To be a scholar is to be a writer—often a writer seeking publication. Part of my career-long journey to teach writing well, or at least always trying to teach writing better, has been to bring the necessarily reduced experience of writing as a student closer to the authentic experiences of writers in situations, for lack of the better phrase, in the real world.

Recently on Twitter, scholars (notably Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco) discussed choices scholars/writers make when working through the revise-and-resubmit phase common in almost all submissions for scholarly publication:

This! With every single-authored journal article I’ve ever published, there was a point post-R&R where I started over with a blank document. Better to start fresh and build the right foundation than try to tinker with something that needs a new core. https://t.co/6lvD9WkrgU

— Jess Calarco (@JessicaCalarco) May 5, 2020

Encouraging and facilitating drafting by students has always been a struggle for me. Some students resist drafting at all (I have students who fear sharing drafts with me until they are “perfect” and many students simply do not have the tools to revise and edit in ways that make the process seem valuable), but I also recognize that an authentic writing process and the many ways we draft are often more complicated than we allow in classrooms.

Two problems at the root of working with students and fostering an effective writing process is, first, helping students who have been taught directly and indirectly to write only one draft from prescriptive prompts and rubrics (an unintended but negative consequence of the Advanced Placement programs and assessments in English, for example), and, second, re-teaching students that have come through a highly regimented writing process sequence (pre-writing, drafting, revising, and publishing).

That second problem often shifts most of the writer’s work to the teacher and leaves students mostly being compliant; however, effective writing pedagogy seeks to provide students support while they navigate an authentic writing process that is anchored in making writer’s decisions along the way.

One way I have tried to foster drafting better is to move away from “the” writing process to “a” writing process, one that students explore and create for themselves by considering the many ways that writers navigate moving from a writing idea to a final piece (often published).

Building a writer’s toolbox is incredibly important for students-as-writers because moving from first draft to final draft is about having purpose and strategies. I encourage and build that toolbox by providing feedback that prompts an action, something specific to do to the draft.

But drafting involves many different aspects of a text to be addressed, aspects that are not necessarily of equal weight in terms of creating meaning for the reader.

I have used these categories for years with students: content and organization (highest level to be addressed), diction and style (the next and important level to be addressed), and grammar, mechanics, and usage (the final level that is essentially editing).

Although students often resist the necessity of several drafts for a single essay, I tend to respond to first and second levels more aggressively in early submissions, stressing that we have no reason to edit a piece that isn’t working to begin with, as LaBrant (1946) argues:

[A teacher] may be content if the writing is composed of sentences with correct structure, with periods neatly placed, verbs correctly ended, pronouns in the right case, and all attractively placed on the page. I have heard teachers say that if their pupils do all this, and spell with reasonable correctness, they (the teachers) are content. I am willing to admit that a conventional paper, such as is just described, tempts one to be satisfied; but I am not willing to admit that it represents a worth-while aim. As a teacher of English, I am not willing to teach the polishing and adornment of irresponsible, unimportant writing [emphasis added]….I would place as the first aim of teaching students to write the development of full responsibility for what they say. (p. 123)

Knowing what aspects of a draft to attack first is incredibly important for students, but as the exchange above by scholars shows, students also need to have a range of options for moving from one draft to the next.

Too often, students have been allowed simply to “fix” the areas marked for them by the teacher. This is probably one of the worst unintended consequences of writer’s workshop.

I constantly have to prompt students to work on their drafts from the comments I have offered, but moving through the entire draft, not just where I have commented.

To expand student drafting options, I have shifted a great deal of my feedback from marking drafts to conferencing. In those conferences we focus on what students should do next.

I offer several options: abandonment (starting the essay over and completely abandoning the first submission), revising/editing the draft I have commented on and that we are conferencing about (still the most common next step), or starting a new Word document and rethinking organization, sentence and paragraph formation, and likely significant aspects of the content (adding or changing sources, changing and/or elaborating on examples, reorganizing the development of that content, etc.).

