Close Readings in WRT 105: Privileging Student Texts in the Writing Studio
    Virginia Blanton-Whetsell

    Over the past two years, I have developed a design overview for WRT 105 that does not include a reader and that is not driven by published readings, though I do not discount their value in my courses. During my first semester at Syracuse (Fall '96), I used Rereading America, one of the readers commonly available, because it fits with the Freirian pedagogy I espouse in 105–helping students to conceive of themselves as writers, getting them to write about what they know, encouraging a social awareness of themselves and others. That semester, however, we used the reader for only the second unit as we explored issues of class, race, and gender within the university. Even though we read an extraordinary number of essays during those five weeks, I realized that many students felt as though they had "wasted" money on the course text, since we did not use it the whole semester. The criticism caused me to evaluate how the reader functioned in the course, and I saw that I had used the readings as jumping off points for discussion, but I had not integrated the readings as a studio practice to encourage good writing.

    As I considered the student responses, I returned to the program's suggested guidelines for understanding WRT 105 as a studio. It occurred to me that the Writing Program curriculum places a strong emphasis on learning to read carefully, yet my approach to reading in that studio had at least one negative result: as an instructor, I glossed over what I perceive are some fundamental aspects of learning to write well, such as the ability to read a text on multiple levels, to discern not only its content, but also to articulate its construction, and to identify its multi-layered meanings. I also omitted exercises for learning to summarize, annotate, and conceptualize complex texts. Routinely, our discussions hit the "big issues" of each essay, but did not consider the finer points that the author articulated, and we did not examine the writer’s style, development, descriptive abilities, use of language, or organizational pattern. The problem was that I was using the reader to fill class time to off-set the number of writing assignments I was giving. My conclusion was that the readings provoked lively and engaging discussions about the students' opinions, but they did not help the students develop as writers.

    When I next taught WRT 105, I had the difficult task of teaching the only section offered during the summer, a section that routinely includes transfer students, management students, students with ESL difficulties, and students who have failed or tried to evade the WRT 105 requirement. As I anticipated a motley crew of writers who had a range of experience (some were first-year students, others seniors), I knew that the diverse reading and writing abilities among this group suggested that a reader appropriate for a first year writing course might not work well for the seniors. In addition, the time limitations of summer term teaching indicated that handling the three full writing projects usually expected in the regular semester would be impossible. The changes I made in my course design that summer were made because of some very practical considerations, but in retrospect, these design changes caused a pedagogical shift in the way I teach writing, a shift that has made a remarkable difference in the development of student texts.

    In the first unit project, in which the students write a form of a literacy autobiography, I begin with an exercise where students must map an historical moment in which they can claim they knew they were writers or a moment when they knew they were not. This generative map leads to a first draft in which the students describe the details of that experience as fully as possible. Then, they write a short analysis, explaining the significance of that moment to their development (and sometimes lack thereof) as writers. At this point, I hand out copies of a very standard reading for first year writers: Richard Rodriguez' "The Achievement of Desire." Our initial reading of this selection allows us to discuss the content issues surrounding immigration and race as they come to the fore in Rodriguez' education narrative; in essence, we start with a standard discussion of this text (in part, to get the "obvious" out of the way), since I know that students expect to discuss the surface level issues Rodriguez' raises. I do suggest, however, that in their small groups they need to evaluate how the piece is written, and this prompt begins our segué into the writing issues in this text that I want to highlight.

    I usually wait a couple of class days before I reassign the text, but I do so as the students are trying to develop their analysis in their own drafts. At this point, I direct them to re-read Rodriguez' account, looking only for description and analysis. Students are instructed to highlight descriptive passages in one colored marking pen and analysis in another. This simplistic move pushes them to read each sentence more carefully, to discern the differences between the descriptive and the analytical, to interrogate Rodriguez' choices as a writer. The exercise illuminates the complexities of the personal essay, which students often perceive as "easy writing" compared to the production of research papers. When the students return to class with their color-coded copies of Rodriguez' essay, I ask them, in small groups, to compare their shaded areas and to figure out the difference between description and analysis. There are often heated discussions when students disagree over complicated passages, unable to collectively name a sentence descriptive or analytical.

