Principles of Writing in Univeristy Seminars
Earlier this summe, the SAGES program circulated a
statement articulating our vision
of writing instruction in the entire seminar sequence. Several
principles from the vision statement are especially relevant to
University Seminars. The purpose in this page is to highlight these
principles, and to suggest how they can guide USEM instructors in
developing the writing component of their seminars.
Five Principles
1. In University Seminars, writing is not
merely an ancillary skill. Rather, it is an intellectual activity
in its own right—one that requires clarity of presentation, linguistic
resourcefulness, and the exercise of reflective judgment.
2. No single combination of attributes
constitutes "good writing" in every situation or for every audience. We
hope that students in University Seminars will notice and value the
deliberate choices that writers make in response to social contexts and
disciplinary expectations.
3. We expect students in University
Seminars to acquire the knowledge and working habits necessary to
correct and improve their drafts, both independently and in
consultation with more experienced writers.
4. Successful writing for University
Seminars extends beyond mechanical correctness. It requires students to
develop their powers of analysis and reflection; to define a compelling
purpose for everything they write; and to build coherent arguments
without remaining caught within the rigid framework of the
five-paragraph essay.
5. As a result of their University Seminar
experience, we hope that our students will become citizens who can
enter into (and sometimes transform) the terms of debate in the world
beyond the classroom; whose ongoing engagement with writing informs
their intellectual and professional lives; and whose practical
knowledge of the writer's craft makes them discerning readers.
Offered on this website is a set of assignments
and timetables for planning a course that realizes these principles.
These are by no means obligatory, but they should provide models for
course planning and execution.
Each row on the semester timetable stands for a
week of instruction and is coordinated with four columns, each
representing a key facet of writing instruction. In each cell, you will
find a specified category of activity pertaining to each facet of
writing instruction, many of which have links to sample assignment
sheets, handouts, and exercises. (More links will appear shortly.)
The first facet, Assignments,
specifies when each assignment should be introduced in the course and
when versions are due. Assignment sequencing is an important part of
designing a University Seminar; it is hard to imagine effective
realization of the principles sequenced assignments that
challenge students to articulate their best thinking.
In the model sequences, all proposed assignments
are “linked” to a single topic. A student chooses, early in the
semester, a topic relevant to the course theme and spends the rest of
the term reading and writing on different facets or issues within that
topic. In this respect, revision is already built into the assignment
sequence; each student continually works and reworks material on a
chosen topic. These assignments also require students to vary the kinds
of arguments they advance and support as well as the audiences or
readers to whom they are writing (as consistent with principles 4 &
5 above).
We also have a responsibility to design
assignments that require students to practice research methods and
skills. In the process, however, we must be careful not to emphasize
ways of finding sources and information without sufficient
emphasis on
the art of working with them. First Seminar does a
very good job of teaching students that serious, thorough research
requires a variety of sources. In University Seminars, we can continue
to ask our students to demonstrate basic research skills while also
teaching them sophisticated ways to integrate, evaluate, and
incorporate the ideas and words of others into their papers.
The second facet, Rhetorical Skills,
focuses attention on means of generating content, the creation of ‘what
to say.' Rhetoricians call these skills invention. How is
it possible to teach student writers to invent content without telling
them what to say in advance? One answer has been to teach imitation of
models; the students read good examples of letters, essays, and
arguments and then attempt to write their own. A more satisfying
answer,
because it is universally applicable, is to teach students
structures of argument. When students finish their seminars, they ought
to possess strategies of invention that will support them in the
unpredictable variety of expository writing experiences they will
encounter in their other college courses, in their jobs, and in their
communities.
Instruction in invention strategies can emphasize
expository patterns or structures of argument. Students should have
practice in analyzing and generating different types of claims and
reasons, such as claims about facts, existence, and definition, claims
about causes, about values and the meaning of symbols, and about
actions. We should not simply treat invention as a technique separate
from writing, but should instead turn our attention to offering
students guided practice in inventing arguments for particular
situations. Ideally, students ought to be able to generate appropriate
content given any combination of the variables of subject, purpose, and
audience.
In addition to invention, students need explicit
instruction in arrangement . Arrangement is the skill of
imposing order on an early draft. With repeated opportunities to apply
the craft of writing, students will become intuitively skillful at
finding an appropriate arrangement or structure for their material.
The third facet, Language Skills,
focuses attention on clarity of presentation and linguistic
resourcefulness. Instruction in this area builds on language capacities
that students already possess but have had little opportunity to
practice and even less opportunity to reflect on. As seminar leaders,
we should not confuse style and appropriateness with mere correctness.
Students often acquire a command of grammar, syntax, and usage in high
school, and they have had the opportunity to refine their skills in
First Seminar. Yet many of these students take colloquial conversation
as their model of expression in formal academic writing—or,
alternatively, regard obscure and verbose phrasing as the hallmark of
intellectual prose. It falls to University Seminar instructors to
address these issues in student writing.
As a continuation of the First Seminar, the
University Seminar is a good place to teach style, the
manipulation of language at the sentence and paragraph level. Invention
and arrangement have to do with the construction and ordering of whole
arguments, but
style explores the details of word choice and position. When we teach
style, we have enormous territory to cover, including how to combine
and separate sentences to serve coherence and cohesion, how to position
words for emphasis, how to reduce wordiness for clarity, and how to use
simple rhetorical figures (such as antithesis), not to
mention how to increase precision with word choice. Such concerns,
however, can be folded into the ongoing seminar activities without much
difficulty.
The fourth facet, reading skills,
focuses analytical attention on course readings, with the goal of
teaching students how expository writing works and helping them develop
reflective judgments about content and form in written arguments.
Discussions and workshops devoted to critical reading also promote the
rhetorical and language skills elements of writing instruction. For
instance, you can plan an activity in which students consider how a
particular writer integrates the words and ideas of others into her
text without losing her own ‘voice.' The following week, you can plan
an activity where students analyze the organizational structure of an
essay and experiment with alternative modes of presentation,
speculating on the different reading experiences that the alternatives
create. This last facet of writing instruction is crucial because
it provides students with sources of engagement and imitation on
subjects relevant to their own research and writing.
Together, these four facets of writing instruction
help students focus an issue , formulate a thesis or
principal claim , develop the support that the thesis
requires , and accommodate the whole to the audience
addressed.
The mission of University Seminars with respect to
writing instruction is daunting but not impossible, for the strategic
integration of assignment design, rhetorical skills, language skills,
and critical reading skills can go a long way toward enabling SAGES
instructors and students to realize the five principles outlined above.
For this reason, we encourage you to keep the four facets of writing
instruction in mind as you plan your syllabus, assignment sequence, and
course activities.
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