Let’s take a pause now to have a brief check-in on how your writing practice and writing process have been going. See Learning Module 2 for a review to remember the difference between a writing practice vs. a writing process.

One thing that comes up a lot is being distracted. Check out this resource on managing distractions and see what is available to you if you get distracted a lot (some of you mentioned this in the Learning Needs Survey responses).

Task

In Discord under “feb-17-process-or-distraction”, choose one of the below four options:

• What has been working well or not so well in your writing practice while working on the first draft of your Literacy Narrative?
• What has been working well or not so well in your writing process while working on the first draft of your Literacy Narrative?
• Talk about a distraction management strategy technique from the resource on managing distractions that you want to try to use and talk about ways you typically manage distractions.
• Respond to another classmate’s Discord post about one of the above three things.

After posting on Discord, click the button below to continue:

One of the big adjustments in college if you are coming right from high school (but, really, for everyone) is managing when and how to get your work done.

The when and how coalesce (mostly the “when”), though, around time management. 

Sometimes, we write at the last minute which doesn’t always produce the best (I know, I know, some of you swear it does but I bet many of you who swear that have only done the procrastinator’s method! And, that one won’t always work once your writing projects get a lot larger).

Go to Blackboard>Submit Assignments>Process Writing and Reading Responses and click on the attachment under “Process Writing: Writing Schedule Activity” to read the instructions for completing this assignment.

You’ll complete this for homework due for Monday, February 22 by 11:59pm, but read through it now to make sure you understand it.

Task

In a comment below, let me know if you have any questions about this assignment due for 2/22 by 11:59pm. If you don’t have a question, just type “I have no questions.”

After commenting below, click the “Click here to continue” button to move on.

During this module, we:

• Thought about the rhetorical situation as a model for thinking about writing
• Thought about how writing processes work and how they are grounded in the rhetorical situation
• Thought about the importance of establishing a writing practice to the best of our ability and circumstances
• Started to work out the logistics for Writing Groups and how to give good feedback on writing.
• Spent some time thinking about needs for learning and being successful in class when thinking about the Learning Needs Survey.

Next Time

• No class on Monday, February 15 because of President’s Day.
• By the end of this week, I will be in contact with you on your assigned Writing Group. You will meet with me next Wednesday, February 17 in your Writing Group (more to come on this).
• Learning Module 3 is due by end of day on Wednesday, February 17.
• Literacy Narrative, Draft 1 is due by end of day on Wednesday, February 17.

As noted on the last page, a big part of the Writing Groups will be giving feedback to each other on your writing.

My guidelines for effective peer response can be found here (can also be found on Blackboard>Course Documents). Take a moment to review those guidelines.

The reading for this week is also full of great information for peer response, so I want you to review your notes on that reading as you are thinking about ways to respond effectively to other people’s writing.

Task

Review any annotations from the Straub reading, skim back through the reading, and list 3 important things about peer feedback that you got from that reading in a comment below.

After commenting below, click the button to continue:

Logistics

So, as talked about on the first day of class and on the syllabus, we are going to split up the class into writing groups. Your writing groups are going to give you other writers to work with, primarily to get friendly readers of your work, but also to hold you accountable to stay on task for your writing goals.

Here are the four roles (adapted from Chris Campbell’s course):

a. Activity Accountant: Your Activity Accountant makes sure that the group is clear on any assignments or deadlines approaching in the coming week. Ideally the Activity Accountant will provide an update to their group each Sunday or Monday declaring what needs to be done in the coming days. While I will send reminder emails, too, the Activity Accountant emphasizes these deadlines as a double reminder at times. The Activity Accountant can also serve as a liaison between me and your group, receiving answers to questions that your group might have about group-related functions over the course of the semester.

b. Community Builder: Your Community Builder facilitates group discussions and conversations that need not necessarily have something to do with assignments. What are some funny memes or videos you’ve come across recently? What sorts of chat-window activities could provide some momentary relief from your group’s workload? A game? A chat? The Community Builder will typically provide comic or conversational relief at the end of each week.

c. Group Historian: Your Group Historian keeps track of decisions made by your group. This is best done in a single Google Doc or Microsoft Word document, where you date each entry. Keeping track of the conversations and decisions made within your group will help in future situations when your group needs recourse to that information. For instance: when/if you will have Zoom writing  sessions, deadlines to get feedback to each other, criteria for feedback. Additionally, the Group Historian alerts me of any changes in group roles, subtopic choices, and other group-related decision-making processes.

d. Group DJ: Your Group DJ will provide songs and playlists that they think could be good for reading, writing, revising, and other aspects of work for this class (and for other classes). The Group DJ should first ask both the kinds of music other group members like and also get a feel for what types of songs they all think might be good for different kinds of work (reading vs. writing vs. brainstorming vs. revising). You might also do “sounds” rather than music (e.g., sounds of a coffee shop, outdoors sounds). The Group DJ should have a selection of songs or playlists roughly each week. Experiment! Don’t just stick to what you all know and like–see if other genres of music, types of songs, collections of sounds, etc. might provide a boost.