    At first, students are not even aware of how they become invested in this level of reading, but this exercise is deepened by a writing prompt. I prepare a worksheet in advance that asks the groups to define both "description" and "analysis" and use examples from Rodriguez to explicate these definitions. Ultimately, my goal is for students to offer the class a way of understanding how each type of writing functions in Rodriguez' text. In this process, students become aware of how difficult it is to name, define, or articulate the differences between description and analysis, and they also come to see how some descriptive passages are a form of analysis, so they move beyond the binary that I have set for them in the assignment, thinking through the ways complex passages work in the essay. One revelation for them is how much analysis exists in the personal essay; another is the multiple levels through which Rodriguez gets his audience to consider his experience through analysis and description.

    This workshop, though so simple, is the single most valuable exercise of my course, for it gets them to work collaboratively, to begin the community building they must have in the writing studio. It has added value, moreover, in that it allows the students to revisit their own texts and consider how the terms description and analysis can work as rhetorical devices in their papers. Their collective definitions–often hammered out among and between the groups–allow them to return to their own autobiographical narratives with language that they have developed communally, language that allows them to assess their own sentences and their peers'.

    The next class, students are asked to read each others' drafts as carefully for description and analysis as they did Rodriguez's essay. Often, the papers have been covered with one color, usually denoting description. The result is that many see how often they rely on description to function as analysis, and they begin the shift into writing more complex narratives about their writing development. In this first workshop on the students' texts, then, I ask that they focus on description and comment on their peers' use of this tool. Group members routinely point to their peers' descriptive passages and comment on whether or not it functions well as it is written; students seem to feel more confidence as readers and responders because they are looking for passages they know they can identify or at least, ones that they can problematize for the writer. Invariably, students push each other to provide more full descriptive passages, and an added luxury is that students become aware of how often they confuse explanation with analysis, and as a result, how limited their educational experience with analysis has been.

    I then ask the students to rewrite the description and to provide a separate analysis of it, stemming from some of the analytic passages in the first draft. When they return the next class, we take up Rodriguez again and look at the ways he places analysis in his essay: a whole paragraph following a descriptive passage; one analytic sentence within a descriptive paragraph; and non-spoken analysis embedded within description that readers have to infer. We then discuss these sentences to see how to write them, as well as how to smoothly combine analysis with description. Students find this part of the unit the hardest, since they are not used to being metacognitive about composing sentences. The second draft of their analysis, however, serves as an map of the issues they want to underline in the description. At this point, I slow the pace of the class even more so that students can get more deliberate about writing. We usually spend a couple of days in the computer cluster practicing and perfecting descriptive and analytical passages. I allow students to tinker with their words, to talk about sentences and paragraphs with peers', to ask me questions about phrasing. The bonus is that students begin to see the work involved in crafting a good piece of writing.

    When the drafts are coming together, I organize another group workshop to focus on the analytical passages. Since they have become securer about identifying analysis, peer response becomes more careful, and even as they prompt each other to provide more detailed description, students encourage each other to move beyond the obvious analytical claims, asking each other to deepen the analysis and make it more present (or in their terms, more definable). While each student's analysis does not become stellar as a result of these practices, most can discern if a passage is or is not analytical, and some can articulate why. This ability to read carefully allows them to see how easily they gloss over meaning, and as a consequence, how often they gloss over writing.

    The conversation that this unit project offers is invaluable in that students define terms, then take some mastery over them. Students also develop their own abilities to respond well to written pieces, whether they are polished, published articles or drafts at a very early stage. Moreover, this unit allows them to see that the writing studio is focused on student texts, not published ones, and that our work includes both collaboration and crafting to produce individual texts of good quality. By the end of five weeks, students can evaluate themselves to see if they have met the goals of the project. This assignment, then, works on multiple levels; it introduces the students to studio practices; pushes them to write in a methodical, process-oriented way; makes them become aware of their own educational histories, including their writing histories; helps them become good collaborators; and allows them to be authoritative about some writing practices.

