Five Things I've Gained from Reading Literature

Families want to know why we teach Shakespeare instead of how to write business reports. Students want to know why they need to read Huck Finn instead of writing resumes. Politicians want to know why we talk about Emily Dickinson instead of doing test prep.

In her report this week, Carol Jago explains that by studying literature, students learn to read and think critically. They learn about the human condition. They learn to explore and critique the many texts that they encounter, from novels and poetry to blog posts and YouTube videos. These are true, well-established reasons, but families, students, and communities who are asking the questions sometimes have a difficulty relating these explanations to their personal experiences.
Here's my solution: rather than telling people the benefits of literature, let's ask them to tell us. Let's ask them to share what they've gained from reading literature. We can take advantage of the popularity of short surveys, quizzes, and lists on sites like Facebook and MySpace by creating our own five questions that demonstrate why people read literature.

What to Do
Copy the questions and instructions below, and paste them into a blog entry, a note on Facebook, or a discussion forum—anywhere that you can reach the people you want to. You can use the comments area on this blog entry if you'd like as well. Delete my answers to the questions, and add your own. Feel free to any extra instructions or invite specific people to answer the questions when you post them. You might ask all the students in your class to complete the questions in their journals or as part of a exam review activity, for instance.

The Questions
Think about the literature you've read—short stories, novels, plays, memoirs, and poetry. Any literature counts, from picture books to epic poems, and from romance novels to sci-fi fan-fiction. Answer each question, and explain your response in a few sentences. Just copy the questions, remove my answers, add your own, and then invite others to respond.

1.What piece of literature has stayed with you, even though you haven't read it recently? Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" comes back to me every spring, when I look at the freshly sprouting trees. When I read this poem in college, my professor pointed to the tree outside the classroom window. As if by design, the sprouting leaves on the trees were a perfect blend of greenish-yellow. They seemed both green and gold, depending upon how you thought of the color. Each spring as the trees wake up and start to leaf, I think about Frost's poem, the incredible serendipity of reading it on that day when the tree outside was a perfect match, and how true it is that "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

2.What character or story has influenced something you've done? Richard Wilbur’s "The Writer" is a poem that I like to teach, but it's also one that influences me as a writer. Often when I'm struggling with something that I'm writing, I find myself flailing against the topic, making no progress. I get angry. I cross things out. I start dozens of sentences that trail off into nothing. I write and write and write, but I say nothing useful. And then I remember "The Writer" and the "dazed starling," both of whom struggle so hard to meet their goal. I forgive myself a little, gather "the wits to try it again," and try a bit harder, knowing that eventually I'll find the right words.

3.What character or piece of literature seemed to relate to a recent news story or personal experience? The recent stories about jurors using digital technologies (iPhones, Blackberries, etc.) to look up information about the trials they were hearing made me think about 12 Angry Men. It's illegal for jurors to check facts in Wikipedia or look up news stories on the lawyers or their clients. As I thought about the desire to look up the answers, I found myself wondering, "Was it strictly legal for Juror 8 to go out in search of a duplicate to the knife that was used to commit the murder that is the focus of 12 Angry Men?"

4.What character has make you wonder why he or she did/said something? Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun makes me crazy. What would make someone think that opening a liquor store would be a better use of money than sending someone to medical school? When I first read the play, his actions left me angry and confused. I could have joined his mother in slapping him. I spent many hours thinking about his motivation and the personal struggles that he faces. Since then, of course, I've had plenty of time to study the play, and I think I understand his actions. Still, though, there's something about a male character deciding that his liquor store is more important than a female character's college education that makes me want to shout at him.

5.Name something from a work of literature (such as a character, setting, or quotation) that you find beautiful or vivid. The most lasting image for me is always Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." It's a distinct, vibrant, specific image. If reduced to a description though, the summary would say simply, "The speaker sees some people waiting for the Metro." The poem, however, is a single moment that is deeper and more vivid than any summary could ever capture. The poem makes me feel as if I too can see these soulless, wandering people, there on the metro platform.

