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Date:         Tue, 29 Sep 1992 17:22:50 -0700
From:         James Crosswhite <JCROSS@OREGON.BITNET>
Subject:      Basic writing, again and again

These are great postings on basic writing and the teaching
of grammar. The Hartwell and Hillocks material is essential.
Mike Rose's articles are also helpful in a different way.

Linguists can be of some help, too. There's a great
dissertation by Brooke Neilson (I'll look up the title if
anyone presses me) that shows that students who write in an
informal register make fewer "errors" than students who
write in a formal register--even when they are using the
same sentence constructions. The idea is that there's a
radical difference between competence and performance. The
students she studied were grammatically competent (they
could write correct sentences), but their performance broke
down when the audience and situation were unfamiliar (for
example, when they were writing to strangers for no clear
purpose).

One of the advantages of helping students with the global
features of their papers, in a top-down way (which includes
clarifying the reasons for writing), is that--in my
experience!--many of the sentence-level performance problems
really do vanish.

What problems remain may need to be addressed in a different
way. However, and again this is just my experience, I have
found that unless students are highly motivated I make
*relatively* little progress at this level. Since I make so
much progress with them by attending to the reasoning in the
papers, and the way the reasoning and the writing are the
same, I put my efforts there, where it seems to do the most
good.

I know that for a lot of teachers there's something counter-
intuitive about this, but why not take the results of 50
years of empirical research, and testimony like mine (of
which there is plenty), and suggest to your friends that
they put their efforts where they will do the most good?

(Last point, just for fun: the most outstanding improvement
I've ever seen from a student in sentence fluency was a
Korean man who wanted to be a wealthy businessman. The
students and I could hardly make any sense at all out of his
tangled sentences. He also had difficulty speaking
intelligibly. I didn't know where to start. For some reason,
I suggested that he memorize speeches, to get a better feel
for the language. He took me more seriously than I'd ever
anticipated. For one hour, twice a week, he came to my
office, and recited *from memory* Ronald Reagan speeches he
had found in _Vital Speeches_. I suffered through this,
since I had suggested it. We talked about the speeches, and
I answered any questions he had. By the end of the term, his
progress in writing English sentences was the greatest I've
ever seen in an equivalent time. You explain it to me.)
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Date:         Tue, 6 Oct 1992 18:47:12 CDT
From:         Jim Layton X <JRL721F@SMSVMA.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: re-jazz

I have difficulty understanding how jazz music has become the focal point
of this network.  I enjoy jazz, music, and composition.  However, as a re-
sult of the quality of the traffic on this network I must withdraw. . . .
Would some kind person on the network provide me with directions--I tried,
but failed. . . .
                 Thank you,
                           Jim
=========================================================================
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Date:         Sat, 3 Oct 1992 01:16:32 EST
From:         "(Gary Beason)" <bubba@MACE.CC.PURDUE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Computer Proficiency vs. Writing
              1, 92 8:03 pm

Bob,

To support what you say about being told what to use . . . what kind
of technology is available influences what we teach, how we teach,
though the technology doesn't necessarily deny us from teaching
writing.  For example, the lack of support for synchronous
communication might discourage certain writing activities.


---------

Gary Beason		         bubba@mace.cc.purdue.edu
Purdue University, English       bubba@expert.cc.purdue.edu (Eudora)
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Date:         Wed, 30 Sep 1992 12:48:19 PDT
Comments:     Warning -- RSCS tag indicates an origin of POSTMAST@IDUI1
From:         Gordon Thomas <ENGLAB@IDUI1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Writing vs. Computing

I agree, Bob, that students have trouble learning computer commands
even when the commands they'll use are not difficult.  Of course students
also have trouble with ordinary typographic conventions, and a typewriter
itself can cause considerable frustration.  I personally find just the
act of writing by hand to be difficult.  It takes a while before the
technology of pen and paper, typewrite, or computer program becomes
transparent.  Although the computer technology can be more forbidding
than these other technolgoies, it seems that basically it's simply the
logical extension of the same problem.

Of course knowing that (or agreeing with that, assuming that you do,
which you may not) still doesn't keep students from using the computers
as typewriters.  But we have observed that while the majority of
students DO use the machines that way at the start of a year-long
sequence with computers, a substantial number manage to learn to
compose at the keyboard and use more complex commands by end of their
second course.  This seems to appear even when the teachers are NOT
emphasizing it much in class.
From: KALER@UKANVM.BITNET (Ellen Redding Kaler)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Subject: Re: computer anxiety
Date: 1 Oct 92 14:18:13 GMT
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Michael Gos, Please tell more about your dissertation on computer anxiety--
full title, brief abstract, etc.  Did you get a job?
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Subject: (no subject given)
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Date:         Thu, 24 Sep 1992 11:35:58 EDT
From:         Computers and Writing <USERK9TG@UMICHUM.BITNET>

Several people have asked for a reposting of the call for papers
for the Ninth Computers and Writing Conference, so here it is.
Please pass this along to anyone you think might be interested, and
feel free to forward it to other lists.  Thanks.

