Think it... Write it... Speak it

In my limited time as a writing coach I’ve had some really positive interactions with the students I’m working with, but not many opportunities to read their work. For the first set of papers, I believe we were instructed to provide feedback on in-text citations. This was relatively simple, and to be honest I was pretty relieved because I realized that I didn’t feel very confident in providing feedback. Prior to this class I always focused on things like grammar but now knew that I wanted to look at higher order concerns, and I was nervous about how to do that. I received two other papers that were variations of the standard book report. I feel like I still focused on things like sentence structure but used the rubric as a guide for my feedback, so I was able to make some comments about topics that were missed or confusing. First and foremost, I think student writers need their teachers to teach them how to write including structure, organization, main ideas, thesis, etc. I also thin...

At this moment, I can’t say I have much experience with digital storytelling or any other forms of multimodal composition. I’ve watched videos on YouTube and have seen book trailers but beyond that, my experience is limited. After further exploring the various types of multimodal composition out there, the two that I was most fond of was the digital poetry and text animation, and the interactive timelines and maps. ( digital storytelling - Bing images ) Within the classroom, I might have students create digital compositions in order to better engage with texts they’re reading. Rather than have students write summaries or book reports they could create interactive timelines for the events of the book, digital poetry could take the place of the traditional pen to paper poetry. Digital compositions might be used as a writing assignment on their own to help students better understand the writing process. As mentioned in “Digital Storytelling in a Place-Based Composition Course” by James Ch...

 As I sit here and try to figure out what my writing process looks like I struggle to find one technique or set of rules I follow for every piece of writing I do. My writing process very much depends on what I am writing but typically follows a goal-driven process similar to the one outlined in “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” by Linda Flower and John R. Hayes. Flower’s and Hayes’ mention writers working under a “high-level goal or plan to explore: that is, to think the topic over, to jot ideas down, or just start writing to see what they have to say,” (382). This is certainly something I do but it takes many different forms, usually resulting from the question, “What am I going to say about this?” Depending on the topic or the type of genre being written, the first step in my process likely involves note taking, which I consider as part of “exploring”. I start by researching the topic with the hope to really narrow the scope of my topic. Once I’ve taken notes from several...