Bringing Students' Writing to the Forefront

First of all, I would like to address the issue of genre that I promised to reintroduce to my class this week. After reading last week’s article I realized that I had miss-taught the concept of genre by defining it as a means to categorize writing styles; however, I now understand it to be a unifier of dichotomies such as style and content, form and context. Instead of relating the complexity and inclusive nature of genre to Swale’s discourse community definition, I decided to explain it through our rhetorical analysis piece, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. As a class, we discussed how the text’s form could not be separated from its content, purpose, audience, and social context. We concluded that genre encompasses all five components of the rhetorical situation and that it is not a static process. Rather than simply studying the definition of genre, we put it into conversation with not only the speech but also with the students' own papers.
Kathleen Welch’s article “Ideology and Freshman Textbook Production: The Place of Theory in Writing Pedagogy” focuses on the importance of using students’ work as the writing classroom’s primary texts and textbooks as secondary references. Textbook examples alienate the students because they are usually presented out of context (273). The students do not benefit from these perfect and, consequently, purposeless papers that offer no explanation for the writer’s writerly choices. When classes focus on students’ papers, teachers can highlight the rhetorical situation. Students can talk about what they did and why they did it and whether or not it was successful; then they can debate what they could do to make their work more effective. Last semester in 101 we stressed that writing is a recursive process, but textbook examples seldom illustrate this. By concentrating on student writing, teachers can prove to students that writing is fluid and, like language itself, ever changing (274). Welch advocates for student writing as the best example of powerful writing: “By giving up the disconnection and decontextualizing of freshman writing texts, we unlock the energy of the students’ and our own expertise as writers” (274). Following this method supports the idea that students are not only capable of producing readable texts but that they are already writing experts in the sense that they see language as living. Presenting writing instruction in this more effective and personal manner proves to students that they are already successful writers and that composition courses are not a waste of their time.