                                C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S

                         NINTH CONFERENCE ON COMPUTERS AND WRITING

                               The University of Michigan
                                   Ann Arbor, Michigan
                                United States of America
                                     May 20-23, 1993

Conference Theme:

Lessons from the Past, Learning for the Future

Conference chairs:  Emily Jessup, Susanmarie Harrington, William
Condon, Wayne Butler

Poised as we are at the end of the first decade of using computers in
writing classes, 1993 seems a good time to pause and reflect upon
what we have discovered during the last ten years and to look
forward to the next ten.  The program chairs invite interested parties
to propose papers, sessions, or workshops.  We are particularly
interested in proposals exploring one or more of the following
themes:

   --Computers, Writing, and the K-12 classroom
   --Getting started with computers and writing instruction
   --Applications of hypertext in the teaching of writing
   --Multimedia and writing instruction
   --Computers and the reading-writing connection
   --Explorations of the virtual classroom
   --Uses of computers in promoting collaborations:
          --among students
          --across disciplines
          --over long distances
   --The effects of computers:
          --on the learning process
          --on the interactions among students and teachers
   --Changing sociopolitical contexts for computer use

Proposals:  Send three copies of a two-page (double-spaced) abstract
for a paper, panel, or workshop.  Include:  name(s), affiliation(s),
address(es), telephone number(s) and, if possible, e-mail address(es)
for all partcipants.  Also include audiovisual or other equipment
needs (including computers, projection, etc).

Deadline:  All proposals must be postmarked by November 1, 1992.
Notification of acceptance will be mailed by January 1993.

Mail proposals to:
Computers and Writing Conference
English Composition Board
1025 Angell Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

OR

E-mail Proposals to:
Computers_and_Writing@um.cc.umich.edu
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Date:         Wed, 30 Sep 1992 08:32:40 -0600
From:         RONRON@USU.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, again and again

Mer -- liked your jazz analogy.  Schema theory suggests that we build mental
constructs out of the data around us, then use them to make predictions
about the world.  With writing, as with jazz, the important thing to get
first is what van Dijk calls the "superstructures" and then work from
that.  In jazz, in art, in rhetoric, memorizing the masters gives us
well formed schemata from which to work.  In my collection, I must
have 15 different versions of "ST. Louis Blues." all different, all
great.  Ron Shook
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Date:         Sun, 4 Oct 1992 20:32:41 EDT
From:         mer <MROSE01@UKCC.UKY.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, again and again

James:

I think that you hit on an important point here, for it reveals what I consider
fundamentally erroneous assumptions about the nature of creativity.  Your con-
cern with intellectual rigor constraining the creative impulse into mere
mechanical repetition/imitation is simply off the mark, at least where jazz
improvisation goes.  Jazz is simply so complex that to improvise without the
deliberate channeling of that creative impulse through quite dense, intellectua
lly rigorous structures will immediately sound inauthentic, geniunely bad to
anyone with even cursory knowledge of the music and its forms.
Why for example, New Age Music sounds like wimpy doodling to most trained
jazz improvisors:  most of the Wyndham Hill folks just don't got no chops ;-).

Jazz musicians understand to quite a significant level of sophistication that
creativity and intellectual rigor are inseparable and interdependent.
I've described Peter Elbow's method of freewriting to Jazz musicians and to a
(wo)man, they recognize immediately the fundamental flaw in Elbow's method:
that creativity can somehow exist independent of structure.

Memorization, over a long period of time, provides a musical version of
Chomskian competence, which then provides the necessary preconditions for
the infinite permutations which are the Jazzer's stock in trade.
The difference between Chompsky and what I'm describing is that you can't
deliberately learn how to generate sentences; you *can* learn how to generate
increasingly sophisticated musical phrases in increasingly complex harmonic
environs.

The problem with people sounding derivative or mechanical is not due to their
overdependence on other people's musical thoughts, but their weakness in a
related but separate skill of being able to *think* musical thoughts
in a spontaneous manner.  That skill is not simply born in someone: jazz
pedagogy has evolved to the point of *teaching* the ability to think spontaneou
sly in increasingly complex musical contexts--contexts learned in a complemen-
tary way through the very approaches to memorization that I've described.

Creativity and intellectual rigor are not opposites, but absolutely symbiotic.
I think that rhetoric and composition has a lot to learn from jazz pedagogy.