Other requirements/tips

You MUST have both the Activity Accountant and the Group Historian.

**If people are unhappy with roles at start, you should decide on points in which you will shift roles

Finally, all of you will play the role of Peer Responder. That means, you will all be reading drafts of each other’s writing and providing feedback for other members of your group.

Task

Below, comment on your preferred role and your second preference of the above 4 roles in the groups.

I will try to take this into account when assigning you to a Writing Group. I will look over the below comments and try to set you up in groups based on these preferences.

After commenting below, click the button to continue:

Reading and Writing Practice

A writing practice is carefully considering what environmental conditions help you read and write best and to try to set those conditions as much as possible when reading and writing.

Some examples are:

• What time of day do you write best?
• Do you like noise or silence?
• Do you prefer a desk or somewhere more informal?
• How do you manage distractions?
• If you like music to help, what kind of music works best for you?

For now, I just want you to think about how/when/where you do your best writing. We are going to do more on this in the next couple of classes, but I wanted you to think about this now because it is important. Writing is a fully embodied experience; it is not just your words on a page.

In future lessons and modules, we will talk more about ways to set up the best conditions possible for a good writing practice that works for you.

Task

For now, in the comments below, tell me about the last time you had what you would call a “successful” writing experience. Take that to mean what you want it to. For example: you were proud of your writing, you felt like you were in a “flow” and got a lot done, you enjoyed yourself (as much as you can if you don’t like writing that much!), etc.

Respond to these questions in your comment as well as providing a brief reflection on why your writing practice that day helped you have a successful writing session. Comment on this page before moving on:

Once you have commented below answering these questions and reflecting on how they contributed to a successful writing session, click the button below to continue.

Writing Process and Reading

All models are wrong, some are useful.

This quote is attributed to statistician George Box. The idea is that all models can only be simplistic versions of complex processes…something will always be missing. However, this imperfection does not render any model useless. Having some window into how things work gets us that much closer to figuring out how some specific thing might work. If there was a perfect model it would not be a model–it would be a full picture into reality, which is unobtainable to any organism.

Here is a model for writing. We start with reading and end with revising (which is also reading). But, revising is also writing…and to make any sense of the reading we are doing, we have to be writing! The snake eat its tail and so on.

So, as a writer, we should always be reading. But as a writer we should always be writing. And as a writer we should always be reading.

A picture of this model would just be a circle, going round and round.

Let me go through some examples:

• Making a reading annotation like “Repeats the idea that with a language they become more than a group of people, they become a culture” when highlighting something from “How to Tame A Wild Tongue.” This reader uses writing to further their understanding of the text and notices a pattern, calls out the “repetition.” The reader sees connections across the text, and writing it out helps solidify it.
• Writing in great depth beyond annotations can help us learn something further. For instance, when a student writes: “Donald Murray describes his own writing process and brings insight into the general writer’s process with examples.  His emphasis is on revision and gauging when to look for completeness in your work.  … I will be choosing ‘moves/movement’ as my specific verb because it is referential to the eye but also to the overall process of writing and revision.  ‘Move’ has a few different definitions, whether it’s a physical action (eyes), a metaphorical action (progression in writing), or a philosophical action (time).” This exploration helps the writer think more and differently about revision by first encountering it in a reading but then writing about it further.
• While we write, we constantly read and re-read our writing to see if it says what we want it, too. This is revision in the short term. In the long term, we re-read full drafts.
• We also give our writing to readers. We do this when we want feedback to then again return to our writing with the aid of the reading of others.
• We put our writing out into the world and people read it. It could lead to further writing on their part and then further reading.

The full writing process is inundated with BOTH writing and reading. We read to gather knowledge, we write to make sense of it, we read our writing to write again, we have others read our writing to write some more, and so on.

Task

Take about 10 minutes and read through a few of your classmates’ blog posts on “How To Tame a Wild Tongue.” Practice your reading/writing integration to learn more about your writing. Following our commenting guidelines, comment on at least 1 of your classmates’ posts.

If you notice any posts without comments, try to go there instead of one with many comments!

