Building the Paper

William K. Lawrence, “Bill”, is a lecturer who has taught over 125 sections of college composition the past 13 years. His novel The Punk and the Professor was recently published and is based on his childhood in New York. 

For many years, my online courses featured what I considered useful weekly exercises in logic, different types of analysis, different rhetorical modes, or explorations in different disciplines. They are all still great assignments that align with our course objectives, and I still use many of them, but I also started to scaffold the paper assignments through the weekly assignments. Teaching the ENG 105 course with one major project helped me realize the need for scaffolding the paper into phases. The 105 project is the common assignment (rhetorical analysis of two scholarly journals), which I have found requires extra support for students. You have eight weeks to complete the paper and the one credit course, so there is no time to waste.

In week one, we jump right into a pre-writing assignment that has them submit their choice of paper to analyze and confirm their understanding of the assignment. To save time, they choose the first of two articles from a pre-selected list. For week two, they submit the second article they have found on their own along with a 2-3 sentence proposal plan. In week three, students produce an outline. At this point, I have a good understanding of whether they comprehend the assignment or not. Without these pre-writing assignments, student writers can find themselves in a situation of having a draft that does not really line up with their assignment.

For weeks four and five, students are writing and submitting body paragraphs, hence they are writing the paper. In week six, they provide an introduction paragraph. All of these assignments are submitted directly to me through the private submission box. This helps my evaluative ability to give quick, direct, and meaningful private constructive criticism throughout the writing of the paper. Since the work is spread out across multiple weeks, it also ensures the student is producing something toward the final draft each and every week.

Why not use discussion forums for these assignments? In addition to the evaluative benefit previously mentioned, private submissions allow me to interact directly with the students, sometimes leading to phone calls or office visits when needed. I use forums for those old traditional assignments, so they can interact and explore the other aspects of the course like understanding the analysis form, documentation formats, annotating paper samples, and discussing readings. Eventually, they all share their drafts for a peer review assignment in week seven.

Because I critique several large components of the paper along the way, less commentary is needed on the draft. For the final graded draft, evaluative comments are limited, which makes sense for the students, but becomes a tricky situation when it is time for instructor evaluation and graded papers are required for review.

Published in NCSU.