                                                            mer
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Date:         Mon, 28 Sep 1992 17:17:06 --500
From:         EIDX576@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Defining HyperCard and Hyper

I think Fred did get his second language waived because of computer
languages, but I was not so lucky.  I approached the same graduate
advisor a couple of years later here at Texas, and was told that Fred's
case was a mistake they didn't intend to repeat.  I had 2 years of
Spanish, and wrote computer programs in pascal, and had written programs
in Basic, COBOL, Assembly language, and FORTRAN.  I was using HyperCard
in our Lab, too.  None of this seemed to make any difference.  I argued
that my "languages" were helping me pursue my studies in this field of
English/Rhetoric; my advisor was not swayed, even though we define our
foreign languages here by their capacity to further your scholarship
and research.
   So I continue collecting "dead" languages.  And I did take French to
satisfy my "real" language requirements.
   Locke Carter
   University of Texas, Austin
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Date:         Tue, 29 Sep 1992 14:04:00 EST
From:         MARY JANE SCHRAMM <01MJSCHRAMM@BSUVAX1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, one more time

>For the other side, you
>might try Kolln's "Closing the Doors on Alchemy," in one of the same
>two journals.  I think her arguments are weak, but I have to preserve the
>appearance of fairness.

If that's Martha Kolln you are referring to, I think her concept of
_rhetorical_ grammar is something entirely different from what most
of us understand to be grammar instruction.  I haven't read the article
referred to above, but her _Rhetorical Grammar_ published in 1991 focuses
on the rhetorical effects of the grammar choices we all make as writers.

Mary Jane Schramm
01mjschramm@bsuvc.bsu.edu
From: IACDES@ASUACAD.BITNET (David E. Schwalm)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Subject: class size
Date: 6 Oct 92 05:12:37 GMT
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 *** Reply to note of 10/05/92 19:25
 At ASU, first year comp courses are capped at 25; our hosted basic writing
 course is capped at 22; our first year comp esl courses are capped at 22; all
 sophomore and junior writing courses are capped at 25. I hope we can hold the
 line on these caps.

 -- David E. Schwalm, Assoc. Provost for Academic Programs
 ___Arizona State University West
 ___4701 West Thunderbird Rd.
 ___Phoenix, AZ 85069-7100___(602) 543-4500
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Date:         Tue, 6 Oct 1992 19:36:07 -0400
From:         Nick.Carbone@WRITING.UMASS.EDU
Subject:      Reply to class size

Lisa,

   At UMass at Amherst the limit is 20 in computer equipped classes, 24 in
pen and paper classes.  It used to be 20 in both and when it was a full stipend
TA was three sections one in the fall two in the spring at $7200.  The
two in the Spring made for a lot of work--40 papers a week.  So we switched by
agreement between the writing department and its TAs to 24 per class, but a full
TA being two courses one in fall, one in Spring for a total of $6500.
    After having forty students in one semester, most didn't mind 24, but
were highly reluctant on the other hand to have that kind of increase.  The
pay loss was balanced against the fact that we were being paid more on a per
student basis.  It was a risk; we risked giving the impression that we could
easily do more.  Part of what alleviated that having too much weight was
that overall we taught fewer students.
    I wasn't too effected.  Since the labs only have 22 terminals, the cap was p
ut at twenty students there. I also believe students in  111 (our version of
basic writing, for lack of a better term at the moment) were capped at
twenty because all of those classes get taught in the computer-equipped
classrooms.  Further, teachers in who teach 111 still get $7200 because
they have more class time and more conference time assigned for that course.
    As luck would have, we as TAs had a good year, we won some concessions on
insurance coverage, mediation, and job protection (parity in cuts) in our
contract negotiations last Spring and returned this Fall to learn that
the state has increased spending (after four or five years of freezing/cutting)
so that each full time TA will have their stipend increased a $1000.
     So in the end, we are teaching two courses for 7500.  And since enrollments
went up this year, we didn't loose any teaching positions.
    Good luck out there.  If it's anything like it was here (This is
the first time I think in three years the library has money for new books.),
you're in for a long, slow ride.
Nick.Carbone@writing.umass.edu
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Date:         Fri, 2 Oct 1992 08:55:22 -0600
From:         RONRON@USU.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, again and again

Jeff Galin -- one reason why imitatio would work is based in schema
theory.  Imitating writing of a certain type and style allows us to
build schemata for that type of writing.  Writing is acquired inductively
and unconsciously, best from examples. The overy presentation of
principles doesn't seem to be necessary to it.  This is far different
from the "rote memorization" you mention. We are problem-solving
mechanisms.  Imitatio is an effective way of standing aside and letting
the mechanism work.  Ron Shook
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Date:         Wed, 30 Sep 1992 19:38:00 EST
From:         Joel Nydahl <NYDAHL@BABSON.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, one more time

