by Hu Zhiwen

I have taught several literature courses in which writing is a very important part. Students are required to do various kinds of writing assignments. When designing these assignments, I always stick to a principle: ideas come first in writing.

I have been teaching English writing to Chinese students back in China. These students whose first language is not English tended to blame their lack of proficiency for their failure in developing good writing skills. However, I gradually realized that it was not that they didn’t have enough knowledge of the English language, but they seemed to have nothing to say about certain topics. So, I gave them some topics that they might find interesting, for example, K-pop. It turned out that they were able to write a lot. Moreover, in spite of some grammar mistakes, their writing was actually very good. So, every time I gave them a topic, I would first give them some readings that were related to the topic. In this way, they had enough knowledge of the topic and started to develop their ideas. It turned out to be very effective, and the students gradually realized that they were able to produce good writing despite the limitation of their English proficiency.

I brought this principle into my literature classes when I started to teach literature courses at UGA. It is always risky to put all the stake on the final paper and expect students to turn in something very profound and interesting. In consequence, I usually give scaffolded assignments to develop their ideas from the very beginning of the semester. One of the methods that I find very useful is asking students to keep a reading journal. They need to have entries in the journal every week, but they are very low-stakes assignments that I only browse through and grade for completion. However, according to previous experiences, students always had very interesting ideas in response to their reading materials. Although such ideas were very sketchy and immature, they kept developing them in other journal entries throughout the semester as they accumulated more knowledge from the readings. As a result, I didn’t usually have to help them find a topic for their final paper because they tended to already have many ideas on their mind. In the end, most of their final papers were very well developed in terms of ideas, and I only need to give suggestions on some minor issues like structural arrangement and sentence-level mistakes.

As long as they have what they want to write and enough materials at hand, they are usually able to turn in a good paper.

Another method that I frequently use is the submission of an outline and annotated bibliography. I usually ask students to come up with an outline that specifies their thesis, main claims and sources that they are going to use. This method is very traditional, but I tend to focus more on the specificity of their ideas and knowledge. When giving feedback to their outlines, I often list quite a few questions concerning the parts of the ideas that are still vague and need to be developed. Students usually find they get lost when they are unable to articulate a certain point on the outline. I often use scaffolding questions to guide them towards more research and clarification. Through accumulating more knowledge on their topics, they tend to be able to gradually articulate more complex ideas. They have to submit another version of the outline to me with most of the questions answered and more relevant items added to the bibliography. In this way, I can scaffold the development of their ideas. When they get the feedback from my second-revision of their outline, they are pretty much sure about how to develop their ideas in their papers.

Through the previous two methods that I mentioned, I want to demonstrate how my idea-first principle can be applied to teaching writing. Whether it is the long-term development of ideas through journal entry and assignment reading or short-term intensive guided research, students are prepared for the ideas and knowledge needed to write a good paper. As long as they have what they want to write and enough materials at hand, they are usually able to turn in a good paper.