Resources for Writing Instruction in SAGES Seminars
Initial Writing Assessment | Recommended Writing Texts | Writing Support Services
Initial Writing Assessment
As you know, all of your students will have completed a First Seminar before they take your course, and some will have completed a University Seminar as well. Still, there is likely to be considerable variation in the quality of their writing. How can you help students who have trouble developing or articulating their ideas? The crucial first steps, we have found, are to identify these students in the early days of the semester; to talk with them about specific issues in their writing; and to motivate them to work on these issues with your writing instructor, tutors from the Writing Resource Center (WRC), or the SAGES Peer Writing Crew.
There are at least two ways to identify struggling writers:
- (1) You can assign a brief, in-class essay during the first or second week of the term. No one favors giving a writing assessment on the very first day of class, when you are trying to establish a congenial environment for your seminar. On day two or three, however, we recommend having students respond to a prompt related to your course topic. After reviewing the assessments with your writing instructor, you can follow up with students who seem likely to have trouble meeting your writing requirements.
- (2) You might also consider asking your students to give you copies of their final papers from their most recent seminars. As you and your instructor read their work, you may notice problems with grammar and syntax, phrasing, or organization that students can begin addressing right away with a tutor's assistance. You may also discover that the standards prevailing in an earlier seminar were very different from yours. In that case, it is important to talk with students about your writing-related expectations for the semester ahead.
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Recommended Writing Texts
We are writing to recommend that you adopt new texts to support your students’ writing in First and University Seminars. As the SAGES program has matured, it has become clear that relatively few SAGES courses have been making classroom use of Andrea Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer (our previously recommended text), and that even fewer students have been purchasing the text (the price of which is creeping toward $60) or retaining it for use in Departmental Seminars or Senior Capstones. Faculty and Writing Instructors have expressed dissatisfaction with Lunsford’s text and found it difficult to tie it to SAGES Learning Outcomes and the English Department’s recommended SAGES Writing Outcomes. Therefore, since a variety of typical “handbook” resources (e.g., grammar and style guides) are available online and in our libraries, the Writing Program believes that the following texts will prove more effective and easier to integrate into your seminars.
If you are teaching a First Seminar, please consider ordering Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (W. W. Norton, 2006; 978-0-393-92409-1; $18.75). The text is the result of the authors’ teaching in a writing-intensive, seminar-based general education program, and a number of faculty at Case have used it successfully in SAGES classrooms since 2006. The book helps students make the transition to university-level reading and writing by approaching the written work in the university as academic conversation, and it offers concrete suggestions (in the form of templates) about how students can identify those conversations, understand their significance, begin to enter them, and reflect on their own “moves” within them. The text fits nicely with First Seminars’ emphases on integrating students into the university, its structures, and its contexts.
If you are teaching a University Seminar, please consider ordering Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams’ The Craft of Research (U of Chicago P, 3rd. ed., 2008; 978-0-226-06566-3; $17). This classic text, updated in 2008, concentrates on generating significant topical research problems, researching those problems across an array of sources, assembling research arguments, communicating evidence verbally and visually, revising for organization and argument, and revising for clear and elegant stylistic presentation. The text dovetails nicely with University Seminars’ focus on developing research in broad domains. Several review copies for inspection are in the SAGES office. SAGES will arrange for desk copies for all faculty who adopt the texts.
Over the remainder of the summer, our writing program administrators will be developing a page of links to supporting resources for First Seminars and University Seminars through the “Faculty” section of the Writing@Case website at www.case.edu/writing. Throughout the 2009-10 academic year, assignments geared to these writing texts will appear on the Case Writing Wiki (also available via the Writing@Case site).
In addition to these online resources, the Writing Resource Center in 104 Bellflower Hall has an extensive library of books to support writing instruction. Call 368-3798 or e-mail writingcenter@case.edu to make an appointment to browse the library.
We hope these new texts will enhance writing instruction in your seminar and will provide valuable resources for students in all of their courses. For your reference, the SAGES objectives for writing are attached here; we encourage you to share these with your students along with your other course goals. If you have any questions as you prepare for the 2009-10 year of seminars, feel free to send them along to writing@case.edu.
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Writing Support Services
Please add a note to your course syllabus, informing all students that they can make an appointment with the Writing Resource Center or the SAGES Peer Writing Crew at any point in the semester. Some of your students would benefit from regular tutorials beginning weeks before they write their first papers—but they won't seek assistance unless you tell them they need it. We encourage you or your writing instructor to hold conferences with individual students as early as week 2, and to establish the expectation that all students in your seminar will avail themselves of opportunities to improve their writing.
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