Writing for Awareness: A Syllabus Rationale for English 114B

As I reflect back on my experiences teaching English 114A, and prepare my syllabus for
teaching English 114B, I find that I have decided upon three lesser goals for next semester in the
hopes of reaching my overarching goal for the class: getting my students to write with
awareness. The first goal is that I want my students to write more. For English 114A, my
students did a lot of writing in a variety of genres essay, narrative, dialogue, comic strip, and
freewrite but I feel that even more writing is necessary for them to become better writers.
When I say more writing, however, I do not necessarily mean more graded writing. I agree with
Peter Elbows sentiment that we should do as little ranking and grading as possible because they
are never fair and they undermine learning and teaching (Elbow, in Johnson 405). I made
extensive use of freewrites and other forms of low-stakes writing in my English 114A class, and
intend to continue doing so with my English 114B class. This time, though, even larger
assignments, such as the research writing for my Project Web, or the larger narrative for Project
Space(d OUT!), will remain ungraded until the very end of class, when students finally turn in
their e-portfolios. I want to practice more of what Peter Elbow termed as evaluation a more
careful, more discriminating, fairer mode of assessment that involves feedback and working
together with my students to revise their writing (Elbow, in Johnson 405). I do not want them to
feel like their entire purpose in the class, in my eyes, is for them to all get As my goal for my
students is for them to ultimately become critically-aware, socially-conscious writers who
engage with writing in the real world.
In order to make this happen, Im going to have my class based around the idea of
personal responsibility. The Credit/No Credit system Ill use for most assignments in my class
will not be without any form of judgment. When my students submit their writing to me for

evaluation, I want it to be the best writing that they can do, and if I feel that they havent tried, I
will return back their writing and tell them to take another crack at it. This isnt to say that Ill
refuse to give them credit how would that convince the students that they were writing in a
low-stakes environment? Instead, I will have writing assignments nominally due on Monday, but
then will provide my students the rest of the week (until Friday) to continue revising until they
present their work to me for feedback (and credit). All of this writing, of course, will be eligible
for revision and inclusion in their final e-portfolio, which will be the only aspect of class I will
be giving a letter grade.
My hope is that by increasing the amount of low-stakes writing I offer in my class, I can
address the concern voiced by Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak in
their book Writing Across Contexts that students are less likely to develop problem-exploring
dispositions because the institutional habitus rewards only students answer-getting practices,
which practices exclude awareness (Yancey et al 11). I dont want my students writing their
assignments worrying if they are right. I would rather have them writing their assignments and
worrying if theyre saying anything important (and to whom theyre saying it). To encourage an
approach to writing that includes awareness, I will continue to make the ridiculous amount of
comments I have been making on student texts, but I will try even harder to move away from the
editing-based comments that I have occasionally made in the past. The feedback I want to give is
the feedback that focuses on global issues in writing, like those emphasized by Julie NeffLippman: thesis or argument, appropriate development and analysis of the evidence,
organization, appropriateness of tone, and attention to audience and purpose (Neff-Lippman, in
Clark 155). I want my students to see my feedback on their papers, which will be joined
frequently by feedback from their fellow classmates, less as do what I say commands, and
more as deictic signs that point to areas that they could further explore or revise. I believe, like