Final drafts are greatly improved, I find, when students are allowed a wide range of drafting options and given ample support for making writer’s decisions based on their goals for the writing project.

In our conference, I typically start by asking students to say aloud what they were trying to accomplish with their essay; then we discuss if and how the submitted draft accomplishes those goals.

After that framing, we address what moves and strategies students should follow next, keeping that next step manageable and not necessarily exhaustive. I usually ask what are two or three next things to do with this draft while also stressing that the full drafting process for the essay may take three or four (or more) drafts to reach a satisfying final version.

Drafting must be purposeful, goal oriented, and grounded in actionable strategies for the student/writer. But drafting should never be reduced to simply following a set sequence or “fixing” what the student initially submitted regardless of the quality of that submission.

As LaBrant adds:

All writing that is worth putting on paper is creative in that it is made by the writer and is his own product… . Again there may be those who will infer that I am advocating no correction, no emphasis on form. The opposite is really true. The reason for clarity, for approved usage, for attractive form, for organization, lies in the fact that these are means to the communication of something important. (p. 126)

For scholars as writers, that “something important” is often about publishing as part of academic and scholarly careers, and while revise and resubmit can be tedious and frustrating, how to move through several drafts has an authentic purpose that is too often missing in traditional classrooms for students as writers.

That said, we as teachers of writing can foster something much closer to authentic than a lockstep writing process and reducing drafting to “fix what the teacher marks.”

One way to teach writing better is to expand the what and how of drafting for our students, in ways that look more like drafting among writers in that so-called real world.

My students and I are in our last couple weeks of remote learning and teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I have examined, the transition for me was facilitated by many of my philosophical/theoretical commitments and practices—most of which are non-traditional and tend to cause tension in traditional circumstances.

At the root of these commitments, I think, is that I am essentially a teacher of writing. Therefore, I am prone to creating classroom experiences around workshop formats, open-ended discussions, and text-based examinations that are seeking goals beyond simply summarizing or analyzing the texts for meaning.

Most of my teaching career—almost two decades each at the high school and higher education levels—has involved teaching writing to students who are not trying to become writers. My writing instruction is primarily grounded in fostering the power of writing as that is valued within academic and scholarly contexts.

One of my best assignments, I think, is that I ask my first-year writing students to interview faculty at my university about how they conduct scholarship and research as well as about their lives as writers. Much to their surprise, students discover that most faculty are begrudging writers if not openly antagonistic to writing.

I work much of the time to balance my commitment to the field (and career) of writing with the reality that the vast majority of my students are attempting to navigate academia well, but may be as resistant to being and becoming writers as many of those professors.

My university now has only two writing-intensive courses for students—the first-year writing seminar and an upper-level writing/research course (intended to be taken in a student’s major department if offered).

I teach the upper-level writing/research course for my department, and we are currently navigating that remotely.

This is my third time through the course; therefore, I have continued to revise and better focus my goals for the course and the assignments. Teaching this course remotely has been another, and unexpected, way to rethink what works when teaching writing.

First, a fortunate accident of the move to remote learning/teaching is that it occurred in the middle of the course, which I have designed to be text-based and direct-instruction focused in the first half and workshop oriented in the second half (see the schedule). As a result of the shift to remote, all of the major assignments in the course have been submitted without our having traditional face-to-face class sessions.

The assignments have included annotated bibliographies, a cited scholarly essay, and a public commentary. Students have been invited to choose a topic in education that is being covered significantly in the media, conducting scholarly searches for what the research base shows about that topic, and conducting an informed analysis of how well the media is covering the topic.

I have now received at least the first submissions of all of these assignments, prompting me to email my students about the public commentaries this morning (since it was due yesterday). A key point I made was that the course is designed so that they are experimenting with how different writing purposes have different submission formats, different standards for citations, and different stylistic concerns.

Students are provided several documents to support producing and submitting the assignments. Those materials include a sample scholarly essay with notes and a sample public commentary with notes.

