integrating “personal” and textual sources

I was thinking: When we require students — as we do here in WR 121 — to write a paper which integrates two textual sources and one personal source, isn’t that actually a more difficult assignment than had we required them to integrate three textual sources? In other words, doesn’t adding personal experience/knowledge to the [...]

one brief break

It’s noon and I’m sitting near Blimpie’s in the MU, working on revising my WR 511 paper. I’m glad I’ve already got some revising done because the loud music from upstairs is distracting. I should be more thankful there is live music here during the lunch hour, but I’ve yet to take [...]

second drafting

I’ve been working all day on the second draft of my review of the literature (for my paper on whether/how much personal experience ought to be assigned in first-year writing courses), except for the nap I took between 3:30 and 5:30, and I don’t think I’m half finished. Papers that are this heavily-sourced are just [...]

most effective discourse = purposeful combination of experience and information

“Rather than privileging either experience or information as sources of subject matter, we should encourage students to use both. It is, I believe, this purposeful combination of experience and information that produces the most effective discourse.”
Jeanette Harris, Expressive Discourse (166-167)
The purposeful combination sounds like assignments that mix external sources and personal experience, like the [...]

[journal entry] on Mike Rose’s “Remedial Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal”

October 31, 2007
Journal Entry on Mike Rose’s “Remedial Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal” (The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook 193-211)
First, I’m wondering if, since it was published in 1983, this article reflects an different state of affairs regarding remedial or developmental writing courses.  Some of what Rose critiques no longer seems true, anyway.  From what [...]

[journal entry] on David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error”

October 31, 2007
Journal Entry on David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error” (The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook 258-272)
In this article, Bartholomae extends and fine-tunes Mina Shaughnessy’s realization that we must discover why student writers make certain “mistakes” if we are to really help them move closer to conventional writing. He thinks that most errors of basic writers [...]

[journal entry] on Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing”

October 29, 2007
Journal Entry on Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” (The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook 94-99)
I approach Shaughnessy’s “Diving In” from a couple of angles. On one hand, I can tell that I am not her primary audience, since I am not a “traditionally-prepared” English teacher (95), one who gradually has to [...]

[journal entry] on Nancy Sommers’ “Between the Drafts”

October 28, 2007
Journal Entry on Nancy Sommers’ “Between the Drafts” (The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook 279-285)
I had skimmed this article last spring.  Then I thought it was stating the obvious: that, of course, we all need to find our own voice/authority, that we cannot disappear behind authorities, and even that we must get used to uncertainty [...]

3:23am do I know where my brain is?

3:23am I decided I’d done enough (it’s a complete draft plus works cited) for this lit review. It was funny: I decided to check my email and I had just gotten an email from Travis (another first-year Writing and Rhetoric MA) saying it was 3:21a and he was going to bed with five pages [...]

more to get from library

Bartholomae, David. “A Reply to Stephen North.” PRE/TEXT 11 (1-2): 121-130.
Bishop, Wendy. “Places to Stand: The Reflective Writer-Teacher-Writer in Composition.” CCC 51 (1999): 9-31.
Bizzell, Patricia. “College Composition: Initiation in the Academic Discourse Community.” Curriculum Inquiry 12 (1982): 191-207.
Bizzell, Patricia. “The Intellectual Work of “Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourse.” Alt-Dis: Alternative Discourses in the Academy eds. [...]