Instructors can help students benefit from sustained writing assignments by encouraging approaches that involve alternatives to reading and writing-intensive activities that can actually enhance writing success, even though they do not necessarily seem to be "about writing" themselves.
Patricia A. Dunn offers a rationale for engaging such multi-modal approaches to the writing process. http://www.boyntoncook.com/shared/products/0570.asp She explores reasons and strategies for enhancing college writing, especially for students with learning disabilities, by:
- Opening "multiple channels of communication" (Paulo Freire's phrase, cited by Dunn) around writing & learning;
- Using sketching, speaking, movement, and metaphor to generate and organize text;
- Using myths, metaphors, and multisensory strategies for revising and editing;
- Using non-writing to analyze reading.
Dunn challenges the favored modes of teaching and learning writing and suggests that using various, and sometimes non-traditional, modes to approach writing might benefit not just students with learning disabilities but all students. For example, she suggests how, for some students, integrating kinesthetic knowledge, making use of oral-verbal exercises, and drawing activities can help students move smoothly through the writing process. In one exercise, Dunn even asks her students to provide oral reports on their writing progress to the rest of the class. Although this is a formal assignment, Dunn points out that such an oral report can ease students' anxiety by allowing them to present this report rather informally from their seats. In another example, Dunn asks her students to leave her weekly voicemail journals/reports about their progress. Such oral journaling keeps students thinking through the writing process. More ideas, like these, are available in her book, Talking, Sketching, Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing,.
Sustained writing assignments can be effective if you:- Provide models:
- Engage students in class discussions:
- office hour conferences with instructors;
- tutorial in the Writing Center;
- online writing assistance;
- key databases for the discipline in general & their topic specifically.
- Help students construct audiences and purposes for these larger kinds of writing activities by
- Dedicate class-time to and discuss the following issues:
Give students the chance to examine good models of the sub-components of the whole writing assignment by
– Creating links/resources to examples of successful writing in the area;
– Creating links/resources to further guides for assistance;
– Offering a moment of modeling (yourself) during class time.
– Their understanding of the writing assignment itself: talk about how they understand the prompt and its components; talk about how this writing assignment supports the purpose of the course and draws upon the conventions and concerns of the academic discipline.
- Their time-on-task and ability to meet deadlines;
- Their utilization of further resources to achieve success on the overall assignment:
– Assisting them in imagining themselves as an "author" with "authority";
– Assisting them in imagining their audience(s).
– Pre-writing;
– Organization/arrangement of their ideas;
– Style and document design decisions (which are often influence by the conventions of discipline-specific genres);
– Revising and editing of the final product.
