Another big element of the semester was writing with other people and things as well as considering our entire process of writing. We neither:

• write by ourselves (Writing Groups! Our whole history with people who have influenced how we think about a subject! The environment we write in! What is a “self” anyway!?)
• write all at once, just sort of sitting down and writing coherent sentence after coherent sentence until we are all finished.

A lot of the recommendations about working with others and thinking more about your process as a writer may not ultimately work for you. However, I hope, you have started to seriously consider what does work best for you and tailor your writing practices accordingly. (and, as you write in the years ahead, you revise your writing processes and practices as needed).

Here are some of the relevant course and unit goals:

• Compose as a process: Experience writing as a creative way of thinking and generating knowledge and as a process involving multiple drafts, review of your work by members of your discourse community (e.g., instructor and peers), revision and editing, reinforced by reflecting on your writing process in metacognitive ways.
• Understand language as social and as part of who you are
• Understand the role of reading in writing (e.g., procedures of annotating, reading to revise)
• Set goals and a process for checking in on your progress on an ongoing basis. Re-evaluate goals, periodically.
• Develop a writing practice (e.g., creating the best environment for productive writing sessions as possible, managing distractions, time management)
• Develop your writing process (e.g., planning, outlining, drafting, reflecting, revising, editing)
• Receive feedback, apply it, and give constructive feedback (e.g., in peer response, workshopping writing, interpreting comments, integrating feedback in a global sense rather than only locally, managing the embodied nature of having an audience for your writing)
• Closely read your writing to learn about it (e.g., annotate your own writing, connect annotations to previous learning goals)
• Use quantification to learn about your writing at a distance (e.g., complete a quantitative of analysis of certain aspects of your three major writing projects to detect things a close reading might not)
• Write about your writing to learn about it—use what you learned in past units (about identity, process, analysis, rhetoric, and research) on your own writing to consider progress toward your own goals and course goals, as well as to develop new goals.

Unit 1 set the stage for thinking about these sorts of things, but we have thought about process writing through various repeating elements throughout the term (e.g., revision plans, reflective activities, writing groups).

Beyond seeing writing as social and as full processes/practices, I really (really!) hope you started to think about writing in surprising ways that might be not so neatly captured in the course and unit goals. Writing is a really complicated phenomenon, one that you absolutely won’t (and cannot expect to) master in one semester at the beginning of college. You will keep working on it, you will learn about it in other classes, and so on.

However, you cannot rely on teachers to always explicitly teach you about writing. So, in that spirit to start getting into the habit of being a learner who can learn without explicit direction, what have you noticed about your writing since you started writing early in the semester (for this class and for other classes?

In a comment below, spend about 100-300 words writing about what you have learned in regard to the following:

• social aspects of writing (e.g., working with a writing group, getting feedback, etc.). See course and unit goals above for more.
• writing as a process and practice (e.g., setting a schedule, managing an environment to write in, coming up with a revision plan, etc.). See course and unit goals above for more.
• something surprising or not explicitly outlined in the course and unit goals.

Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:

You did it! You are all done Learning Modules for this semester. You also spent some time reviewing an important aspect of your Research-Driven Writing Project–writing with other voices/sources–and you spent time developing some material to reflect on in your ELD.

Please, as much as you can, always make time to stop and think and READ what you have written so you can think about how to improve any draft as well as your habits and skills as a writer in general. This is a good habit to keep up, especially because writing is so helpful to learn about what we are writing about and ourselves.

I’m looking forward to reading the ELDs to see where you see you are learning! More than anything, focus on the how you are connecting evidence to claims about your learning rather than only what you claim you are learning or have learned.

Next Time

• On Thursday (12/3) by 11:59pm, you will submit your second draft of your Research-Driven Writing Project. If you need more time, let me know!
• Keep working on the ELD
• Start thinking about revising any other writing if you want to do that.
• Start planning for getting this work done by 12/15.

Okay, so you have done a lot of the initial work for getting started on your ELD in Learning Module 9 and Learning Module 10! So, let’s come up with a rough outline that gets you started on reflecting about your learning throughout the semester.

