Real vs. fake issues in “blogs vs. term papers”

New York Times reporter Matt Richtel positioned Cathy Davidson against William Fitzhugh in this weekend’s Blogs vs. Term Papers article. Currently a Duke University humanities professor, Davidson has experimented with a variety of writing forms she expects from students in her course. As the founding editor of the Concord Review, a journal publishing history essays by high school students, Fitzhugh has long argued for the value of formal research papers. And Richtel makes the most of the contrast between the two articulate teachers: it reads like a genteel cage match between the forces of the New Media against the forces of Tradition.

But it’s a false dichotomy. First, at one level Richtel’s story is another New York Times faux-trends story. Where is concrete evidence about the numbers of composition faculty who are substituting blog entries for formal papers? Faculty have long included informal writing and pre-writing activity as a substantial part of composition courses. So what’s the difference between asking students to keep a journal on paper vs. keeping a journal electronically? More broadly, this article is not being printed in a world where high school and college students must write long, formal papers every semester. As Richtel notes, the National Survey of Student Engagement shows surprisingly low amounts of writing required in many college courses. There is no Horror of Giant Term Paper Death in most colleges (and never has been), and there is no general expectation that high school students write even a single 15-page research paper before graduating.

In addition to the faux-trends assumption, the story obscures the quality of students Davidson and Fitzhugh both work with. The links in the first sentence above capture both Davidson and Fitzhugh’s current explanations of their views, and it is clear in both that they are working with students who have relatively high skills in writing. ((Davidson taught composition many years ago at Michigan State, but her courses with blogging as writing is with Duke students who are voluntarily signing up for an elective. Fitzhugh might also be teaching a broad range of students, but those who submit papers to the Concord Review are working at a different level.)) The real life of teaching research paper skills to undergraduates is best represented by Carol Srole‘s explanation of the typical catch-22 of public university faculty:

I teach on the quarter system at an institution where students work 20 to 40 hours per week. Students do not have the time to read for a seminar and write a research paper in a single-quarter class. They even have trouble devoting a class entirely to a research paper. Without sufficient practice, student skills remain at low levels and faculty become frustrated with the quality of student work. As a result, fewer faculty assign research papers and students do not accumulate enough experience to write good papers in the specifically designed research classes.

Srole here is discussing the dilemma of the history major curriculum at Cal State Los Angeles. In the rest of her article (go read it!), she explains her solution to the dilemma, but for now just focus on how the life of working-class students at a public university is different from the Duke students who are taking Davidson’s class. Whether the assignment is a formal but private academic paper or writing for the public (either blogs or trying to contribute something that sticks in Wikipedia), the question of formality is dwarfed by the dominant conditions under which students work.

I teach at a regional state university with a high proportion of first-generation college students, and I have taught well over 2000 students here. It’s been a wonderful teaching experience, and I have taught many who are so skilled I could throw anything at them and they’d thrive. And there are also many with problems that make the level of formality of an assignment entirely irrelevant: whether the assignment is formal or informal writing, public or private, some students will struggle with composing a coherent sequence of statements. Sometimes the problem is skill level. Sometimes it’s the choices students make when they are not in my class (hint: jello shots do not generally improve your writing). And sometimes it’s concerns students have about everyday living: can they make ends meet with the work hours they currently have, is an aunt able to afford her hypertension medication, are parents moving and expecting them to drive seven hours this weekend to help out? In many of those circumstances, I am sure students grumble I have to go finish that stupid blog as easily as they grumble I have to go finish that stupid paper.

That perspectives does not eliminate the importance of crafting assignments that motivate students and that focus on the right objectives. The reason why cComposition teachers include informal writing in their courses is for pedagogical, and not cultural reasons:. First, fears of being unmasked as an imposter in academic culture interferes with the cognitive effort required to construct and then revise formal academic prose. Second, skilled authors writers can and should range broadly in level fof formality and other characteristics to meet an audience’s needs, and students should be taught learn in an environment that recognizes that realityrange. ((So did all that tinkering with the prose really change the message that much?))

In my experience, the level of formality is generally not the key issue in constructing an appropriate assignment. Rather, constructing an assignment focus is key. Before my program decided on a common set of assignments for our bread-and-butter undergraduate course, faculty had considerable choice on constructing a paper assignment (as long as we understood we all were going to assign papers). For several semesters early in my time at USF, I asked students to write a paper on a topic of their choice related to the course and involving some reading of research literature. For those few semesters, both the students and I were deeply unhappy with that assignment. Students were likely to choose topics that were unrelated to the course, waited until far too late to finalize topics (even when I required proposals early in the semester), struggled with both finding and understanding appropriate pieces of research literature, and all too often wrote papers entirely disconnected from the class (which could have been written without ever enrolling in the course).

After one particularly disastrous summer course, where there were plenty of other conditions interfering with student work, I stepped back and thought about what I wanted from a paper focusing on a topic: I wanted the students to demonstrate that they could apply the key concepts from the course to a context we had not talked about in class. In short, I wanted them to demonstrate that they “got” the perspective I wanted them to learn. So I tossed the “research” part of the paper and kept the formality. I retitled the assignment as a “perspectives paper” and told them, in the first semester, that while they had choice over topic matter, they were to cite no more than 3-5 outside readings, which were to give them background on the topic rather than be considered research in the way I thought of it professionally. That first semester, students again had problems with finding appropriate topics, but there was a quantum leap in student success, both in grades and in demonstrating that they could apply course perspectives to a new topic. So I created a compromise on topic choice that was structured to minimize topic-choice failure for procrastinating students: in later semesters I gave students three pre-approved topics for the perspective paper, gave them background material, and let them choose their own topic if they could propose another topic to me by the fourth week of the semester, complete with a few background readings. Most students selected one of the pre-approved topics, and the assignment functioned much better than my first clumsy attempt at requiring a research paper.

The point here is not that a research paper is inappropriate but that it did not match my deepest goal for the course. Now that we have common assignments in the course, my colleagues and I have struggled with this issue and added group dynamics to the issue — what are our collective priorities? They’re fairly close to my individual priorities, and we have also tinkered heavily with the common assignments. But the fundamental question is not the level of formality for writing assignments: the basic question is whether an assignment accomplishes what we want it to accomplish, and is it structured to maximize student success in the goals we set?