Group work can be frustrating. What should you do if you find yourself yoked to a bunch of slackers who won't pull their weight on an important project? Here's what I wrote to one of my students who complained to me that she had done the lion's share of the work on a group project for my class.
"What you experienced is, of course, similar to what you might face in collaborative writing situations in the "real world"--except that in the real world sometimes the stakes are much higher than a few points on a grade.
I think there are three basic options in situations like this: 1) report the problem to your superiors and engage their help in managing it or 2) keep plugging along, trying to do the best you can on your own, or 3) confront the problem: lay it on the table for your group and make a call-to-action to fix it. In my experience, Option 1 often works in the short-run but can misfire in the long-run. because it creates extra work for your superiors and it associates you, in their minds, with a problem rather than a solution. You chose Option 2, and I think that is often the best choice in situations like the one you faced here--where deadlines are looming, the stakes are relatively low and the collaboration is short-term. But in the real-world, Option 3 is often best. It requires lots of creativity and solid communication skills, but it long run, the effort you put into getting a group back on track can pay off, and when you take the initiative to do so, you can showcase your leadership and communication skills (turning a problem into an opportunity). So at least you can chalk this up as a learning experience, maybe? "
Back for another round of teaching English 255, Public Writing. Frankly, this course is a real bear to teach for me because--- well---what IS public writing anyway? And whatever it is, is it teachable? In a single semester?
So I think I need to start my planning for the course this summer with a definition: Public writing is writing FOR the people, BY the people.
Any writing that we do to serve and sustain the communities we identify with counts as public writing. Public writing, unlike academic writing, i does real work, enhancing, motivating, advocating, informing, promoting, educating, directing and coordinating action tin a community. And unlike private professional writing, it serves the collective, not the individual. It's a form of citizenship.
Exigencies are like fruit--you've got to pick them at just the right moment.
Everyday my e-mail inbox fills up with big juicy issues ripe for the picking. It's frustrating, because so often my plate is already full, but I'm thrilled that i've got a class full of hungry rhetors, ready to reap the harvest. Have I exhausted this metaphor? Probably, but just in time to offer you this farmer's market full of seasonal home-grown rhetorical opportunities. Maybe you'll find one that suits your taste! If so, bite right in!
3/10/10 US Post Office Considering Stamp to Honor Harvey Milk TheNational Gay and Lesbian Task Force is co-sponsoring the Harvey MilkNational Stamp Campaign. "This stamp would serve to further remindAmericans that by honoring Harvey Milk, you honor a true American Heroand Champion of Civil Rights for all people." http://purpleunions.com/blog/2010/03/us-post-office-considering-stamp-to-honor-harvey-milk.html
3/9/10 www.iLoveMountains.org
Dear Laurie,
This week, more than 200 citizens from Appalachia and across the U.S. are gathering in our nation's capital as part of our 5th Annual End Mountaintop Removal Week in Washington.
They will be meeting with members of Congress to urge them to co-sponsor H.R. 1310, the Clean Water Protection Act, which would help to end mountaintop removal coal extraction. This issue is extremely urgent and the coal industry is working overtime to block the passage of this bill.
Your Representative is not signed on to the Clean Water Protection Act. But hearing from their constituents is incredibly powerful -- you can help end mountaintop removal with a simple phone call.
Please take a moment to contact your Representative's office and ask them to sign on to save streams.
3/10/10 ASK YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS TO SIGN A LETTER SAFEGUARDING PIRC FUNDING
Contact Your Members of Congress TODAY!
Members of Congress are making a bi-partisan effort to safeguard Parental Information and Resource Centers (PIRCs). Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and Christopher Bond (R-MO) and Representatives Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Todd Russell Platts (R-PA) are asking their colleagues to sign onto their "Dear Colleague" letters requesting that appropriators safeguard the PIRCs by providing level funding Fiscal Year (FY) 2011.
The Senate and House “Dear Colleague” letters are in response to the President’s FY11 budget proposal that consolidated PIRCs into the Expanding Educational Options budget authority. Consolidation means –elimination of PIRCs by directing funding away from PIRCs.
