writing – News

Ten �ֲ��ý professors share their favorite writing assignments

Emily McConville — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 17:28:15 +0000

The students’ assignment: Write an op-ed about lead poisoning in Lewiston-Auburn. Or write a caption for a photo, or text about a campus tree. Write about how strange quantum theory is, or write a competitive book review in Japanese.

Their professors’ goal: Through solid writing, get students to persuade or inform. Help them understand the course material, whether it’s mathematics, environmental studies, or history. Get them to consider their own writing mistakes, or build up to a larger project.

Your assignment: Read about these 10 professors’ all-time favorite writing assignments, which they presented to their colleagues in the fall. What’s your favorite?

Biblio Battle Project

Instructor: Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese

Course: “Advanced Japanese II”

Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda teaches a section of Beginning Japanese I. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Assignment: Each student writes a book review in Japanese, then turns that review into an oral presentation for the class. After each presentation, students discuss the book, and at the end, the participants vote for the book they most want to read. The assignment was inspired by Biblio Battles, a popular form of competition created by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan.

Why she likes the assignment: “I believe in combining writing and speaking, especially in the context of language courses, I also like to make writing assignments not only to develop writing expertise, but as a stepping stone to developing speaking. Many adult learners who learn a language in the classroom tend to develop writing before they become more comfortable in speaking.”

Op-Ed on Lead in Lewiston

Instructor: William Wallace, Lecturer in Education

Course: “The Environment and Social Justice,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: First, write a two-page essay comparing and contrasting the issue of lead paint in Lewiston-Auburn neighborhoods with the drinking water crisis in Flint, Mich. Then, write a newspaper-style op-ed about the lead paint issue, using an op-ed about the Flint water crisis as an example.

As they geared up to turn in their final op-eds, Wallace’s students received help from, among others, Karyn Butts of the Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention; former American Cultural Studies lecturer Christopher Petrella, and Lewiston Sun Journal reporter Lindsay Tice.

Why he likes the assignment: In their course evaluations, the students “said it was one of the highlights of the semester for them, because they felt like they were learning a new skill they didn’t know before. They knew how to write, but this was a type of persuasive writing that was politically active and important to them.”

Faulty Sentence

Instructor: Myra Wright, Lecturer in English

Course: “Reading Cats & Dogs,” First-Year Seminar

Lecturer in English Myra Wright teaches a section of “The Literary Insect,” her 2017 First-Year Seminar. This fall, she taught “Reading Cats and Dogs” to first-year students. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Assignment: Students submitted a one-sentence analysis of the John Keats poem “To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat” — but made sure the sentence contained one writing error the professor corrected in previous coursework. The class then discussed each sentence, complimenting each other’s writing, identifying the error, and discussing solutions.

Wright was inspired by Associate Professor of Politics Leslie Hill, who had told her about a similar process of identifying errors with her students.

Why she likes the assignment: “It allows me to be a real stickler but also make more friendly the work of doing excellent editing at an investigative, imaginative, and critical level.”

What Makes an Expert?

Instructor: Adriana Salerno, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Course: “Calculus I” (largely taken by non-math majors)

Assignment: Read “What Makes an Expert?” from Ken Bain’s What the Best College Students Do, then write an essay connecting the reading to your experience of taking the midterm exam. Address which example of an expert from Bain’s chapter resonated with you, the approaches to learning you take, and how you can improve your performance in the class.

Why she likes the assignment: I have so many students who are like, ‘I’m so bad at math, I’m not very good at this, I’m just here because I have to be.’ There’s a lot of that anxiety coming into a class like Calc I. This helps them think of how these experiences can be transferred to other things. … This kind of work, understanding that writing is also thinking and processing, gets them to do certain things that are really helpful in math.”

Natural History of a Tree

Instructor: Brett Huggett, Assistant Professor of Biology

Course: “Dendrology and the Natural History of Trees”

In 2015, Julia Fisher ’16 (right) of Philadelphia and Samantha Purnell ’18 of Portland, Ore., measure a tree on the Historic Quad. Their data was part of a webpage documenting the various species of campus trees. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ��ý College)

Assignment: Photograph and write a short essay about one campus tree species. Then, tag each tree with a small plate indicating the species name, family, and a QR code linking to a webpage with the student’s pictures and natural history essay.

Why he likes the assignment: “Writing is heavily emphasized in biology. Students are well-trained in the structure of scientific writing and the format of abstract, introduction, methods, results, and discussion. I felt there was a niche to create a writing assignment that asked students to write for the general public and step out of the framework of the rigid scientific structure.”

