Paragraph Design

Over the past year or so, I've been involved in a redesign of my church's website. About three months ago, we added a professional web designer to the design team. I know, this sounds like an obvious move that was made too late in the process.

My church has an ethos of activating the talents of those in the community, so we were working with the graphic designers, writers, and programmers that we had. All of us are good at what we do, even getting paid to do that work in other contexts, but we'd never done work quite like this site redesign before.

When the professional web designer moved to Tucson and joined our church, he acted as a catalyst. His expertise plus some deadlines on the part of our resident programmer (who is in grad school at the UofA) zoomed us along. The site is now foundationally complete, and we're taking it live this week.

One point in the design process made me think specifically about the role of the professional designer who has an eye for each element in the design and how that connects to what I do in teaching writing. It all had to do with capital letters.

The design used headers on each page in all-caps. When we received the code for the design and began implementing each piece, I suggested changing those to title casing (That Means Like This) instead. In my world, the world of words on paper, THIS LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE YELLING AT SOMEONE, and I didn't want that, so we switched THIS to This. I didn't think anything of it once we did so and went on to other updates.

When the pro jumped back into the conversation, he explained why THIS should remain as THIS and not switch to This. Basically, his argument boiled down to viewing the header as a design element: not a word in itself, but a "readable shape" that tells people where they are in the hierarchy of information without them even needing to read the word. That means, before they read THEOLOGY, they see a readable rectangle at the top of the page that orients them to be able to easily understand the info.

I know, it may not seem like a big deal, all-caps or not, but I saw the function in action. After the pro explained the purpose of uppercasing the headers, I went back to look at the site. He was right. The title casing headers blended right into the other text on the page (now that we had more text on the pages, it was easier to see). There was no direction from the design, no nail to hang the picture on, I suppose.

I told him that I understood what he meant and we switched the headers back to all-caps. I didn't elaborate on my understanding all that much because we had other work to do, but I saw his perspective, his world of elements of design. Each piece played a part in directing users to receive info in some way or another. The choices he made were not shots in the dark. He knew why they were there.

I related this perspective back to my world of words on paper, and came up with this: paragraph design. Students need to know more about this. I've had a theory for awhile that teaching students how to construct paragraphs is a tipping point* in their writing education, and now I think they may need to think more about how to design and paragraph than construct one.

The switch from construct to design is more about how they view the elements**. Instead of constructing with concrete building blocks that are difficult or nearly impossible to change after they are in place, they are working with more fluid design elements that can always be assessed terms of playing their part in communication.



In a Writing 100 class once, I played the intro from Stranger Than Fiction to show the students how the graphic interface represents how this particular man views his world. Then I showed them an academic essay with Points highlighted in pinks, Illustration highlighted in yellow, and Explanation highlighted in green to show them how their teachers view their essays. I wanted them to see that their instructors had a particular way of viewing their writing. As Harold Crick's calculations showed up in his head as he moved about his world, certain pieces of their essays stood out in certain ways when their teachers saw their essays.

This was the first foray into exploring the design of a paper, but I didn't know it was exploring the design. This is something I'm going to keep exploring. I think it's important to not only look at what we are teaching, as in certain concepts that always come up in our courses, but to look at how we are enabling students to work with those concepts. I want a student to not only know that their paragraph needs to begin with a claim***, but how to choose the words to make that first sentence an effective claim. To design that sentence to play its part in what the paragraph is communicating. When students start to do that, they will think about what needs to be in that sentence so others can understand the paragraph instead of just trying to write a good sentence that makes sense to them.

I don't know where this is going to go, but that's often where I have the most fun with ideas.

*I take this term from Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book about trends and use it in a sense that when they understand how to construct a paragraph properly and it's place within the context of an entire academic essay, they will go from being unable to write an academic essay to being able to write an academic essay. It's not quite his usage, but I mean that they tip from No to Yes.

**I also think there may be some cultural capital, some element of uplifting the student from "student writer who thinks they are terrible at writing" to a fresh role as a designer. Designers are cool. Designers get movies made about them. Writers are communicators, and the kind of writing we ask students writers to produce requires that they take on the role of the expert. Many of them don't feel like experts, so their writing reflects the shyness or weakness they are operating out of. Anything we can do as educators to change that is worth their time.

