60 papers later...

Here's what kind of hilarious good times writing instructors have when class is canceled:

Wednesday I joined about fifteen other 101 instructors, and faculty and grad students associated with the National Writing Project to read all the student essays submitted in response to the mid-semester writing prompt completed last week. We spent from 8:30 a.m. to about 1 p.m. reading every essay and assigning a number to each according to the NWP holistic scoring rubric. Each essay had at least two readers and some had three. The goal was to come to agreement on the score assigned to each paper. The papers, with their scores, will be returned some time next week. We'll go over them and the rubric in class, and I think it will be helpful to you to see how writers look at other writers' work.

Do we know how to party, or what?

You might be surprised to learn that the roomful of writers and writing instructors often can't agree on how to score a paper. Every reader sees something a little bit different. Every writing instructor has a little different focus than her fellow instructors. We began by reading the same six papers and trying to rank them 1-6 according to the rubric. While we didn't have trouble separating out good writing from not-so-good, we spent at least an hour discussing the merits of three papers that we all thought were good but had trouble ranking.

Some readers liked the creativity of one paper although its organization was a little confusing. Others liked how the organization of another paper allowed it to flow. A third group noticed the sophistication of a writer's use of parallelism and series.

My point in sharing this insight is that, although I am your writing instructor this semester (and hopefully in the spring if you sign up for 102 04), my reading of your work is just one reading. That's why I ask your classmates to read too. They may see some things that I don't. They may not like an idea that I do. Just because I'm the instructor doesn't mean I know what's best for your work. It means that I have lots of experience as a writer, and have been studying how to work with writers in ways that encourage you to develop your own writing. If we do it well, your writing won't sound like mine. It will be yours.

Please, God, enough five-paragraph essays!

That's what I was looking for on Wednesday: student writers who are developing their own voices by experimenting with sophisticated writing strategies. In those four hours, hunched over a conference table in the third floor board room of the Robert Bell building, I probably read about 60 papers. I read many definitions of "community" and lots of stories about how students were...and were not...fitting into the communities they identified at Ball State. After two hours, many of the papers started to blur together, especially those that are organized in what writing professors call the "five-paragraph essay." It's a framework that students often default to in a timed writing situation: one paragraph introduces three points, each point is explained in one paragraph in the body of the essay, and the conclusion often re-states these points in a little bit different way or provides some sort of "what all this means is..."

The problem with the five-paragraph essay is that it can easily become formulaic, predictable, and deadly dull. Papers like this answer the prompt, but there is little pay-off for the reader. I learned that many 101 students have had a rude awakening in the transition from home and high school to campus and college. Most who chose to write about this transition ended up saying that they need to take responsibility for their own success, and vow to do better. Those who wrote this saga in a five-paragraph essay ended up sounding very much like each other.

The party livened up when there were surprises.

The papers that caught my attention -- the ones I really enjoyed reading, even if they weren't structurally perfect or were underdeveloped in some areas -- were the ones who did more than fill in the framework of a five-paragraph essay. They gave me a well-told story that illustrated one of their points. Or they made a persuasive argument that something was amiss in their community. They surprised me with a interesting twist in their opening sentence. Or they focused entirely on one aspect of community that most writers didn't address. In short, these writers considered that I, as a reader, needed something from them. They knew I wanted something of value in exchange for reading their papers -- a bit of fun, a new insight, a question I hadn't considered before. In short, they made choices that captured my imagination and made me think.

That's the message I've been sharing with many of you this week as we met one-on-one. You have something interesting to share, and we -- the rest of the class and I -- want to help you share it.

I'll be honest, it's easier to write a basic five-paragraph essay and move on. But that's not what I, or your classmates, expect from you. We won't let you get away with it. We don't want dull prose and uninspired ideas. We want your best ones.