Julie Neff-Lippman, that focusing on the big issues helps ensure that students ideas are being
taken seriously (Neff-Lippman, in Clark 155), and this can lead students to seeing their writing
as situated in a greater context than the writing classroom alone. I want my students to be aware
of the role of writing in the greater world around them, and this idea actually leads into the next
lesser goal I have for my English 114B class.
Writing more wouldnt be of much help to my students unless the act is accompanied by
my second goal having my students write in particular contexts. As a writer myself, I know
how important it is for students to see their writing in action and to feel that what theyre writing
is somehow contributing to a larger conversation. I also know how important it is for students to
write in areas that they are interested in writing about. In her discussion of James Adams
Conceptual Blockbusting (1974), Irene Clark noted that one of the common problems for
students generating ideas for a paper is that students are often asked to write about topics in
which they have little interest; their motivation lies only in the grade they hope to receive (Clark
56). To combat this disinterestedness, and further my overall goal of students showing awareness
in their writing, I will be assigning more writing assignments that have strong contextual
elements to their creation. For instance, I will have numerous smaller writing activities
throughout the semester based around the writing assignments my students will encounter in
their particular majors. As Irene Clark states in her chapter on writing processes from Concepts
in Composition (2rd), in order for students to engage with a topic, it is useful for them to
consider what personal involvement they might have with it (Clark 13). What better way is
there for me to show my students their personal involvement in writing than by having them
engage in writing activities taken straight from their future courses? It is true that this
arrangement may be difficult because of time constraints - Ill have to go around to different
departments, asking for assignments or genres that students in that major will encounter but I

feel that this activity will help my class manage the balance between it being a service course
and a course in the English department.
Even though English 114B is a course that services students whose activities may lie
entirely outside of the English department, do not believe that my class will be focused solely on
writing at the expense of reading (a key component of all majors). I agree with Ellen Carillos
statement in Securing a Place for Reading in Composition that both practices of reading and
writing involve the construction or composition of meaning (Carillo 5). For my students to
see the meaning that is generated by their own written texts, they must read the texts of others to
see how audiences construct meaning (and how authorial intent is not always front and center).
They must come to discover that reading is a deliberate intellectual practice that helps us make
sense of interpret that which surrounds us (Carillo 6), and not a passive act where their
readers will intuitively understand their implied meaning. To assist my students in these
discoveries, my class will actively engage with reading in three different areas reading the
work of their peers, reading academic sources, and reading popular texts.
I would like to focus now on that final area of reading, popular texts, as this is the area
often frowned upon by first-year composition course instructors when it is perceived as
something coming directly out of the FYC class association with the English department. My
selection of popular texts for the class has not been entirely finalized, but there are two texts that
stand out as the primary texts of the course: Douglas Adams Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,
and the various songs from the hip-hop Broadway musical Hamilton. I will admit that these are
irregular texts for a first-year composition course, especially considering that Hamilton will be
the focus of Project (Con)Text, and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy will be the basis of Project
Space(d OUT!). However, these two texts will ensure that my students do not focus on reading
as a noun rather than on reading as a verb, as a practice or process (Carillo 7). We will look at

the songs in Hamilton through various readings reading for modern context, reading for
historical information, reading for the physical experience of spoken language (and verse) in
the hope that my students will then create various texts that derive from these types of reading
music reviews, biography, and songs/poems (what can I say the creative writer is alive and
strong within me). When we approach the works of Douglas Adams, we will read the text to see
how the everyday is represented in his work, how science fiction can take abstraction and
make it meaningful, and how authors can continue on the works of other authors by utilizing
their knowledge of audience, voice, and tone (as Eoin Colfer did with And Another Thing).
From these readings, my students will go on to create their own work of science fiction, which
looks at the everyday in their own lives, and then take it a step further by continuing on the story
of one of their classmates. While these writing activities are creative, and may appear at first to
fail to meet the demands of a first-year composition course aimed at training students to survive
academic writing, they still accomplish the various goals set by Douglas Hesse for his own FYC
course: understanding why a text exists, understanding how writings are made of different
source materials, understanding that the context of publication determines many characteristics
of a text, and having my students demonstrate the previous three in their own writing (Hesse
52-54).
Just as the readings that my students will be doing are a little different, so too will the
writing assignments that I give my students be different. This plays into my final lesser goal for
the class getting my students to write differently. The greatest challenge I found with my
students in English 114A was their reliance upon prior knowledge that led to overly restrictive
forms in their writing. To put it more succinctly how the heck can I get my students to stop
writing 5-paragraph essays? Not only are these essays situated in what I refer to as the academic
void, the home of all meaningless writing, they also represent the blocking my students are

