As I was reading through our readings for Monday, I came across a problem I think may arise, especially with freshman that I have been wondering how to handle. As I read through Carl Gerriets article he discussed his letters back and forth with students. At one point, when discussing the letters he said, “A frequent difficulty is getting the students to approach the cover letters seriously yet informally” (Practice in Context 86). That is something I have been wondering about for a long time. I want my students to not approach everything I assign them as an academic piece of writing. The journals I have them write in each class, even more creative assignments are not ones I want them to be so formal in their speech that they are not being themselves. Gerriets does not really solve this, because what he is discussing are the letters that accompany the papers his students turn in. I want to find a way to tell students to write informally but basically not get a jumble of incoherent crap mixed in with misspelled words and fragments of sentences.
I guess this goes along with the stereotypes discussed in the two articles we read, where we see those from upper middle class neighborhoods and good public schools as the typical better writers, and the ones Gerriets discusses who come to his community type two year college, but this expression of self within someone’s writing, to me, would come more coherently from someone who is not the typical college student because they are not used to writing and expressing themselves in a college setting. To me, it is almost just as crippling to have students always writing academically even when they are not asked to because it shows, to me at least, that they are losing their sense of self in their writing. Yes they may be expressing their ideas, but when they are doing it in a different way than they normally would write or speak, they are conforming.
I want to find a way to tell students it is ok to write informally. I want them to know just because they are in a class doesn’t mean they can’t be free to use contractions and an informal voice for some of their work. I think it will be simply a trial and error experiment. In one of the classes my group and I observed the teacher had students write rather informally. When she discussed their next paper she told them they needed to be more formal, they couldn’t swear and write the same way they did for the last assignment. I think maybe just talking to student’s, telling them just how formal or informal you want them to be is the only way to get somewhere. It is very easy to say how many pages you want a paper to be, how you want it formatted, but trying to tell students what kind of “voice” to use is a much harder task.
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I think if you define what "formal" and "informal" writing assignments are, as they relate to your class, then students will have an easier time understanding what the assignment entails. For example, the formality of a journal response will probably differ from a finished multimodal project or academic research paper. The difference should be defined in your assignment sheet, as well as in your discussions with students prior to the assignment.
Their understanding of "formal" writing will rely on their prior experience: probably what their high school English teacher told them about formal writing. You do not want to rely on this. :) Not that their teachers were wrong or misled, but because, again, you define these things as they relate to the course material and requirements.
Perhaps it would be helpful to address formal and informal writing across the disciplines: such as what constitutes formal in the sciences, or in art, or in the humanities. Again, it also depends on the type of assignment. Does formal mean a completed multimodal project? MLA or APA citations?
It is important to note that these definitions (formal and informal) are not static, and thus change according to the rhetorical situation.
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