7.4: . . . College to First Year Writing to Objects of Study

Increasing opportunities for feedback helps you tap into your emerging networks and invent compelling writing projects—ones that blend your interests with what your teacher wants from you according to your assignment, ones that create intriguing experiences and arguments for public audiences, and often look like. . . . Well, over the years, I’ve seen T-shirts, board games, bracelets, student-designed care packages, photo essays, house blueprints, even a letter to college students, divided into seven paragraphs and hung from trees all over campus. All very original, these student projects were created in first semester college writing classes, their authors’ ages ranging from sixteen to fifty-six, with experiences from Central Mexico to Northern Indiana. With that in mind, I want to turn to some course documents, while bringing in some student voices, and a couple of extended examples so that, with this rich context, you can see the potential for re-thinking how you can generate ideas in a first year writing class.

Invention Potential 2: Displacing Focus with Rhetorical Drift

As I think through the types of projects I’ve made room for over the years, it strikes me that even if we just think about the ones I listed above, they seem to be a pretty loose group. Not much holding them together. So far this essay of philosophizing mixed with examples might make you think that I let my students write anything they want and that I’m encouraging you, as well, to write anything you want; in other words, trading rules for freedom. I don’t think writers have to choose one over the other. I don’t think you can. If I try to convince you to write whatever you want, I’m using a traditional strategy for engaging students: your choice, your interests, your whatever. But any writing choice is a choice. At the end of a semester, Adbe Guerrero, a former student, taught me about the positions that expertise and choice occupied in relation to his experiences, my teaching, and one of our later readings:

I have begun to notice that all of my [question and response
papers] are negative. Ha, well, I don’t plan on stopping.
Throughout our last reading, the authors talk about “nurturing
creativity” and I suppose this isn’t something I’m used to
since most of my teachers didn’t give a rat’s ass about what
the students had to say. It was always what they wanted. . . .
In your class I had so much more freedom to write the way I
wanted and made my voice be heard the way I wanted it to be
(rude and realistic). Personally, I can’t stand being polite in my
papers because, if there is something that irritates me, I want
to be able to express it the way I would when I’m speaking
to an individual in person. But in high school they wouldn’t
allow anything close to that.

In class, I do talk about and privilege rhetorical choices rather than impose top-down requirements. Adbe frames our class in terms of voice and choice (and he’s quite aware of the choices he’s making for his preferred written voice and the limits they have in other situations), but his comments and the range of work students might complete in first year writing courses is a challenge to that most misunderstood of misunderstood writing-teacher-terms: focus. You can’t easily find the focus of what my students are writing while I’m busy pushing invention.

That’s by design.

Regardless of how traditional your experience with writing instruction has been, the idea of focus is inescapable. Even though I shy away from talk of focus at the beginning of a project, it’s natural to crave it. We often see the amount of focus as a corollary to the quality of the writing. Both students and teachers want goals, and we should have them. They inspire, direct, and demarcate. But when our goals become expressed by questions like How many words? How many pages? How many sources?, we’ve let the goals displace writing as learning and invention. We have to balance our need to know with our desire to understand. Then we can offset the obstacle of focus and try to generate cohesion in writing through experimentation and drift. So why not ask: How many new ideas should we come up with for this writing project?

I’m introducing words here like experiment, invention, and drift, so I should explain what they mean in this context. I want writers who leave me behind early in their college careers to be able to analyze and adapt to the writing situations they will face after my class. If we believe that there is one type of academic discourse that college authorities value and that we should try to use as a model, you end up learning a long list of rhetorical moves, sentence types, written tones, etc. It may be quite a long list, but it’s still defined by an ideal type of writing. There are a lot of reasons not to believe in an ideal type of writing. We’re not sure if, and to what extent, writing skills transfer from one class to another. You may have teachers from multiple generations who may have very different ideas about how people should write at a university. And your ideas about good writing need an invitation to the party because, otherwise, teachers risk stagnation in their own ideas as writing experts and writing teachers.

Faced with these realities, you can make room to test the effects of different ways of writing (experiment), combine seemingly disconnected forms of writing (invention), and even try to be open to that which you can’t predict or control as writers (drift). In the context of the project sequence I use, I want to share an example from Brittany Ramirez, the student quoted in the epigraph for this chapter, as she works with what Adbe calls freedom of my projects, what I think of as inventive potential. While Erika, Adbe, and Ozzy will chime in about the class and their work in the images I bring in throughout the essay, I want to discuss a sequence of three projects by Brittany to highlight how you can work with experimentation and drift as alternatives to a more focused writing sequence. I think Brittany’s work is a compelling example of how subtle and measured the shifts can be as a writing project develops. And you’ll see how what begins for her as a default essay becomes a mock-up of an ACT exam reading passage with questions.

Invention Potential 3: If You Can Ask WHY?, You’re a Theorist

The first part of a writing sequence that revolves around invention begins with one of three projects. In Project 1-Breaking Ice, I explain our goals this way:

To start a conversation with each of you about this project, I
would start with some questions: How did you get here? What
do you want? How do you think you’re going to get it? Then, after
we talked for a long time, I would say, So what does all that
have do with writing and/or learning?

See, I’m not sure how you think writing happens or how
learning works, and I want to know about your theories even
while we are reading other people’s ideas. I also don’t think
that “writing” and “learning” are easily defined, or that they

happen only in classrooms, or that we always have control over
what we write and what we learn. . . . For this project, then,
I want you to create a text in which you explain a theory
you have about writing and learning. You’ll have to come
up with (1) a real question you have about your experiences
with writing and learning, (2) an idea of what a project about
that question could look like, and (3) a way to answer (1) and
create (2). To begin the project and get the gears turning, I
already asked everyone to write in class about the strangest
piece of writing they ever did (see the blog notes on day one).
After you write about and we discuss your ideas for Project
1 as a whole class, we’ll also discuss potential audiences and
purposes based on who you think is invested in the question
driving your project.

Beginning with Project 1, I ask students to explain the forms they chose for their theory of how writing and learning work. A student could, for instance, write a manifesto to their high school writing teachers calling for an end to test-teaching. We can imagine a letter to parents about how they taught you to learn and how you’re working with strategies at college. Maybe we can even imagine writing a profile to a teacher explaining how a particular type of student works best. I don’t get much of that, regardless of how many examples I throw out. I get “essays” and student explanations that the essays do what essays do. Totally normal, especially when I get a summary of the essay rather than an explanation of how a student crafted it and wanted it to work. Here are excerpts from an early draft of Brittany’s Project 1 that emerged from her response writing. She decided to test the connections between her experiences in high school and in our class. Worth noting is that, without my direct prompting, she and several students began to blend characteristics from their question and response papers into their longer projects, a good sign that they were testing how the familiar meshed with the strange.

Brittany Ramirez
English 1301.02s1–09
6.14.09
Project 1

Q: If you can comprehend difficult material (i.e. Downs & Wardle Article), does that affect your writing capability?