Give a typical student a chance to do work at the very last minute, and he (or she) will take it. Writing a paper the night before, dashing off slides without an outline and not practicing a speech—that’s what college students, most of them, do. Getting them to improve their writing or public speaking is a matter of slowing them down to spend a little more time on composing. You can achieve this miracle by building some checkpoints and teaching activities into your syllabus. As you plan your syllabus for next year, give a thought to working in the composing process. In this post, I will discuss using drafting to improve student writing. The next post will cover low-stakes activities you can assign for homework or for in-class work.
The calendar. Include due dates for topic approvals, due dates for early rough drafts, due dates for final drafts, and due dates for finished work.
Topic approvals. Require a short statement (no more than a paragraph) naming the topic, with a few details relevant to the assignment, such as why it is significant, who the audience is, or what controversies or issues it evokes. If the work is complex or long, you may want to require an annotated bibliography as well. The idea is to get students thinking early, even if briefly, about their work.
Early rough drafts. Ask for a very rough draft of a long paper about a month before it’s due. For a speech, ask for a rough script or sentence outline. Again, the idea is to get even the most reluctant students to at least outline their ideas. They don’t need a formal outline—simply drafting can help most organize. In fact, a better time to outline is often after that first draft is written.
Don’t be afraid of the work early drafts will create for you. First, you’re not going to grade them; instead, make the assignment worth a percentage of the final product as a participation grade, or include it in a homework grade. As long as there is a penalty for not participating, most students will comply.
Because this is a first draft, you needn’t bother about errors in expression or grammar. The point is to explore and flesh out ideas—and you can help by responding to the content, the argument, the logic, and the evidence. Give the drafts a quick read and comment at the end of each about how to develop the content further. If you do mark in the margins, keep comments related to the content. As an alternative to reading them yourself, hold a rough draft workshop in class. (I describe some ways to do that below.)
Final drafts (not to be confused with final version of the product). The final drafts for longer papers or presentations, as I said above, should come about two weeks before the due date for the finished product. Again, no need to give this a letter grade, but do make it worth students’ while to participate. On these drafts, focus on expression as well as content, but still don’t mark every error. Point out a few representative errors, or just tell the student work needs to be done on correctness or spelling or punctuation and that he or she should attend to that. This is a good time to mention the writing center. We can help with grammar and mechanics, but we can also help with that straying thesis or jumbled organization, too. We are even pretty good at pointing out gaps in the logic.
If you cannot review the drafts yourself, make sure you train your assistants using some sample papers. Peer response can also work well at this stage, but it works better if you have trained your students to respond, just as you would train graders. One of the best ways to do this to is devote a class (or two) to practice If you use a rubric to grade the papers, use it for the practice and the workshop. If you don’t, create a worksheet with some open-ended questions you want students to answer about each other’s work, such as:
Identify and evaluate the thesis. Does it seem reasonable in scope and interesting enough to engage the audience?
What is the strongest evidence to support the thesis? The weakest? Any suggestions for improving the evidence or the thesis?
Did anything in the content confuse you? Was anything particularly clear or compelling?
Questions should focus on the structure or generic conventions for type of paper and audience being addressed. Notice anything that requires editing or identifying errors is not included. Many students do this poorly, thus losing their peers’ confidence. They will do best commenting on things you have discussed and practiced as a class.
Hold a practice response session to help students get the knack of commenting. Use a common paper, and ask everyone to rate it (or answer the questions). Either as a whole class or in small groups, have them compare and discuss their answers and consider their differences. If you are working with small groups, ask each group to decide on a common rating or create a group comment on what needs to be done to improve the paper. Then have each group report their ideas to the class, and try to come to a full-class consensus on a response. Although complete consensus may be impossible, at least the most reasonable alternatives should be discussed. If you are not working with groups, have individuals share their responses, and then come to full-class consensus.
When you intervene in the composing process by requiring early work and revision, students learn that writing and speaking, done well, require an investment of time and energy. That’s a valuable lesson.