Situating Student Writers

Each year, Writing Center staff and tutors work with thousands of students at all skill levels and from all disciplines. We've learned a lot from student writers about their assumptions and attitudes about writing and learning. Their conceptions of academic writing inform, and sometimes overwhelm, any individual instructor's assignments, advice, or guidelines, so it may be helpful for you to have a sense of the range of possible starting points for students approaching writing tasks. Note that what follows is a broad range of possibilities. It doesn't describe all students, nor does every student carry all these attitudes or assumptions. It does provide an overview of the potential writing experiences and attitudes that may exist in any one classroom at any one time. That said, the descriptions below are real and based on actual interactions with many Carolina students. Strategies for finding more about your particular students can be found at the end of this document.

For many students, writing has been almost exclusively a school-based activity. While some may be devoted journal keepers or closet poets, they often rightly identify such activities as "creative" or "personal," not the kind of writing that is required and experienced in school. Carolina students have had twelve years or more to accumulate conceptions about what writing in school and for teachers requires. Their felt experience about academic writing and teachers' ideas about good writing is a powerful, although sometimes ill-founded or misdirected, guide. While the debate and production of ideas through writing is the water that academics swim in, the practice of writing is something quite different for most students. Imagining their assumptions about writing and what their prior experiences have been can inform how we create opportunities for them to use writing.

The following list describes attitudes, behaviors, and experiences that may be relevant to students who are writing in the academy.

Your students…

May never have written a paper longer than ten pages.
May always have written papers the night before they are due. They may not have developed a more sophisticated writing process and may not believe they really need to do so.
May not be aware of what an "argument" is in the academy. When told that a paper requires an argument, they may be mystified by the term.
May be avid writers on social networking sites, email, instant messaging systems, or listservs. They may enjoy this kind of writing and be very effective communicators in these environments.
May be used to receiving writing assignments orally in class. They may not have learned to rely on assignment sheets and may not have a good sense of how to read an assignment. They may interpret the whole assignment as a topic suggestion rather than as a specific, carefully crafted set of directions or requirements. They may ignore the assignment sheet entirely and believe that any comments you make about the assignment in class are the "real" assignment.
May struggle with completing writing assignments because they are having serious, legitimate difficulty deciphering the purpose or prose of course readings. They may not have skill in digesting or integrating reading material and may not know how writing can function as a tool for thinking through ideas.
May not have a good sense of how long it might take to produce a well-written page. Some may woefully underestimate and some may exaggerate the number of hours required. Either assumption precipitates procrastination and can lead to writing the paper the night before it is due.
May believe that they will not ever have to write because they are going into the sciences or because their "secretaries" will take care of writing in their futures.
May be less experienced computer and Internet users than you might expect.
May misconstrue a short writing assignment as "easy" or not very important.
May believe that they are very strong writers.
May believe that they are terrible writers.
May get caught up in doing research for a paper. They may be excited about their new knowledge even though they have discovered an overwhelming amount of material and have little skill in sorting, discarding, and organizing material.
May be afraid that you or their peers will think or see how ill-prepared they are as writers. Having met their academic peers for the first time at Carolina, they may feel suddenly "dumb" and wary of exposure.
May feel great relief at successfully communicating a complicated idea and make quick progress in their writing as they gain confidence.
May be committed to becoming strong writers during their college careers. Many students recognize strong writing skills as important and marketable.
May expect and dread that you will rewrite their prose. They may not view teachers' comments as a learning opportunity. Accordingly, they may avoid reading written comments on a paper and only want to know the letter grade assigned. This attitude typically develops out of experience with teachers' harsh, cryptic, unclear comments on papers.
May not believe that writing is important to an instructor when the instructor doesn't devote any class time to discussing the assignment or how to complete it.
May be investing in maintaining what they feel is their original, personal, signature writing style. They may see your attempts to guide them as disrespect for their individual voice or dislike of their ideas.
May not view their instructors as writers. Accordingly, it may not occur to them to ask you about the writing you do in your profession. An instructor who describes his/her writing process and shows a draft of something to students serves as a powerful model and sends a strong message that writing is valued in the course.
May enjoy communicating ideas in writing with peers, even if they are quiet during discussions. Some students thrive on the repartee of debate and role-playing when given a chance to do so in the reflective time and space that writing provides.
May seek to emulate the tone and vocabulary of an instructor or the assigned readings and misuse words in the process, resulting in garbled prose that may make you question their basic writing abilities. Sometimes such attempts are actually signs of risk-taking and intellectual growth. Others times, writers may not yet have tried to really understand the course material and may believe that "sounding good" or "sounding smart" is what they are supposed to do.
May write convoluted, awkward sentences as they struggle to express complex or new ideas. When their ideas become more sharply focused, their struggles with grammar, punctuation, or mechanics may significantly decrease.
May see writing as their strongest academic skill, whether they enjoy writing or not.
May rely heavily on and trust completely the writing advice of a high school teacher, family member, or friend, even when this advice goes against your instructions in class or the requirements of an assignment.
May follow rigid "rules" about what they are "allowed" or "not allowed" to write in an academic paper (e.g., "Never write in the first person") that may not match your assumptions or that may be in conflict with the demands of your assignment.
May have one well-developed writing skill (for example, writing summaries or five-paragraph themes) that they use as an all-purpose strategy when responding to any assignment.
May not believe that they have any worthwhile ideas on a subject or that they are really supposed to express their own views in a paper. They may see their role only as a sponge, a regurgitator, or a teacher-pleaser. Some may resist writing that has other functions; others may embrace opportunities to honestly explore ideas in writing.
May never have cited a source in a paper before. While students receive training in using sources during first-year English courses, some students place out of these courses and are not required to take them; others may currently be enrolled in such courses and may not yet have covered citation.
May have no idea what "APA," "MLA" or "documentation" mean.
May take specific formatting instructions in an assignment (e.g. "Use APA documentation") with a grain of salt because in other courses they are allowed to "use any style—just be consistent" or "make up a system—just be sure you cite sources adequately."
May see the Internet as their primary, and most efficient, gateway for finding and sorting the information available on a given topic.
May not be inclined to go the stacks to seek out a book (preferring Infotrac or other databases because they are quicker).
May not know how to evaluate online sources.
May have structured their course schedules to avoid writing. They may initially evaluate your course based on the length of the papers assigned and the number of writing assignments.
May seek out writing intensive courses.
May believe that writing cannot be fairly graded because it's all "subjective."
May try very hard to figure out "what the teacher really wants" rather than following their own interests and/or instincts about a topic or idea.
May not share your definition of or have operational definitions for terms such as "analyze," "synthesize," " argue," and "critique."
May be simultaneously enrolled in two or more courses that have contradictory "rules" and assumptions about writing. The question "what do you really want us to do?" may be an honest one.
May assume teachers use writing only as "a way to grade us" and assume that assessment is the primary purpose for any given writing assignment.
May wish they had a chance (or an obligation) to get feedback on an early draft of a paper. They may appreciate pre-set deadlines throughout the course for turning in topic proposals, outlines, or drafts before the final due date.

