by Samantha Cauthorn
After completing my first semester as a WIP teaching assistant and my third semester as a TA involved in coaching high-stakes writing assignments, I thought it would be useful to reflect upon my own experience in this discursive space. When thinking about what to blog about I was initially drawn towards picking out a common technical problem in students’ writing, but after grading my student’s final drafts for their high-stakes assignments I thought it would be useful to share what worked and what needs improvement. The biggest issues for students centered around two requisite components for good academic writing:
1. The ability to frame concise, argumentative research questions
2. The kinds of sources and standards that are associated with good academic writing.
These two issues are intimately related as many teachers and their teaching assistants know. Students need to be able to engage rhetorically with their sources in order to narrow their research questions down to something that they can realistically respond to. In acknowledging and playing on the rhetorical nature of writing in academia I would like to examine the second issue concerning sourcing and citations first.
Too often students do not settle on sources early in the research process. Students, when given the freedom to craft their research papers (in this case, in Music History), tend to frame their topic before delving into the research process. This practice is common in writing pedagogy but after seeing the results of my students I would like to share a more nuanced view of what I think would work better. In framing their topics before the research process, students are effectively looking for information that corresponds to their research question rather than engaging with the body of scholarship out there. What follows from here is typical in terms of sourcing: lots of websites rather than journal articles, database definitions instead of primary sources, and a general straying away from primary sources. Students who picked their topics due to their scholarly historical interests, in my opinion, were able to create more effective research questions because they read primary sources for their projects. This foundation of primary sources gave students roots from which they could grow their nuanced observations.
Like a tree, students need their roots to grow as writers. The students who crafted less than effective research topics were the same students who did not engage with the textbook in their lower-stakes writing assignments. While these lower-stakes writing assignments engaged with their topical questions, it was evident in students’ writing who engaged with the questions and those who merely summarized (and paraphrased) historical information. This same phenomenon occurred in the high-stakes research paper and highlighted for me the utility and importance of annotated bibliographies early on in the research process. As a teaching assistant, I did not appreciate this kind of document for what it could tell me about students’ research process and their engagement. In the future, I would like to place this assignment as close to the beginning of the semester as possible and create a more stringent protocol as to the types of sources that should be used. The criteria would be modified to only allow primary sources, book(s) (chapters), and journal articles. The annotations for the bibliography would be closer to 400-500 words rather than a few sentences. This will give the teacher greater clarity for where students are in the process and if they are engaged in their sources. If one or two of these do not work out in the long run it should be stressed that it is okay. It should be emphasized that students formulate their research questions after this exercise.
Simply communicating to students the basic “they say, I say…” argumentative structure in undergraduate writing is not enough.[1] The first clause of their argument “they say” needs discursive engagement from the student, something that I believe can be seen in an expanded annotated bibliography assignment earlier on in the semester. In considering syllabi and course assignment dates, I would like to emphasize the bibliography since this is much earlier on in the process and before students write their rough drafts. Once students write their rough drafts, in my experience, they do not change their argumentation or engagement with primary sources. After this assignment, most students effectively edit and add more information to augment what they already have. I went to great lengths in giving students feedback on their rough and final drafts but believe that feedback was already hampered by where they were in their writing process. Yes, a few students did respond well to my feedback, but I observed that most students were anxious about changing their approaches. The students who were most effective early on in the research process, those who stuck to primary sources (including the textbook), were the most likely to curate a nuanced and informative response to the “they say.”
[1] Graff, Gerald. They Say I Say, 2006.
Samantha Cauthorn is a 2021–22 WIP TA for the music.