The Discussion
As families, students, friends, and others answer the questions, they are actually proving that literature has influenced who they are. Each of the questions has a concrete purpose, to focus on a specific reason that we read literature. Compare the questions to these underlying messages:
1.Literature has enduring value to the reader.
2.Literature influences our actions and beliefs.
3.Literature connects to our own time and place in the world.
4.Literature inspires critical thinking.
5.Literature has lasting beauty.

Together, the five questions tell us not only what a specific person has gained from reading literature, but also the very reasons that students should read and write about literature throughout their lives. Literature matters. No question about it.

Gardner, Traci. ""Five Things I've Learned from Reading Literature"." 28 April 2009. NCTE Inbox. 20 May 2009 .

"Holding College Chiefs to Their Words"

Reed College President Colin Diver suffered writer's block. Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, wrote quickly but then toiled for hours to cut an essay that was twice as long as it was supposed to be. The assignment loomed over Wesleyan University President Michael Roth's family vacation to Disney World.

The university presidents were struggling with a task that tortures high-school seniors around the country every year: writing the college admissions essay. In a particularly competitive year for college admissions, The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school's application.

The "applicants" were told not to exceed 500 words (though most did), and to accept no help from public-relations people or speechwriters. Friends and family could advise but not rewrite. The Journal selected the question from each application so presidents wouldn't pick the easy ones. They had about three weeks to write their essays.

The exercise showed just how challenging it is to write a college essay that stands out from the pack, yet doesn't sound overly self-promotional or phony. Even some presidents say they grappled with the challenge and had second thoughts about the topics they chose. Several shared tips about writing a good essay: Stop trying to come up with the perfect topic, write about personally meaningful themes rather than flashy ones, and don't force a subject to be dramatic when it isn't.

As Mr. Roth of Wesleyan, in Middletown, Conn., waited in line with his daughter for rides at Disney World, he thought about his question -- describe a person who's had a significant influence on you -- and wondered whether the topic he'd chosen for his response was too personal.

"It occurred to me, that must be the question our applicants ask themselves," Mr. Roth says. "I can write this about my history teacher or a public figure, what you'd expect, or should I write something more meaningful to me, but riskier?"
In the end, Mr. Roth decided to take a risk, telling a story of his brother who died at age five, before Mr. Roth was born. His older brother's portrait hung in their childhood home.

"I was to heal the wounds caused by the death of that beautiful little boy in the picture," he wrote. "Yet I was also to remain the trace of those wounds."

Mr. Diver of Reed, in Portland, Ore., was asked to write about an experience that demonstrated the importance of diversity to him. He described a violent episode as a young man that eroded his liberal self-image. Overhearing the mugging of a young black woman outside his home in Boston's South End, Mr. Diver, who is white, grabbed a baseball bat and hit the woman's attacker, who was Latino.

"Doubts welled up in my mind," Mr. Diver wrote. "Did I really understand what it means to live in a diverse neighborhood? Or did I just want cosmetic diversity as a backdrop for imposing my white, professional-class ways?"

The incident, which occurred in 1975, is mentioned in "Common Ground," a book by J. Anthony Lukas that told the story of three families, including Mr. Diver's, in a rapidly gentrifying and racially divided neighborhood.

Robert Oden, president of Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., was asked to evaluate the impact of a significant experience, achievement, risk or ethical dilemma that he had faced. He wrote about how life should be approached as an adventure, and described running, panicked, in the streets of Cairo when a trip to the pyramids, on the western edge of the city, went awry. "Within a few short minutes, I was lost. Utterly, hopelessly, lost and confused."

Eventually, he realized that he was safe, and concluded that around the world, "people are people," and most are kind and quick to help others.
Mr. Oden says he found it tough to write an essay that didn't sound a little crazy in its attempt to be interesting. "I can think of writing an essay that would be batty and daft and wild, and I can think of writing a very conventional essay that would be neither," he says. He went with Cairo because it was a specific story, set in a particular place, with details he remembered vividly.

