a course. Exploratory writing gives students the space, incentive, and tools for more elaborated and complex thinking.5 Build talk time and writing center conferences into the writing process. Student writers need to talk about their ideas with others by conversing with classmates, friends, or writing center consultants/tutors. Writers need to bounce ideas off interested listeners, to test arguments, to see how audiences react, and to get feedback on drafts. In this regard, consider having students talk through their ideas in small groups before they write their first drafts. On many campuses, the writing center director can arrange for writing center consultants/tutors to conduct tutor‐led brainstorming or draft workshops in class. Also encourage one‐on‐one writing center consultations. One of the most important services offered by writing centers is the opportunity for students to talk through their ideas in the early stages of drafting.
6 Use reflections and other metacognitive strategies to help students self‐assess their own drafts. Recent research has shown how reflective writing can help students develop metacognitive awareness of their own thinking processes. This awareness, in turn, helps writers assess the strengths and weaknesses of a work in progress, to recognize problem areas in a draft, and to plan revision strategies to address them. The more students learn to self‐assess their own drafts (and to assess their peers' drafts during peer reviews), the more they will revise their work without instructor intervention. Chapter 11 treats reflective writing and self‐assessment in more detail.
7 Intervene in the writing process by having students submit something to you. Take advantage of the summarizable nature of thesis‐based writing by having students submit to you their problem proposals, thesis statements, nutshelling statements, or self‐written abstracts. Use these brief pieces of writing to identify persons who need extra help. Much of this work can be done online through electronic bulletin boards or other courseware. See chapter 13 for further details.
8 Build process requirements into the assignment, including due dates for drafts. If students are going to stay up all night before a paper is due, make that an all‐night session for a mandatory rough draft rather than for a finished product.
9 Develop strategies for peer review of drafts, either in class or out of class. After students have completed a rough draft, well in advance of the final due date, have students exchange drafts and serve as readers for each other. See chapter 11 for advice on conducting peer reviews.
10 Hold writing conferences with students, especially for those who are having difficulty with the assignment. Traditionally, teachers in American universities spend more time writing comments on finished products than on holding conferences earlier in the writing process. As a general rule, time spent “correcting” finished products is not as valuable as time spent in conference with students at the rough draft stages. See chapter 13 for suggestions.
11 Allow rewrites or make revision‐oriented comments on near final drafts. Many students are motivated toward revision by the hope of an improved grade. If students have an opportunity to revise an essay after you have made your comments, you will strike a major blow for writing as a process. See chapters 12–15 for advice on writing marginal and end comments that encourage revision rather than cosmetic editing. See chapters 11 and 16 for using self‐assessment, peer reviews, portfolios, and alternative grading methods to promote revision.
12 Bring in examples of your own work in progress so that students can see how you go through the writing process yourself. Students like to know that their teachers also struggle with writing. The more you can show students your own difficulties as a writer, the more you can improve their own self‐images.
13 Recognize how essay exams send wrong signals about writing and revision. Symbolically, essay exams convey the message that writing is a transcription of already clear ideas rather than a means of discovering and making meaning. They suggest that revision is not important and that good writers produce acceptable finished copy in one draft. Although essay exams continue to be a common means of assessment in liberal education, they should not substitute for writing that goes through multiple drafts.
14 Hold to high standards for finished products. Teachers are so used to seeing early drafts as final copy that they often forget how good a globally revised essay can be when teachers demand excellence. Students do not see much point in revision if they can earn As or Bs for their quickly edited first drafts.
15 Consider portfolio assessment or contract grading. Portfolios, almost by definition, ensure significantly revised work. Similarly, teachers using contract grading can build evidence of global revision into the contract requirements. See chapter 16 for a full discussion of portfolio assessment and contract grading.
Conclusion: The Implications of Writing as a Means of Thinking in the Undergraduate Curriculum
As this chapter has tried to show, teaching problem‐based analytical and argumentative writing means teaching the thinking processes that underlie academic inquiry. To use writing as a means of thinking, teachers need to make the design of writing assignments a significant part of course preparation and to adopt teaching strategies that give students repeated, active practice at exploring disciplinary questions and problems. Additionally, it is important to emphasize inquiry, question asking, and cognitive dissonance in courses and, whenever possible, to show that scholars in a discipline often disagree about answers to key questions. By teaching a problem‐driven model of the writing process, teachers send a message to the Skylers of the world that good writing is not a pretty package for disguising ignorance. Rather it is a way of discovering, making, and communicating meanings that are significant, interesting, and challenging.
Note
1 * From Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools by Richard Paul and Linda Elder, 2009, Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking Press, p. 2. www.criticalthinking.org. Used by permission.
3 Helping Writers Think Rhetorically
Some years ago John had the opportunity to participate in a statewide assessment of student writing in upper division courses across the curriculum. Researchers collected several hundred papers written by juniors and seniors from a wide range of disciplines at six public universities. The goal for this first‐stage project was descriptive: determining what kinds of papers students were being asked to write and classifying them by whatever categories seemed to emerge. What John and his fellow researchers discovered as they puzzled over many of the papers was that they should have asked for an assignment sheet to be attached to each paper.
John and his fellow researchers' confusion indicated that students were not thinking rhetorically about their purpose or the needs of their audience. Without the assignments, the researchers struggled to understand what many of the papers were doing. Students tended to write directly to the teacher, whose background knowledge the researchers didn't share. The researchers were plopped down in the middle of a conversation to which they hadn't been introduced. As outside readers, they needed papers with effective titles that identified the subject
