Category Archives: Writing

grammar, Writing

Fostering Convention Awareness in Students: Eschewing a Rules-Based View of Language

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The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

“The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats

[W]e should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness.

“Analysis of Cliches and Abstractions,” Lou LaBrant (1949)

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us start with two writers from the monuments of “great authors”—Chaucer and Shakespeare (like Prince and Madonna, from the land of one-name people). Both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote with double negatives and double comparatives/superlatives. In their eras, these constructions were emphatic, not breaking some rule of grammar.

Now for context: On the Teaching and Learning Forum of the NCTE Connected Community a battle has been waged (one rivaling Beowulf versus Grendel) over the use of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

That’s right, while a presidential election is brewing, we teachers of English are hotly debating pronoun/antecedent agreement.

So it is here, as a 30+-year English teacher and teacher of future and current English teachers, I would like to make a stand for descriptive grammar as a compromise for the unrelenting grammar war.

How, I can feel you asking, can taking a side be a compromise? Let me try to explain.

My journey to how I teach grammar, mechanics, and usage has been profoundly informed by the history of the English language and linguists—both of which strongly support a descriptive view of language that recognizes and embraces change.

As well, I am a writer, one who uses the language in the service of my craft, and thus, one who does not work within rules, but through an awareness of conventional usage.

Two key points are worth examining more fully—conventions and awareness.

Language does not function under rules (fixed and prescriptive) but under conventions that are both situational and temporal. Again, read Chaucer or Shakespeare with a keen eye on their usages that became “incorrect,” or peruse Nathaniel Hawthorn’s writing for Olympic gold medal amounts of commas, many of which in our contemporary time would not be used with absolutely no loss of meaning.

Language conventionality, in fact, is a much healthier view of language usage than rules since those conventions are organic, growing out of actual language usage that gravitates toward effective (and even efficient) communication of ideas.

“Why are these homies dissin my girl? Why do they gotta front?” from Weezer reflects the tendency of language to clip—”dissin” for “disrespecting” and “front” for “putting on a front.” Again, Rivers Cuomo and Weezer are representing the exact manipulations of language found in Shakespeare, who is nearly the pinnacle of “authors we worship.”

Next, the key to my argument that a descriptive view of language is a compromise in the grammar war is teaching convention awareness instead of rules acquisition (see Johns for a parallel examination of genre awareness versus genre acquisition).

Taught with a descriptive approach to language (for example, noting that many if not most people use “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun), convention awareness addresses both that conventions exist, and often with status marking consequences (see Weaver’s Teaching Grammar in Context), and that some conventions are in flux (I was taught a rigid distinction between “shall” and “will,” one now defunct with dearly departed “shall,” and contemporary students remain confronted with a similar rigid view of “who” and “whom,” whilst poor “whom” is barely breathing and Hospice surely is on the ready).

In other words, the descriptive view of language acknowledges the prescriptive view, and ultimately renders the student an agent in their use of the language (see what I did there?). However, the prescriptive rules-based approach to language necessarily ignores or marginalizes the much more historically and linguistically sound descriptive view.

I teach my students that pronoun/antecedent agreement remains a status marking usage convention for many in the academic world—highlighting that while common usage of “they” as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is increasing, many in academia or formal publishing remain committed to “they” as always plural, noting, however, that many in academia also strongly conform to gender-neutral and gender-sensitive usages of language.

Ultimately, I want my students to recognize that conventions (and especially viewing language through rules) is about power—who decides what for whom (a few short breaths and chest compressions).

For our students to be aware, then, of both descriptive and prescriptive views of language, for those students to gain a recognition that language use is about purpose and choice, bound by situation and audience, is for them to become agents in how their own credibility and authority is viewed.

As a final plea from someone who teaches first-year writing to college students, I want to note that students who have been taught a rules-based view of language are often disillusioned as soon as they see how often professional writers are not conforming to those rules. Like fragments. Those students tend to struggle with gaining their own voices and their own autonomy over language.

In other words, a rules-based view of language tends to erode a student’s appreciation of the beauty and power of language—while teaching convention awareness fosters in students both the moves for and enjoyment in investigating language usage.

Encouraging students to enthusiastically wrestle with language is a goal of our English classes worth fighting for (wink-wink, nod-nod).

So this is my modest proposal, one dedicated to a full and complex appreciation of language usage.

It is also a plea for a much healthier approach to language that understands “they” most certainly will be a gender-neutral singular pronoun soon, just as “whom” is about to join “shall” in the great archaic constructions in the sky.

All that is sure to remain is the language itself, and it is ours to treat it and our students with the kindness and dignity they deserve.

See Also

From Ken Lindblom on the Teaching and Learning Forum:

For more, please see our book, Grammar Rants (includes the introduction for free) or our freely-available English Journal article, “Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction.” 

Another great resource is Edgar Schuster’s Breaking the Rules.

Students: Do Experts Follow the Rules You’re Taught?, Judith Landrum

Steven Pinker: ‘Many of the alleged rules of writing are actually superstitions’

Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct

Here Is Why We Need Transgender Pronouns

The Washington Post will allow singular ‘they’

The Singular “They” — When Pronouns Get Personal

It’s time for gender-free pronouns, Katharine Whitehorn

Barbara Kingsolver, Writing

Guided Activity: More Reading Like a Writer

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After walking through a reading like a writer (scholar) class session using an essay by Barbara Kingsolver, I want here to offer briefly a guided activity for students to complete in groups in order to practice reading like a writer as one step in their own growth as writers.

Here I ask students to read “Water Is Life” by Barbara Kingsolver, and then, to discuss and answer the following questions:

  • What appears to be Kingsolver’s target/primary audience? What is the evidence from the essay to support that?
  • How does Kingsolver create an effective opening? What techniques (literary, rhetorical), strategies does she employ? Give specific examples.
  • What are Kingsolver’s major claims? How does she elaborate on those claims? What evidence does she use to support her claims? Give specific examples.
  • Identify one or two of the best sentences in this essay. What makes them effective?
  • Does Kingsolver break the “rules” of grammar or that you were taught in school? Examples? What is her purpose in these situations?
  • What is the guiding tone of this essay? How does Kingsolver create that tone? Give specific examples. Does she ever break that tone? Example(s)?
  • What does Kingsolver want her audience to know or do? Give specific examples.
  • How does Kingsolver frame this essay in her closing paragraph(s)? Give specific examples.

