Studio practices such as annotating, paraphrasing, summarizing, journaling, and responding provide students ways to engage complex texts in the writing course and other courses. Brainstorming, freewriting, listing, categorizing, hierarchizing, clustering, mapping, and many other studio practices serve as organizational, analytic, and interpretive tools. Writing is a complex, dynamic process as well as a concrete finished product. We compose multiple pieces, such as notes, annotations, journal entries, informal responses, lists, dialogues, etc., some of which will find their way into more formal essays, and all of which stock a storehouse of raw material from which more polished writing might be crafted. We attend to and value process, therefore we submit writing which documents process, which are collected, organized, reflected upon, and evaluated in portfolios.
Writing is a social act.
Language develops in communities, so the writing studio encourages interaction between teachers and students and among groups of students. We work in both large and small groups to discuss readings, invent organizational schemes and solve problems, take notes, plan presentations, workshop drafts and copy-edit later drafts, and to assess and evaluate each others work. We learn specific strategies for collaborating with class colleagues, and experience the making of language, meaning, and knowledge as communal. Writing is central to scholarly endeavors and to the college experience. Through work in the writing studio, and through actively transporting what we learn in the writing studio to other classes and to extra-curricular and social settings, we come to understand how writing supports thinking, learning, and communicating.