Toward a Philosophy of Nonviolence

Instructor: Stacy Smith, Lecturer in the Humanities

Course: “The Roots of Nonviolence,” First-Year Seminar

Assignment: Having read three texts that influenced Martin Luther King Jr. at the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, write a letter to King about these texts, asking King what you want to ask him and saying what you want to say. Use King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” or James Baldwin’s “Letter to My Nephew” as a model. Alternatively, write a prose essay using as a model King’s chapter entitled “My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” from his book Stride Toward Freedom.

Why she likes the assignment: “I am really interested in cultivating student voice. I feel like I was quite successful as a student, and throughout my academic career, writing in a way where I wasn’t really there. What I’m interested in at this stage of my teaching career is cultivating the ‘alive’ human being, within the student and the teacher, in an academic setting. The personal is intellectual, and the intellectual is personal. This assignment is capturing that.”

Thinking About a Research Paper

Instructor: Joe Hall, Associate Professor of History

Course: “Maine Environment and History”

Associate Professor of History Joe Hall delivers the 2018 Convocation address in August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Assignment: In no more than four pages, explain how two works are helping you think about your 20-page research paper. Put the works in dialogue with each other. The grade on the final research paper replaces the grade on this preliminary assignment, if the final paper is better.

Why he likes the assignment: “The most useful element of the paper as a writing assignment was that it enabled me to tell all of them, because all of them needed to do this, how to use transitions to make an argument that consists of more than one piece. For a research paper, that is absolutely fundamental. Often, the single piece of advice I give my students for all of their papers is, ‘You have a really good summary of this piece and a really good summary of that piece. Tell me why they’re part of the same paper.’ That transition is where your argument is, and now you have an essay.”

Reflective Writing in Quantum Chemistry

Instructor: Lynn Mandeltort, Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Course: “Quantum Chemistry” (mostly upper-level chemistry majors)

Assignment: Write two responses — a paragraph at the beginning of the semester, several pages at the end — to the strangeness of quantum theory, but also accurately describe quantum theory. “Construct concise, specific, logical prose connecting the ideas we have discussed thus far, while tying in your own experience.”

Why she likes the assignment: “In these technically based courses, students can go through the motions and give you an answer and not tell you why it matters or if that answer makes sense. What good is science then? … Writing is something you to do communicate broadly and make sure you understand something in a course like chemistry.”

Lewiston Triptych

Instructor: Jane Costlow, Clark A. Griffith Professor of Environmental Studies

Course: “Lives in Place” (mostly first-year and sophomore non-majors)

Assignment: Read an essay on how nature is embedded in urban spaces, even if we don’t recognize it as nature. Draw or photograph a material object at Museum L-A in downtown Lewiston, and take a picture of “nature” in Lewiston. Caption the photograph with a quote from the essay, and write a 300-word essay that connects the museum object and the photograph, offering a reflection on nature in L-A.

Why she likes the assignment: “These are wonderful essays about Lewiston-Auburn. If there’s not enough writing about Lewiston-Auburn, maybe my students can be doing some of that writing.”

Podcast Guest Profile

Instructor: Michael Sargent, Associate Professor of Psychology

Course: “Searching for the Good Life,” First-Year Seminar

Pictured in 2014, Associate Professor of Psychology Michael Sargent hosts a storytelling event he founded. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Assignment: To prepare for a group project involving making a podcast about an interesting person’s work, write a profile of your subject — focusing not on broad biographical details, but on specific aspects of their work. Develop one or two questions the work raises for you.

For example, students in the group interviewing a former deputy chief of staff to the U.S. Secretary of Defense wrote about such topics as a documentary film the deputy produced, women in the Department of Defense, and artificial intelligence.

Why he likes the assignment: Full disclosure, “this is not my favorite assignment,” Sargent says. “I used to have them write their own eulogy, and I’m really lucky that did not blow up in my face, at least to the best of my knowledge. I’ve dropped that assignment. I’m not taking any more chances.”

This assignment, however, was “writing in the service of some other purpose, and that made it come to life for them. They weren’t just writing for the sake of writing, valuable as it is. They were writing because they saw this as essential to help them get ready for these interviews.”

Paul Suitter ’09 pursues a career in politics

�ֲ��ý News — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:46:28 +0000

During the presidential primary campaign, the Obama camp contacted the �ֲ��ý Democrats and asked if we would host Ted Kennedy’s visit to Lewiston. For a second, I was awestruck. Then I said, “Absolutely!” We had just 22 hours to arrange security and publicity, but the �ֲ��ý network is so tight that it was easy to spread the word. We filled the chapel and even had to turn people away.