With the assignment of picking a person who inspired him -- from fiction, history or a creative work -- Grinnell College's Russell Osgood chose history, writing about 18th-century Anglo-Irish political figure Edmund Burke. Mr. Osgood, who announced this week that he will step down in 2010, drew parallels between his experience as president of Grinnell, in Grinnell, Iowa, and Mr. Burke's philosophy.

"...Burke, like David Hume, believed that change is best accomplished by a gradual movement in structures and institutions rather than by violent upheaval. When I arrived at Grinnell as a new president in 1998, there was concern, even apprehension, about me and the possibility of change," he wrote. In response to those concerns, Mr. Osgood says he told people that any change he brought to the college would occur "thoughtfully and after learning and listening." He says he wanted to act in a way that was consistent with Burke's philosophy.

Given the same question, Marvin Krislov, president of Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio, says he briefly wondered if he should write as if he were a high-school senior, but then concluded he'd write a better essay if he looked back on his experiences from an adult perspective. He described a trip he took a few years ago to South Africa's Robben Island, where anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was imprisoned:

"Contemplating Nelson Mandela's life can make one weep at the inhumanity and cruelty he experienced. But it is also inspiring," Mr. Krislov wrote, adding that he was especially impressed by a school Mr. Mandela and his colleagues created while they were in prison. "I was deeply moved by their faith even under horrific circumstances in education as the path to social change and uplift."

One of the most challenging questions came from the University of Pennsylvania application: Write page 217 of your 300-page autobiography. President Amy Gutmann focused on her professional accomplishments, including creating a vision for the school, dubbed "the Penn Compact," when she became the university's president in 2004. "No sooner had I begun writing my presidential inaugural address than the political philosopher in me took over," she wrote. "Instead of delivering the standard omnibus address that no one will remember, why not propose a new social contract to put the ideals of higher education into ever more effective practice?"

Some presidents, like many high-school students, wrote about their extra-curricular activities. "What I love about bicycling is how close I am to the countryside, moving slowly enough to see everything, and able to stop when a spot beckons," wrote David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. Others took the opportunity to focus on academic policy: "We need to adjust to the new economic realities while maintaining our commitment to access and affordability," wrote Catharine Hill, president of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

The question for University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer was simply a quote by poet Rainer Maria Rilke translated from the German: "At present you need to live the question." His interpretation: "Living the question is not simple. It entails the intensity of argument and engagement. It demands intellectual risk-taking and a preference for analysis, inquiry and complexity over easy solutions or comfort."
Ms. Spar, president of Barnard College in New York, says the application exercise reminded her how difficult it is for students to write an original essay, especially when so many are answering the same questions from the common application.

"In an ideal world, I'd rather go back to the system where colleges ask more idiosyncratic questions, because really what you want to find out is, why is this particular kid a good fit for this particular school?" she says.

When she sat down to write, she rejected one of her first ideas, which was to describe her running and swimming routine. "That struck me that'd be a very, very boring and self-aggrandizing essay to write," she says.

So Ms. Spar, who once wrote a graduate-school application essay about talking backwards, used a trick familiar to many survivors of the college essay ordeal: She turned her question on its head. Asked to describe an ordinary-seeming daily routine or tradition that held special meaning for her, the working mother wrote instead about her lack of routine. She described a typical chaotic day: she was juggling preparations for a black-tie event with the needs of her three kids. Meanwhile, her husband was stuck in a snowstorm in Buffalo, N.Y. and the family cat was found with a "writhing" chipmunk inside the house.

"I pack my daughter's clothes for soccer practice and put her Hebrew homework where she has at least a remote chance of encountering it. In between, I check on the chipmunk, which is now expiring sadly on the downstairs rug," Ms. Spar wrote, later adding: "The chipmunk has died. And another day begins. Thankfully, I've never been much for routine."

Gamerman, Ellen. "Holding College Chiefs to Their Words." The Wall Street Journal 6 May 2009: D1.

