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Revision & Reflection

One of the goals of our composition program is to help students think (and write) about their rhetorical choices throughout their process of completing a writing project. However, the standard practice of having students compose a reflective essay at the end of the semester has not demonstrated that students are truly engaging with their writing process. Instead, the majority of the students in ENG 201 draft a reflection that explains their feelings about the assignment along with cursory descriptions of the editorial changes they chose to make before turning it in for a grade.

It’s clear that waiting until the end of the project to ask students to reflect on their work (especially for just one assignment) has little impact on how the student perceives their development as a writer, which means that they may not be able to sustain a meaningful transfer of the skills they’ve started to develop over the course of the semester.

In order to ensure MU students are getting the most out of their composition courses, we need to collectively engage students with the reflection process throughout the semester. The 2020-21 Composition Committee has compiled some resources and strategies to help MU Comp instructors guide students through the reflection process — not just for the ENG 201 culminating assignment, but starting in ENG 101 and beyond.

  • This short Adobe presentation outlines some helpful strategies and prompts that came out of a 2018 “large-scale, qualitative assessment” conducted by Heather Lindenman, Martin Camper, Lindsay Dunne Jacoby, & Jessica Enoch. This study examined students’ approaches to writing to evaluate the the impact reflection has on students’ revisions (and how to better use reflection to improve the ways that students approach revision).
  • This Reflection Activity PPt is a great tool to help guide students through thinking about 201 Outcomes.
  • “Reflective Writing and The Writing Process: What were you thinking?” (Sandra Giles, 2010) is a straightforward and helpful discussion of the the purposes and processes of reflective writing. She includes excellent examples of assignment prompts and student reflective writing.
  • This “Letter to Readers” assignment is a stellar reflective writing exercise that encourages student writers to address their readers as a means of reflecting about a specific writing project, and to invite feedback from others that might help them to continue to revise/polish their work for submission (or presenting/publishing).

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Multiple Approaches & Multiple Media

Promoting writing (and reading) across different media is an essential part of teaching composition at the undergraduate level. As we know, communication across media has drastically changed what it means to write — whether for expression, conveying information, or making persuasive arguments — and creating these texts might include using video, audio, and digital graphics. When students compose in any of these formats, their process requires many of the same steps (and skills) as writing the more traditional  academic essay: they must find a topic, consider its significance, center a message, establish their voice, and organize relevant information to suit a specific rhetorical purpose. By integrating assignments that take up a multimedia approach to “composition” we enable students to develop a variety of communication strategies, while encouraging their appreciation for how different tools and platforms can help them to convey messages in memorable and persuasive ways.

It’s important to emphasize that digital tools can be used to work through all stages of the writing process— from prewriting to researching to revising and this is true even in cases when the primary objective of a writing project might be a written text, alternative approaches to these writing tasks can augment the process in ways that offer a variety of ways for students to engage with content. Offering multiple means for engagement and learning is an essential part of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and at Marshall, we have a growing community of practice that looks to integrate the principals of UDL in course curriculum. Please visit the university’s UDL webpages to learn more, perhaps starting here with some excellent resources for using multiple media for writing.

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CCCC Statement on the role (and significance) of READING in the Composition Classroom.

Rationale and Purpose

This position statement affirms the need to develop accessible and effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms so that students can engage more deeply in all of their courses and develop the reading abilities that will be essential to their success in college, in their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society. This statement assumes that, like instruction in writing, instruction in reading is most ethical and effective when it engages students’ diverse experiences, needs, and capacities and when it works from an asset-based (rather than a deficit-based) theory of learning. The statement outlines principles and best practices for developing reading-centered pedagogies and curricula and identifies resources and sites at postsecondary institutions that can support this work.

Read the full Position Statement here

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12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym: Boxing and Manhood in Appalachia | West Virginia University Press

“Questions of class and gender in Appalachia have, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and the runaway success of Hillbilly Elegy, moved to the forefront of national conversations about politics and culture. From Todd Snyder, a first generation college student turned college professor, comes a passionate commentary on these themes in a family memoir set in West Virginia coal country.

12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym is the story of the author’s father, Mike “Lo” Snyder, a fifth generation West Virginia coal miner who opened a series of makeshift boxing gyms with the goal of providing local at-risk youth with the opportunities that eluded his adolescence. Taking these hardscrabble stories as his starting point, Snyder interweaves a history of the region, offering a smart analysis of the costs—both financial and cultural—of an economy built around extractive industries.

Part love letter to Appalachia, part rigorous social critique, readers may find 12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym—and its narrative of individual and community strength in the face of globalism’s headwinds—a welcome corrective to popular narratives that blame those in the region for their troubles.”

Source: 12 Rounds in Lo’s Gym: Boxing and Manhood in Appalachia | West Virginia University Press

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Kitalong and Miner. Rhetorical Agency through Multimodal Composing. Mar. 2018 C&C. Posted 02/02/2018. | College Composition Weekly: Summaries of research for college writing professionals

Kitalong, Karla Saari, and Rebecca L. Miner. “Multimodal Composition Pedagogy Designed to Enhance Authors’ Personal Agency: Lessons from Non-academic and Academic Composing Environments.” Computers…

Source: Kitalong and Miner. Rhetorical Agency through Multimodal Composing. Mar. 2018 C&C. Posted 02/02/2018. | College Composition Weekly: Summaries of research for college writing professionals