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

In my syllabus, I included some reasonable assignments that I believe FYC students should grasp the concept of without much trouble, such as daily quizzes and readings, a weekly blog, a group multimedia project, peer critiques, and a rhetorical analysis. The one assignment that I believe would be out of an FYC student’s norm is the emulation paper:

Emulation Paper: Students will analyze two small passages of prose (posted on Blackboard) and compose their own creative passages that emulate each original author’s style. In addition, students will turn in a one-page reflection for each emulation discussing (1) specific written mannerisms or choices they see the author making and (2) how these choices contribute to the author’s argument and style.

I have taken this assignment from one of my undergraduate grammar classes. We were given a passage of Hemingway’s and another of Mary Oliver’s. This assignment caused me to not only analyze a work, but to dissect it. In my mind, this is a valuable exercise that liberates students temporarily from the pressure of finding their own style; rather, they can try out other techniques that they might have otherwise been afraid of using. I think that Hemingway is a useful author to assign because students do not have to be intimidated by a large vocabulary. His style is simple, but distinctive. Oliver would be a more difficult author for basic writers to emulate, but she provides more opportunity for more creative students to indulge in a new writing style.

I see various things that would confuse a student and perhaps cause him/her to stumble. First of all, FYC students have been taught to be very concerned about plagiarism. I think there could be some confusion about what it means to “emulate” an author without copying their work. We would have extensive discussion about this problem in class, looking at several examples of emulations and dissecting what the emulator did in their own writing to mirror the original author’s. This assignment emphasizes the importance of grammar in writing, showing how form shapes content. I think this could also be a point of confusion for some students, as many writers do not adhere to standard grammar. This makes students examine the purpose behind an author’s usage of such grammar, though. We would discuss reasons for particular phrasing, pacing, vocabulary choices, etc. Lastly, I think that students might be intimidated by having to come up with their own creative pieces.

I am not sure that basic writers would be able to succeed in this assignment, strictly because they must succeed at two things: Writing a cohesive section of their own creative writing prose and doing it in the style of someone else. I believe it is a valuable experience regardless, because students will be confronted with the role of form in one’s writing. Oftentimes, students cannot get past the fact that they are not “good” at grammar, and they do not comprehend that grammar is not meant to be a rule book. It is meant to help us convey exactly what we wish to convey, and there is a stark difference between those two purposes.

List 5 terms you don't quite know yet how to define from our final keywords list.

Keywords:

Dialectic vs. Rhetoric

Empowerment

Error correction

Intertextuality

Knowledge

"What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?"

All this talk of photo essays in class, and I had never heard of them before. I am so glad that we got an example of them in class on Monday. After looking at them, I think this is a great assignment for FYC students. We discussed how photo essays slow students down enough to maximize their on-task thought. In addition, collaboration on this type of creative assignment really forces students to discuss their own artistic ideas, and they may not have been challenged in this way before. I especially appreciate this assignment because the technology is not difficult to work with. Like Selfe puts forth: it is vital to create an assignment that maximizes dialectical engagement without cutting off students who don’t have a high technological literacy. So often we are discussing potential ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, and I find myself thinking that if I were a student, the technology itself would be a barrier for me. Maybe I’m just an old grandma when it comes to new technology—I have a basic grasp of how to do most things, but I often find myself thinking that the payoffs of learning some new technology don’t seem to be worth the struggle of learning it. I also am more than willing to recognize that upcoming students will have a better literacy of technology than I do.

As a student, I have always had a reluctance and an apprehensiveness toward both group projects and projects that required more than a basic knowledge of technology. Group projects seemed to exist just so I could carry the weight of four or five other students in my class, and they always somehow ended up with me (or if I was lucky, me and one other person) scrambling the night before it was due to finish every other neglected portion of the project. I think one of the worst cases of this was during my junior year of undergrad, when my professors wanted the entire Cultural Theory class (about 25 students) to collaborate on a group project to create a mock-news program. Everything worked out okay (mostly because we were a classroom full of honors students), but the stresses of collaborating with such a large group and trying our darndest to cope with difficult and unfamiliar technology in the span of two or three weeks almost proved to be too much. We ended up dividing the program into sketches, much like SNL sketches, and writing and filming in our smaller groups, and editing it together subsequently. (I’m embarrassed to say that a friend and I wrote a rap of new social media diction that has been added to our vocabulary over the years… and it turned out a’ight.)

