Writing – Page 5 – College Ready Writing 1.0

Seconds Thoughts about Blogging, Part II

My students have handed in “final” drafts of their blog posts. I put the final in quotation marks because the post isn’t final until it goes online. But even then, because the student can go in and modify it as much as they want (as can I, but I’m going to restrain myself, intruding only to fix broken links and other formatting issues), it is never really “final.” More about writing and publishing on the Internet that I need to get used to. Publishing anything online is permanent in that it is almost impossible to get rid of, but never concrete in that it can be edited, modified, and reshaped. So much to think about, teach, and learn.

But I digress. I have now read and assigned preliminary grades to my students’ blog posts on education reform. Most of them are pretty good. Some are better than others, both in terms of their ideas and their style. Lots of bitterness about standardized tests and poor teacher quality (keep in mind, these students are mostly the product of rural schools). Some didn’t follow directions, and others let their emotions get the best of them. A few, however, have made me once again re-evaluate the idea of putting these posts online, theoretically, for the world to see.

One of my students argued that we can solve the problems of urban education by creating public boarding schools. Another compared the cultures of different races to show that we don’t need education reform but we instead need to reform cultures. Yet another accused all teachers of being lazy alcoholics who have serious mental issues.

Uh-oh.

Interestingly enough, we had spoken (albeit briefly) about the idea of residential schools when we watched the trailer for the documentary Schooling the World. Is our only understanding of what it means to be educated sending our kids to school? But we also talked about the challenges that schools and teachers face in overcoming the issues and challenges that students face outside of school. Taking the kids away from their families, though?

I promised the students that I wasn’t going to be evaluating their actual suggestions but instead how well they argue the reform they propose. But it was hard to stomach a proposal that looked to recreate one of North America’s darkest chapters, the residential schools. When I was a PhD student, I taught a man who had been a product of the residential school system in Canada. He told me stories about his experience there, and I couldn’t help but think of him as I read about my student’s grad plan for reforming urban schools (get rid of them and send them all to the country).

And I cringe at what kind of reception an idea like that will receive when it goes live online, both for me and the student. Part of me thinks that I have obviously failed at teaching some of these students the critical thinking skills, or knowledge acquisition skills, they need. Will people reading the blog think these reforms are all ones that I advocated for in class (disclaimer, they aren’t)? Will my student be equipped to deal with the possible mean and vicious backlash that the post will inspire?

But part of me is also proud that I created a classroom environment where students feel like they can take intellectual chances and possibly “fail.” There was something refreshing about reading a few essay that weren’t about how terrible standardized tests are or how awful their teachers were in high school. As misguided as I think their ideas are, some students genuinely tried to think outside of the box for this assignment. For that, I am proud.

But, I’ll let you, dear readers, be the ultimate judge. Visit edreformbyundergrads.wordpress.com. My ego can take it. But go easy on the students. I know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, my students really do mean well. There will be posts appearing throughout the week. Keep visiting or follow me on Twitter (@readywriting) for up-to-the-minute updates.

Deadlines: Nice or Not?

It’s that time of the semester. The time when students who have been mysteriously absent all semester start showing up, wondering what it is they can do in order to pass my class. My immediate response: “Build a time machine, go back to the beginning of the semester, attend class, and do the work you were supposed to have done up until now.” I hold my tongue, but the kids have mostly been trained to expect bonus work, or credit recovery, in order to salvage their semester. Didn’t do anything all semester? Here’s a small assignment that if you complete it, you’ll not only pass, you may earn an A!

Not in my class. But I have developed a type of compromise: you have until the day before I hand in my grades to submit any and all major writing assignments from the semester. Now, I don’t go advertising this policy on my syllabus or in class. But nor do I advertise any penalty for late work. In my writing class especially, the deadlines are built into the syllabus, but the deadlines are preceded by in-class exercises and homework that guides them through a process for writing their papers. If you attended class and did all of the in-class and homework, your paper will be ready by the deadline (not to mention be a much more polished piece of writing).

But my students always seem to have excuses. Some are valid (freshmen especially seem to end up in the hospital due to the fact that they have taken really poor care of themselves during the semester). Some are suspect (your friend was in the hospital, computer virus, had to go home to babysit). Other are outright ridiculous (I didn’t know we had a paper due, I didn’t understand it, I swear I emailed it to you because I don’t have any money left to print it). I’m tired of trying to figure out who is lying, who is trying to take advantage of me, and who really needs the extra time because of circumstances beyond their control. So, while it’s better for my students to hand things in according to the schedule, at the end of the day, as long as they get it in to me before my grades are due, that’s fine.