We need Congress to safeguard this sole federal program dedicated to engaging families in the education of their children.
What you can do:
* Please ask your two Senators to sign onto Senators Tom Udall and Christopher Bond’s “Dear Colleague” letter requesting level funding for PIRCs. The Senate “Dear Colleague” letter will be sent to Chairman Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-MS) of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies.
* Please ask your Representative to sign onto Representatives Grijalva and Platts' "Dear Colleague" letter requesting level funding for PIRCs. The House “Dear Colleague” letter will be sent to Chairman David Obey (D-WI) and Ranking Member Todd Tiahrt (R- KS) of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.
I’ve read through your draft ‘letters to the editor,' and I see some good DRAFTS, but not one letter that can’t benefit from revision. So I thought I'd take the time here to give you some advice for your revisions. (I’m hoping that if I give you this advice to all of you NOW I won’t have to write it 25 times in the margins of your papers LATER ;-)
Here goes:
Organization:
You need to get a QUICK start. Don’t follow the school essay practice of starting with a generalization. Instead, take one of these approaches:
1)Establish your credibility in the very first phrase. Readers want answers to these questions:Who are you to be writing this letter? Why should I care what your opinion is? That’s why many good letters to the editor begin “As a UT student, I…” or “As a longtime country-music fan, I…”
2)Use the opening sentence to tell exactly what you are responding to—name the particular event or news article that prompted you to write. Be precise. If you think your audience won’t know what you’re talking about, provide a VERY VERY brief recap of the event or story before launching into your own views on the topic.
Audience and Purpose:
Remember that the purpose of a letter to the editor, as a civic genre, is not just to SAY something (to express your opinion) but to DO something—to move your audience toward a new way of thinking or acting. So your letter really needs to speak to the audience directly and ask for a change in belief or action. I saw a lot of opinion in your letters (appropriately) but sometimes it was hard to see what you wanted me, as a reader, to DO about that opinion.
Two good ways to fix this problem:
1)Address your letter directly to the people you imagine will be reading it. Ask them--directly--for a change in belief or action.
OR
2)Set up your letter as a kind of “open letter” to whatever person (usually someone with power or prominence) you think has the power to change the situation you are concerned about. Tell THAT person what you think they need to do or pay attention to.
Focus:
Once you’ve clarified for yourself what you want to accomplish with your letter, keep your focus on JUST THAT point.Don’t ramble, don’t bite off more than you can chew, don’t just write to enjoy the sound of your own voice, (A good letter to the editor can really only make ONE STRONG POINT. Obama's entire administration is probably too much to take on, for example, in a single letter.)
Appealing to your audience:
Did you ever hear the advice “Show, don’t tell”?I wrote that advice in the margins of many of your papers. You’re not going to move your audience just by calling something “ridiculous” or “shameful.” A better way to go at it is to present your case so well that the audience decides for themselves that something is “shameful” or “ridiculous”
The fact that you hold an opinion isn’t going to change any minds, all by itself.You need to appeal to your audience, in at least one of the three ways you learned about in English 101/102:by making them trust you as an authority (credibility or “ethos”), by presenting reasons or evidence that they hadn’t considered before (“logos”) or by moving them emotionally.
Tone:
Lots of your letters had a strong tone—humorous or sarcastic or angry.That’s okay if you are ethical about it (no name-calling, no insults to individuals or groups).A strong tone will definitely entertain and may actually move your audience. But be careful how you target your anger or sarcasm.If your audience feels that they themselves are the target of your sarcasm or anger, it may misfire.
Last but not least, STYLE:
Make every word count.Lots of your letters had the kind of fillers and wheel-spinning that is typical of school writing –overusing adverbs and adjectives like “really”, “truly”, padding your writing with phrases like “in this world we live in today..” or stating the obvious as in “My name is …. and I’d like to share my opinion on…”)You don’t have space for that!
As you are revising your letters, I urge you to apply the lessons from our last “style” quiz.One way to make every word count is to follow those principles: Make your subjects characters and your verbs actions.
And PROOFREAD:Avoid the kinds of errors—misspelled names, misused words, sloppy punctuation, unintentional fragments and run-on sentences—that can undermine your credibility.
