LE: Ch. 2, Ch. 3, Ch. 4, Ch. 5 Response

CHAPTER 2 (Graves)

Graves's study was one of my favorite pieces I have read during this course. It was so clear and instead of concrete conclusions, its goal was concrete questions, and I thought that was an interesting premise.

I noticed that the study was conducted with middle class children whose homes (at least in Michael’s case) seemed to provide the normal middle-class educational support—see Table III. Maybe it has already been done, but I think that it would be very beneficial to conduct a longitudinal study across socio-economic lines. Do the same tests with lower- and upper-class children. I wonder how much the data would change. Maybe the boys and girls reverse their seemingly oppositional relationships. Maybe they grow further apart, or maybe the gaps close. I think it is worth considering. Shipka, if you know of a good study that follows this criterion and is understandable to lay-person such as myself, I would like to read it.

I could not tell if the definition of pre-writing included thinking. It did not seem to. It simply mentioned the outside factors that influenced the writer immediately before writing began. It seems to me that thinking is the biggest part of pre-writing. Nothing will land in black or red or pink or yellow and white, but the child’s mind may be pre-writing in thought.

I think the most striking feature of the study was the children’s methods of pre-writing—drawing. I have never done this, and it has never occurred to me to cross pictorial art with textual art to amplify the effects of the text. I really would like to try this sometime—though I think I will need prodding by an assigned task. I am going to use this with my students, too. I don’t know how successful it will be to my own writing or to others’ writing, but I imagine there are some who would benefit just as some benefit from outlining and others benefit from doodled verbal chaos. The other interesting aspect of the student drawings is that they tended to change the drawing to go along with their text. In effect, they were altering their pre-writing in response to their actual writing. First, this suggests the recursive (non-linear) ideologies surrounding the writing process. Second, I would like to see the benefit of altering one’s pre-writing in response to discoveries or alterations made during the process of creating the actual piece of writing. Maybe even use a different color for each draft’s pre-writing alterations to track when, how, and why things were learned or changed during the process of writing.

CHAPTER 3 (Perl)

Again, I want to address a limitation of this study. What about “skilled” writers? I would like to see the same study implemented with skilled writers and at different levels of the college system (not just NYC’s community colleges). I want fact-based comparisons made. I think that such a study would really deepen the knowledge learned in this particular study.

The quote, “editing intrudes so often…it breaks down rhythms generated by thinking and writing,” really caught my eye. I think it is very accurate. I know that, despite my perfectionism, I must ignore mechanics, structure, cohesiveness and syntax on my first draft (though much of the structure is considered during my pre-writing processes). I usually spend about twice the time I spent writing the first draft editing the first draft. Recognizing the major flaws, etc. When I come to writing blocks during the first draft, I usually make clear set of asterisks or blanks or capitalized remarks to myself that more development or some other kind of change will be necessary during editing. Why do I do this? To avoid the overly recursive process that seems to hinder Tony so much. If I did not do that, I would indeed lose my rhythm, or train, of thought. Also, I believe that my relative propensity for correct spelling helps me to avoid such pitfalls. Maybe, this study could lead to the study of need for understandings of spelling.

I think that the most important fact I learned from this reading was that “unskilled” does not mean beginner. I do believe that without reading this article I would have made such a pitfall. Reading Tony’s drafts alone would suggest to me that he is a beginning writer (and in some ways he is). But the style sheet suggests otherwise. Tony has a prescribed writing process; it just happens that his process does not appear to be one that produces “skilled” writing. I wonder if there is a less time-consuming method of learning a student’s process of writing than this study so that a high school teacher would be able to differentiate her instruction in an effective manner.

CHAPTER 4 (Flowers & Hayes)

Shipka asked in class (the second day, I believe) why we need to teach writing. I think that the statement, "writing is problem-solving," is a very strong argument for such a need. All of education strives to prepare students for the world beyond the school, and the education community has increasingly realized the necessity for students to "critically think"--to problem solve. The fact that writing provides such an opportunity for students seek the best possible route from Point A to Point B is directly relatable to a mathematics class. The difficulty in writing arises because students must determine the problem themselves before they may attempt solving it. In math, this difficulty is removed because the student is given the problem and a prescriptive method for solving (I am not saying all math to those who know math in an intimate manner). Thus, teaching writing must strive to help students learn their own prescriptive methods for determining the correct problem. If the correct problem is known, reaching it will be a much more attainable task, as maps to the problem can be charted for them. [Yikes, that was a rough paragraph. Hope it wasn't as hard to read as it was to write...the brain just wasn't doing the flowing thing.]

Flowers and Hayes spoke of the good writers spending a tremendous amount of time considering the audience and of the poor writers' inattention to the audience. This conclusion suggests that a deep consideration for the audience is necessary to be a good writer. I question this, however. What if the audience consideration is an aspect of the writer's "tacit knowledge"? Maybe the writer spends much time leading discussions in a multitude of social settings to the point that audience considerations in the writer's comminucative methods are no longer a priority. Not that audience becomes unimportant but that audience becomes second nature to all other considerations.

CHAPTER 5 (Sommers)

Sommers claimed that students tend to write a thesis and then use said thesis to drive their paper forward. I agree that this is a very wrong approach because if writing is seen as a method of discovery the thesis should be discovered from all of the related pre-writing and "first draft." The thesis should be borne from the collection of written chunks. The writer may eventually discover a thread that attaches the many seemingly disparate thoughts on the paper, and through that discovery a thesis can be made.

Student "revision" seems to be based on what will earn them a higher grade, and what will earn them a higher grade in their classes is correct usage, spelling, and grammar. What if usage, spelling, and grammar were removed from the student's ideas of improvement (or at least cammoflauged)? I think that the best way a teacher can help her students to improve their writing would be to focus on larger issues such as content, audience, order, etc. The teacher could also focus on one redundant area of grammar, spelling, etc. concern per student paper submitted. Thus, with every paper, the student will be able to focus on one grammar issue (and therefore become sharper in that particular skill) and the student will realize that an improved grade will come from attending to the "larger" issues that they tend to avoid in "revision." These are my Super Teacher ideas; I am not so sure as to how easily implemented they would be in the real world (especially public high school). Maybe the "larger" issues of focus and the grammar lesson could be globalized to the entire class, based on the most frequently occurring difficulties.