I've said this before, but I read a lot of productivity blogs wherein the writers strategize about bringing order to chaos, moving projects forward, that kind of thing. On one of them, I read about a "one room a day" approach to cleaning. The idea is that you do whatever basic subsistence-level cleaning needs to be done (dishes, laundry, cleaning up spills and Goldfish cracker crumbs, etc.), then you focus on deep-cleaning one room for about 15-20 minutes. Here's what we're doing:

Monday, kitchen
Tuesday, bathrooms
Wednesday, bedrooms
Thursday, living room
Friday, garage and cars
Saturday, dining room
Sunday, hallways and laundry room

I'm very happy with how it's working so far; I just hope we can keep it up. I'm much less stressed in a clean house.

Our son Henry now has a little sister, Clara. Eight pounds zero ounces, nineteen inches, score of nine on both Apgars. Born via scheduled c-section, a decision I may or may not write more about later. And she's wonderful, but of course I would say that! Many adorable pictures here.

I've always thought that no, I'm really not an expressivist. I'm much more interested in assigning research-based argument writing in my classes than I am in assigning personal narratives or personal essays. That being said, it isn't as though those genres are mutually exclusive, obviously. Here's where I stand now:

• In my own experience having written a whole lot of different texts for academic audiences, the response to what I write is overwhelmingly more positive when I make it personal and accessible -- chatty, even -- than when I write a paper that more closely resembles the IMRAD tone and structure. I've also noticed that for academic lectures, not just ones I've given but ones I've attended, audience response is much more positive when a speaker tells stories along with presenting information and argument.

  Everybody wants edutainment. They may deny it, but that is, in fact, exactly what they want, I used to think, with a bit of annoyance. But now I've come to the more charitable view that everybody wants to be delighted while they are instructed.

  I believe that expressive touches (anecdotes, first person, reflective personal response to the subject matter) usually enrich the experience of both writing and reading academic discourse.

• For teaching, then, that means I want students to feel personally invested in the subject matter of their essays, even though I am requiring them to write arguments supported by evidence from scholarly or high-popular sources in which they must also engage with opposing arguments. I encourage stories of personal encounters with the topic, in the introduction or wherever the student deems appropriate. Conclusions can be reflections on the process of reading a variety of perspectives on the topic and of writing the paper.

So, am I an expressivist?

So far in my graduate course this semester, among other readings, I've assigned Mina Shaughnessy's introduction to Errors and Expectations, an excerpt from Robert Connors' Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy, an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing, and David Bartholomae's "Inventing the University." These four I mention are really forming a constellation in my mind about teaching academic writing to beginners, especially the place of grammar, that dude who just will not leave the party.

For one thing -- as I'm pleased the students in class picked up on -- when most people say "grammar," they don't mean only grammar. It's a shorthand, umbrella term for a lot of organizational, rhetorical, and stylistic conventions that the user of the term "grammar" doesn't know how to articulate. Every time I read Bartholomae's essay (PDF), I'm re-impressed with how well he describes and demystifies the gestures and postures in academic writing.

I'm interested in looking at these readings with the question in mind of how basic writing should be taught. The approaches in the article I linked here are categorized well, but I have been thinking of two basic categories:

1. The Sequential Method

This approach has the goal of getting rid of sentence-level errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation (GSP). When the writing is clearer in this regard, the instruction can then proceed to issues of genre, argument, etc. Proponents, at least the ones I've talked to, sometimes make the "you have to learn to crawl before you can learn to walk" comparison, which, by the way, isn't true for babies. Writing assignments may be sentences or paragraphs as well as essays; there's a pretty well-established collection of "paragraphs and essays" writing textbooks, many with GSP worksheets and exercises, tailored for this approach.

2. The Tandem Method

This approach, which seems to be favored in the scholarship I've read, calls for students to learn GSP and conventions of academic writing concurrently, so students would learn about making claims with reasons supported by credible evidence, analyzing audience, academic genres like annotated bibliographies, etc.* while learning GSP, but only the GSP the specific student needs to learn. The student may have subject-verb agreement mastered, so no sense spending time on that, but still need help in semicolon usage, for instance.