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    The series of exercises described above is a methodical approach to reading and writing that I repeat throughout the course, particularly in the second unit, where the major writing project is an ethnography of a sub-cultural group's web site. At this point, however, we do not read the published texts of anthropologists; instead, we read several of the ethnographies written by Syracuse University students on the Odyssey page, and we begin a systematic discussion of how these texts were produced, how they are written, how they function. Students, then, inquire into some terms associated with this project: ethnography, sub-cultural group, observation, field notes, claims, patterns, verbal text, visual text, context. Each of the practices learned in the first writing project are repeated and enlarged in the ethnographic study, and students take up the challenge more readily, already feeling confidence about their descriptive and analytical skills. Taking a cue from Donna Marsh, I prompt them by naming the activities we did in the first five weeks, I underscore those that will be useful for them in the ethnography unit, and I add new challenges to the list. We then turn to the web sites that the students have chosen and focus our attention on them as "texts," reading them with the same deliberation that we did Rodriguez' essay or the student ethnographies. Without outlining all the project activities here, let me say that the process to which I subject the students has a similar pace; it continues to focus on their own individual texts and asks students to be good readers and responders as they write about what they are observing in the web sites and what they see as they read each other's drafts.

    Thus, my course only has one text published in traditional media, which is the selection from Rodriguez' autobiography; the other readings include students texts "published" on the Internet and student texts from our class. This might be problematic in that students could conceive of Rodriguez' as the model personal essay, but I off-set that impulse by turning these discussions back to student texts and suggesting that good writers (published or not) think metacognitively about the various complexities of their work and that readers can find evidence of this thought process in almost any written text. I also offer the observation that we might not need to privilege published writing as the standard by which we learn to write, that we might need to consider the process that leads to publication instead. Students are, at times, confused by this comment, but I remind them that we have not seen the multiple drafts of Rodriguez' text, that we might know more about how he works as a writer if we could see a third or fourth draft in addition to the final product that we read. Thinking about how Rodriguez got to the point of publishing his memoir allows students to consider that even published writers have a process. As they consider the multiple layers that a written text can have, they can begin to see how they might include these layers in their own written work.

    Reading student ethnographies also allows students to consider a developing writer's process. Although the Odyssey page only presents the final product of a student's efforts, we get a chance to conceive of what students can produce at the end of WRT 105, as well as to speculate about how the student arrived at the final product. In essence, we can imagine how a process-oriented approach to writing works for the ethnographic assignment, and by extension, any writing task. By introducing these published student texts as reading assignments, students see that I value the writing produced in the studios and that I see it as more than an end-product by which they will pass the class. Like our detailed approach to reading Rodriguez, students take apart the Odyssey ethnographies, looking for description, analysis, evidence of field notes, use of claims, etc. Again, I return the students' attention to their own writing, asking them in peer review to read and to respond as carefully to each other. I even ask students to take their peers' drafts home, to read them as they would published texts, to write response letters to them, and to create a discussion group about their responses when they return to class. The small gesture of making student work part of their reading and writing homework emphasizes the importance of their task as readers, asks them to be mindful of their role as collaborators, and like the super-slow crafting of sentences in unit one, underscores the importance of using what they have read and learned in peer response to revise.

    My attention to student texts invariably rubs off on the students, and they begin to value each other's work beyond the level of "this is good" and "you're a good writer." Peer commentary from my Fall 1997 studios shows that overall, my 105 students recognized not only the quality of the written product, but appreciated the process that preceded it. That semester, I believe I had the greatest success with small group workshops, in part because the students took their work seriously as writers and began to see the value in carefully articulating responses that would be valuable to their peers. Course evaluations also indicate that students conceived of the studio as a writing course, a space where their texts were central readings for the class and central to their development as writers. To my great delight, I had a number of middle-of-the-road writers (those who have some skills and can pass a writing course without any great revelations) who blossomed. They did not become great writers, but they did develop a writing process and did enjoy the writing projects they produced. Moreover, they became really fine readers of and responders to each other's texts, roles which I am convinced led to their development as writers.

    A few years ago, I could not have imagined a writing course in which student texts were the day-to-day primary focus, nor could I have conceived of running a 15-week course with such a limited number of published texts. My perception of how to teach writing has drastically shifted, and I continue to think of other ways to eliminate "filler" time without dragging the students down. Published texts often give us all a needed break in a writing class, but perhaps instead of adding more readings, we can conceive of ways to make readings, particularly student texts, more productive and valuable to the developing writer.