Good writer, bad writer

Everyone has a friend who can’t tell a story. His/her thoughts seem to go everywhere. You can tell s/he has a point, but it takes a long time to get to it and then feels anticlimactic. These stories frustrate us because we generally like to have the general meaning or gist of an idea before we get detailed facts. If we get a bunch of facts without any idea how they fit together, we don’t know what to do with them and are likely to forget them.

The effect is magnified when it appears in analytical papers. When readers encounter evidence without being given the claim you are trying to prove, they feel as confused as you do when your friend tries and fails to tell a story. Even the best evidence in the world will mislead readers unless they know what claim your trying to prove with it first. Some readers may even read your facts and come to conclusions that conflict with those you’re trying to present.

On the other hand, when you present a clear topic sentence, which states your claim, your reader will do part of the work for you. They’ll see your facts and immediately try to connect it to that topic sentence.

Let’s look at an example of how this effect works. Continue reading ‘The value of topic sentences’

Summer nears its end, at least for academics. It’s been a busy time for me, which has kept me from writing here as much as I want. Fortunately, some of those events provide for plenty of topics to write about in the weeks to come.

In the late spring, I had the opportunity to kibitz at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s 75th Anniversary Reunion. I have a piece coming out on that sometime later this year to which I’ll link once it’s posted. One of the threads that I pulled on while writing the draft but ended up not including focused on one of the questions that kept popping up in the research on workshops: can writing be taught?

That seems like a good topic to start the year off. Continue reading ‘Can writing be taught?’

Working in academic support, I constantly think of two very different people. The first is a student, smart but sometimes unmotivated. He does his work, mostly gets it in on time, but is sloppy, some might even call him lazy, in his checking for errors. The second is the rhetoric teacher who sees his students make simple mistakes over and over in a stack of papers and feels frustrated at their lack of improvement. These are two people who on the surface look antagonistic to each other.

Both, of course, are past versions of me. I’ve been that “lazy” student, and I’ve been that “frustrated” teacher. So can I tell you that both want the same things. Both want to feel smart and respected. As a student, I wanted to attain some degree of academic success, but I sometimes sabotaged my effort by allowing myself to get overwhelmed by stress. As a teacher, I wanted my students to get better and tried as hard as I could to invent lessons to make that happen. Naturally, I got frustrated, sometimes even feeling like the quality of my teaching was on the line, when it seemed like students weren’t trying.

Eventually, I learned to reconcile the “lazy” student in me with the “frustrated” teacher by understanding that both came about from a cynical attitude. Cynicism about the potential for improvement, often drawn from a fixed mindset of one’s own intelligence or from what is expected by others, causes problems for both the student and the teacher. It’s one of the bigger causes of burnout in both.

Not surprisingly, a lot of this cynicism comes from a frustrated optimism. No student starts out hating learning. Most are thrilled when they learn something new as a young child, but somewhere along the line they change their view of education. Nor do most teacher get into teaching with a cynical attitude towards the profession. The cynicism that exists in education is there because of the way education works (or doesn’t work), and both sides have to fight it to find meaning and value in learning and teaching.

So when I see sites like “Shit my Students Write”, I understand the sentiment behind whoever put it together, but I’m deeply troubled by the cynicism behind it and what it means for education. Continue reading ‘Against cynicism in education’