I’ve always been interested in politics, and I like to be involved in my community. I’m a school board member in my hometown and I make the 3 ½-hour trip once a month for meetings. Here, I’ve been with the �ֲ��ý Democrats and the �ֲ��ý College Student Government all four years.

Last year I was elected Student Government president. Our most challenging issue is disbursing $300,000 among the more than 100 student clubs. Our decision has a direct impact on the community. That’s one of the most interesting things about �ֲ��ý: we have a voice in important matters affecting students’ lives and the college’s future.

I’m a politics major. Two summers ago I apprenticed with Professor John Baughman, conducting research for his book on the development of Congress. Last summer I interned in Washington, D.C. for Maine Congressman Mike Michaud. They had me doing a lot of writing. The only other intern who did that much writing was another �ֲ��ý student, Michael Petrick ’09. That’s when it hit me how �ֲ��ý, by challenging us to write at a high level, prepares us for the real world.

Read more about career services at �ֲ��ý:

www.bates.edu/career.xml

Pulitzer-winning novelist Diaz speaks in Multicultural Center event

Phyllis Graber Jensen — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:35:40 +0000

Junot Díaz, whose novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, signs books for students after offering a lecture in the Benjamin Mays Center. Part of the Arturo Schomburg Afro-Latino Speaker Series at �ֲ��ý, the talk was sponsored by the Office of Multicultural Affairs.[intlink id=”2641″ type=”post”] More.[/intlink]

Vecsey reads Holocaust memoir sequel by Isaacson '65

�ֲ��ý News — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:23:48 +0000

Last winter, Judith Isaacson ’65, LL.D. ’94 got to hear her own words during a reading at the Lewiston Public Library by Katalin Vecsey, who read selections from Isaacson’s Seed of Sarah, a memoir published in 1990 that recounted her Holocaust experiences at the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hessisch Lichtenau concentration camps.

Vecsey, who like Isaacson is originally from Hungary, also read from Isaacson’s forthcoming sequel, to be published in German in a translation from English by Gerda Neu-Sokol, lecturer in German at �ֲ��ý. One story in the new memoir tells of Isaacson traveling to Hungary in 1977 to research Seed of Sarah and meeting an elderly man on a train. As they spoke, the man discovered the reason for Isaacson’s visit. Silence then fell between them. Finally he haltingly revealed a secret never before shared with anyone: He had been a worker on the trains that brought Jews to the death camps.

Composition One-on-One

�ֲ��ý News — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:16:34 +0000

“You can do the greatest research,” says neuroscience major Erin Bond ’09, “but if you can’t explain your findings effectively, it means basically nothing.” Writing is essential to explaining, and Bond is one of a corps of student writing tutors supporting the College’s effort to enhance, consolidate, and draw attention to the teaching of writing.

In Ladd Library’s Peer Writing Center, tutor Jon Blanchard ’08 of Tewksbury, Mass., works with Alie Schwartz ’08 of Charlotte, N.C. She’s writing a classics honors thesis ("Omens: The Undiscovered Voice of the Common Roman") and sought advice on how to make her writing "understandable and clear to the everyday reader." Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

Along with a stronger drive toward interdisciplinarity and stiffer requirements in science-related disciplines, this renewed emphasis on writing is central to the general education requirements implemented last fall — just as writing is central to the academic enterprise.

“I’m not sure how universally we’ve communicated to students explicitly that writing is a value and a goal of a �ֲ��ý education. And now we’re making that very explicit,” explains Associate Professor of Mathematics Bonnie Shulman, who co-chaired the creation of the new gen-ed requirements and now co-chairs the First-Year Seminar and Writing Committee with philosopher Susan Stark.

As �ֲ��ý began the four-year transition to the new requirements last fall, resources committed to that fundamental shift included the students in the Peer Writing Project. This semester, 16 peer writing assistants have evening shifts in Ladd Library, staffing a drop-in center for students seeking guidance. Another 11, meanwhile, are serving on the front lines as tutors attached to specific courses. (Two assistants are filling both roles.)

The peer-writing initiative has succeeded in ways both predictable and surprising. “It’s a low-stakes encounter for a student to drop in at Ladd and just chat for half an hour about a paper. It’s convenient, it’s accessible, and the evening hours are wonderful,” says Peer Writing Project coordinator Joanne Fennessey Cole ’77.

More than anything, Cole says, peer tutoring works for the simple reason that students speak a common language. “The social piece looms large,” she explains. As approachable as �ֲ��ý faculty strive to be, some students will always be more comfortable with each other than with authority figures. In addition, says Cole, “Student tutors really do bring a special insight to the conversation because they have so recently wrestled with all these writing issues themselves.”

