Write Now: Making Time and Space to Practice Writing

This blog post, including examples of practice for suggestions 1 and 2, draws on the insights of Leah Senatro, an English PhD candidate at the University of California Irvine whose research explores the rhetorical consequences of the body and sensorial experience as well as digital multimodal composition. 

In Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (2015), Dylan Dryer and Kathleen Blake Yancey offer two observations about writing that are worth keeping in mind as we move through the semester. The first, from Dryer, is that though we often use language associated with speech to describe writing processes (for example, we try to determine what the text “says,” we refer to the writer’s “voice” and “tone,” we think of readers as an “audience”), writing is quite distinct from speaking. Unlike speech—which has been central to human communication for over 200,000 years; is learned, developed and reinforced at an early stage through socialization; and is enabled by the physiological and cognitive evolution in our species—writing is an inscriptive technology that has been in use for just a little over 5,000 years. Written language, Dryer notes, cannot be said to be “natural” in the way that speech is (Dylan B. Dryer, “Writing is Not Natural”).

Yancey builds on Dryer’s point. She claims we tend to neglect these important distinctions between speaking and writing when we talk about writers as being “naturally gifted” or when we view writing as a means of communication easily transferred across contexts. Because it remains an “unnatural” act, Yancey reasons, writing must be learned and developed through conscious practice. It is “through the practice of writing, we develop writing capacities, among them the capacity to adjust and adapt to different contexts, purposes and audiences” (Yancey, “Learning to Write Effectively Requires Different Kinds of Practice, Time, and Effort”).

How and when might students in your classes get in some writing practice? Drawing on Yancey’s framework, here are three suggestions:

1. Practice Fluidity

All writers benefit from becoming more fluid with our own writing processes. This fluency can include a range of practices, such as an awareness of how writers generate their ideas, how they construct their sentences and build paragraphs, and how they review their writing to see if it aligns with what they want to communicate. To support students with developing their writing fluidity, instructors can ask them to:

• Brainstorm ideas with a classmate, after a conversation about idea generation
• Reflect on where they are in their writing process and to develop a to-do list, after reviewing the purpose of an assignment
• Freewrite a first draft of a section in their writing assignment, after discussing the value of the drafting process and idea generation
• Summarize an assigned reading, after discussing that reading 

2. Practice Refining Techniques 

With a little priming, framing, or reviewing, instructors can prepare students to practice a writing skill that is situated and relevant to the work in class. For example, after discussing models, students might practice developing indirect characterization through the use of dialogue, creating accurate APA citations for a research paper, synthesizing sources for a literature review, or displaying data in a results section. Rather than approaching writing techniques as generic abilities, instructors can discuss them with students as features of a particular genre or expectations for a disciplinary or professional form of discourse. To support students with practice refining writing techniques, instructors can ask them to:

• Revise a technical memo for clarity, after a lesson on using discipline-specific terminology appropriately
• Write the first paragraph of their methods section, after reading a sample methods section as a class
• Write an entry for their annotated bibliography, after writing a sample annotation as a class
• Properly integrate a citation string into their literature review, after a lesson on drawing similarities and differences across the research literature

3. Practice in and with Different Technologies 

With so many digital tools and technologies, including generative AI, the inscriptive features of writing are being redefined and have become more diffuse and multimodal. Ideas generated in a notebook, on a phone’s notes app, or through a speech-to-text tool might then be migrated to a Google Doc with collaborative editing and eventually result in a slide deck, an interactive timeline, or a podcast script, among many other possibilities. Each of these modes presents affordances and challenges that students can reflect on when given time to practice and share their uses. To support students with practice writing in and with different technologies, instructors can ask them to:

• Interact with an AI tool (e.g. Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot) during the planning stages of their writing assignment and then analyze and discuss with classmates the transcript of that interaction
• Work with a partner to generate a graph using R, after modeling its use in class with a common dataset
• Write the script of a short podcast on a core topic in the course, after analyzing episodes from NPR’s Short Wave

Please Share Your Practices

The Writing Across the Curriculum Team is happy to consult with you on ways to craft Writing to Learn activities and in-class workshops that provide students with opportunities to practice writing. Many of these practice sessions can be done quickly and routinely and integrated with other other modes of instruction. We also eagerly invite you in the comments below to share how you make time and space in your classes for students to practice writing.