I thought I'd use this space to sum up some of what's been said in our class this week about the letter to the editor genre.
The letter-to-the-editor is a traditional platform that private citizens can use to get their voices heard on issues of public concern. Good ways to use the genre as a tool for civic engagement:
To draw more attention to a story of public interest that you think has not received the attention it deserves.
To give readers a new perspective on a news story by sharing your own personal experiences or observations or thoughts about it.
To make rguments in support of your position on issues of public concern, both to rally those who agree with you and to persuade those who disagree with you about the validity of your stance.
The letter-to-the editor can also misfire. Here are some things that can get you into trouble or undermine the effectiveness of the genre:
Name-calling or slander
Emotional ‘rants” that express how you feel but don’t move your audience
Poorly supported or uninformed opinions
Illogical reasoning that relies on logical fallacies (ad hominem attacks, band-wagon appeals, etc.)
Patterns of grammatical or stylistic errors that undermine your credibility.
Some advice:
Know the publication’s guidelines for letters to the editor: length, preferred topics, etc.
Be concise.
Focus on one point; don't ramble.
If you write on a global or national story, find a local angle
Get to your point quickly. Some good ways to start:
Establish your credibility in the first line (e.g. “As a former UT student,…” “ As a longtime Vol fan, …”
Refer directly to the news article story you are writing about (e.g. “in a letter to the editor on 1/28/2010, titled “Kiffin riots demonstrate ignorance, Thomas Walker incorrectly said that …”
Hmm. What is public writing? Since being assigned to teach this course, I've been thinking a lot about this question. Like many simple questions, it seems that it ought to be easy to answer, but it gets harder the more I think about it.
Now, reading other teachers' syllabi, browsing potential textbooks, thinking about other courses I have taught, I am gradually moving toward my own definition of what this course is about: Here's a first attempt:
Public writing is writing by private citizens about public issues in the public sphere.
Okay, so far so good. But now I have a new set of questions: What constitutes a public issue? What counts as the public sphere?
Well... I’ll start by trying to define what I mean by an "issue": I'll follow the rhetoric scholar L. Bitzer here. When he talks about issues, he uses the word "exigence", which he defines this way: a problem or imperfection of some urgency that needs a solution. A public issue might be further defined as an exigence that is of concern to an entire community of people and that MIGHT find a solution--or at least be nudged toward a solution-- if these people can find a way to share information and work together.
This definition seems like a good one, because it excludes some things: Problems out of our control--acts of God or nature that we can do nothing about? Those are not public issues. Problems you can solve all by yourself, just by changing your own attitude or modifying your own behavior or exerting some effort on your own? Those are not public issues. Problems that concern yours truly, but don't affect me or anyone else in your community? Not public issues unless you can convince me that I should care. But this definition does make room for a whole range of issues that can be addressed if and only if people can be moved to work in a concerted way toward a solution. Bet you can list a bunch! If not, just look around you! You'll find lots of grist for the public-writing mill.
Once you've settled on a definition for public writing, it's easier to see who your audience might be. The potential audience for public writing includes ALL THOSE PEOPLE who are concerned about the issue you are addressing or who might be convinced to care about it and even work together to solve it, if you can move them to see things the way you do and to act in a concerted way. So here's another stab at a definition:
Public writing means using language in an intentional way to move other members of your community to adopt new ways of seeing, understanding, feeling and ultimately acting on the exigencies that concern you all.
We might consider the public writer a little like a boatswain calling the strokes for a rowing team as they power down a river, or an orchestra conductor drawing a symphony out of a room full of musicians with the wave of her baton or a tour-guide shepherding a group of people through unfamiliar territory, calling out the sights along the way, directing their gaze to the left or the right, putting things in perspective.
The most important thing I need to remember as I plan this course: Public writing not only SAYS things, but DOES things--it MOVES people in ways that impact our culture and society--even our physical landscape.
It is important for my students to understand the power that public writers exert on us (as readers) and also for them to test and develop their own powers as producers of public texts--and thereby learn what it feels like to be able to make real changes in the public spaces where we live our lives.
