Teaching with Writing Blog

Academic voice is a difficult concept to capture, and in most cases, is not a topic of direct instruction. In part, this difficulty stems from competing senses of what voice means: Is it personal expression of the writer, a conventional scholarly tone owned by a discipline, or both? Although experienced readers can tell when a piece of academic writing sounds ‘wrong’ (perhaps too descriptive, too informal, too stilted, or too oblique), we might be hard pressed to identify which features of the writing contribute to the sense.

Undergraduate students face a challenging terrain when writing with sources. In their prior language arts courses, they often used the MLA style to incorporate ‘textual evidence’ in ‘research papers’. As they cross the university curriculum, they confront a host of different strategies for incorporating summary, paraphrase, and quotation, many new and unfamiliar ways of producing research writing, and a myriad of documentation styles.

When students seek help with the writing tasks they are assigned for class, their most common requests are for detailed and specific feedback and access to effective examples. Assignment sheets with clear evaluative criteria, rubrics that specify expectations, and formative feedback can help to satisfy the first request. How can instructors use student writing samples without creating an accidental template, or worse, encouraging plagiarism and patchwriting?

Sentence-level errors can be a frustrating component of working with student writing. Each instance of a sentence-level error breaks the flow of reading and can lend an impression of carelessness or inattention. Faculty members, many of whom are accomplished writers, can spend hours correcting minor errors in student writing, which distracts from the learning goals of the assignment.

The Teaching With Writing series exists to help instructors use writing in their courses to support student learning, and we know that faculty members and instructors who assign and assess student work are the right people to help their students develop as writers in disciplines. At the same time, we hope that instructors will also encourage student writers to use all of the available resources on campus for support.

As the semester winds down, your students may be winding up. The syllabus and assignments you worked hard to craft and sequence in August take on new urgency in December. Office hours and Student Writing Support are now a lived reality. Amidst the end-of-term immediacy—the present tense, or tense present—it is worthwhile to ask your students to take some time to look back and to look ahead.

Last month’s TWW post offered three suggestions for assigning and supporting team-based writing. These suggestions emphasized a consensual, interdependent, and collaborative vision for team-based work. It’s a fine vision, but, at the end of the day, how do you assess it? Because our students often think of grades as individual, distinctive, and competitive markers of performance, team-based writing assignments can raise challenging questions when it comes to their evaluation. Should one grade be given equally to each student on a team?

Many disciplines and professions require extensive collaboration for research and communication; indeed, for many fields, group writing and presentations are more common than individual work. Given their academic and real-world importance, team-based writing projects are excellent opportunities to practice and develop collaborative skills. However, as quite a few of us—and our students—can attest, “group work” can be a source of frustration due to unclear parameters, unequal distribution of work, and uncertainty about how one will be assessed.

At the start of the semester, students are brimming with questions. While many of these questions may initially concern course logistics and policies, they nonetheless send a powerful signal: engagement. As a good deal of educational research has shown, student engagement is high at the start of the term, and a key indicator of this engagement is talk.