7.3: . . . College to First Year Writing

These three questions mark the productive dissonance of the first year writing class you’re in right now. It is a complicated, transitional space for you as you experiment with new networks of places, people, and identity. If you surveyed your class about their attitudes towards reading and writing—and I do every semester, every class—I bet the majority would describe in great detail how they aren’t good writers, how they’re easily bored by readings they don’t choose, and how they struggle with writing intensive classes because of the pressure and the lack of control they promise. Do you see yourself in one or more of those answers? We all know this writing and reading stuff is important, but it’s rare to find many students who can articulate that importance in their own terms, in the contexts of their lives. My guess is that, over the years, you’ve heard more people preaching the abstract importance of writing in your life than fostering invention.

Perfect example: you’re in a class and find out over half the class hasn’t read an assigned reading or prepared a complete draft of a writing project. Does your teacher get mad and reprimand your class, and make a case for why the work should’ve been done? Do disengaged students hide while prepared students silently seethe? I don’t find these situations, and the assumptions about student intent that underly them, very helpful. Instead, imagine if the students and teacher could figure out how to make the situation work, how to invent a moment for learning with what is readily available, how to bang two rocks together and try to make a spark.

Invention Potential 1: Less Can Be More

Let’s try that, banging two rocks together, first with reading. You didn’t read and prepare for class today. Whether it was too many hours at work or too many other things due in your other classes, something just had to give, and you let the reading go for your writing class. But you have a few minutes before class to pull something together. You have the reading, you have some paper and a pen or a laptop, and you have the course syllabus. Take five minutes, and make them count. Quickly answer these questions.

• What is the title of the reading? In general, what is the abstract (the summary paragraph that may precede the article) or the first paragraph talking about?

• What is the title and subtitle of your class? What goals has the teacher identified for you and the class (now often found in lists called Goals for Instruction or Student Learning Outcomes)?

• What is one idea or question you can think of that connects the assigned reading to at least one of the goals you found in the syllabus?

Even if you don’t feel like sharing your idea or posing your question in class, it’s an opening connection that you’ve made in your own words. It’s a start at writing your way into the class as opposed to letting the class always be written for you. This is writing and invention potentials helping you make sense of a class meeting, and we haven’t even begun to work with a formal writing assignment.

Let’s consider a situation where you were thinking about writing—there will be a day when something is due and either you’re not happy with what you’ve brought to class, or your teacher sees your work as incomplete, or both. But since writing is a process filled with successes and failures, those days when drafts are due or some kind of writing deadline has arrived, I try to make space for a workshop that can help everyone in the room, from those with nothing to show to those with too much. We circle up, one circle inside another, a set of ten to fifteen workshop partners. You get five minutes to explain what you wrote, what you were trying to do, and how this meets the demands of the assignment. And you need to prompt some feedback from your partner—What do you think? Does it make sense? What’s your favorite part of my writing? What would you like to see developed in my next revision? What question do I make you think of with my writing? Ten minutes and an exchange later, we switch partners and repeat until class time is over. Very simple setup, and it doesn’t matter if you have confusion, an unwritten idea, or something of a draft. After one of these speedback sessions (where feedback meets speed-dating), and regardless of whether you started with less or more, you will have likely clarified your goals and learned about how your peers are trying to meet theirs.

I make room for these sessions on a regular basis, but you can do the same outside of class. Speedbacking requires a place, a timer, any work/ideas you have prepared for class, and some time set aside before a class when a piece of writing is due. You can organize this type of feedback in small groups of students, meet in a comfortable environment, and push each other to listen and respond to each other’s writing quickly. It will be less stressful than sitting blank in front of a monitor for hours.

Feedback activities depend on your desire to connect—ideas, people, pieces of writing. They do not depend on imposed trips to writing centers, complicated workshop setups, reading quizzes, or any number of things writers find themselves doing to make sure work is getting done. And when you can find feedback strategies you enjoy, you will find ways to make invention part of the real writing you experience every day instead of relegating it to solitary places outside of class where we often think preliminary and catch-up work has to be done.

The trick here is that in college, especially in writing- and reading-intensive classes, you can take control of getting started and getting eedback by creating a student network willing to talk to each other about their ideas, their potentials, for a writing assignment. You may feel blocked, but maybe you just need several other perspectives on what you’re thinking. And if you can create a speedback situation, or some other feedback stratgey that happens while you’re writing and not just after a deadline, you’re more likely to feel like you’re responding to real questions and not just an assignment.