I have this policy in part because of karma; I was a terrible student as an undergraduate, and I rarely handed in assignments on time. I used every excuse in the book and sometimes didn’t even bother offering one at all. But all of my professors allowed me to hand in my work and gave me full credit, however grudgingly. I can’t help but smile inside when my undergrads come in, begging to be able to hand in their papers just a little late. Take your time, don’t make yourself sick with stress and worry, and just hand it in to me when you have it done.

Is this an accurate reflection of real life? Probably not. Real life has hard and fast deadlines that need to be respected or else there will be some very real and potentially serious consequences. Don’t ever miss an application deadline, and if your boss asks you for something by a certain day or time, you’d better make sure you do it. But in real life, there are always backup plans that can be put in place in oder to be able to mitigate the negative consequences of unforeseen events: work assignments can be handed off, divided up, or reassigned if you really cannot complete the work. There is also something to be said about the ability to say no, knowing when you have enough (or too much) work already, and thus telling your boss that if s/he wants it done well, they should assign it to someone else or give more time. But school doesn’t allow for such flexibility. You are assigned work in each class, almost without regard to what else is being asked of you, and expected to get it done.

I know that students need to learn time management as well as the ability to take responsibility for their (often stupid) choices. But this is the beauty of my system: the students who really want to do well (and typically have a legitimate reason for missing the deadlines) will take the extra time, come and see me to talk about what they missed, and turn in their work in a reasonable timeframe, not falling so far behind that they now owe two or more major pieces of writing. Everyone else will keep putting off their work, scrambling at the end of the semester to hand something, anything, in to me to grade. And the work that they do hand in is rarely, if ever, good enough to earn a passing grade. Because they missed the process, the work is sloppy, and often doesn’t even meet the assignment requirements. The students work harder than they have all semester in a desperate attempt to pass a class they put off, only to (usually) fail anyway.

And those students who do manage to hand in work that’s good enough to pass the class? Good for them. When they become a professor later on in life (like I did), hopefully they’ll pay it forward as well. But I also know that, one day, what they have done in the past won’t work anymore. I also know that it is only then that they will learn the lesson. And those students who participated in the process? They are rewarded with a relatively stress-free semester (at least for my class) and a good grade.

I’ve always tell my students: I’ve got carrots and I’ve got sticks. Pick the one that works best for your motivation.

What Have I Been Up To?

After a flurry of posts, I’ve been really silent for the past two weeks or so. The end of the semester is near, and I have been attempting to figure out what the end of semester is going to look like for my students. I’ve sort-of gone off syllabus. I’ve been applying for conferences, publishing opportunities, and research grants. I’ve been doing mountains of paperwork because we’re buying a house. My kids have been sick, husband away, and Europeans visiting. And, you know, Thanksgiving.

It’s been a crazy two weeks.

But, I have also been blogging for a new education reform website, SoEducated.com. I’ve written about the seeming voicelessness of rural education, why my students think high school sucks, and asked, given all of the negative rhetoric recently, who will be our future professors? I invite you to visit the site and check out the talented and passionate writers who are contributing to the site.

More posts here to come. Until then, enjoy the rest of the weekend.

Getting Nervous about using a Blog Assignment

In my writing class, both advanced and developmental, we are talking about education reform and going to be crafting an argument essay/blog post on what each student thinks is the most important reform that needs to take place (or, as I put it to them, one thing that will make high school suck less). My more advanced writers are coming in with their first drafts next week, while my developmental writers will spend the final three weeks of the semester working on it. We were talking today about the assignment and what the students should include/do/say in their blog posts in order for them to be effective, etc.

The reaction of the students thus far to the assignment has been mixed; on the one hand, a blog post is much shorter than a traditional essay, and so they are very excited about that. On the other hand, it’s going to be out there, in public, for everyone to see. A few of the students are actually more worried about not getting any comments than what people will say. More than a few are excited about the possibility of making their views (based on some very negative academic experiences) public. But some are, justifiably, intimidated by the mixture of new technology, a new approach to their writing, and a real, rather than theoretical, audience.

