Problem-Solving
Okay, so I’m starting to teach at yet another college, and my department chair tells me that students should write four major papers during the course of the semester. While many professors use rhetorical patterns: Description, Process, Definition, Argument, etc, I have trouble plugging myself into the confines of those composition types. If they don’t work well for me, why should I expect them to work for my students?
I think of expository writing as a problem-solving endeavor. Good writing, in its efforts to reach an audience, tells a story of sorts. For instance, a good story sets up a conflict and then takes readers through a character’s conflict and resolution. Similarly, a good composition poses some element of conflict that the writer wants to address and, in some way, resolve.
Thinking about this notion of problem solving, I tried to think about what tools students need to solve a paper as it were. I came up with four verbs: imitate, unravel, speculate, synthesize.
In planning my syllabus, I’m thinking I will use these four verbs to structure the four major writing assignments.
- Paper 1: Imitate
- Develop your own essay, and in as many ways as you can, imitate a published essay.
- Paper 2: Unravel
- Develop a paper that unravels the meaning of a published essay.
- Paper 3: Speculate
- Develop an essay that speculates about a specific topic.
- Paper 4: Synthesize
- Develop an essay that synthesizes your own thought as it intersects, agrees with, disagrees with, wonders about at least two other pieces of writing.
What do you think about these paper assignment ideas? Would they work for you in your classroom? Would they help you as you develop your own writing?
Write back and tell me what you think.
Good thoughts,
Jan
Comments
Yes, I like the segue between unravel and speculate also. That seems accurate. I’m still having trouble articulating what it means to synthesize. And that seems to be the biggest challenge for students…
jan donley Aug 26, 09:29 am
Jane’s comments got me thinking: what if I keep the focus on unravel/speculate and have the final paper combine those two concepts. That is synthesis, yes?
jan donley Aug 27, 08:34 am
I’m generally not a fan of prescribed forms, either—though I think students often benefit from “trying them on,” as it were—even (or maybe especially) if the result is that they reject them as insufficient or too restrictive. At the very least, they’re reminded of rhetorical options, right?—and options are always good, I think…
Allison A. Sep 9, 11:19 pm
Allison makes a good point about trying on the forms and making choices about rejecting or accepting them. There is something to be said for the power of restrictions in helping us learn our freedoms. And speaking of these restrictions, as I wrote my syllabus, I realized that my current list— imitate, unravel, speculate, synthesize—needed some tweaking. In fact, I have fallen back on some established terms: narration and analysis. I lumped speculation into a category called Explore/Wonder About and Unraveling into a category called Unravel/Analyze. So while I am still experimenting with names, I see how the prescribed forms are useful and perhaps necessary?
jd
jan donley Sep 10, 11:41 am
I’m really interested in this side path that Allison and Jan’s comments here are taking about restrictions, and how they can become options, and how they can help us “learn our freedoms.” Often, my ingenuity feels most engaged when I have the least wiggle room (kind of like being assigned a tiny dorm room and stock furniture and still desiring to make a room one’s own). Some students feel at their most creative inside of well-defined forms; others, of course, require more generous or fluid boundaries in order to make something theirs.
Jane Sep 11, 12:06 pm
Oh, boundaries! Such fine lines.
jan donley Sep 14, 07:26 pm
On boundaries, you’re talking about poetry writing and the difference between writing in a form and writing free form. I’ve done both and the paradox is that fulfilling the requirements of form liberates your ideas on many levels, if only, as somebody here said, to reject the form or to feel that you’ve made a choice. But free form can trap your ideas inside your current imaginative limitations. Yes, that’s it, by seeming to limit, form pushes you to find different ways to think.
Anyway, your development of new terms for expository (don’t you hate that word?) genres will be useful to students I think bc the terms you’re working with are more familiar and real to them than the now empty metaphors of terms like “rhetorical analysis.” My students cross their eyes and shudder at that term. I feel all virtuous for coaching them to do it and gratified when some succeed. But the truth is many more might succeed if I found a more “organic” way to bring them into it.
Andrea H Sep 25, 09:49 pm
Yes. Boundaries and paradoxes can go a long way in teaching us about writing and about ourselves. I’m finding, as this semester progresses, that students are willing to enter into discussion about structure. They are willing to see the intersection of content and form. The imitation assignment, mentioned in a later posting, brings out great discussions about style and technique and structure.
jan donley Sep 27, 02:05 pm
Commenting is closed for this article.
I want to do these! (In fact, over the summer, I “assigned myself” to do something akin to the first, with a Sedaris essay.) There is a natural progress, in thinking and writing strategies, from one to the next; I especially like the segue between unravel an essay and speculate about a topic. These assignments, too, seem as if they will inform how you coach the students to consider texts. There’s a visible, almost felt shape to all this, yet there’s still room. I think students will respond to that, whether they are loosey-goosey or prefer knowing the parameters.
Jane K. Aug 25, 06:10 pm