Winter Quarter 2014 News & Reminders

Now that Chicago is recovering from the deep freeze and the quarter is underway, SNL Writing would like to pass on a few notes and reminders for Winter Quarter. 

UCWbL Relocating

The Lincoln Park UCWbL office is now located in the Schmitt Academic Center (SAC) at 2320 N. Kenmore, next to the Richardson Library. The online appointment scheduler will be available beginning January 10, and the center will open on January 13. The Loop office is still in 1600 Lewis (25 E. Jackson). Instructors can request an in-class "orientation" for their students by clicking here. 

Digication

Beginning this quarter all WTC and WW students are asked to create their course portfolios using Digication. Click here to view the UCWbL's comprehensive how-to guide for both instructors and students. Instructors can request additional support and resources from the Teaching Commons, FITS, and the UCWbL. 

SNL Writing Instructor Handbook

The Handbook for SNL Writing Instructors Digication site includes sample syllabi, rubrics, activities, and other instructional resources for instructors of both WW and WTC. 

Overcoming Doubt: Psycho-Emotional "Temperature" and the Process of Composition

by Steffanie Triller Fry

In her October 21 post to SNL Writing News, Katie argued that distraction in the writing process is “not a barrier to overcome but a necessary part of the process of overcoming” (Wozniak, Kathryn. “Distractions in the writing process.” Italics in original). She argued that our brains, bodies, and spirit all want this distraction in order to get us unstuck as writers.

            This post fell on the heels of the SNL Month of Writing Challenge, a month-long effort to encourage writers to overcome distraction and produce as many words as possible. The idea is that a month of writing will encourage us to understand that we can write, and that the more writing that we do, the more good writing we will do.

            On November 26, Kamilah Cummings posted on “Lessons in Failure,” arguing that perhaps one of the best ways to succeed is to readjust our goals. As she reflects on the challenges that adult learners face when balancing their personal, professional, and academic lives, Cummings thinks about the “psychological impact” of teacher expectations and adult students’ struggle to meet these expectations (Cummings “Lessons in Failure.”)  

            In addition to the impact of Katie’s distraction and Cummings’ expectations, I think that when writing, we also experience a significant amount of doubt. I see this regularly in both myself, my fellow writers, and in my students. As an adult student in a graduate program in creative writing, doubt is something that I think about, experience, and attempt to overcome constantly. And, in answer to my prayers, one of my own professors actually addressed this issue in one of my second semester courses. In her seminar “Rich Porridge and Thick Mud,” A.J. Verdelle shared with us the ideas of a little-known text by Kenneth Payson Kempton, The Short Story. In this text, Kempton presents the chronology of composition from the perspective of the psycho-emotional temperature of the writer. Below, I have reproduced his T-Scale as Verdelle presented it to our class:

On this graph, despair through ecstasy represent the psycho-emotional temperature of the writer. A is the point at which composition begins. Note that the temperature (T) here hovers between apathy and assurance: the writer is confident enough in his or her topic to begin. T then rises steadily, the degree depending on the writer. B is the point at which the writer begins to react to his or her composition, perhaps after the first draft is complete. Here T drops, usually well below normal (normal being defined as A). Kempton posits that close to C, somewhere between apathy and despair, is where much good work has been finished.

            This would mean that most great writers – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, King, Morrison, etc, likely finished their great works in despair! Or, at least, even when their manuscripts were published, they still harbored doubt about their composition. When this scale was first presented to me, I felt a kind of familiarity, kinship, acknowledgment. I felt better about the way that I feel when it comes to writing.

            But, after Katie and Cummings’ posts, I revisited Kempton’s ideas. And, of course, something seemed to be missing from his theory of psycho-emotional temperature of the writer. So, I drew up my own graph, thinking in particular of adult students, myself included. I imagined a psycho-emotional temperature of the writer that begins at a stage before the A in the chart above. My adaptation of Kempton’s graph is below:

What I have noticed, from working with writers during the SNL Month of Writing Challenge, reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and experiencing my own life as a writer, and the commonality that I notice in Cummings’ expectation and Katie’s distraction, is that all of this “psychological noise” comes before the actual writing. Yet, Kempton’s chronology of composition begins with the writing. So, my modified graph acknowledges that most of us begin somewhere between apathy and despair, and actually have to bring ourselves from my A-prime to Kempton’s A before we can even begin. If we can learn to overcome the distance between A’ and A, that is where the real work of writing is done. Perhaps, if we consider Kempton’s idea that most great work is achieved at C, then we can begin to understand and accept doubt as part of the entire writing process – beginning and end.

