Writing, Speaking, and Argument Program

February 19, 11:00am - 12:30pm. Kevin Cryderman, "Get Better Self-Assessment and Peer Review Results FAST!", Gamble Room, RRL 361.

Despite common perceptions, students don't intuitively know how to do effective self-assessments or peer feedbacks. In this session, Kevin Cryderman will discuss relatively simple methods to improve the quality of your students' self-assessments and peer feedbacks, and ultimately their essays, through training programs, student models and grading incentives. Along with the process of how to train students in self-assessment and peer feedback and hit home their importance, he will go over his "dual electronic feedback" method, which has consistently produced thorough, insightful and constructively critical peer feedbacks from conscientious students at all levels -- from freshmen to seniors.

 

February 19, 2:30pm - 4:00pm. Kevin Cryderman, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being a Liberal: Making Grading Fair and Transparent.", Gamble Room, RRL 361.

Students in the classroom do not simply learn content but also how to participate in communities of practice, including the values that the course implicitly teaches through its policies, procedures and pedagogical methods, including liberal values such as equality, justice, fairness and transparency. Here Kevin Cryderman will discuss how to make grading more fair and transparent via procedures and materials that clearly explain to students where their grades are coming from and what the standards are for each grade. He will also discuss his "Hall of Justice," where technology such as Blackboard can be used to create a system of 'checks and balances.' If they are unhappy with a professor's grade on an essay, students can turn to a jury of their peers as a court of appeals. 

 

March 1, 10:00am - 12:00pm. Rei Noguchi (session 1), "Working with Core Principles of Writing: Using the Spatial and Visually Iconic to Improve Student Writing.", Gamble Room, RRL 361.

Designed for writing instructors and tutors, this interactive workshop will introduce some compact yet wide-ranging core principles of writing. It will show how to exploit the physical side of written texts (e.g., form, location, size) to enhance text meaning and rhetorical effect. In so doing, the workshop will examine and explore how to improve the major parts (ends, beginnings, and middles) of three important text structures (sentences, paragraphs, and essays) with the following core writing principles:

1. The Emphasis Principle (“Place the key idea of the new information last or in some other prominent position to create emphasis”) fine-tunes the placement of new information at the end. The principle involves placing prominent ideas in prominent places (marked phonologically, syntactically, and visually) to help improve a “flat” writing style. The principle operates not only at the phrase, clause, and sentence levels but also in larger text structures (paragraphs, essays) and even in “text sets” (written texts having a common theme but published at different times).

2. The Aboutness Principle (“Build text around a core idea, or topic”) focuses on the expansion of text around a focal idea in various textual units. This core writing principle, which operates in words, sentences, paragraphs, and essays, is useful in building text coherence. Several coherence-building patterns are suggested. Also introduced here is the notion of “prototype sentence” to help writers who are particularly prone to writing off-target or meandering paragraphs or essays.

3. The Length Principle (“Other things being equal, increase or decrease length to correspond to the degree of complexity of the ideas being represented”) iconically links the amount of physical bulk (i.e., size or length) of a textual element to the amount of meaning complexity. The principle provides unifying rationale and guidance for revising various writing problems, from dropped suffixes on nouns and verbs to unnecessary redundancy in sentences to idea development in paragraphs and essays.

 

March 1, 2:00pm - 3:30 pm. Rei Noguchi (session 2) , "More on Core Principles of Writing.", Welles Brown Room, RRL 1st Floor

This session will be more an open-ended continuation of the morning workshop on core principles of writing.  Depending on time and interest, the afternoon session will give writing instructors and tutors an opportunity to do the following:  (1) discuss the notion of “core principle of writing” and/or the examples of core principles presented in the morning session, (2) submit, if they wish, a copy of a “problematic” student paragraph (submissions encouraged) so that attendees can work as a group to improve the paragraph in light of the core principles, (3) address their own immediate writing concerns pertaining to their students, and (4) learn about another core principle, the Form Consistency Principle (time and interest permitting).

The Form Consistency Principle (“Other things being equal, give similar form to items similar in meaning”) relates conceptual sameness or similarity with physical sameness or similarity.  Unified by this iconically-based principle is an assortment of phenomena involving not only consistency in syntactic form (i.e., parallel structure) but also consistency in verb tense and mood, noun and pronoun number, point of view, tone, document formatting, spelling, and other mechanics of writing.

 

Wednesday, March 24, 4:30pm - 5:30pm. Ben Duncan, "Evolution, Computation, and Acquisition: Tutoring ESL Writing Fluency.", Hawkins-Carlson Seminar Room.

Designed for writing tutors and instructors, this interactive workshop will introduce some practical yet powerful principles to enhance ESL students’ written fluency. In so doing, we will examine the Computational Theory of the Mind, how ESL learners actually acquire a second language, and how this affects our methods of effective ESL writing instruction. Sample activities and lessons plans will be offered to shorten ESL students' writing processes and to effectively manage their pre-writing and revision phases. At the end, attendees will be asked to create their own activities and to offer student-centered feedback following the principles and samples presented in the workshop.