Lunsford and Lunsford's "Mistakes Are a Part of Life"

Lunsford and Lunsford recreate the same frequency of errors study Connors and Lunsford published in 1988. They reason that in twenty-plus years, writing pedagogy and writing have changed considerably. For instance, in the first study, most of the writing samples were hand-written with just a few typed, and not a single document was computer generated. The single most common error was spelling which accounted for three times the number of grammatical errors. Because spelling represented such a significant number in the first study, Connors and Lunsford did not even consider spelling in their initial article and focused on just grammar. However, because of word processing and spell checks, the current study indicates that spelling has become the fifth leading error in writing.

The current study also differs because of the process of obtaining writing samples. In the first study, invitations to faculty across the nation simple submitted copies of their students’ papers which produced over 3000 samples. However, because of federal privacy regulations, the researchers had to receive permission and student samples through institutional research boards, which greatly curtailed the number of samples to 877.

The twenty most common formal errors in the new study include:

1. Wrong word
2. Missing comma after an introductory element
3. Incomplete or missing documentation
4. Vague pronoun reference
5. Spelling error (including homonyms)
6. Mechanical error with quotation
7. Unnecessary comma
8. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
9. Missing word
10. Faulty sentence structure
11. Missing comma with a nonrestrictive element
12. Unnecessary shift in verb tense
13. Missing comma in a compound sentence
14. Unnecessary or missing apostrophe
15. Fused sentence
16. Comma splice
17. Lack of pronoun-antecedent agreement
18. Poorly integrated quotation
19. Unnecessary or missing hyphen
20. Sentence fragment

What distinguishes some of the differences between the current and past study of errors, is the current study suggests students are writing longer papers (twice as long), focusing on documented arguments, and obviously using technology to write. In terms of grammar errors, the new study now includes documentation errors as part of the most frequent errors.

This is a very accessible article that helps examine the errors that we commonly experience as we write and teach writing.

Lunsford, Andrea A. and Karen J. Lunsford. "'Mistakes are a Fact of Life': A National Comparative Study." College Composition and Communication 59.4 (2008): 781-806.

Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford's "Frequency of Formal Errors"

Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford discuss the analysis of 3000 teacher-marked essays from the 1980s to discover the most common patterns of student errors and to determine which errors are most often marked by teachers.

The twenty top errors (next to spelling which represents three times the number of grammar errors marked by teachers) include the following:

1. No comma after introductory element
2. Vague pronoun reference
3. No comma in compound structure
4. Wrong word
5. No comma in non-restrictive element
6. Wrong/missing inflected endings
7. Wrong or missing preposition
8. Comma splice
9. Possessive apostrophe error
10. Tense shift
11. Unnecessary shift in person
12. Sentence fragment
13. Wrong tense or verb form
14. Subject-verb agreement
15. Lack of comma in series
16. Pronoun agreement error
17. Unnecessary comma with restrictive element
18. Run-on or fused sentence
19. Dangling or misplaced modifier
20. Its/It’s error

This article is very accessible as they explain their research process and results. They also discuss previous studies and those major findings. Connors and Lunsford also suggest that teachers mark a relatively limited amount of errors and that college students at the end of the century do not make more errors than they did earlier in the century.

I remember reading this when the article first appeared. Connors and Lunsford did the original research to help prepare them to write their college handbook--they wanted to know where to focus their instruction.

Connors, Robert and Andrea Lunsford. "Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research." College Composition and Communication 39.4 (1988): 394-409.

Carter's "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing"

I wish I had read this article years ago to combat a faculty member’s assertions that as English writing instructors we are not qualified or capable of teaching writing outside our discipline. The faculty insisted that we should only teach within our disciplines. However, my position, and the department’s and university’s positions, relies on English faculty’s ability to apply discipline-specific rhetoric and genres to general, multidiscipline writing courses.

Michael Carter maintains that faculty outside a discipline can teach writing within a discipline. Writing within a discipline is the writing specific to particular discipline, “a process of slow acculturation through various apprenticeship discourses” (385). Individuals within the discipline learn through carefully guided instruction and practice the methods necessary for communicating in acceptable and predictable methods governed by that discipline.