These questions are common in the writing conferences I hold with students about their own original essays so this activity helps further reinforce the need for writers to be aware of and purposeful about these elements of essay writing.

CCSS, Writing

Why You Cannot Trust Common Core Advocacy

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I used to show my high school students a passage from Aristotle that was essentially a “kids today” rant, noting he wrote in the 300s BC. So I generally have little patience with anyone damning contemporary youth as if this generation is somehow quantifiably worse than the ones before. That is so much drivel.

Why Americans can’t write falls squarely in that sub-genre, but, alas!, that is just a mask for its real purpose: propagandizing for the Common Core.

Before we look at the nonsense in this really bad piece of writing that claims kids today can’t write, we must note that the writer, Natalie Wexler, chairs the board of trustees for the Writing Revolution, self-described as “a national not-for-profit organization dedicated to teaching students from underserved school districts to think clearly and reflect that thinking in their writing.”

And here is the key bit of information: Who sits on the advisory board? David Coleman, grand architect of the ELA Common Core. Hmmmm.

So Wexler claims writing is in dire circumstances based on data from NAEP. The problem here is that in my own analysis of the writing section of NAEP (see pages 31-32), I have shown that the test is so badly constructed that we can draw no valid claims about writing at all.

If Wexler were credible on writing quality by American students, she would be aware that we have significant research on how students are being taught writing and what the consequences of those practices are: Applebee and Langer’s Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School Classrooms.

Wexler would also know that, yes, students are not writing as much as they need to write, and in many ways, students arriving at college do not have the background in writing they should or that they need to write well in college.

But the real interesting part of that research is the cause of both our failure to teach writing well and students underperforming as writers in college: the standards and testing movement has effectively dismantled the composition movement that began in the 1970s and 1980s, notably because of the National Writing Project.

In short, Applebee and Langer found that teachers across several disciplines know more than ever about best practices in teaching writing, but because of high-stakes accountability, students are unlikely to receive that instruction or the practice they need to be competent young writers.

Therefore, it is easy and valid to extrapolate that there is no doubt that simply changing the standards will not change the corrosive impact the accountability movement has had on writing. Neither Common Core as standards nor the related high-stakes test will save writing, but they are both poised to continue ruining writing instruction.

We are left only with this: Wexler’s piece is yet more heinous Common Core propaganda, cloaked in the weakest of sheep’s clothing—a really bad piece of writing claiming students today cannot write.

For Further Reading

Why Are We (Still) Failing Writing Instruction?

More on Failing Writing, and Students

TCR: REVIEW: Writing Instruction That Works

Barbara Kingsolver, Writing

Reading Like a Writer (Scholar): Kingsolver’s “Making Peace”

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Just a few weeks into the fall semester of college, a first year student of mine revealed her exasperation about the inordinate amount of time and energy she had spent in high school “learning MLA” because her teachers claimed “everyone in college uses MLA.”

This moment in class captures perfectly the great divide that exists between the mostly rote and significantly flawed approaches to teaching writing in K-12 settings governed by high-stakes accountability and the disciplinary writing that students must demonstrate in college and then (possibly) as writers or scholars themselves.

In my writing intensive first year seminars, we seek to unpack what students have been taught about writing before college, and then begin a journey in which we read authentic texts (both popular and disciplinary essays) like writers and scholars. I have adopted over my 30+ years as a writer and writing teacher a philosophy that begins with the broad (literary essays by writers) and then couches the narrow (disciplinary essays by scholars) within that.

Below, I walk through Barbara Kingsolver’s “Making Peace,” from High Tide in Tucson, as an example of how reading like a writer (scholar)—asking what a writer is doing, how (style, literary/rhetorical technique, grammar, and mechanics) the writer is accomplishing it, and why it works or doesn’t—repeated often and throughout a semester, and even an entire college career, can instill genre awareness so that students can cast off their roles as students to become writers and scholars.

From Literary Essays to Disciplinary Writing

“When I left downtown Tucson to make my home in the desert,” Kingsolver confesses in her opening sentence, “I went, like Thoreau, ‘to live deliberately'” (p. 23).

When my students and I explore this essay by Kingsolver, we have already done an activity on openings—in which we look at just the first paragraphs of several of her essays in order to begin to challenge the introduction/thesis paradigm and move toward a wide range of strategies for engaging and focusing the reader.

Again the purpose here is to pull back to the broad conventions of essays (literary essays for a mostly lay audience) in order to nest disciplinary writing in those conventions (acknowledging that many disciplines do conform to a functional [but not aesthetic] template: introduction with overt thesis, body, and conclusion).

In that first sentence—and then throughout the essay with references to Preston Adams, Joseph Campbell, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Kafka—Kingsolver reveals both her awareness of and her speaking to a targeted audience, well educated and literate readers [1]. As well, the entire opening paragraph is highly detailed (images) and humorous, and thus, engaging and interesting.

For literary essays, then, we note that instead of offering an overt thesis, reader engagement is primary. In fact, while Kingsolver has a very clear focus (thesis), it isn’t revealed until several pages in: “Ownership is an entirely human construct” (p. 26).

Kingsolver’s confrontation of ownership becomes much more direct and even scholarly toward the end when she notes: “Life is easier since I abdicated the throne. What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things”—which is reinforced by quoting Engels (p. 33).

Throughout, our reading this essay like writers (scholars), we begin to note the conventional differences between a literary essay and disciplinary writing, highlighting Kingsolver’s own direct and subtle nods to the disciplines (literature, economics, anthropology, religion, botany, and biology). And so we begin to frame this essay against disciplinary conventions:

  • While Kingsolver highlights narrative and literary constructions, disciplinary writing tends toward exposition.
  • Kingsolver’s citations are sparse—names, quotes—but disciplinary writing has a much more stringent threshold for identifying references and quotations.
  • Organization and structure are more aesthetic, including Kingsolver’s use of graphic breaks to show transitions (the publisher uses a wave image), but disciplinary writing tends toward subheads and more overt structural devices as well as more direct statements of claims.
  • In both Kingsolver’s essay and disciplinary writing, however, diction, style, grammar, and mechanics must match the purpose of the essay as well as the targeted audience; in other words, these matters are about appropriateness and purpose, not correctness. There are no universally right words, there are no rules of grammar.

