Revised Writing Construct Proposal [Maggie Messitt]

Now that we’re working with Writing About Writing inside our classrooms, I’ve decided to dramatically shift my research topic and explore the construct that assumes (and teaches our students to believe) that writing is a solitary act. Kleine’s observation of eight researchers and their individual processes illustrated a journey (from research to the page) that is highly dependent upon one’s peers and the research or writing community within which they reside. I plan to challenge the current expectation that students conduct research and write traditional research papers alone and explore the pedagogical implications this has on how we design our curriculum and run our classroom. Furthermore, as others have defined “community” (Greene, Kleine) and the need for any writers/researchers within that community to have the necessary “cultural literacy” to successfully engage, I will also explore whether the solitary traditional research paper 1) best prepares students for future writing endeavors, and 2) successfully reflects a students ability to research and formulate their own thoughts/ideas.

Javan's Construct Proposal Revamp

Writing Construct Proposal: Natural Writing vs. Learned Writing

            It is my understanding that there exists a common cultural conception that there is such a thing as a natural writer.  That is, some people are born with innate understanding of how writing works and some people are not.  Just as we think of some people being born with a natural talent of music or painting.  For writing is not only a craft, it’s also an art.  Sarah Allen, on the other hand, asserts that writing, at times, is not easy for anybody, including those who are professional writers.  She sites David Bartholomae as confessing to not learning how to write until he finished his undergraduate degree and also had his dissertation rejected because it was “‘poorly written’” (Allen 29).  In her view, Bartholomae is representative of a writer who may have been born with natural ability.  However, Bartholomae, himself is the one who claims that he also had to learn how to write.  I would like to explore this idea further.  Is Stephen King successful because he was born with natural talent, or does he have a better understanding of what is culturally popular?  Because Junot Diaz took ten years of work to complete a novel, does it mean that he is not a natural writer?  I would like argue that the idea of the natural born writer may, in fact, be a reality.  Many of us would like to believe that in the classroom it is up to the teacher, the curriculum and the effort of the student to cultivate the ability of student writer.  So, we are caught in a paradox, neither can natural ability be acknowledged publically nor can it be completely ignored.    

Project One Construct

Elise Page Dixon

My new writing construct focuses primarily on the five-paragraph essay. Many students come into college prepared to plug their “points” into the organized formula of the five paragraph essay. Most research I have found so far on whether the five paragraph essay has any merit is either just pro or con. However, I still have yet to find the solution to the problem that the five-paragrpah essay is trying to solve—that students have a hard time with organizational skills in their writing when they aren’t given a formula to follow. However, many educators from the college and university level reject the five-paragraph formula because it inhibits creativity and keeps students from actually analyzing the texts they use to research. What I have not seen, between the sources I have collected so far, is a way to teach a student organizational skills while allowing him or her to still be creative while writing and researching. Davis and Shadel's article "Building a Mystery" discusses an alternative to the modernist research paper, and gives some possibilities on how to teach writing to promote creativity. The projects Shadel and Davis described are not linearly organized-- however they still work well. I want to investigate if there is a way to teach new writing students how to play with and learn from their research while writing, and how to do it effectively and efficiently. 

Project 1 Revised Proposal

Revised Construct Proposal

                For the first assignment, I wish to explore the use of first person pronouns in academic writing. The beginning of my research was focused on how students, across disciplines, are sent mixed messages about the first person in research writing: some scholars believe that it is impossible to be impersonal when writing, while other think self-inclusion is a slippery slope into “unchecked self-references and narcissism” (Berube 1063). The mixed messages leave students feeling insecure and lacking authorial presence (Tang and John). In I-Writing: The Politics and Practice of Teaching First-Person Writing, Karen Surman Paley discusses an “expressivist pedagogy,” which she describes as including “an openness to the use of personal narrative, a particular type of the narrative mode of discourse” (Paley 13). Like Davis and Shadle in “’Building a Mystery’: Alternative Research Writing and the Academic Act of Seeking Author(s)”Paley sees genre exploration as a way to transfer the ability to write personally into other, more “academic” forms of writing. Moreover, Paley contends that expressive writing-writing that includes the first-person- engenders self-confidence in the writing because the writer knows of what she writes. Perhaps if all students were able to explore various genres of research writing (personal narrative, cause-and-effect, etc.), then they would gain more confidence and authorial voice. One problem I have found, however, is that while some scholars, such as Margaret Kantz, Paley, and Tang and John, advocate for creativity in academic writing, others warn against students reading scholarly articles as stories. It seems incongruous and potentially confusing to suggest a pedagogy that encourages creativity, self-expression, and, essentially, narrative, and also teach students to avoid reading similar articles as stories. 