Carter explains historically how writing within the discipline began to give way to writing outside the disciplines when university focus began to turn to teaching freshman composition as specific treatments for poor writing skills of entering students—the responsibility for writing, left the disciplines and found place in English departments outside the other disciplines.

Carter explains that the distinction he draws “between writing outside and writing inside the disciplines is the difference between knowledge and knowing, that is disciplines are repositories and delivery systems for relatively static content knowledge versus disciplines as active ways of knowing. Some psychologists describe this distinction as declarative or conceptual knowledge on the one hand and procedural or process knowledge on the other, the difference between knowing that and knowing how” (387). Therefore declarative/conceptual knowledge is knowing that, and procedural/process knowledge is knowing how.

Carter then applies knowing to doing—how particular disciplines “do” their writing as a manifestation of how they demonstrate knowledge. “Because doing plays a central role in this conception of writing in the disciplines, it may be helpful to understand disciplinary ways of doing and the connection between knowing and writing” (386).

“It is this relationship among knowing, doing, and writing that is concealed by the disciplinary focus on conceptual knowledge. Doing is the middle term that links writing and knowing in the disciplines. Thus, the challenge in reframing the disciplines as ways of knowing, doing, and writing is to find a means of describing in convincing terms the ways of doing that characterize the disciplines, convincing, that is, to faculty and students in the disciplines” (386).

Carter explains through his university’s program outcomes necessary for ongoing accreditation and assessment, departments and faculty establish outcomes or what students must “do” demonstrate competence within the discipline. “Doing enacts the knowing through students’ writing, and the writing gives shape to the ways of knowing and doing in a discipline. So instead of focusing only on the conceptual knowledge that has traditionally defined the disciplines, faculty are encouraged to focus also on what their students should be able to do, representing largely in their writing. Having faculty identify disciplinary ways of doing and then assess them through students’ writing is a step toward situating writing in, not outside, the disciplines” (391).

Carter explores approaches to express how disciplines know, do, and write. The three chief approaches include individual disciplines, metagenre, and metadiscipline. Individual disciplines establish program outcomes of what students should do. Metagenre “implies categories of knowing, doing, and writing that cut across disciplines but may be inflected differently in different disciplines and in different contexts” (394). And metadiscipline suggests “that disciplines themselves may be grouped according to common ways of knowing, doing, and writing” (394).

Carter establishes four metagenres in academic writing:
•problem solving
•empirical inquiry
•research from sources
•performance

Problem solving asks students to “identify, define, and analyze a problem. . . ; determine what information is appropriate to solving the problem and then find it. . . ; offer a range of potential solutions according to the establish criteria, choose the most viable solution, and make a convincing case for that solution” (395).

Metagenres and acts of doing for problem solving include, business plans, feasibility reports, management plans, marketing plans, reports to management, project reports, project proposals, technical memoranda, and technical reports (396).

Multidisciplines for problem solving include: accounting, agricultural and resource economics, animal science, business management, engineering, food science, forestry management, mathematics, and psychology.

Empirical inquiry “consists of answering questions by drawing conclusions from systematic investigation based on empirical data” (396). To accomplish empirical inquiry students are to “ask pertinent questions about [a subject]. . .; apply deliberate and thorough observational skills to conduct experiments and collect data; organize and summarize data and present them in a way that is accurate and comprehensible in both verbal and graphical forms; and interpret data and draw conclusions that allow the students to support or refute hypotheses and make a case for alternative hypotheses” (397).

Metagenres and actions of doing for empirical inquiry include laboratory report, poster, poster presentation, research proposal, research report, scientific article, and scientific presentation (398).