I was honest with them; I am nervous, too. This is the first time I have used blogs or, more appropriately, a blogging assignment, with my students. This resulting blog posts are as much a reflection of me as it is of them. One of my students came up to me after class and asked me, what if they are all bad? Well, I said, we’ll see. Would I scrap the idea? No. It will be fine, I reassured him (and myself).

But what if it isn’t fine? What if other professors (you know, people with tenure) decide that this idea is too radical and, suddenly, I find that my contract isn’t renewed for next year? What if there are some administrators who don’t like the education reform suggestions that my students are offering? What if this project is interpreted as a political (and not educational) tool that I am using to indoctrinating my students? Education reform suggestions are a dime-a-dozen these days; what if I am setting my students (and myself) up for a rude backlash?

What if they are terrible?

I have to be an optimist, and, judging by the ideas about education reform that my students have been coming up with in class discussions/debates, I am less worried about the quality of the ideas in the posts. I am also not too worried about the reaction of my peers; unless I heavily promote it within the institution, no one will probably notice. But I am still surprised by my own level of apprehension now that the day is here and these blog posts, for a long time just a item on a syllabus, are a reality.

My blog is a reflection of my thoughts, my teaching philosophy, and personal interests. My students’ blogs, on the other hand, will be a reflection of my ability to put these elements into practice. What goes on inside the classroom is usually pretty private; especially in higher education, a professor’s classroom is their proverbial kingdom, to run and rule as we see fit. Now, I am opening up my closed kingdom to the wider world. The result of my rule? What my students put out there.

It is exciting for all of us, but very, very scary at the same time.

It’s All in How You Say it: Thinking About Tone

Today, I talked to my developmental students about making sure that the “tone” of their essays is appropriate. We’ve already talked how they can look like we’re wearing sweatpants to a job interview when they don’t adapt their writing according to purpose and audience, but the students needed reminding, especially since this was their first “formal” essay (the first essay was a narrative). I’ve read drafts and, while their writing has dramatically improved, they are still writing like they talk.

I talked to them about not using contractions, avoiding using slang or txt language, not swearing. I mention that they really don’t need to use the first person when they write essay most of the time; what sounds stronger: “I think this is true” or “This is true and here’s why?” Not to mention that it’s redundant for them to say “the book that I read”; if it’s not in quotation marks, properly referenced, I assume that you have thought it, read it, observed it, etc. It’s your name at the top of the paper, isn’t it?

I warn against trying to hard to sound “formal” in their writing by using big words, complex sentence structures, or trying to give their essay an over-inflated sense of importance/significance. The worst mistake a student can make it to use a word incorrectly, write sentences that don’t make any sense structurally, or make ridiculous statements (real example: “For over 100 years, women have been battling with how they are portrayed on television). Simple, I tell my students, does not equal simplistic. Clarity is their best friend.

Finally, I talk to my students about eliminating what I call “punctuation words”; those words that we use when we speak that act like punctuation. Starting sentences with “So,” “So then,” “Well,” “You know,” or “I mean.” Using “like” or “um” or “uh” as commas (don’t laugh, I’ve seen it in papers). Or ending sentences with “right?”or, once again, “you know?” This is particularly revealing to the students, and the discussion always makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I am now hyperaware of how I use all of these formulations when I lecture. I mean, who of us doesn’t, right?

I try to wait until my developmental students have a good chunk of their papers written before hitting them with this lesson (and requirement to revise). This way, students are not frozen early in the process, focusing more on tone than they are on content. It’s rewarding to watch students scrambling through the drafts of their essays as we talk, crossing out words and trying to reformulate sentences as we talk about these issues. It also helps them to see how easy it is to fix later, as well as how big of a difference just ten minutes of relatively minor editing can make.

I wonder a lot about how good we are as academics at adapting our tone. Or how accepting academia is at our attempts at changes in tone. I’ve written about my own process of adapting my tone and style (scroll down about halfway) and how higher education often frowns upon anything non-academic. People are quick to blame academics, especially in the humanities, for writing in a style that is essentially incomprehensible to a general reader, and thus adding to our increased marginalization (see the recent cuts in language departments and humanities funding in the U.K. as examples). Our audience, as academics, is primarily other academics. Not necessarily because we want it to be, at least not exclusively, but because it has to be in order to get tenure. As academics, we learn quickly what tone we are expected to maintain in our writing. Why are conferences so bad? Because we don’t adapt our writing for a spoken presentation. Why bother? The line still appears on your C.V., and it’s easier to polish it up for publication, which is what really matters.