Go back to what you have written in LM9 and LM10 and comment below with a possible outline for how your ELD might be organized. Review the prompt, especially this part:

1. What I hoped to learn/do (What were my expectations, what were my original plans, what skills did I hope to develop?)
2. What I did (What I wrote/made, what steps I took to complete the tasks, what went very right, what went very wrong?)
3. What I learned (What I’d do differently next time, what I can’t wait to do again, what I’ll never do again, what feedback was particularly useful?)
4. Goals for my writing (What skills I want to develop; what habits I want to keep, change, or adopt; what information I need to learn; what types of writing I want to try; AND THE MEANS by which I will attempt to realize these goals. In other words what is my plan—i.e., goals + means to realize those goals—for my continuing writing? You can think here about goals in terms of next semester, writing in your major, writing in your personal life that you want to do, and writing in your potential career path)

Also consider other requirements, like having at least 3 direct quotes from your writing and spending at least 1 paragraph on writing from another classmate.

No obligation to use all or even any of what you have written so far in LM9 and 10! But, I hope there was something gained there to help get you started on writing a great ELD.

In a comment below, give me a rough outline of what you think you might talk about in each of the four main sections of the ELD as shown above.

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:

Look over the below Course Goals and Unit Subgoals to think through more “small picture” aspects of writing at the level of the word and sentence:

• Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g., essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
• Use conventions appropriate to audience, genre, and purpose: Adapt writing and composing conventions (including your style, content, organization, document design, word choice, syntax, citation style, sentence structure, and grammar) to your rhetorical context.
• Experiment with the rhetorical power of tapping into the full range of your rhetorical expertise (i.e., your rhetorical practices in all of the contexts in which you use rhetoric)
• Learn the differences between genres at the level of words, sentences, paragraphing, document design, mode, etc.
• Change stylistic features of your writing to accommodate your audience
• Write with other voices (e.g., paraphrasing, direct quotes, summary, footnotes, endnotes, managing claims and evidence with other voices, qualifying claims, counterarguments)

Thinking back to many of the style exercises we did in the first few Learning Modules can especially be valuable to do, in addition to thinking through these goals.

Speaking of, in one of the Learning Modules, you were asked to calculate sentence average and variation of sentence length as well as classify and count sentence types for two paragraphs in your writing.

I want you to skim through all of your writing with the course and unit goals in mind, Learning Module activities on style (especially Learning Module 2, Learning Module 3, Learning Module 4, Learning Module 5–these modules considered things like punctuation, word choice, coherence, translingualism, and register), and various lesson plans in the first half of the semester that focused on style in order to begin to notice things you notice that you got better at as the semester went on at the word and sentence level.

After doing this skimming and note-taking, focus especially on at least 2 paragraphs. One from an early part of the semester and one from a latter part of the semester or one paragraph from a first draft and one paragraph from a second draft.

You have three tasks:

• Using the instructions from this Learning Module page, calculate sentence average and variation of sentence length of both paragraphs.
• Using the instructions from this Learning Module page, classify and count sentence types for two paragraphs in your writing of both paragraphs.
• Write about any growth you notice in terms of rhetorical effects of sentence variety AND one other element of style we talked about (e.g., punctuation, word choice, register, coherence) in about 100-200 words. Also include information about differences in sentence length and type that you found doing your calculations. Think about what you are working on and want to continue to work on at the word and sentence level.

Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:

Look over these Course Goals and Unit Subgoals that relate to “intermediate” considerations at the level of paragraphing, analysis, etc.

• Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.
• Using examples effectively in your writing to help illustrate things you are trying to explain or argue
• Learn the differences between genres at the level of words, sentences, paragraphing, document design, mode, etc.
• Learn how to analyze vs. summarize
• Find, evaluate, and synthesize evidence in texts we analyze
• Establish links between claims and evidence
• Develop information literacy (e.g., finding information via search engines/library databases/stacks, evaluating source credibility and relevance, analyzing primary vs. secondary sources, using citation tools)
• Write with other voices (e.g., paraphrasing, direct quotes, summary, footnotes, endnotes, managing claims and evidence with other voices, qualifying claims, counterarguments)

The sort of things you can think about here: What have you noticed in earlier introductions, conclusions, or body paragraphs in terms of using examples, writing with sources, establishing links between claims and evidence, establishing the exigence or reason for writing, etc. that has changed from earlier drafts to newer drafts?

