Response for 7/15

“Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook”

The Rhetoric and Composition Wikibook claims it is, “designed for use as a textbook in first year college composition courses.” The Wikibook is jointly authored and edited by about twenty-five people, including four professors, a high school teacher, several graduate students, and even some undergraduates. Sixteen of those involved with this Wikibook are affiliated with St. Cloud State University. The introduction states that the text was designed for students who wouldn’t be able to afford a traditional writing guide. The Wikibook covers the writing process, writing applications, “advanced topics,” grammar, and it also includes a teacher’s guide.

I’m sure the people who put this book together worked very hard on it, but I would not recommend consulting it to any of my freshman writers. There are many issues I have with this text, but one example is the “Citing Sources” subsection, under the Grammar and Mechanics section. The explanation for MLA formatting is so vague students would be better off not even consulting it.

Some of my classmates will be teaching freshman writing in the fall. I recommend you check out http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ for a much, much better free guide to writing. I printed the MLA guide out, took it down to binding, and distributed it to all of my students who claimed to be too poor to buy a proper, paperbound MLA guide.

“Collaboration, Literacy, Authorship”

In the 1980’s, some guy named Kenneth Bruffee theorized that knowledge was created through social construction. Eventually, college English faculty caught on—and they started to celebrate collaborative writing initiatives. But what really happened was English professors mostly ignored what they were celebrating, because they knew individual ownership of academic writing was the way to get tenure. College writing classrooms mirrored this, and individual writing remained the most important (the only) element of writing class.

While all that was going on this really cool thing happened called the Internet, and people started constructing knowledge through even more obvious collaborative means. Writing teachers really haven’t done a great job keeping up with this authentic form of collaborative work, but the authors of this text do list some good examples of where writing teachers are electronically collaborating and where their students are doing the same. Additionally, the authors call for “…the emphasis on individual achievement to be balanced with an appreciation of and rewards for collaborative work.”

The writers of this article are not advocating anything too radical. I guess these guys would be the first to tell you freshman writers need to learn proper research skills and all the other things that go along with freshman writing. They just advocate that a place should be made for collaborative work. As a graduate student and as an English teacher, I agree.

My time in the Language and Literacy program here at CCNY has been a wonderful experience. At the end of my second semester in the program, I wrote a paper that I was especially proud of. Another student in the program wrote probably an even better paper on the same educational theory. We wrote our papers individually, but realized what we had done after the fact. Later, we decided to work collaboratively to do a presentation at a conference on the papers we wrote for the class. The collaboration we did went well, and was one of the highlights of my time in graduate school.

On the other hand, collaborative writing exercises can be a nightmare. There was another professor in the program who made us do these response sheets to our drafts. There was a lot of anxiety in the classroom, that I don’t want to elaborate on, but needless to say, the collaborative writing experiences weren’t very fruitful. I was so stressed out by the other elements of the class I would just throw the responses away—without even reading them.