*OK, so maybe not a lot of Basic Writing teachers are assigning full-on annotated bibliographies. But still, the tandem method does have students focus on content and organization of whole essays from the beginning of the course.

I have more to say on this topic, but right now I'd rather go to sleep. I'm interested in exploring the possible advantages of each of the two methods. So far I have, for the sequential method: maybe the students whose GSP is improved after a course taught this way (and the research suggests there aren't many of those) are in a better position because some of the teachers they'll have in the future will be more positively predisposed toward them, more willing to believe that these students have intelligence and are not lost causes, and more willing to make the effort to teach the argument, analytical skills, genre conventions, and so forth.

This afternoon in my composition pedagogy course, we talked about Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing -- the excerpt from the Norton Book of Composition Studies, anyway. We also talked about the article by Peter Elbow in the same anthology. As I was preparing for class, I thought it would be fun to make a diagram of Macrorie's idea of "Engfish," the unfortunate result of a lot of schooling in writing, next to his definition of "good writing." I plan to say more about expressivism, the approach to teaching writing that Macrorie and Elbow are often associated with, in a near-future post. But for now, the concept map:

I want to start off by stating my awareness of Sharon Crowley's position in "The Evolution of Current-Traditional Rhetoric" that narrowing down an essay topic is an overly simple, current-traditional approach to invention. I concede that she has a good point and that just "narrowing down" without a specific rhetorical purpose for doing so is problematic. However, it is practical and expedient to have good strategies for focusing during the research and writing process, and years of experience -- both teaching and writing -- convince me that research papers are much, MUCH BETTER when the topics are narrow.

So I'm working on a handout to add to the 70+ documents on my writing program's site for instructors. To that site, I upload all the documents I can possibly think of that could help someone teaching writing: assignment handouts, descriptions of class activities, policies, procedures...someone even requested that I write a script for an email a teacher could use to warn a student that s/he is in danger of failing a course for low attendance. That's up there too.

Anyway, the start of the handout:

How to tell when a topic is too broad, and how to narrow it down

Topics that are broad usually...

have a long history. Decades would count as a long history.
affect large groups of people nationwide, or worldwide.

Ways you can narrow your topic:

Examine the issue during a specific point in time (the year 2009, for example)
Focus on how the issue plays out in a specific location (city, state)
Focus on how the issue affects a specific group of people (auto workers, single mothers, recent college graduates)

I'd appreciate finding out about other ways you've advised students to focus their inquiry when writing research papers.

Resolutions for 2010:

1. Post to the blog at least twice a week.

2. Do some research-related writing, and reading, EVERY day if AT ALL possible. There will definitely be some days in 2010 that I'm, you know, in the hospital or otherwise out of commission.

3. Starting as soon as I've completely recovered from the birth, get back into a regular exercise routine: about three times a week.

I'm excited about this year's CCCC-IP Annual. We're looking at having at least six articles in the 2009 publication, which will be my third as editor. I plan on getting my article for it finished in the next week or two. Usually the articles cover the developments in copyright and intellectual property law over the past year; this year will be no different except for a couple of reviews of books that were published in the latter half of 2008 that I decided to make exceptions for.

But for my article, I wanted to cover something that happened in 2009 if possible. I did some reading through the 2009 archives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society's site, and then I found the topic.

In 2009, both the Recording Industry Association of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation released curricula for teaching children about copyright and intellectual property. The RIAA's curriculum, intended for grades 3 through 8, is quite one-sided. The EFF's curriculum seems to be geared toward grades 9 through 12 and examines copyright in a more complex way. I just finished writing a review of Jessica Reyman's new book The Rhetoric of Intellectual Property: Copyright Law and the Regulation of Digital Culture, and I already see so many connections between her argument, which examines the rhetorical workings of the content industries' argument (she terms this "the property stewardship narrative") and the copyright activists' argument (which she calls "the cultural conservancy narrative"), and these curricula: how these narratives are told to young audiences. I love it when I can be invigorated by my research and writing. I'll link to the Annual once it goes live, of course. I expect that will be in early March; I want to publish it before the conference and before my rambunctious little girl is born.