If we have our own challenges in adapting our writing, why are we trusted with helping students do the same?

Blasts from the Past

As I gather a stronger following, I want to share with readers some of the posts I am most proud of from the “early” days of my blog (before I was posting at University of Venus, before Blogger began keeping stats for me).

“If Not the University, Where?” A very early post where I am still trying to figure out where I belong, if not teaching at a university. There has been much talk (most recently a hysterical video) about how students shouldn’t even bother getting a PhD in English/Humanities. I may have chosen my path naively, but looking back, even on the worst days, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

“A Women’s Work in Higher Ed” and “Higher Ed’s Missing Women” Where I examine the effects of an entire generation of women who are off the tenure-track and thus excluded from the ranks of leaders in higher education, essentially silencing their voices in the quest to shape the university in the 21st Century.

“Loyalty or Desperation?” When we are off the tenure-track, at what point does our loyalty to an institution become a form of desperation? One of my first University of Venus posts.

“Who Will be our Future Teachers?” With the continued vilification of teachers in the media and much of the education reform debate (most recently with New York publishing the value-added scores of teachers), I wonder who is going to become the next generation(s) of K-12 teachers? I think one can start asking, too, who will be our future university professors, as well.

“The Resilency of Trees” Possibly the post I am most proud of, if only because the image has stuck with me throughout the past eight months. For any of us who are going out on a limb for what we believe in, this is for you.

Thanks everyone for your support, your feedback, and thanks for reading.

The Personal Is Political – Please Vote

We are well into the political season, gearing up to vote in a short number of days. By now, we are exhausted and probably disgusted by the negative ads and vacuous campaign rhetoric. No matter the collective cynicism we hold now for politics and politicians, please remember to vote. I can’t, and each election cycle that passes me by reminds me of how much I value the opportunity.

My first opportunity to vote was in the 1995 Quebec Referendum. I had just turned 18 that summer. Obviously, I was on the “No” side, the side that was not in favor of Quebec separating. I say obviously for a few reasons. The most important was that my mother’s family is from the same small Quebec town as the then-Prime Minister, Jean Chretien. My great-grandmother taught him English. My grandfather employed some of his younger sibling in his store. He was a hometown hero for our family, and thus there was never any question as to which way I would vote when the time came.

I was at the Unity Rally in downtown Montreal with tens of thousands of other Canadians who had come to show Quebec that they were loved. Three days later, on October 30, we voted. We watched all night as the numbers fluctuated between “Yes” and “No” being in the lead. In the end, Quebec remained a part of Canada by the slimmest of margins, a couple of thousand votes. Voter turnout was over 90%. Our votes, my vote, had clearly made a difference.

I was naïve then. The Unity Rally was a huge point of contention, with major corporations basically giving plane, train, and bus tickets away so people would attend. A large number of ballots in certain ridings were deemed spoiled, ridings where the “No” side was in the lead. Jean Chretien was implicated in what became known as the Sponsorship Scandal, directing huge amounts of Federal money to his supporters and inner-circle members, in the name of unity. Some in the rest of Canada were fed up with Quebec monopolizing federal politics and opposition parties from the Western provinces began to gain real strength; in 1997, the Reform Party became the Official Opposition in Parliament.

The real eye-opening experience for me, however, came a year later when I left to attend a French university in Quebec. Most of my classmates were “sovereignists,” or in favor of Quebec’s independence from Canada. Politics is as much about vilifying the opposing side, and while we were all burnt out from the previous year’s battle and avoided politics as much as possible, it was important that we met, became friends, and earned each other’s respect. I’ll admit that I had never met and gotten to know a “real” separatist, while many of them told me that I was the first English person they had ever really known. Gradually, the certainty of my “No” vote wasn’t as easy as it had once been.

None of this shook my belief in democracy. Nor did living in California whose state government has lurched to a standstill, unable to pass a budget. I had the privilege of working at an HBCU when President Obama was elected and saw the same feeling of pride and wonder on these young students’ faces, many of whom had voted for the first time. I saw a little of myself in them. It broke my heart to hear so many of them discouraged and disillusioned less than a year after the historic event.

The cynicism and “dirty” politics we witness today is not a reason to give up on democracy and voting, but a reason to invest more fully in the process. I wish I had known more than the simple rhetoric of separatist politics, or been able to see the larger implications of the debate. As a professor, I believe it is part of my job to teach critical thinking, civility, and tolerance to my students, to try and inoculate them against a debilitating feeling of futility. My idealism was shattered; in its place, I rebuilt something much more meaningful and valuable.