The challenges students face include preparing separate writing assignments and documents with those differences—APA format v. submitting a work of journalism, in-text scholarly citation v. hyperlinking, writing for a scholarly audience v. writing for the general public.

This writing-intensive course, I think, is both quite challenging for students (and the teacher) and a perfect model for helping students move beyond a rules-based or template-driven approaches to writing in academic, scholarly, and public contexts.

The scholarly essay and public commentary force students to see that writing is grounded in purpose and audience—not a simple set of rules demanded by the teacher.

Since workshopping the assignments remotely is not fundamentally different than when we have in-class sessions, I am recognizing another layer of stress because the remote is occurring during a health crisis and the unusual experiences of isolation many of my students are experiencing.

When I have been charged with providing faculty development for faculty teaching writing (as disciplinary professors without backgrounds in composition beyond their own experiences as writers), especially first-year writing, I have highlighted the problem with cognitive overload—asking students to write about new or challenging content while also focusing on being better writers.

If students are overwhelmed intellectually, they often do the multiple expectations poorly (or at least less well than if they could focus on only one) or prioritize by doing one thing well at the exclusion of the other(s), typically choosing to address content and fumble the writing itself.

One of my refrains is that when we are primarily teaching a class addressing writing instruction, we must be careful not to detract from that focus on writing well (or better) by engaging students in new or challenging course content (such as reading a highly technical, complex text to write about).

However, as we move into upper-level writing course, that problem is essentially impossible to avoid. Even in so-called normal circumstances, students have struggled with this upper-level writing/research course because, to be blunt, it is asking a great deal of undergraduate students.

I am accustomed to responding to initial drafts with “Did you look at the sample?” and “You are not doing the assignment.” But during this remote experience compounded by a pandemic, I am giving these responses far more often, nearly to the point of frustration on my part.

As I continue to interrogate my own role as a teacher of writing and a writer/scholar, I have a few key elements of my teaching that need careful consideration:

• Increasing the tenuous value of providing students with models of writing in academic and public writing.
• Fairly balancing writing assignments with supporting students making autonomous decisions as writers/scholars.
• Providing feedback that supports effective and efficient revision (and learning).
• Disrupting student misconceptions about drafting, written products, and performing as a student instead of as a writer or scholar.

I am not certain that a course shifted mid-semester into remote learning/teaching because of a pandemic can be anything other than a pale version of the original course, but I have witnessed that my courses are providing many if not most of my students quite valuable learning experiences.

The negative consequences of teaching remote during this pandemic are not quite clear yet, but I am certain the added stress of the situation has worked against many of my course goals.

I worry that many of us teaching fail to consider the demands of writing and writing well while students are simultaneously learning and navigating new content. It ultimately may be far too much to ask of students forced to remain in their homes and rooms for weeks on end with a newly uncertain world around them.

When John Warner released The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing soon after his Why They Can’t Write, I highly recommended both volumes for those teaching writing (here and here). Of course, a much better barometer of the value of books on how to write and how to teach writing is to put them in the hands of students and teachers.

A bit past midway through this fall semester of 2019, my first-year writing students have just finished reading and reflecting on The Writer’s Practice; the final reflections and our in-class debrief yesterday revealed high praise and key lessons we who teach writing can learn from what my students valued about the book, and how they framed those lessons for them as students and writers.

One student began her reflection as follows:

As I opened up The Writer’s Practice to read the final section, I felt myself experiencing emotions similar to those when I am about to finish a really wonderful piece of fictional writing. This feeling for me is more guttural, and it comes about when I am truly sad or upset to be finishing a piece. Most of the time it is because there is a change in the plot that I didn’t enjoy, or I just truly don’t want the happily ever after to conclude. But I was genuinely confused as to why I experienced this feeling when reading the final few sentences of this piece. Never in my life has I been saddened by the conclusion of reading a book for school, fiction or nonfiction, besides The Catcher and the Rye and now this book. Because of this, I have come to the conclusion that I truly did enjoy reading this book. And I believe it was mostly because of the informal language used throughout. The way in which Warner speaks to the audience is something very intriguing to me, and it made me feel like I was holding a conversation with an actual person instead of reading a boring and monotonous book for school.