The above is just an example to think through, but utilize the full list of course and unit goals above to think through possible questions and things you can notice in how your writing grew from early on to where it is now (and feel free to use writing from other classes to help you think about this if you want!

In a comment below, using notes from last week when you close read your own writing as well as through returning to skimming through your writing again, talk through specific evidence from your writing that you might use to write about your writing in terms of “intermediate” aspects of writing. Use about 100-200 words to do this.

Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:

One of the reasons I like to have only a piece of reflective writing due at the end of the semester (rather than One Big Paper) is that I want you to take time to re-read and think deeply about what you have written this term.

To write about that process, essentially, is the write a Rhetorical Analysis, something that you have already done. The only difference in the Experiential-Learning Document (ELD) vs. the Rhetorical Analysis assignment is that you are writing about multiple texts in order to say something about your growth and interests as a writer rather than being motivated by a theoretical lens to analyze a single text.

In Learning Module 9, you reflected about the sorts of goals you have had during the term and taking the time to closely read your writing and the writing of your peers as a way to gather evidence for goals and learning.

For the rest of Learning Module 10 (our last module!), you’ll be spending more time trying to think about how you might fit the pieces together to start writing your ELD.

Small Picture, Intermediate, Big Picture

It might be helpful to think about different “levels” of writing to think about how you’ve grown are how you want to keep growing as a writer:

• Small Picture: This is the kind of stuff that happens at the level of word choice and sentence structure. Think sentence-level style concerns, word choice and tone, rhetorical choices involving punctuation, sentence variation and patterns, etc.
• Intermediate: This is the kind of stuff that happens at a larger scale, but not in a totalizing way of looking at an entire draft. Think paragraphing, integrating sources into paragraphs, transitioning between ideas.
• Big Picture: This is the kind of stuff that you can only think about across the entire piece of writing. Think organization, the progression of an argument or narrative, genre conventions.

This is just a model to think with, and not something that is “true.” If this model for thinking about writing were “true,” then it would be “false” to suggest that decisions at the “small picture” level do not affect “big picture” aspects of writing. But, these things bleed into one another all the time! Patterns in style impact an argument, how you integrate sources into paragraphs rely on stylistic decisions, organization impacts how you transition into new ideas, and so on.

Still, breaking things down makes thinking about the different kinds of writerly moves you make in a less overwhelming fashion.

On this page, and on the two pages after this one, you will be asked to look at your own writing from these perspectives.

Let’s move from the big picture to intermediate and then finally to small picture.

Big Picture

In terms of Course Goals and Unit Subgoals, these are the sorts of things that involve Big Picture writing concerns:

• Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.
• Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g., essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.
• Understand language as social and as part of who you are
• Experiment with the rhetorical power of tapping into the full range of your rhetorical expertise (i.e., your rhetorical practices in all of the contexts in which you use rhetoric)
• Learn the functions of rhetoric: make knowledge, coordinate human and nonhuman activity, and impact others.
• Learn the differences between genres at the level of words, sentences, paragraphing, document design, mode, etc.
• Recognize the full rhetorical situation to understand the context for writing
• Consider the important material concerns for writing, to include different modes, circulation, and other infrastructural concerns for writing
• Establish links between claims and evidence
• Apply theoretical lenses to what we analyze in ways that both expand and limit what we can know
• Integrate textual analysis into a larger argument or narrative
• Write to learn (e.g., writing out processes and aspects of a topic to see what you know, moving from analysis to synthesis, moving from summary to analysis, coordinating multiple voices to reveal something new)
• Learn differences in research genres and disciplinary knowledge (e.g., using documentation style, IMRaD vs. thesis-driven paper)
• Organize and making an argument (e.g., stasis theory, Toulmin’s model, organizing sources and mapping their use, making an annotated bibliography, supplementing research process onto writing process)

Looking over your writing again, what do you notice as areas of growth from early writing to later writing that attends to bigger picture writing items like the above? How might you describe this progress in the ELD do you think?

