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de¢S. INNOVATION ABSTRACTS *2:"

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7h CAN Published by the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development
With support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and Sid W. Richardson Foundation

 

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AN UPPER-DIVISION WRITING COURSE

Background ;

Several principles underlay the organization of my upper-class writing course in anthropology. First, it
was focused specifically on writing rather than on a particular topic in anthropology. I was not obliged to cover
any special substantive area so we were free to spend class time discussing exposition. We did use anthropolog-
ical examples, but these ranged as widely over the field as did the students’ interests.

Second, earlier experience with my own writing convinced me that the secret of writing—if there is one—
lies in re-writing: in fussing with words, in trying varied combinations, in producing second, third, and fourth
drafts.

Third, I stressed, from the start, that my concern would be with the craft of organizing words in clear, logi-
cal and, if possible, graceful ways, and that I was not yearning for creativity. I wanted, instead, to focus on the
more mundane, but far more manageable, craft of getting one’s ideas across. Creativity can find an outlet only
after some skill with the craft has first been achieved.

Finally, and most important, I wanted to help the students to help each other. I believed that I would ac-
complish more by encouraging students to help each other than by showing a handful of isolated individuals
how to attend more carefully to their own problems. I decided, therefore, to turn my course into a class in mu-
tual criticism. It is this aspect of the course that has been most successful, and it is this aspect that I will stress,
Mutual Criticism

I announced, at the beginning, that the course grade would depend upon how helpful they had been to
their classmates rather than upon the quality of their own writing. Immediately the threat of judgment was re-
moved from my own criticisms. I could express myself freely without implying a grading or a ranking. In their
own writing, students were free to experiment without worrying about a grade, but they knew that whatever
they wrote would receive searching criticism. Reciprocally they knew they would have to grapple with the writ-
ing of others and to ask themselves, repeatedly, not only how to improve their own writing, but how to help
their classmates. I have looked at student papers only after they have first been read and commented upon by
another student. In this way, I have looked simultaneously at one student's writing and at another student's
criticisms. .

Getting Started

The first week I brought a half dozen samples of published anthropological writing to class, some that I
liked and some that I did not. I asked students to read the samples and to rank them according to their judg-
ment of writing style. I put rankings on the board, including my own, and we spent the next hour discussing
the basis of our varying judgments. We were beginning to ask ourselves what makes some writing seem more
appealing than other writing. During that first class session I also brought the successive drafts of a piece of my
own writing, | showed them how radically I had reworked my first terrible draft, and how I had then modified
it again for a third, and then a fourth, draft.

I also gave them copies of two pages from a poorly written book. I had written in the margins and at the
end of these pages the kinds of comments that I might have offered had it been a student paper. This, I sug-
gested, was the kind of help needed by any writer, experienced or inexperienced. It is the kind of help that |
would expect them to give each other.

I gave them two assignments for the second class. First they were asked to rewrite a passage that I gave
them. They were told to rework this passage with care so as to make it clearer and more readable. Second,
they were to search through the anthropological literature for two samples of writing—one that they felt was
particularly good, the other that they found particularly bad.

The students made copies of these assignments to pass around to the class, and we spent the second meet-
ing discussing what they had brought. We had a particularly joyous time comparing notes on the passage that
we had rewritten. We found that the same problems in the original passage had bothered many of us, but we
also saw that a problem could usually be solved in many different ways.

 

MOO} Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin, EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712