I believe that effective writing emerges when we write on topics that genuinely interest us and then continually revise, expand, and reconsider that writing; therefore, these practices are central to the writing courses I teach. By revising, expanding, and reconsidering what they write, students become better writers not only through repeated practice, but also through the opportunity to think more deeply about the issues with which they are engaging.
In the classroom itself, I want to foster a positive writing environment in which students are empowered to think deeply and write what they want—in the language that they want—across a variety of genres. This is in part based on my professional experience in marketing, journalism, and editing, which has inspired an appreciation for the codemeshed, genre-fluid nature of modern business writing. The purpose of writing instruction in my classroom is not to permanently exchange one genre of writing for another, or to suppress one form of English for another, but rather to guide students towards a realization of when and how to use various genres and Englishes—including digital speak and dialects—to communicate clearly with their audiences.
Accordingly, a syllabus built around multimedia and digital writing goes hand-in-hand with this goal; this is a core tenet of my teaching philosophy. As a copywriter and marketer, I was expected to write in a variety of genres across many different media—video and radio scripts, speeches, emails, brochures, long-form articles. Through this diversity, I engaged with different conventions of style, language and grammar, and by replicating this experience in the classroom I hope to prepare students for success beyond the academy. As an example of this approach, students in my WRD 110 first-year writing course completed a semester-long project to research and author a Wikipedia page. Prior to publishing their final Wikipedia edits, students completed a series of scaffolded projects that included a draft of the proposed edits, a presentation of their research, a visual outline of their work, and a traditional essay which evaluated the way we use Wikipedia in the modern world. This design exposes students to diverse genres and mediums of communication—encyclopedia, speech, visual design, rhetorical analysis—while still supporting larger pedagogical goals of media literacy and revision-based writing.
To that end, I believe that any writing-centered course should provide students with built-in opportunities for revision, reflection, and conversations about how they use language. This is because students’ best, most engaged writing is only possible through the process of revision over an extended period of time. I’ve experienced this in my own studies as a graduate student:, my most effective seminar paper began its life as a midterm paper. Because I was afforded the opportunity to revisit that initial paper several weeks later in the semester, I was able to revise and expand what I had already written and use the most salient parts as a jumping off point for new intellectual directions. The several week gap between the submission of that midterm paper and the drafting of the seminar paper was an essential part of this process because the passage of time is a powerful problem solving tool and catalyst for creative thinking. While many students are accustomed to quickly revising a document prior to submission, I structure courses around portfolio-style projects that provide frequent writing check-ins and multiple opportunities to revise previous work.
