Prompt: Major Assignment 1
Requirements: 1000-1500 words
Due Date: TBD
Rubric Blocks: Process (50 pts), Reflection (20 pts), Organization (20 pts), Student Goals (10 pts)
Assignment Description:
One of the most important steps toward becoming a skillful and effective writer is determining your own best habits, processes, and strategies. Studies have proven that consistency, more than almost anything else, influences both the quantity and quality of your writing. In order to find a consistent practice that’s effective, however, you must first discover what strategies work best for you. Do you need perfect silence? Minor background noise? Do you have better ideas in the morning or the evening? Does a traditional outline work best for you, or is your planning process less linear? Do you need a soft, comfortable chair, or is a hard chair at a coffee shop your best bet? Can you write effectively in your home or dorm? How often do you need breaks to keep yourself fresh and focused? Do you need to remove every distraction, or does paying attention to something else every few minutes keep you on your toes?
These are the kinds of questions you’ll be asking in order to complete this assignment. This paper should reflect a process of experimentation. For one week, you’ll keep track of your current writing habits, recording how effectively they’re working for you. Then, you’ll spend at least one week trying out some different habits, experimenting with things like setting, time, community, etc. You’ll record the results of this experiment carefully, and finally, make changes to your writing habits based on what works and what doesn’t. This assignment should record and reflect on this process from beginning to end.
Assignment Instructions:
First, spend a week documenting your current writing habits and practices. What format, platform, or genre do you write in the most (this includes social media platforms!)? At what time of day do you do the most writing? When you write, how long do you spend on each “session”? What is easy about the writing process? What is difficult? Feel free to look back to high school experiences and/or instruction to help understand your current writing practices. Feel free to discuss your feelings about writing and how they might be affected by your writing habits. Keep good notes! This will form the first major section of your paper.
Second, spend a week trying out new writing habits and practices. I’d recommend choosing 2-4 to begin with; you can always try new ones in the future. The options really are endless: you might try writing in an entirely new place; writing with/without music; clustering; brainstorming; sticky-noting; traditional outlining; write in the morning; write at night; institute a firm writing schedule; write by hand; write on your phone; write in the sandy bank of a river! The most important thing is that you’re introducing something new into your practice that you think sounds appealing and/or would work for you as a writer.
Finally, the paper itself will have three major sections, but should open with a brief introduction summarizing the project and what you learned. The major sections (not paragraphs) are described below:
- The first will describe your writing practices before trying new things. In this section, you’ll talk about what you learned about writing in high school or other classes; what kinds of writing you do most frequently; and what strategies have been working/failing for you thus far. Make sure to record when you tend to do most of your writing; where you tend to write; and how you tend to go about planning and executing writing, especially academic assignments. Include anything that you wish from step 1 of the project.
- The second section will describe your experience experimenting with new strategies and techniques. You’ll carefully describe the strategies themselves, then discuss how you implemented them. Finally, you’ll assess which ones worked and which didn’t, and why.
- The final section is composed of reflection. Discuss what you learned about your writing habits during this process. What breakthroughs did you have? How will your writing habits change going forward? Finally, consider what kinds of writing you might be doing in the future and discuss how the strategies you tried out might help you with such projects. What are your goals for the rest of the semester, specifically with regards to developing writing habits that work for you?
To Submit: you’ll find a submission folder on eLC labeled “MA1: Grading Draft.” Upload your essay as a PDF or Word doc only.
Assignment Schedule:
Week 1: Introduction to writing habits and practices.
Week 2: Observe, record, and narrate your current writing habits and practices.
Week 3: Experiment with new strategies, record results, and narrate your findings.
Week 4: Peer review rough drafts of papers; short conferences with Professor Fontenot.
Week 5: Revise and submit.