I just can’t do anything about it. Go out and vote.

The Truth About Grading

I finally handed back all of the papers I had today. Last week, it was my developmental writers. This week, it’s my more advanced 200-level writers. They’re all decent writers, so grading becomes less about correcting grammar and more about how they fulfill the requirements of the specific essay assignment. This is much more art than science.

The students had to chose a piece of rhetoric (speech, op-ed, or advertisement) and break down the rhetorical “tricks” the author/speaker/creator used. They were limited to using the six essays we had discussed in class about rhetoric. I had approved their selected piece, seen an outline, and given feedback on their introductions. We had done a number of peer review and self-assessment exercises in class. The peer review questions addressed the exact questions I would be asking when grading, as well as the self-assessment exercise. I felt confident that if the students attended class and took the exercises seriously, they would produce decent essays.

I was partially right. I neglected to include an assignment checklist, which I give to my developmental writers, wrongly assuming that the 200-level students didn’t need one. Essays are like a house of cards; take away one of the fundamental pieces, and the whole thing collapses. But how badly did it collapse? Was the roof missing or was it just a mess of cards? And what corresponding grade accompanies each unique deficiency?

Take the following example: I have one student whom I particularly get along with. We both lived in Southern California, and he’s tracked me down after class to talk about living in a place so completely different from the one where we currently find ourselves. He comes to class, does all the work, and does it well. He chose a particularly challenging piece of visual rhetoric: an illustration used pre-American Revolution that was intended to garner support for taking up arms against the British. We talked about how it would be a challenging, but possibly rewarding project.

The end result was well-written and thorough, but poorly organized and neglected to refer to any of the rhetorical tricks we had discussed and they were required to use. So what grade does that earn? Complicating matter is that I like the kid and I know that he has worked hard on the paper. If I give him a C, am I being too harsh, but if I don’t, am I being too generous? It’s hard to compare the papers because each paper did different things well and poorly. If I didn’t know who this student was, what grade would I give the paper?

I don’t know. I can never know, really. Built into my writing classes are lots of opportunities for feedback directly from me, meaning that submitting papers anonymously is practically impossible. Getting to know my students is my way of a) remembering who they are and b) knowing how best to give them feedback. I might not have the time or freedom to personalize how I deliver the courses I teach, but I do have complete power over how and what I say to my students to help them become better writers. The only way that works is if I get to know them as much as I get to know their writing.

You could argue that I took the easy way out of the problem; I decided that each student would have an opportunity to revise and resubmit their essays for a new grade. I knew that the aforementioned student would be troubled by the grade that I gave him (he was) and would come to talk to me (he did) with the aim of rewriting and improving what he had done. I knew that all of the students who had worked hard but produced flawed papers would come and see me in order to be able to resubmit their revised papers. I also knew that a poor grade would serve as a wake-up call for the students who weren’t taking me seriously yet.

Grading is, indeed, an art, but one I take very seriously. The feedback I give to justify that grade is as much an art and no less important. If getting to know my students makes the former job more difficult, so be it. The latter is more meaningful in the long run.

Working Smarter, Not Harder (Take 2)

You can find the first version of the post here.

Why a second draft? You can read about that here.

Growing up, I wasn’t good at a lot of things; I was hopeless with a ball, or worse, a stick and a ball, completely useless as a runner, climber, or any sort of movement on land. But put me in the water, and I was a fish or a dolphin, a clear natural. My mom put me in swimming lessons before I could even walk, and, since then, I had always been told, because swimming seemed to come easily to me, that I was destined for great things.

When I was fourteen, however, I hit a wall; my times stopped improving and even started to get slower. I tried to push myself in training, swimming until my lungs burned and my muscles failed. I was in the pool at 5:30 AM every day for two hours, back again in the evenings for three more. And yet, at the end of every race, I would look up and see a time that was stagnant.

I continued swimming competitively until I was nineteen. Five years is a long time to kill yourself in the water for little gain. I couldn’t understand why my times weren’t improving. Was it because I had hit puberty and my body was no longer “built” for swimming? This was a time before Dara Torres, and female swimmers were believed to peak at fourteen or fifteen. Most girls quit, but I stubbornly stuck with it. Perhaps “greatness” was no longer in the cards, but I was going to get a best time, even if it killed me. Day in and day out, I lifted weights and worked out in the pool. It didn’t kill me, but it did kill my knees and shoulders. Although I had planned to swim in college, after one semester, my body and spirit had had enough. It was too hard to balance the demands of college and swimming. I quit and focused instead on my education.

