Uncategorized | College Comp

I repurposed last month’s research paper by using it to create a Prezi video. My research paper’s audience was made up of English teachers, but my Prezi video’s audience is made up of my students’ parents. I’m using this video this coming fall for our back-to-school activities (though I plan on revising the video before then). (For about a minute of this video, the audio and video are out of sync. Sorry about that.)

I chose a Prezi Video because I wanted to show my face to my students’ parents. I like the idea of bullets and photographs flying in and out that support the points I make with my talk. This is important because my audience lives in a high-tech community, and I wanted my communication to imply that the course will cover the genres and occasions that my students may face in a more high-tech life.

When I wrote the script for the Prezi video, I left out most of the first three pages of my research paper, which mostly focus on the history of composition instruction as it pertains to correcting grammar, usage, and spelling on student work. I thought that I had no basis for thinking that my audience would be interested in that information since they were more interested in their teen’s teacher’s approach to their teen’s writing than to the historical factors that may have influenced it.

I also introduce myself and get to the point of my Prezi video in my script’s second sentence: “ The guy who’s supposed to spill all of that red ink all over your teen’s papers? But I don’t spill so much of it anymore. Instead, I’m learning how to be a closer reader of my students’ writing.” By contrast, my research paper contains no introduction of myself because of a convention in research paper writing. And my research paper has an evolving thesis, starting with an initial thesis — a “they say” — concerning the importance of giving “red ink” feedback.

One thing in both communications is evidence that grammar instruction, when it is divorced from rhetorical writing instruction, is futile. In the research paper, I give more quotes from authoritative works, and I give anecdotal evidence from “English teacher workrooms” of English teachers who complain about their students’ failure to apply their grammar knowledge to their writing. To put all of my research into my Prezi video would seem like overkill. To put the English teacher workroom generalization in a communication for parents, however, would seem unprofessional.

Ever thanked an author? I did once. I looked up the guy who wrote my college comp textbook.

Somehow I found Robert Ray’s number and reached him at home. He had been wrapping up his teaching career and concentrating on his writing — mysteries, mostly. Typical for him, he was also writing books on how to write books. The Weekend Novelist series, he calls them.

How, I asked him, did this textbook, The Art of Reading: A Handbook on Writing, come to be? The idea came at a party:

I had been teaching an advanced exposition class at Beloit College in Wisconsin. I used that class to field test my ideas about reading and writing, and I came up with exercises to use in the class. The exercises turned into a book. I was talking about it to a classics professor at a cocktail party one night, and he happened to be an acquisitions editor at Blaisdell Publishing.

It’s long been out of print. If you want a copy, it’ll cost you $144.89 on Amazon. Check out the book’s page there: I wrote the only customer review. Well, besides “Tyler,” whose entire review is “Great Book.” Is that gratitude, Tyler?

The book — and the college freshman course I read it in — changed my approach to writing. Instead of inventing my own style, why not imitate the pros’ prose? Ray wanted me to read a few of them a little at a time and slowly. Here’s what he told me on the phone about the book’s approach:

Using colored ballpoints, the reader circles words. If you’re reading for structure, you circle words that repeat. If you’re reading for content, you circle nouns and verbs. Nouns in red, say, and verbs in blue. When you draw connecting lines, the patterns jump out at you. Seeing the patterns takes you into the style and mind-set of the writer. I still circle words.

I do, too. I did so much circling and web-making in college comp that my writing started to take on the style of William Faulkner — long, meandering streams of sentences banked by shoals of subordinate phrases and clauses.

Ray, like me, was grateful for another writing instructor — Natalie Goldberg, whose Writing Down the Bones is a mixture of Zen living and fast writing. Ray called Goldberg “the guru of timed writing.” Here’s how he described her approach:

It’s so simple. Set the timer. Write until it beeps. Read your writing aloud. Set your timer, write until it beeps. The timer distracts the left brain editor-critic-judge. You zone out on the writing.

So Ray still imitates from slow reading, but that’s for revisions. To get the words on the page in the first place, he writes fast.

I haven’t thanked many of my teachers years down the road. I should, but I haven’t. But I find I thank my mentors.

College Comp

Category Archives: Uncategorized

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