The Philosopher
on the Writing Conference
"The
single most rewarding and challenging thing I do as a teacher
is to have student writing conferences," said Richard Baker, philosophy professor. Frustrated by poorly written
papers that kept him from spending time with his wife on weekends,
Baker turned to student conferences initially "out of desperation."
He found that with a thirty-minute conference to discuss rough
drafts with students, he got better papers.
He also found a different kind of relationship
developing with students: he became more a "mentor trying
to help students express themselves" rather than "a
gatekeeper or taskmaster." He detected a shift in the
way students viewed their papers as well--from something "to
get out of the way" to a "means to discover and say
what they think." They also began to see writing as a skill
they could get better at, rather than a task in which they must
conform to "idiosyncratic and ultimately mysterious rules.
Students began to form a well-founded judgment of what is good
writing," said Baker.
Since writing papers early in the semester helped
him get to know the students and also improved class discussion,
Baker recommended assigning papers and conferences in the first
month of the semester. When assigning the paper, Baker includes
a due date for the rough draft. He specifies that the rough draft
be typed and specifies the length. He grades this draft, which
counts as 20% of the overall paper grade, and makes a copy of
the paper after having written his comments.
The student schedules a thirty minute conference
on the rough draft. When the student comes for the conference,
Baker welcomes her and asks first, "What did you think of
the paper?" After a short discussion of the answer, he lets
her have five minutes or so to read his comments. When he returns,
they discuss the paper. The goal of the conference is to answer
the question: "How can you say better what you think you
want to say?"
Often the conference is on the main point: "What's
your overall point? What do you really want to say in this paper?"
As Baker explained, "I want them to understand that in an
essay they do not just throw everything in but develop an idea,
a thesis." When the answer to his questions about the thesis
is better than anything in the paper itself, Baker gets excited
and says, "Write that down." He frequently finds that
the student's main point has changed from the first to the last
paragraph, but the rest of the paper has stayed the same. The
student needs to revise for the changes she made in writing the
paper, in discovering new ideas. After helping the student find
the thesis, the next step is seeing if the points, one per paragraph,
are related to the thesis: "What's related to your main point?
What's irrelevant?"
Baker advised faculty to avoid general criticism
when talking with students about their writing, to avoid saying,
"This is unclear," or "This lacks unity."
Instead, he has the student reread an unclear sentence or paragraph,
and he asks, "What does this mean? Think of your reader.
Could I get what you just said from what you've written here?""Think of your reader"
may be the four most important
words I can give them," said Baker. He finds that most students
are writing for themselves and never stop to think that they will
have a reader.
Although ideas should be discussed first, Baker
tells students that errors in spelling and punctuation count.
Errors in mechanics can be as distracting to a reader as "saliva
from a speaker spraying onto the first row of seats in the audience."
He often helps students by pulling out a dictionary to find what
a word means or by referring to pages from his favorite handbook,
Writing with Style by John Trimble. At the end of
the conference, he reviews the points with the student: "Where
do we go from here?" They agree on a due date, usually one
week from the conference. He suggests that the student rewrite
the paper the same night while the ideas they discussed are fresh
and then let it sit for a few days before printing up the final
draft.
One problem Baker encounters
in a conference is the student he calls the "Minimalist,"
who sees revision as final editing and makes only the specific
changes he recommends. He tells students that final grades can
go down if they do not improve their papers since final draft
standards are tougher than rough draft ones. "I care about
what you say and think and how you say and think it" is the
message implicit in the writing conference, according to Baker.
"What is a teacher?" he asked those at the workshop.
"The conference with an individual student on a draft of
a paper gets very close to the essence, the heart of teaching."
|
|
|
Home Page |