I establish one writing assignment as the largest project of the semester. I force my kids to take a second look at their work, and then a third look. I select certain areas of their argument where I require them to elaborate. Regardless of the quality of their expression skills, they all do three drafts. Yes, that's right. Even if they have the ability to express themselves eloquently, I require them to look again at their work and strive to improve it, and then do so again.
Those kids who have hunted the web and stolen thoughts of others get their just desserts in my class; I'll come to that later. But there's another category of kid to consider first: Those who have memorized popular, shallow patterns of thinking and expression.
This experience with a student will serve to illustrate: She was, and I trust, still is, an extremely bright young lady. She was also cheerful and energetic. She had a good ear for language and used it to string familiar, high-toned phrases together. She was a verbal stylist, not much of an independent thinker, and not really a writer. She didn't reflect upon a situation and compose her own thoughts; she shopped through her inventory of stored up sound bites, threaded them together, and hit a mental "print" button.
Since she'd had little practice at composing her own thoughts, she could not control what she was saying, but she could certainly put phrases and clauses together. Without reading carefully, an instructor might suppose she'd simply missed a few transition elements and neglected to attend to a couple of details on her way through an otherwise acceptable essay.
I obtained a first draft from her and discerned in it a certain amount of passion and interest, but little else beyond a great many deeply prejudiced opinions, some of which contradicted one another.
During one of my scheduled writing workshops, she made it clear that she was not happy about having to do a second draft. Cheerfully challenging me on my methods, she asked, "What exactly do you want from me?"
When I responded by directing her attention to the writing prompt, she retained her smile but became visibly indignant. I asked her to address the requirement to provide examples from our reading to illustrate and support the author's position, and then register either agreement, or in her case, disagreement with the author, and finally, support her opinions with evidence of her own. The student's smile disappeared and never returned.
She did eventually submit a second draft. In it, I encountered tangential thinking. It began rounds of reasoning with specific references to a quote or a general reference to one of the various developments in the required reading, but then it drifted far off topic as it followed various sorts of memorized phraseology whose actual ideas, structure, and logic belonged with entirely different realms. She was selecting events here and there from the story, but she wasn't maintaining attention upon them or seeing them through to their conclusion.
She would begin with an event and/or character, then almost immediately depart into a discussion about politics. She would write, for example, "... of a productive, free society where the free market is allowed to react and respond according to natural trends, a place grounded in real principles, not floundering in a sea of doubt, blah, blah, blah ... ." Again and again she would do this.
Where on Earth did she get this stuff? Sometimes she sounded like a talk show cheerleader. At others, it seemed as though she had gathered and beaten senseless various trite expressions heard on the air, stored them in a personal library of mental zip files, and rearranged them into a political diatribe.
A conversation with her revealed that she hadn't done her reading assignments. I would recount a series of events she'd been assigned to read. I would start with one she'd selected to write about, and then I would ask her to explain the consequences and further developments that followed. "Oh, I guess I didn't really get that part. I don't remember much of what happened there at all," she told me.
When I asked her to read that part over carefully and try writing again, she was baffled. "How do you mean?" she asked.
"Well, for example, look at this chain of events. I'll summarize it for you. It suggests that a choice made by people in this circumstance will produce these consequences. You see?" She nodded. "Now look at your essay. You assert, using your own words, 'it could never be.' I've just shown you that the author emphatically asserts that it could indeed be. What do you think?" I asked.
She said, "I don't get it. Can't I just tell you what I think?"
"Yes, please, tell me what you think. Tell me what you think about what happens here, and about what the author thinks."
"But do I have to write about what's in the story?"
"Yes, you must respond to what's in the story. The author reveals an attitude. Do you think her attitude is justified? Look at the scenario the author develops. Is she convincing? Is she right? Is she wrong? Why do you believe as you do?"
"Can't I just tell you what I think without doing all that? Isn't that the point of the assignment?"
"I'm sorry, but no."
I waited for her to close her mouth. When she did, her lower lip protruded. Her brows narrowed. She became more indignant. I was going to say something to soothe the gathering storm, but she cut in, "That's not fair! It's just my opinion, and I have a right to my opinion."
I continued, "You do have a right, but your thinking, all by itself, is extremely prejudiced."
"I'm not prejudiced."
"Yes, you are, extremely." Her eyes grew wide. I added, "You've made assumptions about this author's ideas without even reading them. That's prejudice."
She was silent now, and I continued, "You've selected a few popular expressions we've all heard in today's political speeches, and you've strung them together, but you haven't demonstrated that you've read and understood what this author thinks, and you haven't even started to answer some of her claims. You go off talking about today's politics a little too fast."
"I still don't get it," she said. "I've always gotten 'A's' from all my other English teachers. I just don't see what you want from me. I'm not going to change my opinions for you."
"I'm not asking you to change your opinions. What I want you to do is start with a good, careful re-reading of this part of the story. Then in your writing, explain what the author is saying about these issues first. Show me you understand. It shouldn't be too hard. I'll do some of it for you, and then you can finish up."
She brightened at that, and we had a pretty good conversation for a while. She was smart, and when I pressed matters, I found that she had good reasons for her opinions. She began explaining herself. I took down some notes for her and helped her to add language and examples when she became stumped. I advised her not to engage in personal attacks against the author. I also showed her how to be more careful about selecting words to specifically address her concerns, instead of imitating some absurd blanket of a phrase that shut out the light and completely halted the thought process. She respected and, I thought, appreciated the attention I was giving her.
"Excellent!" I said, after we'd talked out an early part of the argument. "That's the sort of case you want to build. You're now telling me very clearly why the author's logic doesn't always apply to reality, and you're bringing in evidence to support your own beliefs. Start with this point, and continue doing more of the same throughout your essay. Make sure you demonstrate an understanding of what the author says, and then show why you're right and she's wrong."
She seemed slightly distressed, so I said, "Look, I know you've already done a little work here," - 'Very little,' I thought silently to myself. - I went on after an awkward but necessary pause, during which I waged a private, inner battle between the urge to growl that post script at her and an effort to defeat the temptation to be rude. I don't always win this battle, I confess.)
I added the next part cautiously: "If you want, you can bring in some of the other information you've used. Select developments in our own society to show that your thoughts apply universally. But remember, wherever you disagree with this author, your first responsibility is to reveal what she presents in this book, explain how she arrives at her conclusion, and then tell how she misses the point. Don't make accusations. Don't just say, out of hand, that she has distorted the facts to suit her purposes. Maintain a civil tone. Provide your own examples and explain how they reveal that she is mistaken."
"OK. I see!" She almost smiled.
Here is where all plagiarists get theirs, incidentally. Kids who have copied another essay from somewhere become totally baffled when they're required to take a key element of "their" essay and elaborate upon it. They discover that they can't begin to extend thinking they never did in the first place. And if their moms or their friends (or their friends' moms) did the actual writing, the student's explanation of the requirements to the actual writer become a game of "telephone." Instructions hardly ever translate, and the whole process of revising a plagiarized piece becomes a lesson in itself. (Here is where you have to be forgiving, skirt accusations, and keep offering extra time for kids to start over and do what was expected of them at the beginning.)
But back to the matter of the verbal stylist: Over the next several weeks, I continued to ask how she was doing. She almost smiled many times and said, "Just fine!" She passed the class, but she never did that final draft. Because her writing project was incomplete, she took a 40% on it, and because it was heavily weighted, her overall grade was dismal.
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