Louise Wetherbee Phelps

The Syracuse writing studios teach writing as an intellectual tool that enables students to become responsible for their own education: using writing to learn actively and critically, to connect and integrate their knowledge, to achieve and test their own discoveries, insights, and beliefs. At the same time, students are learning writing as an art of rhetoric--a system of codes, conventions, strategies, and social knowledge through which people express their ideas and attitudes and attempt to influence the beliefs of others. What is "basic" to achieving these goals?

Often, people think writing is just a matter of "basic skills," meaning something very limited: knowledge of correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and other conventions of written language. studio teachers have reinterpreted this concept of skills and broadened the understanding of what is basic to encompass not only skills but conceptual knowledge about language and good judgment in using it effectively. We think of these three forms of knowledge as fundamental to writing well.

SKILLS: Writing studios understand skills not simply as mastery of language conventions but as the whole set of basic intellectual and linguistic tools that writers acquire for thinking and learning and communicating with written language. To be "skillful" is to use these tools of language and thought with discipline, purpose, inventiveness, and flexibility. Because skills are not formal knowledge but "know-how," or ways of doing things, students learn them through practice. Writing "studios" are classrooms where students practice ways of inquiring and communicating both individually and with other students. These personal and social practices are the heart of studio learning. Studio teachers do not neglect the technical skills that are part of the language resources students need to express ideas clearly and appropriately for given social contexts. But rather than teaching these skills in isolation, teachers emphasize their importance in producing "edited" texts ready for "publication." Studio students publish their writing for their peers, parents, friends, other classrooms, and the larger community.

CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE: The second kind of knowledge "basic" to writing studios is concepts, or ideas that students learn to name and use. While language skills translate into classroom practices, students gain access to conceptual knowledge about writing through specialized language drawn from composition and rhetoric and other disciplines that study writing, and key words special to the writing studios. Such language helps students to gain more precise and subtle knowledge of literacy and its uses, introducing them to theories about writing and encouraging them to invent and debate their own. Skills and concepts are connected through invitations to students to reflect constantly on the processes of writing and learning that they are engaged in. Through research, study, speculative writing, and reflective thinking, students form concepts and test theories about writing and its relationships to cognition, rhetoric, historical and cultural contexts, and technologies.

JUDGMENT: Finally, students need to acquire judgment, the ability to relate skills and concepts of writing to cultural or disciplinary knowledge that they are learning and writing about, in studios and in other classes. Studios teach the arts of writing as "portable" knowledge, capable of transfer or application to many disciplinary and professional discourse communities and different situations. Students learn, however, that their intellectual and language skills and their conceptual knowledge about writing and rhetoric do not automatically transfer across contexts, but must be adapted and extended for different subject matter and situations. Good rhetorical judgment can only develop from practice in making these transfers and applications while "reflecting-in-action'" about one's experience. In such practice, students learn that language reflects values embodied in the language of communities they enter, and that judgment in using language requires thoughtful choices beyond technical skill.

The following chart shows the triad of "basics," or fundamentals, that organize studio teaching and learning. The left column shows goals for students' learning in studios. The right column translates these goals or end points of student learning into features of the classroom--practices, opportunities, information--that teachers offer to facilitate students' efforts to acquire writing skills, writing concepts, and rhetorical judgment.

FOR STUDENT TO LEARN:	TEACHERS OFFER:
Intellectual and symbolic skills------>	Language practices: social activities and processes of inquiry, writing, reading, talk; and opportunities to reflect on their meaning and on the learning process
Conceptual knowledge------>	Naming: the terms, or key words, used by teachers and students to discuss, invent, and reflect on theories of writing and thinking (drawn from the Program and the disciplines that study writing)
Rhetorical judgment------>	Experience of applying skills and knowledge across contexts, especially adapting and extending them to new contexts; and of articulating rhetorical judgments and choices in light of personal and cultural/disciplinary values, critically examined

Here is a scheme for thinking about the skills taught in writing studios. There is nothing sacred about these categories; there are many ways to divide up and name studio practices. These are chosen to fit teachers' normal ways of talking and thinking about what they do and what students do in the classroom. They work well because each one translates easily into concrete classroom strategies and events. The scheme provides a heuristic for generating or evaluating content and methods for studios.

