Thread by @biblioracle

The origins of The Writer's Practice are as a self-help book with an audience of one: Me. I wanted to see if I could have students write in situations similar to which I do my own best work. School was not letting them do this, IMO.

I had exhausted my limits with prescriptive instruction. I thought They Say/I Say would finally unleash my students into the world of ideas so they could wrestle with interesting things in interesting ways. It didn't work. What they experienced with that book didn't transfer.

I needed a framework in which student writers could practice being "writers" not "students" or even "scholars." They needed to practice their thinking. Prescription and templates were short-circuiting that. They needed to work on making choices as writers do and must.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the writing challenges I faced in my life and how I learned to navigate them. This brought me back to 3rd grade and Mrs. Goldman who asked my class to write instructions for a PB&J sandwich.

As I tried to make my sandwich according to my own instructions (failing badly). I had an epiphany - writing has a purpose and an audience. I was in 3rd grade. My first-year college students had only ever written to a teacher or a disembodied assessor. That would end, immediately

From then on, all assignments would have a genuine audience. That was a big help, but I was still wedded to prescriptive methods to get students to achieve their objectives. I was afraid of them struggling because it would harm their grades. Epiphany 2: The struggle is the point.

Seeing the struggle as the point allowed me to reconcile the assignments I'd always given as "experiences," where the point is not to get a good grade on the artifact, but to learn things during the process. By navigating difficulties, students would learn.

For those who've had a chance to look at The Writer's Practice, you may notice how many traditional assignment things I leave out, e.g., word counts, genre, grading criteria, etc... Every experience starts with a question followed by a process which maximizes the challenge.

Whereas I used to offer tips and cautions and read drafts and offer prescriptions, I was now answering questions with questions that sent students back into the process. No more smoothing potholes. They would drive through or around them, learning the consequences of their choice

To teach argument, rather than going over ethos, pathos, logos, quizzing on logical fallacies, I simply make students argue. This is the first experience in the argument unit, The Impossible Argument: Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich? (Screenshots below)

The reflection and remix aspects are key here. The do the initial no sourcing argument in class, than go research between periods and come back re-armed for battle. They make every rhetorical move you can imagine intuitively once armed with their sources. I "teach" nothing.

After this, I can transition students to any argument they're interested in by pointing back to the impossible argument. "Do that." I say, and they get it. As the arguments get more sophisticated they still struggle, but they know what they're trying to achieve, zero prescription

I get pushback because admittedly the work is not obviously academic or scholarly, but the ways students are thinking translate to academic and scholarly work. They are better prepared for those challenges than when I was mired in only scholarly forms.

My hope is that The Writer's Practice will be useful for people like me who are simply dissatisfied with what we ask students to do and how we ask them to do it. Please buy and use the book in your classes. Let students explore the entirety of its contents, but...

I also want instructors to know that this is something anyone can make for themselves. I have no degreed background in rhet-comp. I have an MFA in creative writing. My approach was developed through reflection and iteration. There's nothing magical about it.

So, yes, please buy The Writer's Practice, consider it as your class text. Some of you may find it liberating. Indie stores are the best and we want to support them. indiebound.org/book/978014313…

But I know some are also locked into Prime, so you know where this link leads. amazon.com/Writers-Practi…