In the two sections of FYW I teach, I read in reflections and heard in our discussion some powerful patterns throughout the student endorsements of Warner’s book as an effective textbook for teaching writing. Those patterns include the following:

• One student expressed relief that Warner encouraged progress, and not perfection. In fact, many students recognized that Warner’s lessons combined with my approach to teaching writing had significantly reduced their levels of stress and anxiety about writing. The overwhelming result of reducing stress and anxiety for students as writers is that they are more eager to write, they produce better early drafts of their essays, and they are also more motivated to revise (and even begin again) in order to produce the essays they want to write. In short, Warner’s messages resonate with and compliment my commitment to having students choose their topics and types of essays as well as my low-stakes approached to teaching (delaying grades, emphasizing feedback and revision, and fostering a writing and learning community among students and with me as a mentor/teacher).
• Several students responded directly to Warner speaking from his own humble authority as a practicing writer, an authority grounded in his recognition that becoming a writing is a journey, and not a destination. Here, I think, was one of the most powerful aspects of how students praised Warner’s book: students valued that Warner did not speak down to them; they felt respected and appreciate the casual and empathetic tone Warner maintains throughout the book. A common response was that teaching and textbooks can too often be condescending, and students have found that this book and some of the different aspects of my teaching and writing instruction honored their basic human dignity.
• In terms of nuts-and-bolts writing lessons that were effective because of Warner’s text, I would highlight that students almost universally came to recognize and value the role of having a clear audience at the center of their work as writers. I have always struggled with helping students move away from writing for the teacher/professor (working mostly as compliant students) and toward thinking and working more as writers (drafting for real audiences). Students reading and engaging with Warner’s text while completing my second essay assignment, a public essay that incorporates hyperlinks for citation, was mentioned as very effective experiences for a number of students, especially in terms of writing with an audience in mind and writing by choice about a topic that interests and even invigorates the writer/students.
• Broader and foundational lessons (ones that are essential for students making the transition from high school to college, from writing like a student to writing as a scholar) include students rethinking what essay writing entails (different disciplines have different expectations for essays), students moving away from rules-based thinking to conventional awareness, and students thinking and working more purposefully through their writing process. The one-size-fits-all effect of the five-paragraph essay (which all of my students bring to the class in some form) and the tyranny of grammar rules and writing mandates definitely were at least strongly confronted if not entirely debunked through the combination of students reading Warner and receiving similar messages in my class.

As a teacher, specifically of writing, this experience with assigning Warner’s The Writer’s Practice has reinforced the importance of the relationship among the teacher, students, and the textbook. When the messages and learning environment are cohesive, like a good piece of writing, everything is more effective.

My initial recommendation for this book is now strongly supported by actually incorporating it into my FYWs, but I must hasten to add a final word of caution as well.

This really positive experience with teaching writing and with students showing real and  often observable learning as writers also exposes one of the most challenging aspects of formal writing instruction and learning in formal schooling: Even as first-year college students, these young writers are at a very early stage of development as writers, and thinkers.

Once again, placing too much emphasis on evaluating my teaching, evaluating the students’ writing, or evaluating the effectiveness of an FYW course is quite dangerous and likely very misleading.

Many of the students expressing effusive praise for Warner stumbled mightily in the writing of those reflections, and continue to struggle in their formal essay assignments. People evaluating as outsiders those students’ writing would likely find it hard to identify the growth (or quality), especially the changes in attitudes these students have experienced about writing forms and the writing process.

For students as writers and me as a teacher of writing, it remains as issue of progress, not perfection.

A high school ELA teacher who completed the certification program where I teach was telling me recently about one of her students. The student, the teacher explained, had submitted an essay that the student worked diligently on, completing multiple drafts.

The teacher noted that the final essay showed marked improvement in the writing, but grading the essay also posed a dilemma because despite substantive feedback on the content from the teacher, the student simply made very little progress in thinking well about the topic.