experiencing because of the strict enforcement of prescriptive grammar and structure rules that
came out of their development as high school writers. Peter Elbow notes, The problem is that
these rules seem to be followed as though they were algorithms, absolute dicta, rather than the
loose heuristics that they were intended to be (Elbow, in Johnson 158). In order to break my
students from relying on the rules they took away from high school, I will devise assignments
that will not allow them to fall back upon any traditional writing forms in their entirety. For
example, when the students write their narratives for Project Space(d OUT!), they will not be
able to fall back upon the traditional form of the personal narrative because of the oddities Ill
include in the writing prompt using elements of science fiction, including instances of
everyday activity, and incorporating the story of their peers in telling the full story. When writing
in English 114B, my students will have the freedom to explore multiple forms of writing within
the same project (and sometimes the same prompt), all in the hopes that theyll abandon their
reliance upon the tried (and untrue) form of the 5-paragraph essay.
To conclude this syllabus rationale, I would like to touch upon two topics that are of
central importance to my class, and will be a primary focus for most of the writing my students
will do inside, and outside, of the classroom: audience and voice. This is not to say that I will be
dictatorial about my students usage of audience in all their writing I do agree with Peter Elbow
that we can teach students to notice when audience awareness is getting in their way and
when this happens, consciously to put aside the needs of the reader for a while (Elbow, in
Johnson 175). However, I do not want my students to forget that writing situated in the real
world, writing done in context, is done for an audience that is determined by, and determines,
the writing itself. Going back to that idea of the 5-paragraph essay, I want my students to see
how such writing is absent of an audience, and in that way, it is often absent of context and,
ultimately, any meaningful purpose.

I also want my class to see how different audiences change the rhetorical moves we are
able to use, especially when it comes to their language. I am a strong proponent of codemeshing, as described by Vershawn Ashanti Young and his fellow writers in Other Peoples
English. I want students to use their own languages, since we not only use language to tell
people things, but also to tell people who we are (Young 25). Code-meshing is not only another
way to get students involved in their writing, but it is also a way for students to see how the
audience of their work affects how they write. In my class, for example, students will become
familiar with my identity and pedagogy as a teacher theyll hear my crazy stories, read some of
my own work, and realize that they are free to write in whatever form they choose with whatever
language they choose, as long as it fits the context. However, well also explore what happens
when we choose to use our own languages in writing done for other contexts, such as a science
class or a business letter, and how that changes the perception of the writing and the writer.
By allowing my students to use their own languages in their writing, I am also inviting
my students to use their own voices. I understand that voice is a complicated term, one that
Ian Barnard was wary of because the demands for authenticity that come along with the
concept of voice can also be used to police identity, demonize hybridity, or justify ethnic
cleaning (Barnard 69). My advocacy for encouraging students to use their voice, though,
comes from my own personal experiences in my English 114A class. One of my students was
having a difficult time writing an argumentative essay on why Beyonc Knowles should be
elected president. To help her along, I suggested she forget the word essay, focus on writing an
argument instead, and let loose her own voice in the text to give it more passion. My student
had never been given the opportunity to use her voice before in writing, and she took to it with
delight. Not only did her argument turn out to be one of the most well-written (as well as
entertaining) arguments that I read, but the reflection she wrote for me at the end of class

resounded with her voice in celebration, and showed a beautiful blend of poetry, passion, and
personal narrative.
If that experience taught me anything, it is that all of my students can become great
writers, if only given the chance to do so. My hope is that by organizing my class to focus on
writing more, writing in context, and writing differently, I will be able to unleash the inner writer
in all of my students, leading to better writing in all forms and genres (not just academic essays).
Ultimately, this is a task which will not only benefit them, but benefit me as well because
really, who wants to read boring writing?