Cross Purposes Response

“Students do not use writing for the making of new knowledge.” It is not necessarily true that we, the students, only write to learn fact-based knowledge. We can, indeed, write to learn something new. However, we are required to tie in factual research and/or knowledge to bolster that which we claim to have learned. Students learn new knowledge, though that new knowledge may already be a fact known by the experts, because the knowledge is new to them—thought, synthesized, and created after gathering fact-based knowledge. So I think the above quote should clarify to whom the learned knowledge is new.

I believe that the limitations regarding writing to gain new knowledge occur because most students are taught early to depend on a specific writing prompt, which is conducive to uniform topics, purposes, and audiences. The crutch of teacher-determined-topic dependency never seems to be removed. I believe that the only opportunity to gain new knowledge through writing is to challenge the students with broad, open topics and to ask that the students add something productive to the world of academia, creativity, etc.

The scant nature of student pre-writing is a quite solvable dilemma. One method that could be easily implemented would be to have two assignments of great similarity. The first assignment would be given without regulations and requirements in drafting and pre-writing. Following the completion of the first assignment, extensive lessons regarding pre-wring and drafting should be given. The second assignment, which should be as similar as possible to the first without repetition, would have a very regimented requirement regarding pre-writing, the number of drafts, and methods used for each. After the second is submitted, the students will then compare the differences in the writing, and the teacher could take it from there.

The analytic essay is a “poor way to acquire school knowledge”? Is school knowledge just another way of saying factual knowledge? Does this not suggest then that the students may be gaining new knowledge in place of the somewhat less desirable factual knowledge?

This piece speaks of analytic writing’s inability to prepare the students for the broad ranges of tests they must take. What if the students’ tests were, in fact, the writing assignments? Would they not then be prepared for the tests?