Style is critical in my job teaching writing for an online college. I facilitate asynchronous conversations among 40 students from all over the country in two classrooms. I have nine weeks to teach the fundamentals of persuasive writing and grammar.
My students sometimes write badly; Joseph Williams in Style nails the causes of bad writing (Chapter 1): students have been scarred by overcritical English teachers; students try too hard to make simple ideas impressive; students are writing about subjects outside their experience.
Sadly, I also find regional differences in students' ability to compose the simplest sentences. As Baron notes in A Better Pencil, literacy separates the disadvantaged from the advantaged in our society (23).
Regardless of background of my students, I enforce high standards for virtual writing. I agree with Baron that virtual communities are self-regulating, and that norms are emerging ("spelling counts online, just as it counts on the page" (xiii)).
I work on style issues with every student. I model college writing for students who struggle with clarity. Others explore stylistic consequences of passive voice and danging modifiers and finding voice. The technology my school employs makes it possible for me to provide virtually a personalized writing seminar to every student, no matter what level of expertise they possess. My goal is to encourage students to think of themselves as writers, even if they are studying to become a medical assistant or a police officer. As universal access meets digitized instruction, writing teachers have extraordinary challenges and exciting tools for working with students.
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How exciting to feel like you're able to give your students their own writing seminar. I used to love it when students "got it" and began to feel like they could really write.
ReplyDeleteI also remember an incident where a freshman in a composition class put a comma before an "and" at the beginning of a typed line. When I questioned him about it, he said, "You always put the comma before the and." He had distorted the rule.
You're right, too, that over-critical teachers have done damage to students' confidence about writing some of the most simple things. I'll bet you will go a long way to reverse some of that!
Thanks for your post.
~Rhonda
Gina,
ReplyDeleteI hope that you can reverse some of the damage inflicted on students by overly critical teachers, while remembering that a certain percentage of students only listened to their teachers with one ear if at all.
I had the privilege of having excellent instructors throughout school, but I was also considered to be an excellent student, so perhaps my perspective is skewed. I often wonder how much of the blame the student's should share because I have classmates who would make mistakes similar to those that you pointed out, even though we had the same teachers.
I feel that you have an admirable goal.