Just as I focus on openings, I also highlight endings. Kingsolver’s “Making Peace” builds to a two-sentence final paragraph: “So what, they all declare with glittering eyes. This is their party, and I wasn’t exactly invited” (p. 34).

Here, I emphasize that just as Kingsolver eschews the mechanical introduction/thesis, she also avoids the conclusion as restatement of the introduction. Instead, literary essays often frame the body paragraphs; in this essay, Kingsolver returns to the party/not invited motif from the end of the first paragraph.

Framing is an aesthetic approach that many disciplines ignore, especially if the disciplinary writing is primarily functional, such as transmitting new or synthesized information.

For students as emerging writers and scholars, the lessons of reading like a writer (scholar) are about appropriateness in the context of conventions and purposefulness within the writer’s/scholar’s awareness of her/his audience.

From Reading like a Writer (Scholar) to Drafting to Conferencing

My goals and process for first year seminar students in a writing intensive course include exploring What is an essay? and then What is a disciplinary essay? In those explorations, I am seeking ways in which students can become autonomous, ways in which students can rise above being students in order to embrace their autonomy as writers and/or scholars.

Reading like a writer (scholar) is foundational to that so that students begin to ask what writers are doing, how writers are achieving their purposes, and in what genres and conventions writers (scholars) are working.

The walk-through above is within a process that asks students to craft and submit a personal narrative followed by an on-line essay (using hyperlinks for citation) and then a disciplinary essay using a discipline-specific citation style sheet. Students also submit a fourth essay, but that is determined by their needs after completing the first three.

Vital to that process and anchored by reading like a writer are professor/student conferences after the initial submission of each essay.

Reading like a writer practices help inform what students need to consider, but also provide concrete references during the conferences.

For example, I begin conferences by asking who the primary/intended audience is as well as what the purpose of the essay is: to inform that audience or to call that audience to some action or behavior.

From there, we begin to investigate the essay draft against what we have discussed with authentic essays and reading like a writer (scholar): we consider the effectiveness of the opening, the scope and amount of claims, the authority of the student in the context of those claims and the topic(s), the use (or lack) of evidence, and the framing of the essay.

These investigations of the first draft become revision strategies for the student, with a premium placed on the agency of the student as a writer (scholar).

Just as reading like a writer replaces the narrow high school focus on literary analysis (the literary technique hunt and parroting back to the teacher what she/he said about the text), we replace the mechanical essay template of high school with a developing genre awareness of students as becoming-writers (scholars) who write with an awareness of audience and conventions (both popular and disciplinary) that demonstrates purposefulness, and not mere rote compliance.

My exasperated student shaking her head about the misguided focus on MLA prompted many other students to express the same sort of frustration. But more troubling is that very bright students with outstanding potential are often nearly frozen with uncertainty when faced with authentic expectations of essay writing.

The essay, however, is a vibrant and beautiful thing, rendered like students into a lifeless state by formal schooling.

Reading like a writer (scholar) helps breath life back into reading as well as writing, opening the door for students to become the writers (scholars) they can be.

[1] In Kingsolver’s “Creation Stories,” for example, she begins with “June is the cruelest month in Tucson,” as allusion aimed at a literate audience indeed.

Paulo Freire, Teaching, Writing

Teaching, Writing as Activism?

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To the extent that I become clearer about my choices and my dreams, which are substantively political and attributively pedagogical, and to the extent that I recognize that though an educator I am also a political agent, I can better understand why I fear and realize how far we still have to go to improve our democracy. I also understand that as we put into practice an education that critically provokes the learner’s consciousness, we are necessarily working against the myths that deform us. As we confront such myths, we also face the dominant power because those myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of its ideology.

Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers

Thus, proponents of critical pedagogy understand that every dimension of schooling and every form of educational practice are politically contested spaces. Shaped by history and challenged by a wide range of interest groups, educational practice is a fuzzy concept as it takes place in numerous settings, is shaped by a plethora of often-invisible forces, and can operate even in the name of democracy and justice to be totalitarian and oppressive.

Joe Kincheloe, Critical Pedagogy Primer

Low self-esteem and doubt are evil, tiny demons, and both have plagued me lately with a question: Are teaching and writing activism?

In the past several months, from Ferguson to Bree Newsome’s removing the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds in South Carolina, the public in the U.S. has had to confront the power and tensions with activism.

The activism connected with race and racism across the nation also prompted for me a question about what exactly counts as activism as well as what are our moral obligations when faced with bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all forms of oppression.

To do nothing, to strike the “I’m not political” pose, we must admit, is itself a political act, one that tacitly reinforces the status quo of oppression and inequity.

To proclaim “I don’t see race” is to be complicit in the very racism those who claim not to see race pretend to be above.

Activism broadly is taking action for change, and despite the cultural pressure that teachers somehow stand above activism and politics, despite the perception that writing is not action, both teaching and writing are types of activism—although each of us who are teachers and writers has decisions about how that looks in our own careers and lives.

For me, the urge to teach and write is grounded in confronting a world that is incomplete, inadequate, and then calling for a world that could be.

More than a decade after I began teaching high school English, I discovered critical pedagogy and social reconstructionism during my doctoral program—and was able to place my muddled and naive efforts at teaching-as-activism into a purposeful context.

As a K-12 teacher, I always held tight to the autonomy of my classroom to do what was right by my students—usually against the grain of the school and the community, and often in ways that were threatening to my career.

The curriculum we offer our students and the pedagogy we practice are activism if we embrace that call.

Instead of the prescribed textbook and reading list, I augmented what my students read and pushed each year to change, to expand the required reading lists to include women and writers of color.

My first quarter of American literature began with Howard Zinn’s reconsideration of the Columbus discovering America myth and then built on adding Margaret Fuller to the traditional examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The second half of that first quarter focused on Gandhi’s non-violent non-cooperation as well as an expanded sub-unit of black thought—including Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. We considered whose voice matters, and why, along with complicating the often oversimplified presentation of MLK as the only black voice in U.S. history.