Looking back now, I may have worked hard in the pool, but I didn’t take very good care of myself outside of the pool. My eating habits were atrocious, and my sleeping habits weren’t very much better. I would kill myself in the pool and leave my body little to no support in the recovery. It was no coincidence that not only did I hit puberty at fourteen, but my parents also got divorced. Everyday, I swam distracted; swimming was easy and an escape for me, so my mind was never really focused at the task at hand. It wasn’t until I began training as a Master’s swimmer that I realized how important that focus is.

Five years and twenty pounds later, I began to train again. I was in the middled of my PhD, teaching college students, and well on my way to fulfilling my goal of becoming a university professor. Something was still missing, however. I missed the water, the camaraderie, and the physical challenge that swimming provided. I joined a Master’s swim team. We only trained an hour a day, five days a week. Many weeks, I couldn’t even make all five practices. It felt so good to be in the water again. My shoulders weren’t an issue anymore. And while my lungs still burned and my muscles just about failed at the end of a workout, I could finally see the effort paying off. Despite my extra weight and age, on top of the severely reduced training time, at the end of the year, my times were almost as fast as they were when I had left competitive swimming.

My coaches preached swimming and training smarter, not harder. We had a limited amount of time to train, so every moment had to be as close to excellence as possible. Every stroke, every turn, every push off the wall should be nearly perfect. This took an incredible amount of mental discipline, someting I didn’t have when I was swimming as a teen. It was doubly important for me because if I let up my concentration on my stroke, my shoulders would start to complain loudly. I started to understand how just simply mindlessly going through the motions, no matter how much effort I had put into those motions, had lead me to peak at such an early age.

Now that I am university instructor, when I teach writing, I try to get my students to understand that effort is important, but they need to work hard at doing the right things and doing things right. It doesn’t necessarily make the work any easier, but it does make the work more meaningful and rewarding.

Practicing What I Preach

In my developmental writing class, the students just turned in their narrative essay assignment. The topic was to describe an event in their lives that shaped their attitude towards school or education. Initially, I asked them to write on the topic as a “free write” during the first ten minutes of class. When I handed it back to them, I congratulated them on having written a first draft of their essay.

We read other narrative essays, talked about pacing and organization, making sure your story has a point, as well as including vivid details, or showing instead of telling. We did outlines, different peer review exercises, as well as turning it into a more familiar looking grammar exercise (pressing enter at the end of every sentence). The assignment was only 750 words long, which most students cleared without problem. I saw students beginning to gain confidence in their own ideas and their own writing.

And then came time to grade them. It was frustrating for me to go through the papers that I knew the student had worked so hard on but still came up short. How do I give feedback on these papers while making sure that the students didn’t get discouraged or give out, without it sounding like empty encouragement? It inspired me to write my latest blog post on working smarter, not harder, but it also gave me an idea on how to let the kids know that all writing can be improved, as well as putting into practice (again) their critical reading skills.

I printed out copies of my blog post and after I had handed back the students their essays, I passed them out and told the students to have at my writing. They read the essays by themselves, but paired off to talk about how I could improve the essay. They spent almost 30 minutes tearing my writing a new one. I was filled with incredible pride when my words were coming back to me, directed at my own work; they had really got it.

My conclusion was too abrupt. I was missing important pieces of information (who was Dara Torres? When did you decide to be a teacher? When did you start swimming? What does swimming smarter even mean?), as well as jumping to far forward in time (you told me that I couldn’t do that!). I had sentence fragments, muddled syntax (although they didn’t call it that), and missing words. They looked at the story as a whole, as well as the individual word choices (you use the same word a lot) and grammar issues.

The students seemed to really enjoy it. It helped that I sat there with a smile on my face the entire time. All it took was for that first student to speak up and offer their (tentative) advice and for me to acknowledge and accept it. I tried to show them that all writing can be improved and that feedback isn’t personal, it’s made in order to make your writing better. The message, found in the post itself, is that we all need to find a way to channel our effort in order to get the best results.

Writing has always come easy for me, but it can always be better. For my students, here is the end result of their hard work on my writing.