Multidisciplines for empirical inquiry “reside in the sciences, both natural and social, such as anthropology, biology, chemistry, geology, microbiology, political science, and sociology” (405)

Research from sources has two primary distinguishing characteristics: “(1) the kind of research that is done, that is not, not based on data gathered from independent observations but largely on sources that have their origins elsewhere; and (2) the goal of the research, which typically does not have extrinsic value, such as solving practical problems or investigating hypotheses, but value that is intrinsic to the discipline” (398). Generally research from sources “pose an interesting research question about [a subject]; locate relevant primary and secondary sources for investigating a research question; critically evaluate primary and secondary sources in terms of credibility, authenticity, interpretative stance, audience, potential biases, and value for answering the research question; and marshall the evidence from the research to support an. . . . argument for an answer to a research question” (398)

Metagenres and actions of doing for research form sources principally are research papers. However, Carter maintains that different disciplines have different purposes behind their research papers. For instance in literature research the goal is “to enable students to read and understand literature from historical, cultural, and theoretical perspectives” (400).

Metadisciplines for research from sources include history, literature, multidisciplinary studies, philosophy, religious studies, gender studies, and humanities.

Performance denotes both the “act and the resulting object of a performance, but particularly the primacy of the object as evidence of success in learning to perform the act, doing the performance” (400).

Metagenres and actions doing for research from sources does include fine arts performances; additionally, but it also applies to rhetoric and writing: “In rhetoric, writing, and language, the focus is mainly on written performance including such genres. . . as documentation, editorials, feature articles, news stories, proposals, and technical reports, but also certain media such as PowerPoint presentations and websites” (402). Metagenre for performance also includes assessment documents such as “the artifact, a portfolio of artifacts, and the critique” (406).

Metadisciplines for performance include architecture, art and design, graphic design, industrial design , landscape architecture, and language, writing, and rhetoric.

Carter concludes: “By questioning the strict boundaries that mark off the disciplines one from another, postdisciplinarity also implicitly questions the assumed disjunction between the specialized knowledge of a discipline and the generalized knowledge of writing: the former is not so special; the latter is not so general. It may be, then, that writing is located neither fully in nor fully outside the disciplines because disciplinary boundaries themselves are porous and in flux; the disciplines are not fixed containers at all. Projecting the disciplines as ways of knowing, doing, and writing tends to emphasize not disjunction but junction, the intersections of disciplines, the connection between research and teaching, and the ties between writing and knowing. From this perspective, it is not so much writing in our outside but writing of the disciplines” (410).

Carter, Michael. "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines." College Composition and Communication 58.1 (2007): 385-418.

Nancy Sommer's "The Call of Research"

Nancy Sommers begins to report on Harvard’s five-year study of the writing development of a class of students from their freshman through senior years. I have heard her discuss this research and process several times at CCCCs and NCTE. They have collected over 600 pounds of student documents for 400 students and continue to analyze document the significance of their findings.

Their overarching research question is “Do students leave college stronger writers than when they entered?”

Sommers explains that in college, “students are asked to write more than plot summary, more than a cut-and-paste presentation of secondary sources. Rather they are instructed in the language of analysis, argument, and counter-argument and are urged, in our responses to their drafts to ‘analyze more’ and to ‘go deeper into their sources’” (152).

She uses the metaphor of students entering the university seeking the secret handshakes and esoteric codes and passwords practiced in the writing of their disciplines only to find that as they move across the curriculum those handshakes, codes, and passwords change—writing continues to be a mystery for many students for much of their academic experience. Student writing continues to develop throughout their studies.

Sommers admits that their study offers “two paradoxes of writing development: (1) writing development is not always visible on the page—students may be able to articulate standards of good writing before being able to put them into practice; (2) writing development involves steps both forward and backward, gains and losses, and requires some amount of ‘bad’ writing while new skills are practiced” (154)

Sommers study does admit that what students learn in their first-year writing classes are not adequate to prepare them for later college writing: “Such a foundation [first year writing classes] is inadequate for the more and deeper research assignments they [students] are asked to complete in their junior and senior years. Why some students prosper within their disciplines, while others stall, is one of the perplexing questions we explored, and a question that is intimately connected to issues of audience. Students who prosper as writers, we observed, cultivate a desire to enter disciplinary debates and to find their place in an academic exchange, with something to gain and much to give” (155-56).

