Peter Elbow writes, “The goal of low stakes assignments is not so much to produce excellent pieces of writing as to get students to think, learn, and understand more of the course material.” I agree with this statement and have the utmost faith in writing as a mode of learning; I always engage much more deeply with material that I write about in even an informal manner. However, I struggle with my sense that the “course material” in a writing class is how to produce excellent pieces of writing. Is it more important for the students to learn the thematic content we choose, or is it that they learn how to write well? Of course, these agendas are not mutually exclusive and form and content have a mutually productive and informative relationship; a composition class offers a particularly marked illustration of why that is the case. But if we emphasize the content as a means of achieving goals of improvements in form, does that require us to choose content about writing? I enjoyed teaching Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue,” Malcolm X’s “Homemade Education,” and Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts,” but all of these readings serve dual functions of talking about life and talking about writing. I had initially planned my course to focus on a theme of professional and socioeconomic inequalities and related social constructs of identity, but I’ve really put that theme on ice because I can’t think of readings to assign that talk about those issues while also speaking explicitly to writing, being a writer, or language itself. While that isn’t strictly necessary, if we are going to focus on teaching content, then doesn’t the content need to directly address those issues?

On the other hand, I think Elbow is absolutely right when he says we should “use low stakes writing to fumble and fish for words for what they sense and intuit but cannot yet clearly say.” That’s an incredibly important process, and even if the students are phoning it in, they’ll understand the ideas they’re working with better than if they hadn’t done any writing. However, in spite of Elbow’s claim that low-stakes writing tends to be clearer than high-stakes writing, I was much more impressed with my students’ rough drafts of their first high-stakes assignment than with any of their low-stakes work, acknowledging that problems in their low-stakes work product may have resulted from issues with my own assignment design. At any rate, I’m looking forward to trying some ideas from Anson and Dannels’s list of highly intuitive and interesting low-stakes writing assignments.

I take Elbow’s points about criticism and responses to writing; we discussed this issue last week. It’s such a fine line, isn’t it? It’s always important to be kind, under any circumstance, but I made great strides in my college writing by sitting down with difficult professors and asking them to explain each of their comments. It was difficult, and I always had that first instinct to hold my nose, look at the grade, and never think about the paper again, but those professors’ comments had a huge impact on my writing and my confidence. Watching the steady decline of professorial ink on each subsequent essay was really satisfying and fruitful. If I were teaching anything other than Writing I, I’d feel great about letting writing issues slide if the content was there, but as it is, I’ll try to take Elbow’s advice on faith.