Blogs vs. Term Papers
The format — designed to force students to produce a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to a lot of like an exercise in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a minor key.
Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how precisely better to teach writing in the era that is digital.
“This mechanistic writing is a proper disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails from the form in her own new book, “Now The truth is It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”
“As a writer, it offends me deeply.”
Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog and the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. In place of writing a term that is quarterly, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog about the issues and readings they truly are studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.
She’s in good company. Across the country, blog writing has grown to become a basic requirement in sets from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree using the transformation? Have you thought to replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that offers the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical link with contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?
Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to instruct key facets of thinking and writing. They argue that the format that is old less about how exactly Sherman got to the ocean and more about how precisely the writer organized the points, fashioned an argument, showed grasp of substance and evidence of its origin. Its rigidity was punishment that is n’t pedagogy.
Their reductio ad absurdum: why not just bypass the blog, too, and move directly on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?
“Writing term papers is a art that is dying but those that do write them have a dramatic leg up with regards to critical thinking, argumentation as well as the sort of expression required not only in college, however in the task market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist when it comes to American School Board Journal and founder associated with the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It doesn’t mean there blogs that are aren’t interesting. But nobody would conflate writing that is interesting premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”
The National Survey of Student Engagement unearthed that last year, 82 percent of first-year college students and much more than 1 / 2 of seniors weren’t asked to complete a paper that is single of pages or maybe more, even though the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.
The definition of paper happens to be falling from favor for a while. A research in 2002 estimated that about 80 percent of twelfth grade students were not asked to create a past history term paper of more than 15 pages. William H. Fitzhugh, the study’s author and founder for the Concord Review, a journal that publishes twelfth grade students’ research papers, says that, more broadly, educators shy far from rigorous academic writing, giving students the relative ease of writing short essays. He argues that the main problem is that teachers are asking students to read less, which means less substance — whether historical, political or literary — to focus a phrase paper on.
He proposes what he calls the “page per year” solution: in first grade, a one-page paper using one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.
The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more conventional types of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from your blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and essay that is audio.
“We’re at a crux right now of where we must figure out as teachers what the main old literacy is worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re racking your brains on how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging most abundant in exciting and promising new literacies.”
Professor Lunsford has collected 16,000 writing samples from 189 Stanford students from 2001 to 2007, and it is studying how their writing abilities and passions evolved as blogs along with other multimedia tools crept into their lives and classrooms. She’s also solicited student feedback about their experiences.
Her conclusion is that students feel far more impassioned by the literacy that is new. They love writing for an audience, engaging along with it. They feel as if they do so only to produce a grade if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as.
So Professor Lunsford is playing to student passions. Her writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed over the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first couple of weeks. Once that’s done, they normally use the ideas with it to build blogs, Web sites, and PowerPoint and audio and presentations that are oral. The students often find their ideas far more crystallized after expressing these with new media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays.
“What I’m asking myself is, ‘Will we must keep carefully the 15-page paper forever or move directly to this new way?’ ” she says. “Stanford’s writing program won’t be making that change right away, since our students still seem to take advantage of learning how to present their research findings both in traditional print and new media.”
As Professor Lunsford illustrates, deciding to educate using either blogs or term papers is something of a opposition that is false. Teachers may use both. And blogs, a platform that seems to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, can certainly be well crafted and meticulously researched. The debate is not a false one: while some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic at the same time.
“I became basically kicked out of the program that is writing thinking that was more important than writing a five-paragraph essay,” she says. “I’m not against discipline. I’m not certain that writing a essay that is five-paragraph discipline a great deal as standardization. It’s a formula, but writing that is good with formulas, and changes formulas.”
Today, she attempts to keep herself grounded when you look at the experiences of a range of students by tutoring at a residential district college. Recently, one student essay writer she tutors was given an assignment with prescribed sentence length and structure that is rigid. Him to follow all the rules,” she says“ I urged. “If he’d done it my way, I don’t know he’d have passed the class.
“The sad thing is, he’s now convinced there is brilliance when you look at the art world, brilliance within the multimedia world, brilliance in the music world and that writing is boring,” Professor Davidson says. “I hated teaching him bad writing.”
Matt Richtel, a reporter at The Times, writes often about information technology within the classroom.
a form of this short article appears on the net on January 22, 2012, on Page ED28 of Education Life with the headline: Term Paper Blogging. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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