make that more of a teaching moment by giving students more of an idea of the fundamentals of rhetoric, as well as giving an assortment of questions that give a sort of criteria for rhetoric, i.e. a couple of guidelines on how to detect any sort of rhetorical argument in any speeches or presentations. So in effect, I would be teaching these students to know where to find hidden forms of rhetorical argument, giving them a better understanding of the different types of rhetoric that we have in the world. By instructing them thoroughly with this checklist that tests if something you read or hear is any kind of rhetorical argument, students can have a better understanding on how to approach the assignment and rhetorical arguments in general.

Students also might fail to keep up with the assignment or even fail to actually put effort into the assignment, due to the really late deadline at May 2nd. I can make something like that equally as teachable as the instructions on different types of rhetoric by having them work on it for most of the semester and setting up times that they can see me in my office and discuss their progress on the assignment in general. I can set up some kind of due date for a rough draft of the analysis early on the semester, just to give students ideas on what to use and to get them thinking about the assignment in general. The rough draft would generally get a good grade, while having lots of criticism on how to handle the assignment. The sort of thing that I'd be teaching them would more or less be a lesson in planning out an assignment in advance, while giving a clearer understanding on how to handle the complex idea of a rhetorical analysis. The rhetorical analysis, while 10% of the final grade, is necessary for giving students a better idea of the different aspects of rhetoric, but hard to nail on someone's first try. So special countermeasures like due dates for rough drafts and teaching rhetorical qualifications are more than necessary in helping to turn around students' failures to understand the assignment at hand.