Writing Construct Revised

            For this project, I would like to research the construct of voice in writing. At the high school level, voice is a reading and a writing standard; students are asked to identify an author’s voice as well as demonstrate using their own voice throughout the year in the classroom and on standardized tests. However, the language used within the academic content standards themselves vaguely indicates what voice is; in fact, the articles I’ve read throughout my research do not even agree on how to define it. Consequently, teachers do not adequately explain the concept of voice to students, who then confuse voice with style and tone. One of my sources is Peter Elbow’s “Voice in Writing Again: Embracing Contraries,” which illustrates that the discourse arguing for and against voice in writing has essentially fallen silent; Elbow emphasizes that voice must be used in rhetoric to in order to effectively influence audience. I intend to argue that the uncertainty at the fundamental level of definition clearly prevents teachers from modeling proper use of voice in writing to students and that the discussion of voice in literacy needs to be reawakened to improve both teacher education in writing and the quality of our students’ writing experiences.

Construct Proposal--Revised

Christina Jones
Albert Rouzie
ENG 5890
Construct Proposal-- Revision
9/4/12

Writing Right: An Article on the Debate of Correct Grammar in Creative Writing

Are you fully dressed if you don't wear socks? By use of extended metaphor, is a sentence "fullly dressed" without a comma where one should be, to be grammatically correct? Is it okay for your shirt to not match your pants, or again, what if noun plurality doesn't match the verb conjugation? Sure, it can be confusing, but isn't it your creative choice? The argument of whether to be grammatically correct in creative writing has been two-sided for many years: yes, you need to be grammatically correct or no, you do not. More recent sources, such as Anna Leahy, Kathryn Mincey, and Susan Myhill--all educators, argue that it's not if a writer should be grammatically correct or not, it's when we as educators should introduce grammatical rules and when to let students deviate from them.  My reason for exploring all sides of the argument is to evaluate if it does matter when standard grammar rules are abandoned for creative purposes and whether or not the evolution of language has been taken into consideration. We are not the students our grandparents were. Grammar has changed into a new outfit. But are we just holding onto the same old coveralls?

Project Proposal Revision

Katie Berta

Project Proposal: Questioning A Writing Construct

            For this assignment, I intend to examine the idea that writing is about communication and that, therefore, clarity should be the student’s main focus. As I was looking at the readings by Kantz and Porter, I began formulating the idea in response to them. Kantz’s “Helping Students Use Textual Sources Persuasively” discusses the way that students often revert to earlier, already-learned forms of writing in order to tackle an intimidating task, which I believe is directly related to the idea that the student believes he or she must, in the service of clarity, simplify complex issues and use reductive reasoning and logical fallacies to make their points in a linear way that, he or she thinks, is easier for the reader. Complication is seen as undesirable and it, along with any nuanced argument, goes out the window. Students who aren’t aware of or who misunderstand the specific discourse community they’re working within will revert to these previous patterns of understanding argument because, as Porter says, “genuine originality is difficult within the confines of a well regulated system” (93). In this paper, I would argue that imposing a restrictive system upon students—and attempting to debunk their “dashing image” of the intellectual hero (94)—is actually in many ways doing students a disservice, preempting the genuine originality that Porter finds desirable because students are left both without knowledge of the private discourse community they are hoping to enter and the empowerment that romantic individualism allows them. Allowing students to experiment and, by virtue of the experimentation, to be unclear, to make mistakes, and to communicate ineffectively as they transition from high school writers to college writers may not be as detrimental as someone like Porter poses it as. Students must become acquainted with the community they’re hoping to enter—while at the same time retaining the empowerment they feel as individuals. My initial research revolved around originality—I hope to support these claims with that research and with counter examples of successful, complicated, unclear narratives that work in unconventional ways but still meet the requirements of their form. Most of the existing research deals with originality by giving instructors formal structures that they may impose upon their students—an attempt to demystify the subject for teacher and student both, dismisses the idea of originality as romantic and nearly unavailable as Porter does, or poses creativity and originality as the most important part of composition. By the end of the paper, I hope to find a niche in reaction to these two approaches—one that acknowledges the value of formal exercises but doesn’t rely on them—and one that allows students some measure of autonomy without dismissing the need for intertextual conversation.