Monday January 16, 2023; 8:12 AM EST
- I used to ask students to illustrate and test an idea they chose from one reading against the contents of another reading. Whether they did this well or not so well, they were trying for original analysis when they did this. How do the anecdotes in Reading 2 illustrate what the ideas of Author 1? How does Reading 2 push back against those ideas? Given what you've seen as you've illustrated and tested the ideas from one reading against the content of another, where do you stand on the value of those ideas?#
- That was a classic assignment in the kind of writing course I learned to teach at Rutgers, and in many ways I never stopped making that kind of assignment. But at Iowa we learned how to create other kinds of writing activities. Some were rhetorical, such as adapting an argument you made in your last paper so that it might work well with a new readership, which is a practical kind of assignment: practicing the practical. Other assignments were formal or stylistic, such as writing about an experience in short or long sentences, in balanced or cumulative sentences, in a formal or informal voice, etc. These assignments were often a kind of play with the tools of the writer's craft.#
- Some assignments were conceptual. Write about a time you found yourself at one of life's forks in the road. What were the choices, and what do you think was down each of the paths offered there? Why did you choose left or right? What difference came of that choice.#
- In creative writing, we might practice writing under restrictions. Write a poem that includes a color, the name of an old friend, an aroma, an act of kindness or theft. Writing that assignment would make you think about topics you wouldn't ordinarily write about, and you might surprise yourself doing that.#
- So many ways to practice, so many things to practice, more than I've listed here, if you like that sort of learning. They add up to confidence and fluency, I think, if you keep at it.#