In the 1980s and 1990s of rural upstate SC, these texts and conversations were rare and hard for my students, resisted and rejected by the community (my birth town), and challenging for me as a becoming-teacher. And much of this I did badly despite my best intentions.

Beyond my classroom, as department chair, I worked to de-track our English classes as much as possible (reducing the levels from 4 to 3), but also ended the practice of multiple texts per grade level that in effect labeled our students walking down the hallways. I also had the department stop issuing grammar and vocabulary texts to all students, moving those texts to resources for teachers who wished to use them.

Then, I did not think of that teaching as activism, however.

So I share all this not to pat myself on the back, but to acknowledge now how our teaching can—and I would argue must—be activism. To detail what teaching-as-activism looks like in the day to day.

I share also to note that when working within the system as it is handed to us, we are being political in that we are complicit when we passively work as agents of practices that are a disservice to our students, and ourselves.

Activism is teaching for that which we want to be and thus against that which we witness as wrong.

None of this is easy or comfortable, and I recognize in hindsight, to work against the system has real costs, even if we do not lose our jobs, which of course serves no one well.

My journey to embrace writing as activism was much slower developing, but along the way I have shifted much of my energy toward public work because I believe that also to be activism—raising a voice in the pursuit of change, putting ones name behind words that challenge.

But it is the writing as activism that gives me greater pause because writing is a solitary and often isolated thing (although teaching is often a profession in which we are isolated from each other, and fail in teaching in solidarity because of that dynamic).

My dual vocations as teacher/writer are significantly impacted by my privilege as well as the perceptions that teaching is not/should not be political and that writing is not really putting one bodily into the fray.

Thus, my vigilance lies in setting aside paternalistic urges, working beside and not for, and seeking ways in which my unearned privilege can be used in the service of others who are burdened by inequity.

As teachers and writers, are we activists, then?

I say that we can be, that we must be.

But how that looks is ours to decide; grand and small, our impact on the world is in our daily actions, our daily words.

And I am always, always anchored in my high school classroom, where my efforts to open the world to my students, to foster in them a belief that the world can be different, the world can be better were often subtly taped to my wall—the words of Henry David Thoreau:

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.

I think to be a teacher is to confront our doubts, to break through the stigma we may feel about our desire to make a difference, to change the world, to be activists.

These doubts and these callings are shared by writers as well, I believe.

Yes, teaching and writing are activism, activism we should be proud to own.

Writing

Who Can, Who Should Teach Writing?

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My transition from public high school English teacher to university assistant professor overlapped with my university debating and then voting to change its core curriculum and academic calendar.

I sat in many contentious faculty meetings mostly listening as faculty held forth about the pros and cons of both the established core/calendar and the proposed core/calendar. One thing that I witnessed was that faculty are quite protective of their own disciplines—but are apt to step carelessly on disciplines outside their area of expertise.

For example, the faculty were considering dropping the traditional first-year composition approach that is taught exclusively by English faculty for a first-year seminar approach that allowed and required faculty across all disciplines to teach the writing-intensive seminars for first year students.

As someone who taught high school English for almost twenty years—most of that time spent learning the complex craft of teaching writing through trial-and-error and dedicating much of my own energy to learning how to teach writing by studying the research against my own practices—I heard faculty repeated trample the field of composition, in terms of speaking as if the field doesn’t exist as well as stating directly and indirectly that “anyone can teach writing because we all are scholars.”

Let’s jump ahead about ten years. The faculty did adopt a new core and calendar, including the first year seminar structure.

Currently, we are reconsidering the first year seminar model, and much of the motivation for that reflection is that who can and who should teach writing have become a significant problems—ones not anticipated well or addressed adequately.

A few academic years ago, due to my interest in the first year seminars and teaching writing, I was named Faculty Director, First Year Seminars in order to help provide the sort of faculty support that had been lacking.

We have a First Year Oversight Committee, but that oversight has focused primarily on approving new courses and monitoring funding for seminars—although the committee has managed faculty workshops over the summer to address course development and teaching writing.

This summer we have implemented the initial year-long Faculty Writing Fellows seminar, including 12 faculty and three seminar facilitators to begin building a purposeful approach to supporting faculty who teach writing across the curriculum.

Just as I remain in search of how to teach writing well to students of all ages (there is no finish line), I also can attest that teaching faculty at any level how to teach writing is a perpetual and nearly overwhelming struggle.

First, then, I want to highlight a couple foundational issues and questions that must be addressed when any school is considering who can and who should teach writing:

  • Initially, acknowledge that composition is a disciplinary field that is not the same as English as a discipline. In fact, many K-12 teachers and college professors with credentials/degrees in English are skilled in literary analysis, not teaching writing. As well, even when we acknowledge composition as a field, we should also recognize that it is typically a marginalized field. That marginalization includes assigning new/beginning teachers to teach composition and so-called “remedial”writing as a sort of gauntlet they must endure to earn better course assignments. In higher education, adjuncts and teaching assistants are disproportionately staffing the teaching of writing also.
  • The larger questions of who can and who should teach writing are much more complex than many schools admit. All educators at every educational level have attained a degree of literacy that equips them for the ability (can) to teach writing, but flipping that can to should is where schools often make a fundamental mistake. Faculty charged with teaching writing purposefully but without a formal background in composition must want to teach writing and then must receive sustained and organized instruction and support in how to teach writing.

