Review – The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing by Michelle Tucker

December 18, 2001 by Leave a Comment

In the children’s story The Wizard of Oz Dorothy, the main character, exclaims as she’s walking through woods that scare her, “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”  When our composition students show up on the first day of classes they often feel like exclaiming a 21st century version of Dorothy’s lament. Looking like deer that have been caught in the headlights of a writing class, they are unsure and overwhelmed by what they consider the sheer terror of having to actually “write”.  It is incumbent upon us as composition teachers to have a “first-day of classes” primary goal of allaying our students’ fears about succeeding in a writing class.  Part of our strategy to achieve this goal is providing our students with a textbook that logically guides them through their thinking and writing processes.  The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing does just that – it offers a logical, comprehensive writing textbook that will remain on our student’s bookshelves rather than in the Aztec Bookshop’s “Book Buy- Back” bins.

In the preface of the sixth edition of The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing Axelrod and Cooper state

…our basic goals remain unchanged.  From the beginning, we have tried to continue the classical tradition of teaching writing not only as a method of composing rhetorically effective prose but also a powerful heuristic for thinking creatively and critically.  To the best insights from that tradition, we have with each edition added what we believed to be some promising developments in composition theory and research. In particular, we have tried to emphasize the idea that writing is both a social act and a way of knowing.  We try to teach students that form emerges from context as well as content, that knowledge of writing comes not from analyzing genres alone but from participating in a community of writers and readers.  Our principal aim is to demystify writing and authorize students as writers.  To this end, we seek to teachstudents how to use the composing process as a means of seeing what they know as well as how they know it.  We want students to learn to use writing to think critically and communicate effectively with others.  Finally, we hope to inspire students with the desire to question their own certainties and provide them with strategies for doing so (vii).

Axelrod and Cooper have been successful with their goal; it is now up to us as instructors to utilize their textbook as a powerful heuristic for our success in teaching our students.

The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is divided into six sections with a total of twenty-eight chapters and a handbook.  Section One is entitled “Writing Activities” and presents nine assignments that our students may experience in our academic community as well as the local and global communities they will encounter when they leave academia. Each of the nine chapters include, in addition to the chapter topic, the following organizational components:

¨      Readings to compliment the topic explored in the chapter;

¨      Summary of the purpose and audience for the topic addressed;

¨      Basic features of the topic discussed;

¨      A Guide to Writing that includes tips for choosing, planning, drafting, critical reading, revising, editing and proofreading any writing assignments about the topic of the chapter;

¨      An example of an actual writer’s writing process as it applies to the chapter topic;

¨      Designing written work;

¨      Critical thinking activities to aid the student in reflecting and reviewing what they learned from the chapter.

Section Two explores heuristics available to the student and this part of the textbook is divided into two chapters.  The first chapter provides strategies that include clustering, listing, outlining, cubing, dialoguing, dramatizing, journalizing, looping, questioning and quick drafting.  The second chapter provides reading strategies that include annotating, outlining, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, contextualizing, exploring the significance of figurative language, patterns of opposition, reflecting on challenges to the writer’s beliefs and values, evaluating the logic of an argument, recognizing emotional manipulation and judging the writer’s credibility.

Section Three of The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing addresses writing strategies. Orienting statements, paragraphing, cohesive devices, connectives, headings and subheadings are explored as well as modes of presenting information. Those modes addressed include narrating, describing, defining, classifying, comparison and contrast, and arguing.

The fourth section of this textbook looks at research strategies ranging from field research to library and Internet research.  Guidelines for using and acknowledging sources are provided and examples of the MLA and APA systems of documentation are covered.  This section concludes with a sample student research paper.

Section Five is entitled “Writing for Assessment” and covers essay exams and writing portfolios.  Tips are given for both topics that range from preparing to writing an essay exam and the purpose for and the assembly of a writing portfolio.