…All this to say that I never dreamed of assigning many (if any) group projects after becoming a professor. Dr. Rice’s statement in class that all assignments should be group projects was some serious food for thought for me. I understand that in the “real world,” collaboration is an essential skill, and I agree that it should be practiced at least once a semester. However, I do not think that making every project a group project in college would be great practice of the type of collaboration students will have to do in the “real world,”—if only due to the fact that at a job, the students get paid, whereas in school, the students are paying. For students who are used to getting by with the bare minimum grades, there is no reason for them to try in a group; rather, groups tend to protect lazy students and punish good students simultaneously. While we can make the argument that this also happens in the “real world,” we also have to acknowledge that in one instance, you can get fired, whereas in the other, you might just get a lower grade.

I think that for group projects to work, they must be like these photo essays. You must be able to see the collaboration, having each student define and defend the role s/he takes up during the project. In continuation with this idea, I think that groups should never receive one collective grade.

"Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible."

I suppose that one concept that has continued to stick out to me in this class is the problem of addressing an audience and teaching students to do so in their writing. We began talking about “audience” by reading Ede and Lunsford and noting their most important questions: What does it mean to address an audience? How do we define audience? To what degree should teachers address/stress audience?

We mentioned in class on Friday that the notion of audience has fundamentally changed in the last ten years with growing globalization. In this regard, it is difficult for students to understand that a piece of writing can have a specific audience, as opposed to sending it into the “void.” I have to admit that I also struggle with the concept of audience, and I find that I relate to the students who cannot always grasp the significance of “audience.” My high school taught English through rhetorical analysis, and I have come to feel that this is the reason I never felt strong about English until college (where they taught English classes through literature). In college, I was rarely, if ever, told to pick out the author’s audience. We would dwell on audience so far as it meant to look at a work’s context—time period, political landscape, biographical information about the author and their relationship to the rest of the world, etc. However, audience was rarely the entire focus in our study of literature. Much more so, in literature, we focused on resurfacing themes in a piece. Literature became the study of a person’s mind and the ways that they chose to present it in writing.

For some reason, discussion of audience can sometimes seem unnatural to me, like going against the grain of what I feel the author was trying to do. Some authors don’t even know what they are doing as they write—they do not have an audience in mind, and their only concern in regards to audience is if their work will be understood by a reader. We discussed in class Mitchell and Taylor’s “General Model of Writing” and how it places far too much emphasis on the audience (even disregarding the author as a reader). With this model, writing becomes pandering to the masses rather than expression of the human mind. In class, we have discussed several times the idea of the author as the first reader. In addition, we talked about audience addressed vs. audience invoked. My main concern is that sometimes, the author is the only reader. Some authors do not set out to “inform” or to “persuade” (they may do so in the process of writing, but for many this is not a primary goal). Some authors just wish to toy with an idea. Some authors begin writing because they see a problem and wish to offer new perspectives on it, to provoke thought in anyone who will read their piece, including themselves (and yet, in our grading, if a student points out that the author’s audience could be anyone, we tell them they need to specify, specify, specify).

Specifically while grading, I have noticed that most students struggle to supply an answer to the concept of “audience.” After three assignments that each ask for the audience and purpose of the same three articles, most students still don’t get it. (Something is wrong when a class does an assignment three times and is still doing it wrong). I think that many students cannot see the higher purpose in picking out audience/purpose/rhetorical choices, because many times, starting that small in a work makes you feel like you are failing to see the greater significance of the work. Specifically within andragogy, I find it almost impossible to explain to an adult why it matters that they be able to pick out the rhetorical choices that Robert MacNeil, John Simon, and Douglas McGray make. When you sit down to learn about great literature and your teacher tells you to search for rhetorical choices in the work (and that’s all you’re allowed to write about), it is very easy to get frustrated with English. In teaching with such a strong emphasis on rhetorical choices, audience, and purpose, I find that Shaughnessy’s idea says it all:  the student “risks as little as possible on the page… producing written Anguish.” We have to allow for deviation in the formula, for other potential ways of seeing a piece to peek through. It’s so complicated, because I feel that it is necessary to be able to recognize rhetorical choices, as that contributes to one’s interpretation of major themes in the work. But for me, writing never “clicked” until I was allowed to discuss the themes that I perceived in the work, rather than being herded into a distinct formula for a certain type of paper. For this reason, I loved the model of GW’s program that Jessica presented on during Friday’s class. I hope that programs like this can become the basis for other composition programs, as they provide such a high degree of relevance for the students.