If schools committed to writing across the curriculum, expanding writing-intensive courses, or embracing “anyone can teach writing” manage the two hurdles above, however, several new problems are sure to exist:

  • Faculty without composition backgrounds tend to view “teaching writing” as correcting grammar, mechanics, and usage “errors.” This dynamic requires establishing common language among faulty teaching writing (for example, do not say “writing” to mean “grammar”) and then couching that common terminology in a robust examination of linguistics that confronts the tension between prescriptive grammarians and descriptive grammarians. That tension typically can be predicted in that the general public and educators without composition backgrounds skew toward prescriptive grammar (rules-based) while composition best practices tend to be driven by a descriptive grounding in linguistics (conventions-based).
  • Without addressing that tension above, then, I am convinced the process to expand who can and should teach writing is doomed to failure. How to accomplish that, however, is another matter entirely. That tension is likely to manifest itself in a trap: Faculty without composition backgrounds will often note that they feel unprepared to teach “writing” (which is code for correcting grammar, mechanics, and usage), but when they are introduced to best practice in teaching writing and descriptive linguistics, they balk. The result is: “Teach me how to teach writing, but I don’t want to hear about how to teach writing, I want to correct my students’ horrible grammar.”
  • That trap means the first step to learning how to teach writing is giving faculty the opportunity to investigate their own attitudes toward language, and then to invite them to set aside, as Connie Weaver calls it, the “error hunt.” Teaching writing begins with having a rich and healthy attitude about language, and then coming to understand that teaching writing is not simply teaching grammar and that the question is not if we address grammar, mechanics, and usage, but how, when, and why (and that the why is to foster students as writers, not grammarians).
  • Even those of us with formal backgrounds in teaching writing face a significant hurdle shared with many educators without that formal background: It is very difficult to teach writing in the context of best practices (for example, writing workshop) if the teacher her/himself has not been a participant in best practices such as a writing workshop. One of the most powerful elements of the National Writing Project’s professional development model has been summer workshops that provide just that experience. Faculty designated for teaching writing must be provided some extended opportunities to examine themselves as writers, participating in writing workshop and the practices they will bring to their own students.
  • All of the problems above should also be within a formal mission and concurrent goals for writing shared within the school/college and among faculty. Both faculty and students are likely to be more successful if everyone has core goals to maintain a manageable focus for teaching writing. However, that mission and those goals must acknowledge that teaching writing is never a fixed outcome. In other words, no single course or teacher/professor can or should be expected to produce a “finished” writer. Even so-called “basic” skills of writing are nearly impossible to identify and master at predictable points along formal education.

Who can teach writing? Nearly any educator motivated to teach students as writers and then provided the necessary support to become a writing teacher.

Who should teach writing? See above.

As a writer and teacher primarily focused on teaching writing, I am in the process of both and daily aware that writing and teaching writing are always a process of becoming.

Few human endeavors are as complex and important as being a writer or being a teacher of writing, and thus, asking who can and who should teach writing remains just as complex.

—

See Also

To Grammar or Not to Grammar: That Is Not the Question!, Connie Weaver, Carol McNally, and Sharon Moerman

citation, plagiarism, Turn It In, Writing

Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests

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My home university has taken another step in our quest to provide our students more effective and intentional first-year and sustained writing instruction during their time at our liberal arts institution. Once we moved away from the traditional English Department-based approach to first year composition and committed to a first year seminar format, just under a decade ago, we opened the door to having professors in any department teach first-year writing.

We are currently re-thinking the first year seminar model, but we are also taking steps to support better professors who have content expertise in the disciplines, experience as researchers and writers, but little or no formal background in teaching writing or composition research. This summer, then, we have begun a year-long faculty seminar on teaching writing.

Coincidentally, on the day this week we were scheduled to address plagiarism and citation, a session I was leading, I came across in my Twitter feed Carl Straumsheim’s What Is Detected?:

Plagiarism detection software from vendors such as Turnitin is often criticized for labeling clumsy student writing as plagiarism. Now a set of new tests suggests the software lets too many students get away with it.

The data come from Susan E. Schorn, a writing coordinator at the University of Texas at Austin. Schorn first ran a test to determine Turnitin’s efficacy back in 2007, when the university was considering paying for an institutionwide license. Her results initially dissuaded the university from paying a five-figure sum to license the software, she said. A follow-up test, conducted this March, produced similar results.

I have been resisting the use of Turnitin, or any plagiarism detection software, but my university and many professors remain committed to the technology. The growing body of research discrediting the software suggests:

“We say that we’re using this software in order to teach students about academic dishonesty, but we’re using software we know doesn’t work,” Schorn said. “In effect, we’re trying to teach them about academic dishonesty by lying to them.”

My general skepticism about technology was confirmed years ago when I was serving on my university Academic Discipline Committee where faculty often debated about whether or not students flagged for plagiarism by Turnitin had actually plagiarized (see Thomas, 2007, below). That debate turned on many issues being raised by the failure of plagiarism detection software, as highlighted at the University of Texas-Austin based on Schorn’s research:

  • Despite industry claims to the contrary, most plagiarism detection software fails to accurately detect plagiarism. Read more.
  • The Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Council of Writing Program Administrators do not endorse plagiarism detection software and have issued statements warning of its limitations. Read more.
  • Plagiarism detection software can have substantial unintended effects on student learning. It perpetuates a very narrow definition of originality and does little to teach students about the complex interplay of voices required in dialogic academic writing.
  • Plagiarism detection software transfers the responsibility for identifying plagiarism from a human reader to a non-human process. This runs counter to the Writing Flag’s concern for “careful reading and analysis of the writing of others” as part of the learning process.
  • Plagiarism detection software raises potential legal and ethical concerns, such as the use of student writing to construct databases that earn a profit for software companies, the lack of appeals processes, and potential violations of student privacy and FERPA protections.
  • Plagiarism detection software does not, by itself, provide sufficient evidence to prove academic dishonesty; it should not serve as the sole grounds for cases filed with Student Judicial Services.
  • Instructors who choose to use plagiarism detection software should include a syllabus statement about the software and its use, establish appeals processes, and plan for potential technological failures.

The fourth bullet above—where the authority for both teaching citation and detecting plagiarism is shifted from the professor/teacher to the technology—is the core problem for me because of two key issues: (1) many professors/teachers resist recognizing or practicing that teaching citation (and all aspects of writing) is an ongoing process—not a one-shot act, and (2) focusing on warning students about plagiarism and suspecting all students as potential plagiarizers (teaching plagiarism, a negative, instead of citation, a positive) are part of a larger and corrupt deficit view of scholarship, students, and human nature.

While plagiarism detection software is being unmasked as not as effective as using browser search engines (a free resource), we must admit that even if software or technology works as advertised, best practice always dictates that professors/teachers and students recognize that technology is only one tool in a larger obligation to teaching and/or scholarship.