Once you have commented, click the below button to continue:

Here’s my non-official list of possible writing process stages writers tend to use:

• exploring – just getting stuff down. No plans necessarily, just start scribbling in different places. Perhaps this also extends from notes you took on reading you have done. No pressure, just see where your mind takes you (e.g., you could try “freewriting” where you don’t stop typing even when you have nothing meaningful to write).
• planning – getting organized. It seems some writers swear by outlines, flow charts, concept maps, lists.
• drafting – Putting stuff down. That first draft is always kinda “meh”–that’s okay! You need to start somewhere. In the act of writing you get further than where you were–like good science, you really don’t know what is going to happen until you run the experiment. So, run the experiment! And do it early if possible…that waiting until the last minute thing can only get you so far.
• revising – This is what Murray was talking about. Revising is looking over a draft to cut stuff out, rewrite stuff, move stuff around. You ran your experiment and the results leave more questions than answers. Time to tweak things and run it again. It is the big picture stuff.
• editing – Not everyone makes a clean distinction between revising and editing, but I think it can be useful. Editing is often (not always) easier than revising. It is often what I do when I should be revising. It is cleaning up a sentence to be more readable, it is fixing typos, it is changing a word that you think works better, etc. It is the small stuff.
• feedback – learning how to interpret feedback (in both emotional terms–who likes to be criticized!–and in terms of what it means) and how to integrate it into your writing is a real skill and something valuable for revising and editing our writing.
• reflection – to reflect is to sort of plan after you re-read or think again about how your writing went. It is to ask questions of how you think you did, where you want to go next, and how to get there. This might be in relation to goals you have in your writing in general or specific to the piece you wrote. It is helpful to make time for reflection so you can name what you specifically want to do in next steps.

Writing Process-es

None of these steps have clear boundaries–you might be exploring while revising or planning while drafting, and so on. And there is no one right way to do any of them (e.g., outlines to plan work for some people and not for others, some people rather explore through generative writing before planning, some might include other steps like reading/annotating).

Most writers also do these steps in different orders and–most important–in a recursive way. That is, you might: explore, plan, draft, revise, reflect, draft again, revise again, get feedback, reflect, revise again, edit, reflect, draft again, revise again, edit…and then publish.

All this to say: there are not hard and solid rules here!! Only that you should think carefully about what your process is and works best for you to feel best about your writing.

Take this term to experiment with different ways to have a writing process! Change and adapt when things aren’t working.

Task

Before moving on to the next page in the module, post about which stage of the writing process you do best or which stage of the writing process you struggle most with and why to our Discord server in the text channel:

“best-stage-process-feb-10” in the “Reading/Writing Discussion” category.

• Instead of creating your own post, you can instead reply to someone else in the text channel who wrote about something similar. (try to do this! We want to get some cross-talk going)

Once done, click the button below to continue.

If there is one thing we know pretty confidently in my field of rhetoric and composition, it is that to improve your writing you have to consider all aspects of the writing process and not just when the final words hit the page.

There’s no one way to do it, but here are some general stages that typically are useful to think through that I want to share. But before I do, what stages of writing would you name and how would you define them?

On a separate piece of paper or on an application on your device, take 1-2 minutes to map out the full process of how you write from the moment you are thinking through ideas all the way to the point of sharing a final version with some readers.

Task

Once finished, post on our Discord server in the text channel “you-writing-process-feb-10” under “Reading/Writing Discussion” and post the typical stages of your writing process.

Feel free to respond to others with similarities or differences, if you want.

After posting on Discord, click the button below to continue:

I want you to think about considering the full rhetorical situation. That is: what is your purpose? Who is your audience? What constraints do you face to do this writing? (e.g., deadline, the genre of writing that is expected, amount of space you have to write, logistics for circulation).

For your first draft of your Literacy Narrative, the rhetorical situation would include information like the following:

• purpose is to explore your history as a language user, reader, and writer in ways how it shaped your identity and your feelings about language and literacy
• audience is me and your classmates; possibly others if you imagine writing this for other readers, too.
• Constraints include following our rubric for what I expect to see (e.g., word count, making sure you write about literacy as well as speaking, using examples), deadline of 2/17, working in Microsoft Word and what you can and can’t do there, and other circumstances in your life.

Once you have a sense of the rhetorical situation, it is time to figure out the full context of how you’ll do your writing:

1. the process we use for going from ideas to words on page (and back again to ideas and back to words and so on).
2. the practice you will develop to get you into a space to do some writing, reading, revising, etc. (e.g., the time you will write, the place you will write, the sounds you want to hear, the ways you’ll nourish your body)

On the next page of this module, we will explore the writing process in more detail.

Task

However, before we do, comment below on a previous rhetorical situation you might have been in or are in now. Be sure to list your purpose, the audience, and any constraints you were under when you wrote or spoke in this rhetorical situation as well as a brief reflection on how your speech or writing went once you did it.

You can do:

• a time where you had to write a text/message or prepare to speak to a boyfriend/girlfriend/significant other, a family member, a friend about something important.
• a time where you had to navigate a difficult situation at your job or a place you volunteer at.
• a memorable school assignment
• an essay/article/post you wrote online somewhere (e.g., a newsletter article, a school newspaper, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok)

Once you have commented below on your rhetorical situation, click the button below to continue.