Having taught high school ELA and then at the college level for 18 years each, I quipped, “That’s what Bs are for,” adding, “Maybe a B+.”

I wasn’t being as cavalier as it seems because I have navigated this problem hundreds of times since most of my teaching of writing has been situated in the lives of teenagers and young adults. Compounding the concern for brain development—that this age group is still developing the ability to think critically and deeply—is, for me, my own practice of de-grading and de-testing my classes.

In other words, this scenario is one of dozens that highlights why grading is often misleading and almost always harmful to the learning process.

In a reasonable world, this teacher would be allowed simply to express to the student this reality—the writing is exceptional for showing improvement, but the thinking on the topic remains trapped in simplistic and unsupported ways.

And that assessment in the form of expository feedback can be shared in this spirit: This is not a negative criticism of your effort, or your ability, but a fair reflection of your current growth, a snapshot of your journey to writing and thinking more complexly and in more compelling ways.

For teachers of writing, this problem also asks us to face key elements of giving students feedback and grading when required. The challenge revolves around having clear goals for the writing assignment, and then being able to contextualize those goals by student characteristics such as brain development (a really challenging concern).

Here are some of the common issues teachers of writing face when working with teenagers and young adults, problems that occur at the intersection of writing proficiency and thinking well:

• Students make a large number of extreme claims, rarely offering credible evidence in compelling ways. Yet, the students have a high command of the language and construct effective sentences and paragraphs as well as relatively cohesive essays.
• Students submit a jumbled draft, seemingly carelessly constructed (surface features, formatting), but includes several strong claims linked to solid evidence. Sentence structure, paragraphing, and essay coherence are spotty at best.
• Students submit a well structured essay with solid sentence and paragraph formation; surface features are also solid. The essays pose a manageable number of reasonable claims linked to evidence in traditional ways (for example, all claims about a text are connected to quotes from the text); however, that evidence is thin, from sources that are not credible, or doesn’t support the claim (the quote doesn’t support the claim).

Just to name a few common challenges above, but the focus here is that each of these situations is common and made complicated by the need to grade; each is, in fact, not as challenging for offering feedback, especially to support revision.

The evaluation culture of schooling works against both student growth as writers and thinkers, in fact, because summative evaluation de-contextualizes artifacts of learning from the larger realities of human development.

Grades also stunt some of the essential elements of learning, notably that errors are often not to be avoided, but are essential for growth.

For example, many of my students in first-year college writing submit work that is mostly claims, no evidence, or work that is narrowly grounded in the “all evidence is quoting” trap they have mis-learned from writing too much literary analysis in high school (such as in Advanced Placement Literature and Composition).

Less of my instruction is about writing in those cases, although I tend to find that young writers are lazy and careless with word choice, sentence formation, and paragraphing, but more about the substance of their claims and their ability to find, choose, and incorporate effective evidence.

Young people, we must remember, live in experiences outside of schooling where being persistent, loud, or assertive results in simplistic or even false claims being viewed as credible. And young people often have not reached a level of brain development to investigate critically claims and evidence.

To teach writing is inextricable from teaching thinking. Simultaneously, those of us teaching writing can distinguish between something like good writing that can sit next to poor thinking, and flawed writing that includes important aspects of complex thinking.

Much to our chagrin, we almost always have to grade the submitted writing sample—even when we are aware that many of our teenagers and young adults simply will not think complexly for several more years despite our best effort to nudge them along that path.

Ultimately, assigning, responding to, and then assessing/grading student writing requires that we very clearly identify what our goals are for the writing assignment and the students, that we acknowledge the tension between responding to and assessing/grading both the writing and thinking in writing samples, and that we find ways to resolve how assessment/grading inhibits and even deforms those learning goals (such as delaying grades).

As I approach forty years of teaching teenagers and young adults to write and think, I have remained fairly vigilant in my demands for their ability to grow as writers while also becoming more and more patient with the time it takes for them to become the critical thinkers I hope they will be.