Another related example of the essential folly of placing too much faith in technology when seeking ways to teach students scholarly citation is citation software, such as NoodleBib and the more recent App RefMe.

Despite, once again, many universities (typically through the library services) encouraging uncritically students to use citation software, I discourage the practice because almost always the generated bibliographies my students submit are incorrect—in part due to some of the harder aspects of APA for the software to address (capitalization/lower-case issues, for example) and in part due to students’ lack of oversight after generating the bibliographies.

Ultimately, then, if we think of citation software as a tool, and if students can be taught to review and edit generated bibliographies, the technology has promise (setting aside that some citation software embeds formatting that can be problematic once inserted into a document also).

Both plagiarism detection and citation software are harbingers of the dangers of seeking shortcuts for teaching students any aspect of writing; spending school or university funds on these inadequate technologies, I think, is hard to defend, but the greater pedagogical problem is how technology often serves to impede, not strengthen our roles as educators—especially as teachers of writing.

Some lessons from these failures of technology include the following:

  1. Be skeptical of technology, especially if their are significant costs involved. Are there free or cheaper alternatives, and can that funding be better spent in the name of teaching and learning?
  2. Be vigilant about teacher agency, notably resisting abdicating that agency to technology instead of incorporating technology into enhancing teacher agency.
  3. Recognize that teaching writing and subsets such as citation are ongoing and developmental commitments that take years and years of intentional instruction.
  4. Resist deficit thinking about students/humans (do not address primarily plagiarism, but citation).

Straumsheim draws a key conclusion from Schorn’s research: “In addition to the issues of false negatives and positives, plagiarism detection software fits into a larger ethical debate about how to teach writing.”

The ethics of teaching writing, I believe, demand we set aside technology mis-serving our teaching and our students—setting technology aside and returning to our own obligations as teachers.

See Also

Thomas, P.L. (2007, May). Of flattery and thievery: Reconsidering plagiarism in a time of virtual information. English Journal, 96(5), 81-84.

Statement on Plagiarism Detection Software (UT-Austin)

Preventing Plagiarism (UT-Austin)

Teaching with Plagiarism Detection Software (UT-Austin)

Plagiarism Detection Software: Limitations and Responsibilities (UT-Austin)

Results of the Plagiarism Detection System Test 2013

Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices (WPA)

CCCC Resolution on Plagiarism Detection Services (#3)

Why I Won’t Use TurnItIn to Check My PhD Thesis, Travis Holland

Another Terrible Idea from Turnitin | Just Visiting, John Warner

reading, Teaching, Writing

Scapegoat

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The GEICO Scapegoat: It’s What You Do commercial transports me to 10th-grade English class with Lynn Harrill, who would become my mentor and friend.

Throughout high school, I was living a double life: at school I was a math and science student—the courses in which I made As—but at home, I was collecting and reading thousands of comic books as well as consuming science fiction (SF) novels, starting with Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain and working through Arthur C. Clark, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and other SF writers with the same obsession I brought to comic books.

In Mr. Harrill’s class, I experienced a paradigm shift about English class because 8th- and 9th-grade English had been spent doing grammar text exercises and days on end of sentence diagramming (assignments that earned me As in junior high). But in Mr. Harrill’s class, we wrote essays and spent (what seemed to me) hellish hours doing vocabulary workbook exercises and tests (assignments that pulled my English grade down to Bs).

Vocabulary words struck me as a huge waste of time, completely disassociated from my secret home life dedicated to words.

“Scapegoat” was one of those words that I still associate with feeling no connection between the isolated act of studying and being testing on the weekly list of words and being a young man who would in the coming years discover in spite of formal school he is a writer and a lover of books.

The word itself, “scapegoat,” as the commercial skewers, creates a tension between the word’s meaning and the embedded “goat,” that triggers most people’s prior knowledge. Out of context, studying “scapegoat” for a test cheated me—cheats all students—of being engaged with the rich etymology (one blossoming with allusion) of the word.

Formal English, I regret to admit, has mostly and continues to treat human communication as separate skills—grammar, phonics, vocabulary—meant for lifeless and mechanical analysis and acquisition.

Reading and writing in school are too often reduced to algebra.

I hate to confess also that in Mr. Harrill’s class I was chastised about reading SF—told I needed to read real literature—and never given any sense that my comic book life was worthy of being considered the foundation of my life as a writer, reader, and teacher.

•

While reading Gary Saul Morson’s Why College Kids Are Avoiding the Study of Literature, I immediately thought also of my high school experience with English and vocabulary—leading again to “scapegoat.”

“Time and again,” Morson explains, “students tell me of three common ways in which most high school and college classes kill their interest in novels.”

Morson’s three ways (“the technical, the judgmental, and the documentary”) essentially are reflected in my story above—reducing human communication to algebra, stripping the life out of reading and writing through school-only practices such as five-paragraph, prompted writing and answering multiple-choice answers after reading decontextualized passages.

But Morson’s criticism sparked for me the scapegoat-de-jour: the Common Core.

While it is fashionable for some to proclaim that the Common Core will save U.S. public education and others to condemn Common Core as the end to all that is good and right in the world, a much more accurate assessment of Common Core is that it reflects more than a hundreds years of misguided teaching and about thirty-plus years of horribly misguided education reform.

•

I attended junior and senior high school in the mid- to late-1970s, just a few years before accountability gripped my home state of South Carolina. However, my English classes were dominated by isolated grammar instruction, nearly no original essay writing or drafting, weekly vocabulary lists and tests, prescribed reading lists of novels by white males, and literature textbooks that were mostly god awful.

As I mentioned, Lynn Harrill would teach me 10th- and 11th-grade English, embodying the teacher I wanted to be, mentoring me as a beginning teacher, and guiding me into a doctoral program as well as eventually a university position as a teacher educator.

Many of our conversations over the years have been about his regrets as a teacher—about how even as a young and seemingly “radical” teacher himself, he bent to the pressures of traditional teaching that were not supported by research and instilled in the students he loved what Morson laments in his essay above: English classes often make students hate reading and writing.

How many students, as I did, fell in love with words in spite of school, in spite of their English teachers’ practices?

•

That doctoral program to which Lynn Harrill guided me opened another world to me—in much the same way a speech class in college opened the world of poetry high school had hidden and my English professors opened the world of black writers high school had ignored—the world of Lou LaBrant, the eventual subject of my dissertation.