Discovering your students' writing perspectives

If you are curious about students' writing experience in a particular course or about how they might respond to a particular assignment, ask them about their writing lives. Here are some quick and easy ways to learn more about your students' conceptions of writing:

Ask students to take five minutes to write an ending to this sentence: "Writing is like…"
Ask them to describe their best writing experience and why it was a good one.
Ask them to guess what role writing may play for them in the future. What kind of writing will they be doing and what skills do they need to begin practicing now?
Ask them to submit a list of questions they'd like to ask about you as a writer.
Ask them to describe what is most difficult for them about writing in school.
Ask them what they like to write outside of class assignments.
Ask them to describe a writing assignment in their own words.
Ask them to guess why you designed an assignment in a particular way.
Ask them how you could help them to become stronger writers. What have they found helpful in the past? What doesn't seem to help them as much?
Ask them to identify the person who has taught them most about writing so far and the most important thing they learned from that person.
Ask them what they think is special about writing in your discipline.
Ask them to identify who they perceive as good writers.
Ask them what they think of the writing style in the assigned course readings.
Ask them to make a list of the rules they think should never be broken when writing an academic paper.
Ask them to describe their ideal writing assignment.
Ask them what they think the relationship is between writing and reading or writing and researching.

This information gathering could happen a number of different ways:

Five-minute in class writing exercises (collect students' responses and read them quickly for your own edification).
Questions posted to a discussion board for response.
Homework (ask students to write a paragraph in response to your question).
An in-class exercise where students write, then share what they have written with a neighbor and discuss it for 5 minutes.
A writing inventory or 2-3 page personal writing history, given as one assignment during the first week of class.

For more information about student writing or to talk with someone about your writing assignments, contact Vicki Behrens (vicki@unc.edu) at the Writing Center.