The last section of this textbook assists students with the design of written documents and oral presentations.  It also includes information about working with others on individual and joint writing projects and concludes with remarks about students writing for their individual communities.

The handbook included at the end of the textbook is a thorough reference guide that covers grammar, word choice, punctuation, mechanics, sentence boundaries, effective sentences, ESL troublespots, sentence structure and frequently misused words.  The handbook is designed to be a quick reference guide that allows students to quickly access answers to issues they may encounter during their writing process.

Flexible and comprehensive, The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is one of the best how-to-write textbooks currently available and is applicable for college audiences as well as any writer who wants to sharpen their writing skills.  It is a invaluable and resourceful textbook because it gives our students extensive support for their writing process, interesting readings for writing models and discussion, and, given the skyrocketing costs of college textbooks, its comprehensiveness means instructors don’t have to require their students to purchase more than one book!  What I like best about this textbook is its careful attention to supporting how one writes with step-by-step explanations and examples.  This care to detail is very useful for students as it guides them in the many types of nonfiction writing tasks, from research papers and essay exams to interviews and arguments, emphasizing a step-by-step process and offering strategies for critical thinking and reading.  Unlike many textbooks that cater to the writing needs of students while they are immersed in the university’s academic environment, The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing provides a solid guide for not only their academic writing needs but also for the many types of writing that our students will become “immersed” in when they leave the halls of academia for the streets of the “real world”.

With this textbook to compliment and aid our classroom instruction, our students, when they leave our classroom, will no longer feel like deer caught in the glare of oncoming headlights.  Instead of running scared through the woods of writing and shouting “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!” our students will have a thoroughly detailed reference book that allows them to exclaim “Reading and Thinking and Writing and Communicating, Yes!”

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“Observable Objects”: Assessing a Study of Instructors’ Grading by Ellen Quandahl

December 14, 2001 by Leave a Comment

I’m going to use a small, under-theorized assessment project undertaken in the Lower Division Writing Program (which I direct) at San Diego State as an anecdote for thinking about practices of documentation within assessment.  Our project–to gather information about how teachers grade student writing–was what the assessment literature calls a “formative evaluation,” undertaken to help us answer the question “How can we improve our program?” (Erwin 7).  It was driven partly by suggestions from TAs that they needed more clarity about what constituted the A, B, and C paper in the first semester course and partly by the institutional mandate to present an assessment plan, guided by principles articulated by the American Association for Higher Education, as part of the departmental self-study prepared for external review.  (And I should add that this work antedates a system-wide call, this year, for an assessment driven curriculum, in response to which our campus is, I think wisely, looking into what we think constitutes G.E. through a series of faculty work-groups, even as departments develop learning outcomes and assessment instruments.)

My title, of course, refers to Foucault’s idea that today’s people, in order to be taught and brought into productive life in the society, are assessed, described, and made individual through an analytical pedagogy built upon schemas of observable, measurable or classifiable objects (218).  (That was an idea that had the writing profession shaken up a number of years ago, but which, oddly, seems to have receded as administrators and faculty embrace a language of evidence about outcomes and service to stakeholders.)   I’m interested in what happened when the text summarizing data in our study became an “observable object” in this sense, a text reinforced by institutional demands and read back to us in the course of a departmental review.  But I want also to refer to Jim Slevin’s fine recent CE article, in which he argues that the language of assessment, with its attention to evidence of learning, also obscures theintellectual work of students and faculty, which is difficult to make visible, because it seems “private and inaccessible” (294).  Slevin calls for bringing this work into the picture.  He writes: “Once this intellectual work can be seen. . . it can be studied and reviewed with rigor, according to norms generally recognized in the academy” (298).  I’m not sure how much he’s aware of the echo of Foucault, turned upside down, in that sentence, but what he’s calling for is a making visible of the things that tend to defy normative documentation: like the labor of producing and testing knowledge.

