Topic: "You Mean, Write It Over in Ink?"

10-second review: Just a reminder of what it was like to teach composition without word processing.

Title: “You Mean, Write It Over in Ink?” L Odell and J Cohick. English Journal (December 1975),48-53. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: The date of this article was December of 1975. The computer did not begin to infiltrate schools until about 1980. The title of the article gives you some idea of the tediousness of the task of revising when students had to rewrite—even the parts that were OK. No wonder students did not like to revise and teachers preferred teaching grammar exercises to teaching students to write.

I went through the word processing revolution. When students revised by hand the copy was laden with red marks, with cross-outs, arrows to show changes in position of the text, and barely legible cursive handwriting. Word processing made writing, especially revising, almost easy. And each copy, with black print on clean white paper, looked like a finished product, even if it was not.

Some issues at that time: How to encourage English teachers to teach word processing when they themselves were completely unfamiliar with and afraid of using the computer. Should students learn to type correctly before they learned word processing? Should students abandon paper and pencil now that the computer had made writing so much more attractive? What happens when the word processing program is so complex that the students worried more about which key to push than about expressing their ideas in writing? And these were only some of the issues with which we struggled in the early 1980s.

Word processing revolutionized students’ attitude about learning to write. Today, when word processing is taken for granted, no one remembers what we pioneers went through to adopt this technological miracle. RayS.

Topic: Teachers' Comments on Compositions

10-second review: Do students understand what we mean by “awk,” “more detail needed,” “paper lacks unity,” “topic sentence?” and “evidence?”

Title: “You Mean, Write It Over in Ink?” L Odell and J Cohick. English Journal (December 1975), 48-53. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: It might be a good idea to put student compositions on the overhead with my comments and ask students what these comments mean to them. RayS.

Topic: Critical Thinking

10-second review: Begin by having students respond to advertisement or TV commercials. What questions do the students have about the advertisement’s messages?

Title: “You Mean, Write It Over in Ink?” L Odell and J Cohick. English Journal (December 1975), 48-53. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Of course I’m old and have probably lost my ability to comprehend. I view on TV more and more ads that simply don’t make sense to me. Seems like a good place to begin my own and students’ training in asking questions for the purpose of improving critical thinking. RayS.

Topic: Teacher-Student Writing Conferences

10-second review: Define specific tasks for the conference and give students a written record of what was discussed—or have the student write a record of what was discussed—supplemented by teacher clarification, if needed.

Title: “The Student-Conference and the Writing Process.” CR Duke. English Journal (December 1975), 44-47. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: A record of what was discussed in the conference will provide continuity from conference to conference. RayS.

Topic: Revision and Proofreading

10-second review: For most students proofreading is the same as revision. The author of this article suggests that the instructor first read the composition through as a whole and then comment on unity, thesis, development, clarity, and smoothness which require revision. Second, read to provide corrections in sentence structure, usage, punctuation and spelling, which are the stuff of proofreading.

Title: “What about Revision?” R Baird Shuman. English Journal (December 1975), 41-43. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Provides a clear differentiation between revision and proofreading. Revision involves the whole composition. Proofreading involves the sentence and grammar.

If the instructor follows this approach to revision and proofreading, the students can soon learn to use the same approach themselves.

Unity. The writer folds a paper width-wise and on one side writes the main idea of the composition. Partner reads the composition and writes the perception of the main idea on the other side. Unfold the paper and compare main ideas. If they generally agree, the paper is probably unified.

Clarity. Partner reads the composition again. Whenever the partner encounters an idea that is not clear, the partner puts a question mark in the margin next to the sentence(s) that is/are not clear. Writer reviews the question marks, decides if the development is not complete or if the word choice is not clear and revises as necessary.

Smoothness. Tries to anticipate the awk.’s. Partner reads aloud the composition. If the partner stumbles or goes back to repeat in reading, underlines the part on which stumbled or has repeated. Writer reviews the underlined parts and decides if expression needs to be smoothed.

Spelling. Writer reads from last word to first. If you read from first to last, you will read for comprehension and will miss the details of each word. Reading from last to first focuses on the words and their details.

Grammar: Writer reads from first to last slowly in order to find the incomplete or run-on sentences, use of the passive voice, dangling modifiers, problems in parallelism, sexist language, usage and punctuation, etc.

RayS.

Topic: Case Studies in Teaching

10-second review: In working with student teachers, use case studies to discuss problems they encounter in teaching. What problems are they encountering? How have they tried to resolve them? What are some alternative solutions?

The article that suggested this activity in working with student teachers concerned the teaching of values in which students wrestled with ethical dilemmas. The article brought to mind the value of discussing case studies in preparing classroom teachers for the real world of teaching.

Title: “Discussing Moral Dilemmas in the Classroom.” J Mackey. English Journal (December 1975), 28-30. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: The case study approach could also be used in inservice programs in which teachers learn how to write a case study for discussion. The case study involves the following elements: Setting. Situation. Tentative Resolution. Results. Questions.

Example of a case study:

Setting: Community college writing course. Teacher was an adjunct instructor.

Situation: Young man with severe writing disabilities that prevented him from putting words, sentences and paragraphs together coherently. I had received no advanced information about this student’s problems nor about the school’s program for students with severe learning disabilities.

Tentative Resolution: Student wrote for ten minutes a day for the entire semester. I corrected his writing and he rewrote, incorporating my corrections so that he could visualize his writing as coherent writing.

Results: In a semester, the student was able to put together coherent sentences and paragraphs and even a bare-bones composition.

Questions: How do you grade this student in a composition class in which students are expected to write college-level compositions? Because the student did what I asked, I felt he earned A’s for his efforts and his progress. However, his writing was not college-level work. How should I have graded the student?

How could the school continue my work with this student? Nothing was available for me, an adjunct writing instructor, to communicate my concerns and efforts to other English teachers or to the department head. As it was, he would go on to the next teacher who would see that he had received an “A” grade, quickly determine that he was not a competent college-level writer and would severely penalize him for his writing.RayS.

Topic: Dealing with Parent Complaints about the Writing Program

10-second review: Go to the source. Talk to your English teacher about the writing program. If there is a problem with grammar, what is it from your point of view? Find out what the teacher intends to do about it. Read actual examples of your child’s compositions.

Title: “Grammar and Composition: Myths and Realities.” C Kuykendall. English Journal (December 1975), 6-7. A publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

Comment: Long ago, I found out that when people stand up in school board meetings and say that our students can’t read and write, I needed to find out from them exactly what they meant by “can’t read” or “can’t write.” Until the problem is defined, I couldn’t help to resolve it. “They don’t understand their textbooks” is a different problem from “they do not read anything outside of school.”

One time, the parents said their children were not being taught to write because they never saw any compositions coming home. When we were able to show them the collected compositions in the students’ folders, they recognized that the students were being taught to write. But we also learned that we needed to send the compositions home for their parents to see them before we filed them. We filed them, of course, so that students could analyze their progress from composition to composition. We also needed to send home the complete file at the end of the year so that students and parents could assess their progress together—before returning the file to keep for the following year.

We need to learn from parents their perceptions of the students’ problems in learning to read and to write. “They can’t read” and “They can’t write” are too general to be of any help in resolving the students’ problems. RayS.