Writing and thinking are not distinct processes.  You don’t really know what you think until you put it down on the page and enforce some kind of discipline and organization upon it.  I stress writing as a means of organizing thoughts, and I talk about it as a process.  Writing allows you to get your muddled thoughts down on paper so they get clearer and clearer as you go along, and at the end of that first draft you have a much more solid idea about your beliefs than when you started. 

 

 

One of my goals in creating The Write Stuff – Virginia was to gain insight from teachers of all content areas and grade levels about the function and importance of writing in their classrooms.  With this as a given, I was especially interested in interviewing Will Mackintosh of the University of Mary Washington.  Will is an associate professor in the Department of History and American Studies with a full teaching schedule keeping him busy each semester.  He offers thoughtful insight into university-level expectations for writing, including his own philosophies about the purpose of writing within his own content area.

Initially, Will described some reasons why the teaching of writing is seen as a chore across all levels of education.  He recognizes it as enormously time-consuming, and he understands teachers’ reluctance to spend time on a skill where evidence of growth and progress is frustratingly slow in most cases.  He says, “Growth in writing is often only apparent much later.  You don’t see much improvement over the course of a semester.  You may see progress within two drafts of a paper, but that progress is small.  As a teacher, you discover you’ve been successful ten years later when the student comes back and tells you about the writing they’ve done in their career and how the lessons you imparted were meaningful in that process.  It’s a delayed gratification, so I get why people don’t recognize how critical it is;  nevertheless, it’s very important and it needs to happen.”

Will feels another issue that deflects the teaching of writing has to do with a trend in education toward proving and measuring efficiency.  He explains, “One of the things that gets squeezed out when efficiency takes precedence is the meaningful teaching of writing, because it is a fundamentally inefficient process, one that involves a lot of false starts, a lot of wasted time, a lot of screwing things up before you get them right, both on the part of teachers and on the part of students.  Teaching writing is inevitably a messy, inefficient process if you’re going to do it right, and it’s difficult to apply any kind of meaningful metric to a student’s progress with it. Even the writing rubric is designed to give the illusion of objectivity to a fundamentally subjective thing, so it’s one of the first things to go in the classroom.”

Despite these negative aspects of writing instruction, Will describes ways that he has preserved and utilized the teaching of this integral skill within his history courses:

Drafting

With a philosophy that centers on the intrinsic development of thought and ideas, Will supports the practice of a drafting process for developing strong, argumentative writing.  He explains, “I rarely give any type of writing assignment that doesn’t involve at least two drafts.  There is almost no point in having them writing something for me and then not revisit it again, because there’s no growth if they only complete one draft.  They don’t even look at my feedback if it’s not going to help them improve their writing in a second draft.  In most of my courses, I’ve cut down on the number of writing assignments they have to do, but I include multiple drafts.  I make those drafts either required or optional depending on the course and the level.”

Will says the second phase of the process, the second draft, allows students to return to the decisions they’ve arrived at and view them through their overall treatment of the topic.  In this way, he hopes to meet students at their own levels. It is because he emphasizes the process that Will says, “Writing and thinking are not distinct.  You don’t really know what you think until you put it down on the page and enforce some kind of discipline and organization upon it.  I stress writing as a means of organizing thoughts, and I talk about it as a process.  Writing allows you to get your muddled thoughts down on paper so they get clearer and clearer as you go along, and at the end of that first draft you have a much more solid idea about what you think about an idea than when you started.”

Presentation as a Segue to Scholarly Writing

In recent years, Will has been exploring the idea of speaking and writing as two distinct but interrelated processes.  He says, “When you look at professional scholars, they almost always speak before they write, presenting at conferences and talking about their ideas with colleagues, giving both formal and informal presentations before publishing anything.  Oral presentation helps you realize what your audience is interested in, where their confusion remains, and what resonates and what is a compelling narrative.  It’s only partly about the feedback from the audience; it’s also about the process of organizing your thoughts to say it to someone outside of your own brain.  I want students to think of the presentation as a rough draft and again to emphasize it as a process allowing them to think about what they want to argue and what their evidence allows them to say.”

Though the papers are almost always better when written after an oral presentation, Will does tend to use this method more often with his upper division students.  He recognizes that freshmen, and even some sophomores, are often so nervous that any benefit a presentation would afford them is often negated.  He says, “Their stage freight overwhelms them, so I make sure I have them present in a more controlled environment so they can manage their anxieties.

Informal Writing as a Link to Thinking

Because the link between thinking and writing is something Will wants to integrate in his classroom, he believes more opportunities for informal writing support this function.  He says that one of the less formal pieces of writing that he has students do is to have them collectively build a Wiki about the readings that they’re doing in class.   He explains, “I use Media Wiki;  it looks like Wikipedia.  There’s a page where the course readings are listed, and I require students to post things with the goal of building a collaborative set of reading notes over the course of the semester, hoping that maybe we will get a little bit of wisdom of the crowd and will examine the connections between the readings.  I’ve had some success with it, because there is a potential outcome.”

Authentic Audience as a Motivator for Thoughtful Writing

Will describes a conversation that many professors are having at UMW regarding writing assignments that matter and have an afterlife outside of the office filing cabinet.  He and his colleagues recognize that students complete essays in their classes because the professors ask it of them, but it creates an artificial product. He says, “One thing many of us have been experimenting with is having a class collectively put together a resource about a content related topic on a source where it will have a life after the end of the semester.  I’ve done this in one of my courses where I teach about the history of the book, printing, and publishing. We go to the special collections on campus, and students pick one book from which to research and write a history.  The books can range anywhere from 17^th Century encyclopedias to  20^th Century books that were produced for soldiers during WWII.  I ask them to write the history in academic language in a scholarly tone, and then I ask them to rewrite the same information for a website which then becomes a public repository where any user can go to learn about objects that are in the special collections at UMW. The exercise gives us the opportunity to talk about how you write the same content in different voices and styles for different audiences.”