Think about an entire paper. How is the Rhetorical Analysis organized from draft to draft? How did the thesis change? How did your writing consider your audience from the early draft of your Literacy Narrative to the first draft of your Research-Driven Writing Project?

These are example questions to think through, but utilize the full list of course and unit goals above to think through possible questions and things you can notice in how your writing grew from early on to where it is now (and feel free to use writing from other classes to help you think about this if you want!

In a comment below, using notes from last week when you close read your own writing as well as through returning to skimming through your writing again, talk through specific evidence from your writing that you might use to write about your writing in terms of “big picture” aspects of writing. Use about 100-200 words to do this.

Remember: nothing has to be “perfect” here…you can write about things that improved but you still would like to keep improving! That is honestly how most of this stuff is: frustratingly always-in-progress. But, life is kind of always in process and sort of never finished, so, yeah.

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module:

One thing that can be difficult with writing with other sources (and, thus, voices), is it feels a little unnatural. That’s probably because we never really wrote with sources while we learned how to write. Maybe one or two other voices might make it into our writing. Think of the book report, for instance, where you might write something like:

In the book, the main character grows up in a town…

The book report is a genre of writing that asks you to show how you are an expert on what happened in a book, and, maybe, why the book is important or why you liked it or didn’t like it. But it is just one book, and the genre already implies that you are always writing with the other voice of the author of the book, so you never really have to go out of your way to distinguish among other voices.

In research-driven writing, you often have to manage a lot of different voices. So, it becomes necessary to identify when you are doing that in ways that become readable in your writing.

Signal phrases are really helpful here to do that.

Signal Phrases

Read over this resource from The George Mason University Writing Center on signal phrases. This resource will give you some background on a variety of signal phrases and why we use them.

Here are some examples:

According to Maxwell and Hanson,…

As the 2017 IRS report indicates, …

Smith and Johnson state that …

Legal scholar Terrence Roberts offered a persuasive argument: “….”

Synthesis

Using signal phrases can help make your reading easier to follow when you work with a lot of sources.

Doing some responsible and sophisticated analysis is also another thing to get used to when you are managing several sources.

This resource from the Purdue Online Writing Lab on synthesis shows two really good examples of paragraphs that both use multiple sources but only one puts them in conversation with each other.

Your Tasks

There are two tasks for this review page.

1. Go back to your Research-Driven Writing Project draft and select a sentence (or excerpt of multiple sentences if easier) that does not do a great job of using signal phrases (or does not have a signal phrase at all). In a comment below, paste the original and then paste a revision that includes a signal phrase if there is none or a new signal phrase. Keep in mind your documentation style and whether you should be using present or past tense. The George Mason page has a word bank of signal phrase words toward the bottom that can be helpful.
2. Also in your comment below, besides than the use of “similarly,” what other things do your notice in the second paragraph example in the Purdue OWL page that helps put different sources in conversation with one another? How does it do that?

After commenting below with these two tasks (the revision and the answer about comparing the paragraphs), click on the button below to continue the module:

You did it! You submitted the first draft of your Research-Driven Writing Project. You got some feedback from peers, you got some feedback from me (hopefully!). You have, no doubt, thought more about it (even a little bit!) since you turned it in.

Now it is time to start planning (and start doing) revision.

As with the Literacy Narrative and Rhetorical Analysis assignments, I’m going to ask you to consider (but not require you to submit) a Revision Plan.

Here are those guidelines for formulating this plan:

