In our first reading, Elbow notes that an audience can act as a beneficial or detrimental force. He goes on to state how the idea of an audience often acts as a disruptive force, making the production of an essay difficult for FYC students. I believe this is the case for many of my students. My students are so concerned about “sounding academic” that their writing obscures their meaning or prevents them from discovering new meaning. I understand what they are attempting to do. They are trying to place themselves in the discourse (and, of course, get full points on the audience portion of the grading rubric). But in their flurry of ten-dollar words and complex sentence structures, I am left confused and somewhat frustrated.

After one a round of particularly dreadful rough drafts, I tried a freewriting activity in class. My directions were simple: take out a sheet of paper and pen and write for 15 minutes without stopping. Do not pause. Do not erase. Do not revise. Just write and see where it takes you, what ideas it generates. I set them on their task. They seemed confused when I told them that this assignment would not be collected.

I could sense their hesitancy as they wrote, struggling to keep their pen moving and their ideas flowing. Besides the fact that they were burnt out on the topic of technology, they struggled to ignore audience. Perhaps this struggle will persist as most of their writing occurs in a classroom setting. So, of course, they construct these pieces of work knowing that they will be seen, commented on, and graded. Can they learn to ignore audience (at least in the beginning stages of writing)? And if they did, would their writing be different/better as a result? What would my students’ papers look like if they knew I would not see them?

Despite the activity’s mixed success, I plan to use more freewriting activities. I’ll update with any promising developments.

“To be blunt, I must be sure not to ‘teach’ these texts (in the common sense of the term), but rather to ‘have them around’ to wrestle with, to bounce off of, to talk about and talk from, to write about and write from. Again: not feel we must be polite or do them justice. In taking this approach I think we would be treating texts the way academics and writers treat them: using them rather than serving them” (74)

While I attempt to do this in my class, and I stress the importance of using the texts to create and support your own argument, I find most students still fall under the category of “serving them.” Their thesis statements just seem to be reiterations of the author’s claim, and no new thoughts are formed. If no new thoughts are formed regarding the matter, how can they actually enter the conversation the texts have created?

I think I have found a way to counter this dilemma in the classroom setting during peer review, by forcing them to think of their own papers as the text, since the majority of them are just summaries anyway, this works out. If their own papers become the text, then the classroom is the writing community, and their papers begin to form a conversation amongst themselves, and their peers become their audience. For essay two, some students agreed with Restak while others agreed with Samuel, and I put those people into pairs. The conversations the erupted from this disagreement led to some new generation of ideas that they hadn’t previously considered, and their papers drastically improved. They began to consider themselves as writers within their own community.

I totally tracked with Lynn Bloom’s “Why I (Used To) Hate to Give Grades” until her last few paragraphs. The reason why is the same reason I consider this post a double-whammy in Classroom Praxis and Pre-Class Reading Response: I tried it with freshmen, and it didn’t work.

A few weeks ago I had the Bloomian inclination to have freshman ENC1101 students grade their own drafts. My thinking was partially on par with Bloom’s (in that they would shoulder the work of proof), but also around other ideas like:

• it would force them to read their own work critically (instead of cranking it out and handing it in to me as soon as they hit the page limit),
• they would be tricked into practicing the art of rhetoric and argument, which is arguably one of our main teacherly goals of instruction in ENC1101,
• they would feel less entitled to A’s once they found flaws in their writing,
• they would begin to understand, in using the grading criteria, what “standard” is used by our Department to determine their grades,
• they would be forced to participate in a dialogue about their writing’s strengths and weakness, rather than stick to the age-old submit-and-receive relationship of grades from the teacher,
• they might start to recognize their identity, authority and capacity to shape their own life and experience as maturing college adults, rather than passive, powerless freshmen,
• a boatload of other idealistic reasons.

Almost all of them gave themselves A’s, though I interestingly had many students — largely female, if we want to break it down by gender — who underestimated their grade like Suzy. That might have been fine, but they had zero proof or argument as to why they deserved the grade. All this signals to me that the requirement in Bloom’s method is that you have students who are mature enough to handle the burden of self-evaluation. And it seems like that’s something they learn over time, maybe with age. On the bright side, it also showed me that there’s merit to what they’re learning in ENC: that they need to learn what argument is, and how to do it.