{"id":12,"date":"2008-10-22T14:40:31","date_gmt":"2008-10-22T18:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2008\/10\/22\/core-writing-workshop-report\/"},"modified":"2008-10-22T14:40:31","modified_gmt":"2008-10-22T18:40:31","slug":"core-writing-workshop-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2008\/10\/22\/core-writing-workshop-report\/","title":{"rendered":"Core Writing Workshop Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was pleased to join several Core 101-102 faculty members for a recent workshop.\u00a0 We shared excellent WAC-style pedagogy and I can take no credit for this; the Core faculty developed and led this event.<\/p>\n<p>The most important lesson for this observer is that faculty are concerned about commentary.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve long known that faculty work hard when designing assignments, but I&#8217;ve had an impression&#8211;probably mistaken&#8211;that most faculty are writing the sort of vague and counterproductive commentary I once saw as a Writing Center tutor.<\/p>\n<p>Ray Hilliard moderated our meeting; Ray returned to his former position of coordinator while David Leary is on leave. Ray has always had a strong investment in improving students&#8217; academic-writing skills, and we covered a lot of ground with our colleagues.\u00a0 We discussed the follow topics, and participants used actual student papers to consider appropriate pedagogy:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Eric Yellin (History) had a very useful yardstick for measuring student understanding of an assignment.\u00a0 He said that one mark of\u00a0 a strong writer would be someone who was &#8220;thinking beyond the question&#8221; and doing original work as compared to a writer who might be &#8220;struggling with what the question was.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Ray finds himself spending less time writing commentary now that he employs MS Word&#8217;s embedded commentary feature.\u00a0 Several participants either use that tool or plan to do so.<\/li>\n<li>We all noted that in our sample papers, the instructors began with positive reinforcement for something a writer had done well, then maintained a friendly tone all along. This is a pedagogical approach all Writing Fellows learn in Eng. 383.<\/li>\n<li>We all agreed to &#8220;put grammar in its place&#8221; as an important, but not primary, concern when writing commentary. In Core, crafting one&#8217;s focus, analysis, and support are first-order concerns.\u00a0 Grammar must be addressed, but faculty, again in the same way Fellows learn, agreed that finding patterns of error rather than isolated incidents would best serve writers.<\/li>\n<li>Several faculty did lament that students were not being careful enough with word-choice. This lack of care and nuance can lead to prose that does the job but not in an eloquent manner.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was pleased to join several Core 101-102 faculty members for a recent workshop.\u00a0 We shared excellent WAC-style pedagogy and I can take no credit for this; the Core faculty developed and led this event. The most important lesson for this observer is that faculty are concerned about commentary.\u00a0 I&#8217;ve long known that faculty work &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2008\/10\/22\/core-writing-workshop-report\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Core Writing Workshop Report<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}