Dave Roberts has done me (and, I suspect, most if not all of us) a real
service by forwarding his letter.  I don't know how many times recently
that I've been forced to argue and reargue this old but important issue; but
I do know how often I'll avail myself of Dave's brilliant and telling
summary of trends and research.  Again, Dave--thanks heaps.
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Date:         Mon, 5 Oct 1992 19:40:31 PDT
From:         "A. Keller" <AKELLER@UVVM.UVIC.CA>
Subject:      Re: class size

At the University of Victoria (14,000 students), first-year
writing courses have 20 students maximum. Second-year and beyond
courses have 18. The department simply won't enroll extra students
in any section unless a student is graduating and absolutely needs
the course right away. This does create backlogs and waitlists, but
that's preferable to large writing classes where we can't give the kind
of attention we know students need. We know also that we're bloody
lucky.

Arnie Keller
University of Victoria
Victoria BC
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Date:         Sat, 26 Sep 1992 19:21:26 CDT
From:         Bob Boston <S2.RSB@ISUMVS.IASTATE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Idaho Transformation

Gordon, it's good to hear your voice again.  Will you be at C&W9?

We will be hiring a full-time techie for our Writing Labs this year.  I
remember telling Cindy a couple of years ago that I was reluctant to make such
a move because I liked to feel in control of the Lab.  Now it's reached the
point where the Labs are controlling me.  Therefore, I'll be interested in any
responses you get regarding that part of the impending "transformation."

The other part, allowing public use of the Lab, is how we've always worked.
Although the rooms are reserved for English classes about 60% of the time, any
student of the university can use the computers at other hours.  The only
problem we had was controlling Laser printing, which was free for public users
while registered class members had to pay a $30 course fee.  Now that the
university has established a computer fee for all students and has distributed
that money to all eligible computer facilities, the problem has diminished.

I think the third element of the transformation is the most insidious threat.
You say, "the real reason for this (potential) bonanza is that many faculty
and Computer Services people (and managers of other general-purpose labs) see
our facility as the cornerstone in building a networked set of student labs
run by various departments (including the central Computer Services) and that
INTRODUCES the students to this environment."

This is the problem we're facing now.  We're grateful to the administration
for pumping a lot of money into the Labs, but our objective is to teach
writing, not to teach computer proficiency. I'm already seeing that these
objectives conflict.  We want to spend as little class time as possible on
computer training so that we can concentrate on teaching writing.  Therefore,
we want to use hardware and software that require little computer expertise--
precisely what the administration does NOT want us to use.

It's going to be interesting.

Bob Boston
Iowa State University
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Date:         Fri, 2 Oct 1992 06:34:14 EST
From:         "(Jim Porter)" <jporter@MACE.CC.PURDUE.EDU>
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, one more time
              at Oct 1, 92 11:59 am

>Thanks for the encouragement.  The letter has not been published.  Any
>suggestions?

Dave ... I was thinking of _English Journal_ or _Journal of Teaching
Writing_.  The latter is intended for English teachers K thru college,
which gives you a wider spectrum--but _EJ_ probably has more readers.
I think both forums are probably open to the possibility of
alternative article formats (like letters).

It would be challenging to try to get the letter published as a
newspaper editorial.  In 1981, I published a statement about the
teaching of writing (vs. grammar) in the Fort Wayne
_News-Sentinel_--but it was a true opinion statement (and
without reference to sources).  Would newspapers print a more
scholarly statement with a bibliography?  Some might.  Anyway,
I was thinking of how you might get this statement ought to
the "concerned parents" who are your characterized readers.

Much of the strength of your statement comes from its being in
_letter_ form: it's a direct address to specific readers,
addressing a particular set of concerns. It read in some ways
like a speech.  At the same time it was a scholarly presentation--
but one which did not let the scholarship dominate the statement.
(The references served as unobtrusive backing--I liked that.)

I'd recommend keeping the letter "feel" as much as possible,
because I think that makes the piece all the more effective.
You might have to make some adjustments, however, to make it
fit whatever forum you decide to try for: e.g., attach a short
explanatory intro for _EJ_.  On the other hand, if you wanted
to rewrite the piece as a more conventional article, I
think it would still have an impact.

Good luck with it whatever you decide--but I hope you decide
to let more people see it!

Jim

--------------------
Jim Porter
Purdue University
jporter@mace.cc.purdue.edu
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Date:         Mon, 5 Oct 1992 09:12:54 -0600
From:         RONRON@USU.BITNET
Subject:      Re: Basic writing, again and again

Mer -- re your posting on Jazz.  Do you know what you get if you
platy new age music backwards?  New age music. Ron Shook
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