By Rachel Kravetz
I decided to write a blog post about using model texts after several unsuccessful encounters with them—as a writer, not as a teacher. When required to write a new sort of document, such as a teaching statement, I found that reading model texts left me feeling less capable than before. I couldn’t lift their ideas or borrow from them tonally, and didn’t know what else to do. I found that, to begin, I had to generate ideas out of my own teaching experience, and talk them over with knowledgeable teachers.
In this case, I didn’t end up returning to my models, but later, I noticed that model texts seemed more useful after writing my own. After I wrote a new description for a course on Victorian Degeneration, intelligent models reminded me that course descriptions can include questions as a simple way to gesture to the classroom. Now I can see myself going back to sample teaching statements very different from my own with specific objectives: to see how they balance abstract values with more tangible practices, for example.
Out of curiosity about the oft-recommended practice of using model texts, I interviewed other writers, creative and academic. Following are the accounts they gave, most of which were delivered orally and informally:
- In my PhD program, the first major original writing project is the QP1, or first-year qualifying paper. There was a workshop and everyone had to bring a model text. I didn’t know how to write a long paper of 40-45 pages and was scared about filling so many pages. I made a reverse outline (though I didn’t know the term then) using the model paper in order to develop an outline for my own paper. This showed me that I had enough to say.
- I use models for structuring screenplays and fiction. Screenplays are very technical—you have to know how to indicate background noise, for example. A model allows for cheating. With both screenplays and novels, models help to structure the plot. I have to know what I’m looking for—this or that kind of story—then I find someone who’s done it. For example, there is a group of people looking for someone: the characters in Kids spend the whole time looking for someone. If we need a campfire scene, we look at Stand by Me and see what everyone is doing in that scene, and then just change the words to fit the characters.
- I was in a dissertation writing group my last year of graduate school, and for years, I had been given the feedback that my writing needed to be clearer, that I needed to foreground the argument, but I was having a hard time executing this. One of the other writers in my group was a master at this kind of clarity; she wasn’t afraid to start paragraphs with short summaries of the argument to come, or to repeat her main claim to help the reader along. I wound up consulting her dissertation whenever I needed to add transitions/signposts into mine. In my own writing, I had always seen direct short statements as over-simplified and style-less, but in her writing, I was able to see how helpful it was to a reader unlikely to read slowly the first time through. I think the call for “clarity” in academic writing is difficult precisely because so little of peer-reviewed scholarship actually models that value.
- In “creative” writing, I like to use models that are from the totally wrong genre/period to get me out of ruts. For example, I was reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling in a moment of particularly bad writer’s block, and decided to write a short story that used the structure of his argument as a model (his complaint that today’s philosopher “is not content in doubting everything but goes further”). Using a model that seems somehow ridiculous calms me down a bit.
- I learned to write citations by looking at models. The template for an MLA citation was never as helpful as looking at a model, because the language was abstract. No matter how precise abstract language is, you need to know a specialized vocabulary. The model allowed me to bypass the abstractions.
After assembling these accounts, I considered how to bring models texts into the classroom. I’ve provided full student papers as models in the past, but with ambivalence. I appreciate the need to make writing concepts—which can appear so abstract—accessible. But how are students to know which features in a model texts are “exemplary”?
This semester, I’m assigning a research paper that performs close visual analysis of a film (from a particular list) and to begin, I asked students to write a paragraph in response to this prompt: “What was the most visually compelling scene in your film? Describe it briefly and explain why you found the visuals crucial.” A number of students didn’t discuss the visuals at all, but only the plot. In the next class, I had a visual analysis workshop in which students volunteered to attend to a specific visual aspect of the film Big Eyes: lighting; cinematography/framing; scenery/sets/props; costumes/makeup/styling; facial expressions/body language; or color/contrast. They wrote paragraphs connecting the visuals to a theme, discussed them in their groups, and presented ideas to the class. Then we went over four model paragraphs from their less-successful homework assignment, with both visual description and thematic analysis highlighted. They seemed to see what distinguished these paragraphs, so I’ve come to think that it’s at times useful to share models that are not fully realized.
At the end of class, we read a model paragraph with excellent visual analysis from a complete essay to show where I would like them to go next. Though their initial models weren’t developed enough to be strong paragraphs in an essay, they demonstrated the first step that I wanted students to take.
Published December 1, 2016