BROAD LANGUAGE AND LEARNING SKILLS	SPECIAL STUDIO SKILLS
Composing	Working collaboratively
Learning through writing	Editing documents for "publication"
Inquiring through writing	Assessing the work and writing development of oneself and others
Making writing-reading connections	Linking writing with technologies and other symbol-making systems
Engaging in focused forms of conversation	Transferring skills and knowledge: making them deliberately portable to new contexts through rhetorical inquiries and adaptation

BROAD LANGUAGE AND LEARNING SKILLS

1. Composing text: turning ideas and prior informal writing into public text, and using this process heuristically to discover or connect ideas; managing one's own thinking and writing processes to deliberately compose meanings into discursive structures and genres, to make them public for particular audiences, purposes, and situations. Encompasses strategies of "process teaching" including invention heuristics, planning, drafting, mapping one's own ideas or text, analyzing the audience, etc.

2. Learning through writing: using informal, semi-private modes of writing actively to comprehend, remember, record, transform, reflect on, and evaluate the organized knowledge made available by texts and by others (e.g., in textbooks, readings, lectures, workshops). Concrete activities include, for example, keeping double-entry journals, annotating texts, taking class notes; paraphrasing, glossing or listing concepts, digging out underlying assumptions, questioning.

3. Inquiring or researching through writing: using informal modes of writing to aid in pursuing inquiries directly, to discover, invent, or organize knowledge using methods like search, observation, experimentation, interviewing; making connections among ideas with processes like patterning, hypothesizing, categorizing, comparing, metaphor, reasoning from evidence. Writing modes include field notes, lab observations, interview notes, observational narratives, speculative journals, clustering and mapping.

4. Making writing-reading connections: connecting writing to reading in various relations of ends and means, especially the following:

a. Writing to read (better): with comprehension, with appreciation; to remember reading content, to organize or reorganize information and ideas, to contrast and combine, to challenge. Includes prereading; listing, mapping, glossing, paraphrasing, summarizing, questioning; reading for concepts, gist, issues and arguments, values, rhetorical tone, etc.

b. Reading like a writer: to learn, or to imitate, writing techniques, strategies, and possibilities from models; to analyze and evaluate writing performances as skillful and effective. Imitative writing.

c. Reading to write: using conceptually complex texts as a starting point (stimulus, source, or object of inquiry): to respond to, interpret, or critique a text; to be stimulated to write; to derive information and ideas from multiple sources so as to construct an original argument or interpretation. Reading logs; high and low-tech strategies for manipulating and glossing, synthesizing ideas from multiple sources.

5. Engaging in focused forms of conversation: practicing special forms of literate talk, including argument, debate, role-playing, "crits," webbing, craft talk, student lecture, mock trials, conferring.

SPECIAL STUDIO SKILLS

1. Working collaboratively: participating with awareness of group dynamics in workshops and projects where ideas and writing are shared, criticized, sometimes jointly authored, using structured forms of talk and task sharing.

2. Editing for publication: handling grammar and style issues in terms of copy-editing processes modeled on those of professional publication; stylistic editing based on the psychology and rhetoric of reading; document preparation including formatting and document design. Class magazines are an illustrative activity.

3. Assessing the work, and ultimately the writing and intellectual development, of others and oneself: providing feedback and critical judgments to others as reader and co-author; playing this role for oneself, in processes of revision; tracking, evaluating, and thus planning and managing one's own development as a writer, reader, and thinker. Organized around portfolios maintained by students throughout the college years.

4. Linking writing with technologies and other symbolic systems: not merely word processing, but practicing, creating, and studying new linkages between writers or thinkers and technologies like computers and video--tools that challenge and revise the notion of text and make texts intertextual and multi-modal. Also, connecting and comparing writing with other symbolic modes like speech, pictures, animation, or computer programming.

5. Transferring knowledge: making skills and concepts deliberately portable by rhetorical inquiry--actively researching and contrastively describing new discourse tasks, their contexts, their specific demands and expectations; using systematic questioning, observation, peer feedback, consultation of authorities and models, analysis, imitation, and other means to describe for oneself and begin practicing new discourse tasks and genres, adapting basic or "portable" skills to different needs and contexts, with the aim of becoming independent of formal instruction for further growth in writing and thinking skills.