To illustrate the necessity of students involving themselves significantly into discipline conversations, Sommers chronicles the experience of one student, Luisa from her freshman year which Luisa calls herself the “queen of the B minus” (156) through her senior year’s 75-page original political science research paper. Sommers explains: “if Luisa is to engage others in the arguments that matter to her, she needs to explain her logic by employing the methods and conventions of the disciplinary communities she enters. . . . She needs to learn their language and use their methods and approaches, not just her own idiosyncratic frame of reference. To reach an audience of political scientists, she needs to write like one—testing theories and hypotheses, synthesizing large bodies of information, and anticipating and refuting counterarguments” (157).

Luisa learns to achieve this success through “practice, repetition, and instruction” (157). And Sommers observes that Luisa “succeeds not by writing out of expertise but by writing into expertise” (157).

The principle of gaining knowledge and expertise comes throughout students’ university experience: “The critical role of expertise and knowledge play in preparing students to address an audience helps to account for may patterns we observed over four years. Students do not simply struggle with audience at the beginning of their college careers: they struggle with it whenever they find themselves as novices, unfamiliar with the ideas and methods of a particular discipline or subject matter. Expertise—or more accurately, the lack of it—also helps explain why students who never pursue one subject or one discipline in depth have more difficulty engaging readers” (158).

“Every time students read new texts, enter new debates, or practice new sets of disciplinary conventions, they must in effect, learn how to address a new audience. . . . If students learn to write to and for an audience, it happens because of a confluence of desires: an institution desires its students to receive explicit, sustained, and incremental instruction in thinking and writing; and students desire to see their writing not as an isolated exercise but as part of an ongoing academic exchange” (159).

Sommers explains that a single element influencing students writing development is never sufficient for students to succeed as writers—many elements must mesh: “Any single element necessary for development is never sufficient for students to succeed as college writers. For instance, close reading is necessary but not sufficient in itself for making arguable claims. Learning to question sources and pose counterarguments are necessary to establish a place in an academic debate but not sufficient to engage readers if a student lacks expertise in the subject matter or lacks expertise with the disciplinary methods of engagement. And learning to ask questions that matter to a student is necessary but not sufficient, especially if these questions matter only to the student and not to a community of readers” (161).

Sommers concludes with a reference to Luisa: “It is through writing that Luisa learns to shape her personal interests into public ones, moving into the wider world as a thoughtful and educated citizen” (162).

Sommers, Nancy. "The Call of Research: A Longitudinal View of Writing Development." College Composition and Communication 60.1 (2008): 152-164.

WPA Outcomes

I had forgotten “WPA Outcome Statement for First-Year Composition.” I was reminded of these outcomes when Nancy Sommers referenced them.
After reviewing these outcomes again, I’ve decided to use them in my English 450 Rhetorical Studies as the framework for their final class period. The students will review these outcomes and use them as the foundation for establishing what they perceive to be the outcomes for English 450. The students will suggest how the course does or does not adheres to their outcomes.
By the end of first year composition, students should:
Rhetorical Knowledge
•Focus on a purpose
•Respond to the needs of different audiences
•Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations
•Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation
•Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
•Understand how genres shape reading and writing
Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
•Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating
•Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources
•Integrate their own ideas with those of others
•Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power
Processes
•Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text
•Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading
•Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to revise their work
•Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
•Learn to critique their own and others' works
•Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part
•Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences
Knowledge of Conventions
•Learn common formats for different kinds of texts
•Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics
•Practice appropriate means of documenting their work
•Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Composing in Electronic Environments
By the end of first-year composition, students should:
•Use electronic environments for drafting, reviewing, revising, editing, and sharing texts
•Locate, evaluate, organize, and use research material collected from electronic sources, including scholarly library databases; other official databases (e.g., federal government databases); and informal electronic networks and internet sources
•Understand and exploit the differences in the rhetorical strategies and in the affordances available for both print and electronic composing processes and texts.

Writing Program Administration. "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition." WPA: Writing Program Administration 23.1/2 (1999): 59-66.