Writing Across Berkeley

Writing Anxiety

October 11, 2019
Carmen Acevedo Butcher

What is writing anxiety?

“I sit down but then choke.”

“I paralyze myself by overthinking.”

“I feel completely unprepared.”

“I’m terrified that my ideas won’t be good enough.”

If you’ve had thoughts like these, you’re not alone. Many experience writing anxiety as “negative, anxious feelings (about oneself as a writer, one’s writing situation, or one’s writing task) that disrupt some part of the writing process”...

How to Make the Most of Office Hours: For Students

March 25, 2020
Jonathan Lang

Office hours, tutoring sessions, and consultations offer an unparalleled opportunity to improve your reading and writing skills.

Reading and writing are social activities. You grow in your ability to read and write by discussing your reading and writing with others in the working groups you choose to join; in class; and in one-on-one conferences with instructors, tutors, and consultants.

To be sure, these are risk taking activities because you may find yourself challenged: you are taking public positions on your ideas about what you read and may feel vulnerable when you share...

How to Make the Most of Office Hours: For Instructors

April 5, 2020
College Writing Programs

Students should be engaged in their own learning:

The easiest route is for an instructor, or tutor, or consultant to take the lead. You are viewed as the expert, and students may not be able to assess writing well enough to know what to focus on: they don’t have the vocabulary to ask the right questions.

In such a circumstance, you can model for students appropriate questions to ask, or guide them towards such questions.

What do you think you’ve done well? Tell me why you think you’ve done it well. What have you most struggled over? Why do you think you are...

Campus Voices: Using Writing in Class

January 1, 2001
WAB Editors
How, in addition to essays and exams, do you use writing in your class? Rick Kern (French Department)

In French Department language courses, we use writing for a number of purposes other than essays and exams. At the most basic level, of course, we use written grammar and vocabulary exercises to help students master the basic forms of the language. More creative activities include writing cinquain poems (where students are given a schematic structure, but fill it in with words of their choice), scripting skits that students perform in class, keeping personal journals, and writing quick in-...

The Strange Unmooring of Virtual Instruction

October 26, 2020
Carmen Acevedo Butcher

The sequence of events is blurry, but I believe it went like this. Spring semester was moved online for safety; forty million Californians were ordered into a coronavirus lockdown; posts debated a possible “hybrid plan” for Fall semester; and one long “I-Got-You-Babe”-Groundhog-Day later, Fall was shifted to remote instruction also. At some indefinite time during those several upside down months, I heard that our usual course days and hours were scrubbed completely from the University website. I felt a little vertigo, so I opened a window and stared unblinking at our workshop-...

Only Connect

August 1, 2000
Kevin Padian

The Diction Grinch is worried about the expression of cause and effect in writing. For example: “Credit is due to the House Minority Whip for arranging bipartisan support of today’s trade bill.” We all like to give credit where it’s due, and here the expression is used correctly. Quite often, though, you read something like this: “Due to weather patterns of the past decade, crops in sub-Saharan Africa have failed repeatedly.” That’s a different “due to”: We’re not exactly trying to establish credit here, but cause. And that can become tricky. Are we really establishing cause, for example,...

Seeing into the River: Peer Tutors Respond to Student Writing

January 1, 2001
Elizabeth Keithley

In training tutors to respond to student writing, we first point out that they are in a unique position to encounter drafts in-progress, rather than finished pieces of writing. The kind of reading that’s called for can be very different from the evaluative reading that a finished paper may be given by a teacher who must assign a grade. The pieces of writing they will encounter will be at some stage of a process, one step in an evolution that will eventually be a finished paper. The evaluative sensibility they might bring to a finished piece of writing is not always helpful or appropriate...

Designing Effective Writing Assignments

August 1, 2000
Steve Tollefson

As all instructors know, shaping a writing assignment to get what you want from students is not easy. We’ve all had the experience of creating an assignment that we thought was perfect, only to see it produce less-than-sterling papers. On the other hand, we’ve all been surprised by excellent papers responding to what we thought were so-so assignments. Attention to a few details can even out this roller-coaster ride.

Whatever type of assignment you decide to make, spend some time in class preparing your students to do the work expected of them. For example, if you are assigning a...

Why Assign Multiple Drafts?

January 1, 2000
Jane Hammons

When students are required to write drafts, they begin thinking about an assignment well in advance of the due date. This not only prevents procrastination, it also gives students the opportunity to display their early thinking.

Early thinking often takes the form of summary or reaction, valid approaches for a draft, but not acceptable substitutes for the analysis expected in a final paper. The advantage of encouraging students to bring this early thinking to class is that you can actually reward them for things in a draft that you might penalize them for in a final paper.

...

Campus Voices: Effective and Ineffective Responses to Writing

January 1, 2001
WAB Editors
What were the least effective and most effective responses you ever had to your writing, and why? Cecelia Webster (College Writing Programs)

When I began attending Berkeley, the comment “Awk” “Awk” “Awk” plagued the margins of my papers, like a predatory bird screeching at my sentences. That sentences were clunking through my papers embarrassed me. A diligent undergraduate, I bravely took them to office hours. However, no professor or graduate student could tell me what was wrong. They said, “Well, we just wouldn’t say it that way.” I’d already figured that out. But this response gave me...