Works Cited

Cummings “Lessons in Failure.” Weblog entry. SNL Writing News. November 26, 2013. January 4, 2014 http://snlwritingnews.blogspot.com/2013/11/lessons-in-failure.html

Kempton, Kenneth Payson. The Short Story. Harvard University Press, 1947. Print.

Verdelle, A.J. “Rich Porridge and Thick Mud.” Lesley University MFA June Residency. Lesley University, Cambridge, MA. June 2013. Seminar.

Wozniak, Kathryn. “Distractions in the writing process.” Weblog entry. SNL Writing News. October 21, 2013. January 4, 2014 http://snlwritingnews.blogspot.com/2013/10/distractions-in-writing-process.html  

SNL Student a Finalist for Essay Contest

While enrolled in instructor Nicholas Hayes's Writing Workshop, SNL student Diana M. began an essay about caring for her father. She continued to revise the essay when the course ended, and she eventually entered it into the Shield HealthCare Contest. Diana is now a finalist competing in the Reader's Choice Contest.

To read and vote for Diana's piece, click here (scroll down to Diana M., Caregiver for her father, Riverside, IL). Voting for the contest ends on January 31, 2014.

Congratulations Diana!

Resources for Writing Instructors & Upcoming Incomplete Boot Camp

Two New Resource Sites
Teaching Central highlights Bedford St. Martin's collection of resource guides, background readings, and bibliographies for writing teachers. The collection is searchable by publication date, author, and title, as well as topic (teaching advice, workshops and symposia, adjuncting, and more).  

Teachnet is a blog featuring advice, resources, and links, with an emphasis on teaching with technology. Recent posts include "10 Tips for Grading Writing with Less Stress and Frustration" and "Accelerating Community Through Online Writing."

These sites have joined the Handbook for SNL Writing Instructors Digication site on the Key Resources & Websites page. 

Upcoming Incomplete Boot Camp: Wednesday, December 18
If you have students with incompletes outstanding or other projects to work on over break, please consider inviting them to the next Boot Camp, which meets on December 18 from 5:30-9PM at 14 E. Jackson. Students should contact snlsa@depaul.edu to register.

Writing Showcase Is Accepting Submissions

If you had students who produced particularly good writing this past quarter, please encourage them to submit to the 2014 Writing Showcase. The Showcase celebrates the hard work of SNL student writers and provides inspiration for other students working on writing projects. The submission period is open until April 1, 2014, and winners will be recognized at the Spring Awards Luncheon.

Click here for more information, past winners, and an application form. 

Lessons in Failure

by Kamilah Cummings

Write 50,000 words in one month. That was the challenge for the SNL Month of Writing (MOW), and I joined the challenge. Although I rarely set goals that I deem unrealistic, I somehow thought that I might be able to climb mount 50,000. I set out on my mission despite the glaring absence of logic in the thought of me accomplishing the lofty MOW goal. In hindsight, or perhaps foresight if I am honest, I was not equipped to embark on this journey at this time in my life. Like so many other lessons that I am currently learning, my failure to write 50,000 words in 31 days is a reminder that life does not always follow the script that I write, no matter how many times I revise it.  Needless to say, as it so often does, reality had already penned a different script. 

I registered for the MOW with every hope of writing 50,000 words by Halloween. I convinced myself that a hearty mix of pride, a love for writing, and a desire to succeed would thrust me across the finish line regardless of mounting personal and professional responsibilities. The desire was there but the opportunities to write often eluded me. I found the task of juggling personal and professional responsibilities with the MOW difficult at best. This made me think about students in this writing-intensive program who, regardless of the priority placed on earning a degree or the desire to do well in school, struggle to fit school into their busy lives. A 2013 Public Agenda report titled Is it Worth It for Me? How Adults Without Degrees Think About Going (Back) to School found that a top concern for adult students is balancing “school with work and family obligations” (Hagelskamp, Schleifer and DiStasi). As I struggled to meet my writing goal, I took a harder look at my students last quarter. Several of them started out with earnest desires to do well, but quickly found their school work taking a back seat to unexpected personal and professional situations.

I have always tried to be an empathetic and supportive teacher. As teachers, we sometimes walk a precarious line between supporting, enabling, and downright handicapping adult students because of an awareness of the constraints associated with returning to college later in life.  With that being said, after receiving my personal invitation to sit at the table of unforeseen challenges and requisite demands during the MOW, I have a new found appreciation for my students' challenges.  As students spoke with me, emailed or telephoned about issues preventing them from submitting work, I found myself almost commiserating with them. My inability to secure time to write even when I wanted to produced a new layer of empathy.