Extended Analysis Response--Plagiarism

For this week’s blog, I listened to a podcast on plagiarism by Colleen, Jill, Mary, and Rachel.  In their podcast, they highlight several points:  unintentional plagiarism, plagiarism vs. inspiration, plagiarism vs. fanfiction, and plagiarism vs. parody.

I found their discussion on unintentional plagiarism spot-on. Mary discussed the fact that many high-schoolers have no idea that they are plagiarizing, particularly with paraphrases. Many students do not understand that they need to cite paraphrases, nor do they truly understand how to put an author’s thoughts into their own words (as we saw in our grading of the paraphrasing assignments). Personally, when grading I saw many students who simply took to the thesaurus and attempted to translate every one of the author’s words.  I saw this as an even lazier form of Engfish. More importantly, I left notes on each of these papers explaining that they will need to learn to paraphrase properly for future research, or even for future jobs. Being able to paraphrase properly shows that you actually understand what you just read or what was just told to you.  Jill pointed out that many students do not have a grasp of their own voice yet and do not feel that they have a right to some words. I agree, and would go further in saying that some students do not feel like they have the knowledge to restate an author’s ideas accurately. I think that this is why so many of them turned to a thesaurus before even trying to restate an idea in words that they know.

Colleen then moved into discussion of having an “original” thought and questioned, how do you make something truly original? How can an author’s work be inspired by another work and still maintain its originality? Mary pointed out that scholarship builds from other scholarship and that, in today’s world, authors cannot be responsible for the originality of every single thought. I agree, and (as I am not in creative writing) I have always marveled at authors who are able to come up with never-before-seen or –heard-of storylines. I often think of this question of originality when looking at newly released movies. It seems so rare that a movie is released that is not (a) a remake or reboot of an older movie or (b) an adaptation of a book. I am not saying that reboots and adaptations cannot be well done or even quite original; I am saying that, in today’s world, one would be hard-pressed to find a story that was not inspired by another, or a story that does not reflect another in some way.

Jill then transitioned to the discussion of fanfiction vs. plagiarism. Colleen explained the finer points of fanfiction:  the work (a) must be in your own words and (b) cannot follow the author’s original plot. Apparently (I did not know this) some fanfiction authors are professional and they get paid for their fanfics. They have to be knowledgeable about whether or not the author allows for fanfiction of their work, as some authors (Colleen mentioned Anne Rice) dislike fanfiction. Colleen also mentioned that some authors enjoy building up their fan bases, as “fandoms” are a large movement now. Encouraging fanfiction of your own work can serve as free publicity, and many authors choose to take advantage of it. I honestly do not know much about fanfiction, and I had never before thought of its connection to plagiarism. This section of the podcast was enlightening to me. I thought Mary’s addition at the end was fascinating:  the idea that fanfiction almost mirrors oral folklore, in that new storytellers add to, embellish, or even change plot points of well-known stories.

Lastly, they discussed parody vs. plagiarism. Jill elaborated on the difference in parody and satire. Parody, she pointed out, is protected under copyright law, as it says true to the original source material (ex: Young Frankenstein). Satire, in contrast, is if the source material is changed to comment on larger social issues, and is not protected under copyright law. To get around this, satire authors often tack on the words, “Unauthorized Parody” to their work. I had always wondered about the logistics of parodies and I never looked into it. Honestly, I had never thought of how much legalese has to be accounted for in the career of creative writing.  This discussion brought to light for me that my cohorts in creative writing must be constantly thinking about plagiarism and how to get around it. It is an absolute feat for authors to build a good storyline (whether original or inspired by another work) and have it successfully published.