Writing Across the Curriculum
By: Caitlin Dungan
Caitlin Dungan is a PhD student in Mason’s Writing and Rhetoric PhD Program. Caitlin is a Graduate Research Assistant for Mason’s Writing Across the Curriculum Program, and her current research interests include fanfiction, digital media and rhetoric, online feedback practices, and participatory culture.
When scholars talk about the intersections between writing and technology, as well as how technology forms, limits, complicates or expands writing practice, we tend to overlook the fact that writing itself is a form of technology. While writing changed the world as profoundly as the wheel did, somehow the act of writing always seems to undergo cyclical scrutiny as being attacked by some new, seemingly insidious form of technology (as handwriting was by the typewriter), being changed by that technology into something worthy of being preserved, and then attacked again by whatever technological innovation comes next.
The Writing Campus will be on a two-week hiatus for Spring Break and participation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication. New content will resume on Thursday, March 26th. However, reblogs will continue starting March 16th on both our Facebook page and Twitter feed.
In the meantime, please feel free to continue sending blog submissions!
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Though writing is certainly one of the most complex acts humans engage in, sometimes it helps to boil the crafting of writing down to its most basic elements. When it comes to good writing, the essentials go beyond process and repetition and into the realm of psychology. Time’s Eric Barker interviewed Steven Pinker, of Harvard’s Department of Psychology, on what he considers to be the best tips for better writing. These helpful strategies are deceptively simple: things like “Don’t assume your reader knows what you already know.”
“…another bit of cognitive science that is highly relevant is a phenomenon called ‘the curse of knowledge.’ Namely, the inability that we all have in imagining what it’s like not to know something that we do know. And that has been studied in various guises in the psychological literature. People assume that the words that they know are common knowledge. That the facts that they know are universally known… the writer doesn’t stop to think what the reader doesn’t know.”
How to Be a Better Writer: 6 Tips from Harvard’s Steven Pinker
Today we are highlighting a helpful module from Eli Review on how to understand, use, and teach informative feedback strategies and in-depth revision. Timely and explicit feedback from both teachers and peers leads not only to improved drafts, but to improved writing skills overall. Giving students the instruction they need to learn reflective skills for analyzing both their own writing and their peers’ is critical to fostering the confidence of emerging writers.
“Teaching and learning don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen within specific schools, classrooms, and cultural contexts. This is true for feedback as well.
Effective feedback requires a context in which learners have both the ability and opportunity to hear, understand, and act on that feedback. We might think about feedback rich classrooms as “safe and smart” learning contexts, or classroom communities in which students feel comfortable enough to risk engaging and learning with each other.”
Feedback and Revision: The Key Components of Powerful Writing Pedagogy