My failure to reach my goal also made me think about the psychological impact that teacher expectations have on adult students. The Public Agenda report found that “many also worry whether they will be able to keep up academically” (Hagelskamp, Schleifer and DiStasi). As I plodded along in the writing challenge, I wondered how my students feel when they do not meet course or individual assignment expectations. This led me to create an unofficial survey of students in one of my classes. One of the questions that I asked was what they were most/least proud of regarding their participation. The thing that most disappointed students was not completing assignments. Over the years, I have seen that some adult students are equally disappointed when they do not earn A’s. I admit that as the weekly writing totals were tallied for MOW participants, I felt increasing disappointment at my low numbers in relation to my peers. After sitting with my disappointment for a while, it was easy for me to move past it because my lack of achievement was devoid of ramifications.  However, the same cannot be said for students who are financially and emotionally invested in their school work. 

After several weeks of missing my writing goals, I reset my goal to a more realistic 5,000 words. I ultimately met that goal (barely) and felt a sense of satisfaction in doing so.  While readjusting my goal, I thought about the Olympics and said to myself, a gold medal would be great, but silver and bronze also make it to the podium. Achieving my 5,000-word goal made me feel like I was on the podium being draped in bronze. I plan to work more on communicating this message to my students. I want them to feel motivated to achieve certain goals, but I do not want them to feel defeated or disappointed if they do not meet “A” expectations. In fact, sometimes just completing an assignment amid a chaotic time might feel like winning gold to a student, and I want to make sure that I acknowledge that. 

It can be difficult to fail at something as seemingly innocuous as a writing challenge. However, this experience reinforced the idea that the failure to achieve a goal is not in itself always a failure. The pursuit of a goal can sometimes yield a more profound result than the attainment of it. It certainly did for me. Despite failing to pen 50,000 words last month, I learned lessons that I think will ultimately improve my teaching.

Works Cited

Hagelskamp, Carolin, David Schleifer and Christopher DiStasi. "Is College Worth It For Me? How Adults Without Degrees Think About Going (Back) to School." Study. 2013.

Collaborative Writing on the Web

Last month Brooklyn-based writer and computer programmer Paul Ford reviewed for the MIT Technology Review several new web-based writing tools: Fargo, Editorially, Medium, Svubtle, Marquee, Scroll Kit, Quip, and Ghost. 

A teaser for the review explains that “a new crop of startups is gearing up to change the way we write, taking on traditional authoring tools such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and WordPress. The newcomers don’t just promise to make it easy to create documents or write blog posts—they promise to make you smarter.”

Ford finds Fargo, a simple yet powerful outlining tool, particularly appealing, noting that “with an outlining program, you don’t need a clumsy numbering system, because the computer does the bookkeeping for you.” Ford also appreciates the flexibility in such programs, describing an outliner as something that “treats a text as a set of Lego bricks to be pulled apart and reassembled until the most pleasing structure is found...That’s the thing about outlines: they can become anything.”

Editorially is a pared-down text editor that, like Fargo, runs in a web browser. Ford calls Editorially’s focus “rigidly on composing,” describing its editing screen as “one huge blank field with only a few options.” However, with this simplicity comes useful options for collaboration; every edit made by collaborators (or a single author) is tracked, and a timeline function lets users go back to a past moment in the text’s creation. 

Medium, yet another web-based platform, is better suited to blogging and other web writing by an individual. The program suggests a structure for the piece, and once the text is published, other uses can leave feedback for the author in the form of comments that, in this context, serve more as marginal notes. Ford says that “the ‘Medium Post’ is emerging as its own sort of thing—not quite a blog post, not quite an article, but something in between.”

Ford describes but doesn’t review a number of other platforms still in development. Marquee calls itself a “flexible platform that’s perfect for telling stories,” while Scroll Kit is “a new type of content editor that allows you to own the page in one click.” Ghost is a blogging platform that Ford characterizes as “a sort of modernization of WordPress.” A departure from these web-based platforms is Quip, an iOS app.  

One thing most of these new tools have in common is that they’re designed for collaboration. According to Ford, the developers of these new platforms are “building tools for reflective thought. They expect their users to contemplate, revise, collaborate—in short, to work more the way writers historically have written, and as the pioneers of the digital revolution expected people to continue to write.” To Ford, the proliferation of such collaborative efforts proves “that there are enough people willing to give up the quick pleasures of the tweet or Facebook post and return to the hard business of writing whole paragraphs that are themselves part of a larger structure of argument.” 

Click here to read the full text of Ford’s review.