Never an Off Day

It's Sunday. I'm not at work right now, but I was thinking this morning, for whatever reason, about writing and research, about simple assignments and the complicated papers that can grow from them, and I decided on something I would like to do in the context of a research+literature class (like Pima's Writing 102).

It's in two stages for two specific reasons.
Stage 1: Meet an Author
Stage 2: Tell Someone Else to Read an Author

Here's the first stage. I'd like to have students research contemporary and recent authors. That could be pretty broad in terms of places, but I'd try to keep the timeframe fairly recent. I think I would make a list of authors and tack on a little info about that person. I'd let them choose who they want to look into. They could even go off the list as long as they convince me their choice is worth it.

Here's the reason for the first stage. I work with a lot of student writers who don't have the knowledge of their subjects and arguments that they need to form a solid essay because they have not invested the time into the process of research. I'm not blaming anyone here. I'm not pointing my finger at lazy students or teachers who rush through a semester. I'm just saying: writing is a result of thinking, so let's give folks we expect to write a little time to think. Let's make sure they have it. Let's make sure their brains can soak up enough information to form an opinion.

The first stage allows the student to get to know the research process while getting to know their author. We could work on database searches, knowing what kinds of sources are legitimate*, how to quote and paraphrase, choosing what to quote and what to paraphrase, organizing information from sources in a paragraph in your own paper, and all kinds of other little things that pop up in research.

The second stage would move on to adding in an argument. Here's my plan**: As a class, we would present our findings on our authors. Then each student would choose an author to support as someone people--not just academics or students or bookworms or nerds or kids whose parents don't buy them XBoxes--should read. They would have to think critically and connect who that author is, what that author writes about, where they came from, where they went, when they lived, and other contextual whowhatwhenwherehows with the same kinds of contextual issues in the people they are saying should read their author.

I'd love to see the arguments people come up with. I guess this comes from my desire to simplify assignments in order to let the complications grow organically from the students' thought processes, my hope that people see value in reading, and my observation that Writing classes often ask people to learn a skill which they have never seen in use. This assignment (which would really stretch over an entire semester in three large parts; the third being a revision stage that rarely gets taught but nearly always needs learning) would allow students to form their own ideas about something they have worked at gaining familiarity with, argue for time spent with your nose in a book, and learn more about people who choose to spend their time writing.

*Too many times I see people rushing through a research paper of one kind or another and all they've done is go to a few different basic sites like encyclodepias, Wikipedia (No!), About.com, or some other surface level biographical site with information gleaned from some other surface level biographical site. That's shoddy researchmanship.

**This is all just thinking and hoping because I'm not teaching right now, and if I were, I would be teaching Writing 70, which exists to help people write a solid sentence and then a solid paragraph.