For our project, we asked TAs who were using a common assignment sequence to turn in student papers responding to a prompt which asked for the analysis of information in a piece by Clifford Geertz.  We invited departmental instructors to read four unmarked papers and to grade them using the citeria for evaluation that had been given to the students and used by their instructors. These criteria were customized for the assignment from a one-page list of course criteria, not unlike the “outcomes” document recently published by the WPA.  Our idea was simply to see the grading by TAs, lecturers and tenured faculty.   We put the grades on a chart, which showed that there was not perfect consistency of grading for any one paper.  Some were very close, but some papers received a wide array of grades.  The departmental review took place just after we had collected these data, and we shared with the reviewers this interpretive but uninterpreted document.

Our own follow-up was to select several papers, both the consistently marked and the anomalous, for discussion in departmental meetings.  I suggest that this ought to have been the key moment of data collecting, for the discussions revealed these things: that in addition to our different inclinations in reading Geertz’ argument, which were substantial, and our tendencies to weigh the six criteria differently, instructors also brought to their reading additional criteria, mostly having to do with matters of voice, correctness, and their sense of evidence of ESL writing.  These frequently overtook the focus on discussing what students had to say about Geertz, to which, in fact, there was a quite high resistance.  I believe, in other words, that a transcript of the discussions would reveal what one might call, following Christine Ross, the latent force of approaches to writing and reading quite different from those in our programmatic documents.  Such a transcript would make visible a range of discourses about literacy among our teachers, including: the discourses of past and recent schooling, of what one might term popular or public notions of what first-year writing ought to do, of the culture of other institutions where our instructors also teach, of programmatic documents, and of rhetorical and practical training offered in our TA program and graduate courses.

Our reviewers, however (who were selected by us and who wrote a powerfully positive response to the program) wrote three lines of text interpreting the project that I’ve outlined.  These were bullets, noting (despite our written criteria both for the course and the assignment) “inconsistency of grading standards across sections in GE courses,” and “the absence of agreed upon common standards of student writing in GE courses,” and urging us to “investigate a common final assessment for the course to establish common standards for student outcomes.”

My point is not to dispute these conclusions (for consistency across multiple sections is a real issue), but rather to suggest that they could not have been otherwise.  Our chart of grades looked like a kind of “true discourse,” providing a set of facts, arrayed and made visible, about difference in teachers’ grading. The array seemed at once to speak a question, to suggest that in this project what we sought to know is not how are we grading, but how can we normalize, and the answer came rushing in–by establishing common standards for outcomes, or rather clearer, more consistently gradable outcomes than those I spoke of a moment ago, which would in effect normalize our diversity of both students and teachers.

This makes very pointed the most important issue for assessment, and that is that one must carefully develop the question for what one seeks to know.  Out of this attempt, an intriguing set of questions emerges:  How, in rhetorical terms, is our faculty reading student texts?  What are the interpretive models that allow us to produce a reading of a student paper?  What are the markers that indicate ESL writing and what difference do those features make to teachers?  How do the elements listed in our evaluative criteria square with instructors’ schemas, and how do those criteria become discrete tasks, which, to quote Christine Ross, “take on specific force and produce a reading”?  These are formative questions. To make such answers visible might be what Slevin is getting at: whether we see composition as preparatory to or enacting the intellectual work of the university, whether and how we expect writing students to participate in making knowledge and testing its truthfulness.  I suggest that a better study would help us get at “the relationship between assessment and the intellectual purposes” (Slevin 289) of our particular institution.
Works Cited

Ewrin, T. Dary.  Assessing Student Learning and Development.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.

Foucault, Michel.  The Archeology of Knowledge.  New York, Pantheon, 1969.

Ross, Christine.  “In Pursuit of the ‘Clear’ and the ‘Fair’: Education Reform and the Limits of Institutional Discourse.”  Unpublished paper.

Slevin, James.  “Engaging Intellectual Work: The Faculty’s Role in Assessment.”  College English 63.3 (January 2001): 288-305.

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