“A brief consideration,” LaBrant wrote in 1947, “will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods.”

Just as no accountability, standards, or high-stales testing were mandating the bad practices of my junior and high school English teachers, LaBrant nearly 70 years ago leveled a charge that resonates today, coincidentally in our Common Core era.

As English teachers, we have a long tradition of abdicating our autonomy to a shifting series of scapegoats: next year’s teacher, textbooks, the canon, Standard English, standards, and high-stakes tests (to name a few of the most prominent).

Do we love reading and writing, love language? Do we love our students?

Each student who trudges through our classes and learns to hate reading, writing, and language suggests our answer is “no.”

•

Engulfed in war, the world LaBrant wrote in during 1943 prompted her to note: “Hence teaching is a unique profession, dealing with remote rather than immediate influence over society,” adding:

It is important that we do not set up in our classrooms prejudices or snobberies which will make our students less instead of better able to understand, enjoy, and use this language….

Too frequently we give children books which have enough value that we call them “good,” forgetting that there are other, perhaps more important values which we are thereby missing. It is actually possible that reading will narrow rather than broaden understanding….Let us have no more of assignments which emphasize quantity, place form above meaning, or insist on structure which is not the child’s….

We are responsible for such writing when we approve the correctly punctuated, correctly spelled, and neatly written paper which says nothing of importance, as against a less attractive but sincere account or argument. Children can and should learn to write correctly; but first should be sincere, purposeful expression of the child’s own ideas….

Similar unsound attitudes can be the result of being taught to “write just anything” (or to write on the teacher’s topic) ; to spend time correcting sentences which someone else has written about nothing of importance; to change one’s structure merely to have a variety of sentence forms; and so on through a whole series of assignments based on the principle that form is first and meaning second….

Today, LaBrant’s final warning rings true still: “Teachers should consider carefully what they are doing with the most intimate subject in the curriculum.”

•

As Lynn Harrill did with me—his greatest lesson—I now often face myself, the struggling me who stumbled and bumbled his way through teaching English—often badly—as I sought to gain my balance, stand on my own two feet in order to continue my journey toward being that teacher who embodies a love of language and students, to be in some small way the because and not the in spite of.

—

See Also

“A Call to Action,” P.L. Thomas, English Journal, 93(2), 67-69.

genre, Writing

O, Genre, What Art Thou?

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“What is genre in the first place?” asks novelist Kazuo Ishiguro during a conversation with writer Neil Gaiman, who reviewed Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant. Ishiguro continues: “Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?”

Ishiguro then makes an interesting speculation about focusing on genre:

Is it possible that what we think of as genre boundaries are things that have been invented fairly recently by the publishing industry? I can see there’s a case for saying there are certain patterns, and you can divide up stories according to these patterns, perhaps usefully. But I get worried when readers and writers take these boundaries too seriously, and think that something strange happens when you cross them, and that you should think very carefully before doing so.

As I have grown older as both a teacher and a writer, I have become both more interested in genre (as well as medium and form—the distinctions and intersections) and less certain, like Ishiguro, about the utility of the labels.

Over the past several years, in fact, I have stumbled over publishers labeling Haruki Murakami‘s 1Q84 and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods as “science fiction.”

While I love both books and authors, I am hard-pressed to define either novel as science fiction; in fact, I am like Gaiman confronting Ishiguro’s Giant:

Fantasy and historical fiction and myth here run together with the Matter of Britain, in a novel that’s easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy, but difficult to love. Still, “The Buried Giant” does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over. On a second reading, and on a third, its characters and events and motives are easier to understand, but even so, it guards its secrets and its world close.

Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it.

Just as many enduring writers do, Ishiguro, Murakami, Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Kurt Vonnegut—just to name a few—weave genre conventions together, working within, against, and beyond the so-called boundaries of genre, medium, and form.

Unfortunately, formal education (and thus students and teachers) tends to remain trapped in the rote, the narrow, and the prescribed—or genre acquisition:

…GENRE ACQUISITION [is] a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach. A much more sophisticated version, introduced in Australia but now popular elsewhere, has been devised by the proponents of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Christie 1991; Martin 1993; Eggins 2004). Using well-established pedagogies, practitioners follow a teaching/learning cycle as students are encouraged to acquire and reproduce a limited number of text types (‘genres’) that are thought to be basic to the culture (Macken-Horarik 2002).

However, for the skilled writer, genre awareness is part of the craft of writing, but not templates that dictate:

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. Though there are few genre awareness curricula, for a number of reasons (see Freedman 1993), I will argue here that a carefully designed and scaffolded genre awareness program is the ideal for novice students – and for other students, as well.

Investigating Text as a Writer

For my first-year college students, we start the writing experience by cataloguing everything they have been taught about writing essays in school (concepts about introductions, bodies, conclusions, thesis sentences, and paragraphing, for example), and then we investigate the Prologue to Louise DeSalvo’s memoir Vertigo.

That investigation asks students to consider how this piece of nonfiction compares to what they have been taught about writing in school, but we also examine what the term “memoir” means against other terms such as “autobiography,” “biography,” and the fiction/nonfiction dichotomy.

Now I will add this exchange that sets as rule one for writing memoir: “Don’t try to ‘fit’ the genre.”

Learning to write becomes a continual tension between what we think we know about text as that is confirmed and contradicted by what we read—as preparation for what we write.

Being a writer is inseparable from being a reader, but both are ways of being that are always evolving, never fixed just as no genre, medium, or form is ever truly fixed.

As Gaiman and Ishiguro discuss genre, and Gaiman explains, “I think that there’s a huge difference between, for example, a novel with spies in it and a spy novel; or a novel with cowboys in it and a cowboy novel,” Ishiguro adds:

So we have to distinguish between something that’s part of the essence of the genre and things that are merely characteristic of it. Gunfights are characteristic of a western, but may not be essential to making the story arresting.

So there is where I am guiding my students as emerging writers and developing readers—to have the sense of purpose and awareness to recognize “essence” versus “characteristic,” to attain a level of sophistication that informs them in their writing and reading but doesn’t artificially restrain them.