1. It’s about love!!!! Ask yourself: What do you love about this piece? What do you want to return to and work on more? Why? Choose “love” and not “well, this was bad” or “well, this was pretty good.” Instead, what did you enjoy working on most? What is the most exciting part of this text? Why? How do you build off of that? Or, what about this text, generally, interests you the most? There will always be moments where you’ll have to revise something you don’t want to ever look at again. Still, even for something you rather not look at again (which will happen to you), finding something that attracts you to it, something that can make it a positive experience, will both motivate you and also help you to identify its strength.
2. Let yourself be guided. How can you let that excitement and energy guide you? What enhances that energy? What takes away from that energy?
3. Hear out others (including yourself). Part of (but not ONLY) what should inform you is the feedback you have received previously: my comments on your draft, peer response feedback, your old notes as you were working on the draft, etc.
4. Task list. Begin to develop some tasks that can assist you in addressing the above. (e.g., revise this paragraph, move this section up earlier and adjust it so it fits, add this supporting argument, do this analysis and see where it takes me, do more research for secondary sources). Consider what YOU want to do with the piece and the comments you received from others.
5. Be specific. As you write out your tasks, you MUST be specific. Why are you doing this task? As in, what about your writing has led you to think you should do x to enhance the essay overall? How will you do this task? As in, what specifically do you have in mind as some potential changes that would work to address the “why” of the task you chose. For example: I will add more secondary sources to support the claim I make in paragraph 4, I need to show a more cohesive transition between section 3 and 4, my argument is too broad so I need to be more specific about the limits of my argument when I make the main argument early on, I want to incorporate my lessons on style to many of sentences that are a little harder to read.
6. Be a planner. Finally, if helpful, begin to develop a schedule of when and how you will work on your revision. Revision (or any aspect of writing!) benefits from work that is spread out rather than work that happens all at once. A fresh mind is an asset. Backwards plan. “This is due 12/3, what do I need done by 11/25? By 11/29? By 12/1? Etc.”.
7. Are there new constraints or affordances to consider? Are there new things you have to consider now? For instance, do you need to more closely consider the documentation style, macro-structure, genre, integration of sources, etc.?

Eventually, I encourage you to address all 8 of the below questions, but, for now, just comment below with responses to 3 of the below questions or instructions.

1. What do you love about this piece? What do you want to return to and work on more? Why? Choose “love” and not “well, this was bad” or “well, this was pretty good.” Instead, what did you enjoy working on most? What is the most exciting part of this text? Why? How do you build off of that? Or, what about this text, generally, interests you the most?
2. What feedback will you incorporate do you think? Why?
3. How will you enhance or add analysis to your draft?
4. What might be a change to your thesis?
5. What are some changes that you’ll make to make it fit the genre of the blog post through the medium of online writing?
6. What about your word choice and sentence structure? How will you revise your style in a way that best fits what you want to do in your piece and in ways your audience would appreciate?
7. Write out ALL of the specific tasks you will take based on: what you love, the feedback you got, and other considerations. Be SPECIFIC.
8. What is your schedule for getting this done? Consult your writing schedule that you hopefully kept up with (even if in spirit if not quite by pen/paper/computer)

After commenting below, click the button to continue the module.

In this Learning Module, we:

• Started to piece together a revision plan for your Research-Driven Writing Project.
• Started to think about the value of and how to reflect on the writing we have done this term.
• Started to think about goals we had and goals we are continuing to try to reach going forward.
• Thought more about closely reading our own writing and the writing of others to consider.

Here is what is coming up for the next time we meet:

• No class Thursday (11/26), get some rest!
• Start work on revising your Research-Driven Writing Project. Revision is due 12/3.
• Continue working on your Experiential-Learning Document assignment. During the next Learning Module on 12/1, there will be some more attention to that assignment, but get started sooner rather than later. This assignment is due at the end of the semester.

You have spent a lot of time with your Writing Group this semester. I hope it has been helpful both to receive comments from your group members, but also to have been able to read their writing and learn something you might not have learned otherwise.

In terms of writing, I want you to think about what you learned about writing from your Writing Group members.

By this point, you would have read:

• multiple versions of their Literacy Narrative
• multiple versions of their Rhetorical Analysis
• a draft of their Research-Driven Writing Project

In the ELD you are asked to spend at least 1 paragraph on someone else’s writing from your Writing Group to talk about how it has influenced your own reading and writing.

Take some time now to start to think about this writing you have read and what might be a valuable lesson that you took away from it.

Without naming anyone, in a comment below, write about one aspect of someone’s writing (if you can quote it, even better!) that you thought was really great and explain how it demonstrates something about writing that you think is important and that you could learn from.

After commenting below, click the button to continue the module.