***I used Point, Illustration, and Explanation earlier, but those are often referred to as Claim, Evidence, and Explanation on my campus. Either way works for me.

It's Not Me, It's You

One of the teachers here at Desert Vista assigns a persuasive letter as her third essay in Writing 100 every semester. This semester's crop of essay topics has been the best I've seen. Instead of students trying to get the State of Arizona to completely overhaul their education system or convincing the government to change laws, these students picked accomplishable goals: Dad, stop smoking; downstairs neighbors, stop filing all those complaints; suitor, look elsewhere for romantic involvement; teacher, amend your assignments; etc.

These are manageable requests, and working with these students has generally centered on two ideas:

1. Me, Me, Me
The students know what they want. Knowing what they want is the first hurdle they overcome. And the first obstacle they face. It's what the student wants, so their rhetoric focuses on how this change will meet their needs. They pretty much stop right there. They don't realize that while the request they make originates in a need they have, the action will take place on the other side of the fence, so they need to go over there and see it from that person's perspective.

2. You, You, You
What they need to do is think about who they are persuading and what their idea involves for that person.

Instead of presenting tons of medical information to get your father to stop smoking, think about why your father smokes in the first place. What if he doesn't care so much about his health, but cares more about appearing manly because he started smoking on a ranch as a preteen because his father let him? Data about lung cancer may not hit the bullseye.

Instead of asking your neighbors one floor down to "put yourselves in my shoes," you need to slip into theirs. They complain about the noise your two-year-old makes at ten o'clock at night because they want to go to bed. If you want them to stop filing complaints, explain your situation (why is that kid up at 10:00pm?), explain what you'll do to try and be quieter, and maybe go so far as to invite them up for a meal so they will think about how wonderful you and your family are instead of curse you and call the apartment office the next time they hear stomp stomp stomp when they are trying to fall sleep.

Instead of pointing out how much of an idiot he is, lay out the differences between what you want and what the guy who keeps asking you out wants in a relationship. Be objective. Sure, he wants to be a drug dealer and you think basing your life on illegal crime is a bad idea, but he's not going to change if you tell him he's stupid. Take the emotion away for a bit and present your case rationally. You want security. Comfort. Not men with guns. Maybe he'll see that getting a real job isn't so bad, especially if he wants to date a girl.

Instead of asking your teacher to rework her entire semester's worth of assignments to exclude personal details, think about why she set it up that way (hint: you already know yourself and don't have to do research in a non-research class) and how much work would be involved in crafting an entirely new class. Then think beyond your desire to not talk about your bad memories and examine why focusing on other things might help more people learn to write. Oh, and give her some ideas about what you would be willing to write about. You don't want to appear "like [you] don't want to participate." Help her out and think about what she's trying to accomplish: getting you to write essays without sinking you into deep research.


These are interesting conversations. The students don't realize they are focusing solely on their own needs. Or they don't realize they are using broad arguments that don't necessarily apply to their audience. Bringing it up changes their papers from a general repetition of their basic premise to specific thoughts aimed at actually getting something done.

Keep Calm and Carry On

It's the time of year when people start freaking out because big projects and final papers are due. I shared this image with a particularly stressed student today. She's a non-traditional student of the sort who combines go-getter-ness with I'm-gonna-make-something-of-my-life-ocity, so everything must must must be perfect.

In reality, perfect doesn't happen all the time. Deadlines come, things are handed in, the semester marches on, and so should she.

Evolution as It Pertains to Introductions

I've noticed myself repeatedly saying something new about introductions lately. It's the natural evolution of my usual advice.

My usual advice on intros: Wait.Work on the body paragraphs. Know what you have to say first. It's okay to work on the middle before the beginning.

See, people jump in and write their intro first because it's the first part of their paper. They jump in without knowing what they have to say. They just know that they need to get this paper done, so logically start at the beginning and try to work from there.

The problem, as I said, is that they don't know what they have to say. Thus, the evolution.

The evolution in my advice on intros: Your intro should introduce your paper, not the general topic you're working with.