Faculty with peer writing assistants attached to first-year seminars last autumn could use them to support the classes’ writing as they saw fit. Some tutors worked alongside professors in the classroom, as well as one-on-one with students. Helen Regan, of the education faculty, says that she regarded her PWP assistant, Leigh Warner ’10, “as a colleague.”

“It’s really hard to measure, but I think that the improvement that I saw with several students would have been less without Leigh’s help, because there was just more coaching available,” Regan says. The Ladd writing center, meanwhile, is in a large room near the periodicals area. It’s open from 7 until 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday — prime time for students grappling with writing issues.

Through readings assigned during the summer of 2007 and in group sessions early last semester, Cole trained the tutors to deal with everything from fine grammatical points to the overall organization and flow of a text — structural issues that proved to be among clients’ more common concerns.

One of the writing lessons that the College is emphasizing is the importance of revision. “�ֲ��ý students typically start a paper only a few days before it’s due, finish it the night before, read through it once for spelling and grammar, and then turn it in,” says Ladd tutor Jon Blanchard ’08. “One of our aims is to alter this culture of completing assignments at the last minute without a formal revision process.”

During his shifts at Ladd, reports tutor Owen Harris ’08, “I was surprised by the variety of questions. Some people came with just an outline — or not even an outline — just looking for help brainstorming and coming up with a place to start. Others came with papers that had already been corrected by the professor, but they were being allowed to revise, and needed help deciphering the professor’s comments. “And there was pretty much everything in between.” Including pure moral support. “We’re finding that one of the tutors’ most important roles is to reassure students,” says Cole. “Some students come to �ֲ��ý uncertain about the expectations of college-level writing, and the writing assistants are here to say, ‘You’re doing fine. Be confident.’”

The tutors see themselves as guides or mentors, not hard-boiled copyeditors. The tutoring approach is inquisitive and supportive, not critical. Emma White, a student in a first-year chemistry seminar taught by Paula Schlax, consulted twice with tutor Bond. “Erin had me read my paper out loud and answer her questions about what messages I meant to convey to the reader,” White says. “This really helped — it showed me the differences between what I wanted to say and what I wrote. I can look more critically at my own writing.”

Tutor Regina Tavani ’10 was attached to a first-year seminar in English. “I really tried to establish myself as a kind of gentle guide rather than as a strong force in how the students improved their papers,” she says. “The program taught us that we should seek to improve not only the paper, but much more importantly, the writer.”

By Doug Hubley

Composition One-on-One

�ֲ��ý News — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:16:34 +0000

By Doug Hubley

Isaacson to to discuss "Writing about Architecture"

�ֲ��ý News — Wed, 27 Jan 1999 16:27:26 +0000

Attorney, art critic, essayist and children’s book author Philip Isaacson ’47 will discuss Writing about Architecture at �ֲ��ý College Feb. 7 at 3 p.m. in the Special Collections Room of Ladd Library. The public is invited to attend the Readings with �ֲ��ý Authors presentation free of charge.

Isaacson’s interest in reaching out to children, combined with his ability as a photographer, earned him a Horn Book award for his acclaimed work, Round Buildings, Square Buildings & Buildings That Wiggle Like a Fish, a study of the aesthetics of architecture for young readers. He has also written on the aesthetics of art, including A Short Walk Around the Pyramids and Through the World of Art. Isaacson is a frequent lecturer, contributor of essays, and a book reviewer on a variety of art-related subjects.

As an attorney and advocate for the arts, Isaacson has been actively engaged in the practice of law in Lewiston since 1950. He is currently senior partner in the firm of Isaacson & Raymond. His legal career has included roles as president of the Androscoggin County Bar Association, corporation counsel for the City of Lewiston and assistant county attorney for Androscoggin County.

Isaacson earned his bachelor’s degree from �ֲ��ý College in 1947 and his law degree from Harvard. Known as “the dean of Maine art critics,” he has reviewed for the Maine Sunday Telegram since 1966.

writing – News

Ten �ֲ���ý professors share their favorite writing assignments

Biblio Battle Project

Op-Ed on Lead in Lewiston

Faulty Sentence

What Makes an Expert?

Natural History of a Tree

Toward a Philosophy of Nonviolence

Thinking About a Research Paper

Reflective Writing in Quantum Chemistry

Lewiston Triptych

Podcast Guest Profile

Paul Suitter ’09 pursues a career in politics

Pulitzer-winning novelist Diaz speaks in Multicultural Center event

Vecsey reads Holocaust memoir sequel by Isaacson '65

Composition One-on-One

Composition One-on-One

Isaacson to to discuss "Writing about Architecture"

Ten �ֲ��ý professors share their favorite writing assignments