Monday, February 12, 2007
On Informal Assignments
The chapters in Bean on informal assignments raised some interesting questions, especially Chapter 2 which seemed to downplay the effectiveness of thesis-driven writing, odd because that is what College Composition courses are all about. I think, of course, that he's not saying that the formal paper with a thesis is a bad thing. He seems to be saying that expecting freshman students to automatically adhere to a thesis-model is problematic, and that looking at other processes which involve writing that is more exploratory would be helpful to do before the demanding thesis-driven paper. Of course, when we're integrating this into our class, which is based upon the writing of at least 3 thesis-driven papers, we must keep in mind that the informal "exploratory" writing is intended to eventually help them to focus in on a more thesis-driven model. Chapter 3's cycle from Kolb seems like a good model to follow for the class. Starting them off with informal writing to explore the "chaos" of the topic, and then gradually taking this chaos into the more focused structure of a formal essay. I agree with this approach because the main problem I see with so many student essays at the writing lab is that they don't realize that they actually do have a decent thesis hiding in their essays, but because their first draft tends to be exploratory, they just haven't found the best way to structure an argument around the thesis. I also liked the idea on page 115 of using thesis-statement writing as an informal assignment.
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2 comments:
I agree. I had one student after the other today in the WL who each had an apparent lack of thesis yet they had really good arguments stashed away toward the end. I sat in on a bunch of Eng. 1K classes last semester and thought the informal thesis-writing assiment was awesome. Of course, many of them failed to take this lesson to heart, but I think it did help.
To me Bean's critique seemed to be more about the idea that you come up with a thesis and then write your paper- as opposed to writing and exploring, and arriving at your thesis after more writing- at which point you rewrite. One of the rhetorics I'm reviewing has considerable content on this idea of writing toward a thesis instead of writing from a thesis. The tricky part then is to teach them how to pick out the thesis from its hiding place in the "brouillon."
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