Student writers sit down with a blank Word document and they start generally writing about whatever it is that they are supposed to be writing about. They make broad statements that include all people everywhere or every time anyone has done a certain thing or been a particular place. They are doing the wrong work. They are trying to go from general to specific before they know the specifics. They are not introducing their paper. They are trying to introduce a subject, an assignment, a big idea, but they are not introducing what they will cover in their essay.

So I've started to talk about that specifically with people whose intros are painted with broad strokes. It seems to be helping because it removes the stress of getting the paper off to an interesting/humorous/engaging/thoughtful/never-before-seen/amazing start and subtly plants the seed that they do in fact have something specific to say with this paper.

Why We Do What We Do

Part I.
Yesterday in the Writing Lab, a conversation about my 22-month- and five-week-old daughters turned toward the H1N1 Flu shot:

Ania: Did you give your daughter the swine flu shot?
Me: Yes, we did.
Joe: You did?
Me: Yes
Joe: I wouldn't do that.
Me: Why?
Joe: I know lots of people who aren't doing that.
Me: I know lots of people who don't save money, but that's not a reason to not save money.
Joe: Well, yeah, but it sure is controversial.
Me: Yes, but that's not a reason not to give her the shot, either.

After that, Ania and I had a lengthy conversation about support, arguments, opposition, and credible sources. Too bad Joe left.

Part II.
Today, Brooks, a writing tutor, came back from a trip to Alabama with a Bear Bryant hat. A student came in, pointed to the hat and to me...

Joe B: That hat on him would look just like Crocodile Dundee.
Me: Crocodile Dundee's hat was leather.
Joe B: Details, details. As long as it's a hat.

The Best Worksheet I've Seen In Awhile, Perhaps Ever

Today, a student came in with a worksheet. I'm not a huge fan of worksheets because they usually focus on technical aspects of grammar that are not inherently bad things to know (people would do well to know them) but are generally less than useful in terms of their applied function for writing students.

This worksheet, however, is possibly one of the most useful I've ever seen. It was simple. It took some sentences the student composed for a prior worksheet and had them replace general terms with specific nouns. Students need to know how to do that. They need that practice.

The example was corny (it replaced "elderly man" with "Old Jimmy Two-Teeth"), but the worksheet gave this student a chance to work on a writing skill that I see people struggle with everyday: being specific. I'm all for this and will probably add a similar activity to any classroom work I do in the future.

They Follow Rules That Do Not Exist

I just had someone ask me about whether or not they needed a particular comma in a particular sentence. I asked why they thought it shouldn't be there.

"Because that's too many commas."

How many is too many?

"Um..."

I hear versions of that all the time. They either have to do with commas, as in this example, or with the length of sentences. Students tell me that their sentence is wrong because it is too long or too short.

Sometimes when they say it's too long, I bust out a sentence written by Virginia Woolf in an essay called "On Being Ill" that appears in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. It's 181 words long and takes up most of the printed page in the book. They are shocked to learn that such things are possible.

I'm not sure where people pick up such rules. I suppose a teacher in some class told them a sentence was too long, but didn't define the measurements for a proper sentence. Thus, they were left with a vague notion that sentences could be too long, but that the border between proper and too long was a thing undetectable except by experts.

When they say a sentence is too short, there is usually an undertone of Short Sentence = Unintelligent Writer. They don't want to present a two-, three-, or four-word sentence to their teacher, and they usually seem a bit embarrassed to even let a tutor know that they were only able to come up with those few words.

The saddest thing about those moments is that the short sentences usually serve the purpose of a short sentence. Students just don't know there is such a purpose. They don't know the value of rhythm, of mixing up long, medium, and short sentences for legibility and effect. They don't know that choosing, at times, to write a short, pointed sentence shows intelligence. They just know that it's shorter than their other sentences and they think there is something sad about that.

Too long. Too short. Too many commas*. I don't know where these arbitrary rules come from. It's strange because they aren't definable and aren't teachable like their real counterparts--subjects + verbs = clauses of different sorts, connecting clauses and phrases, listing, separating, connecting again.

*Oh, and also: Place a comma wherever you take a breath. This notion of a rule might work for speakers of proper English, but it proves disastrous for those who do not already know the rhythms of the language. Commas pop up it the strangest places because the reader paused ever so slightly to breathe.