For both the reader and the writer, then, genre is a question, one to ask continually and not a definition or a prescription.

And then, we must admit, the ultimate question remains: Was the text satisfying? That, too, becomes the source of even more debate, which, I would add, is the real essence of writing and reading because as long as there are readers the text always lives.

That, of course, if what every writer wants, to live forever:

NG I know that when I create a story, I never know what’s going to work. Sometimes I will do something that I think was just a bit of fun, and people will love it and it catches fire, and sometimes I will work very hard on something that I think people will love, and it just fades: it never quite finds its people.

KI Even if something doesn’t catch fire at the time, you may find it catches fire further down the line, in 20 years’ time, or 30 years’ time. That has happened, often.

—

See Also

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196. Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell

Public Intellectual, Writing

Writing for the Public: A Framework

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In several undergraduate courses (a May course on education documentaries and first year seminars) and a graduate course (current trends in literacy) I teach, students write public pieces that challenges them to examine a common misconception and then help a general audience better understand the issue. The piece is created as an online document as well—requiring that students explore citing and supporting their claims with hyperlinks to credible and effective sources.

Having written public pieces in mainstream and alternative publications (The Conversation, AlterNet) regularly for over a decade and then writing online (in different types and for different venues) blogs for about five years, I have learned a great deal about writing from a specialized perspective for the public. As a university-based academic, I have also come to advocate that public work is at least as important for scholars as traditional publishing (peer-reviewed journals, books)—if not more important since the social/practical impact and scope of reach are often much greater for public work.

As a genre (commentary), a distinct medium (virtual/online), and advocacy, writing for the public is incredibly difficult and too often discouraging.

Primarily for K-12 teachers, academics, and scholars/researchers, this discussion of a framework for public writing also argues that we need more informed public voices—especially from educators, academics, and researchers.

Writing for the Public: A Framework

Public writing is an especially important genre of writing for stepping away from traditional views of essays and argumentation (as taught in formal schooling)—rejecting introduction (thesis), body, and conclusion templates; reconsidering paragraphing (short is better).

Openings (and even the title) of public works should seek to accomplish three goals (sometimes simultaneously): (1) engaging the reader by being interesting, (2) focusing the reader on the central topic and major claim of the piece, and (3) establishing for the reader your expertise or unique perspective related to the topic (consider that readers likely are reading you for the first time and have no context for your credibility).

For educators, academics, and scholars/researchers, public writing must purposefully and carefully recognize that popular perceptions about issues tend to be simplistic or even misinformed. That reality means the audience will be antagonistic and nearly impossible to sway.

Powerful examples of this for me has been writing about grade retention, corporal punishment, and the word gap. In all three situations, the evidence is overwhelming (or significantly complex, as with the research on literacy and social class) but also counter to popular beliefs.

For writers with expertise and experience in a field, public writing must remain constantly aware of that public while also navigating the high standards of traditional scholarship.

That means opening a public piece by being interesting can be accomplished by following a key guideline from Joseph Williams (Style): write with characters and plot. Readers are often interested in people doing things—narrative; and people are really interested in real people doing real things.

For teachers and professors, we can often share actual classroom stories, but public writing can also mine the rich world of journalism for real-world stories that accurately reflect the broader generalizations found in high-quality research.

Yes, qualitative data (narratives) can be outliers or misleading, but our job as experts is to choose and shape narratives that are representative, while also engaging the general public.

Within a few opening paragraphs, then, we want to engage and focus our readers while establishing our credibility; this is a much different and much harder task for a writer than the formulaic introduction/thesis.

Here, we need to acknowledge that public commentaries generally fall in a word-count range of about 750-1250 words (typically at the lower end). This is really brief for complex topics (ones that academics may cover in several 1000 words), and many feel writing public commentaries has more in common with writing poetry (concision, concision, concision) than other forms of prose.

I agree—since I am also a poet.

The bulk of your piece, however, must be the main claims, evidence (hyperlinked) and elaborations that constitute the body. In the body, typically you are challenged to make complicated and sometimes technical information accessible to the general public.

Word choice, sentence formation, use of evidence—these are the really hard parts of doing public writing (and these i no template). And while your evidence is essential, hyperlinks must be used as if readers will not follow them, and the credibility of the evidence (just as you do initially with yourself) must be established in a way that is compelling to the average (non-expert) reader.

And here is the truly frustrating part of public writing: although, for example, I noted that major medical organizations and the American Psychological Association all have clear stances against corporal punishment of any kind, much of the responses I have received completely ignore or even discount that evidence (evidence that in the academic world would carry a great deal of weight).

Since public pieces are brief, as well, your agenda is best served by having a clear major claim/argument and then a few supporting claims; keep the argument as simple as possible without being simplistic.

Just as a narrative is engaging as an opening, the bulk of your discussion must be carried by concrete and vivid details; always give the reader as many sensory triggers as possible (an old Flannery O’Connor rule about writing fiction, by the way).

Now, as we think about an ending, I want to make a counterintuitive claim: The traditional view of the essay (as we have been taught in formal schooling) includes that the body is the meat of an essay; thus, the part that matters most. However, in public writing, the opening captures the reader’s attentions, and then the ending leaves the reader with the impression that likely works or doesn’t in terms of making your case.

Instead of thinking about a conclusion as a restatement of the introduction (horrible advice, by the way, that serves no purpose in any type of writing), the ending often is most effective when you work on framing your argument.

Framing also depends heavily on the use of the concrete. Once you establish a story—or even a refrain—in your opening, you can return to that image, those people, that event, or the refrain in the final paragraph or two.

That motif, then, gives your piece coherence in the reader’s mind, establishing an internal logic to the piece that may have a stronger influence on the reader intuitively than the rational arguments of the body.

As a final point—something I stress to my students since their writing often will be evaluated, graded: work diligently to have a final few sentences, a final few words that are vivid and leave the reader with the new idea or new impression that is at the center of your argument.

“What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” explained George Orwell in “Why I Write,” adding, “I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

“The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us,” Orwell continued; however, “It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness.”

As educators, academics, and scholars/researchers, we are well prepared to tackle “the problem of truthfulness,” and if we the informed do not, we are leaving that important task to others less credible.