Daily Writing for Peer Response

Author(s): Alan Cooper

Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Oct., 1986), pp. 346-348
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358054
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346 College Composition and Communication

skills of students, especially the skill at detecting and using transitions and other cues
that signal structure to a reader. Additionally, by composing two versions of each
summary, students learn the technical skills needed for using other persons' ideas in
their own papers. But most importantly, summary writing can help initiate dialectic
thinking by urging students away from egocentric vision, forcing them to confront
the "notyou" of another person's ideas. By "just saying other people's thoughts," stu-
dents learn to build bridges toward other people and to acknowledge viewpoints dif-
ferent from their own. Summary writing thus becomes a heuristic for discovery.

Notes

1. J. H. Flavell, TheDevelopmental
PsychologyofJean Piaget(Princeton,NJ: Van Nostrand,
1963), p. 60.
2. "Anxietyof Influencein the Classroom,or, the Will to Ignorance,"CollegeEnglish,42
(October,1980), 115.
3. New York:Harcourt,1970, pp. 273-289.
4. Citedin Rhetoric. and Change,p. 286.
Discovery
5. In CarlRogers, On Becoming a Person(Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1961), pp. 329-337;
rpt. in Rhetoric: and Change,pp. 284-289.
Discovery
6. "Teaching Creativity in Argumentation," CollegeEnglish, 39 (December, 1977),
507-510.
7. Other compositionteacherswho have stressedthe value of Rogerianargumentinclude
MaxineHairston, "CarlRogers' Alternativeto TraditionalRhetoric," CCC, 27 (December,
1976), 373-377; and Paul Bator, "Aristotelianand RogerianRhetoric,"CCC, 31 (December,
1980), 427-432.

Daily Writing for Peer Response, Alan Cooper, York College of The City Universi-
ty of New York

Daily writing is to composition classes as practice is to piano lessons. Not the scales
and fingering exercises: for these there are drill books. Daily writing, rather, is play-
ing the music-acquiring a sureness and fluidity with the medium. Like an instru-
ment, a notebook can be addressed in the absence of the teacher. But the writing
teacher, like the music teacher, must reward the industry and correct the perfor-
mance.
The more practice in writing, the better; the problem is that students want their
writing read, their progress certified. But no writing teacher can grade the 350 to
500 practice essays turned out each week by 50 to 75 students writing every day.
What is needed is a way to spare the instructor that extra labor, yet get students both
to write daily and to identify and correct their faults. That can be done by allowing
the class, under careful guidance, to be the primary readers.
For several years now I have required students to write for about twenty minutes a
day in a notebook and to bring that notebook to every session. They are always pre-
pared with a body of their writing on which to apply the lessons of the composition
class. And since most applications are performed on each other's entries, students are
assured of having their writing read. Elaborations of this simple requirement have
brought variety and efficiency to the classroom and some relief to me as teacher.
Lessons in usage, rhetoric, or style move from the rhetoric or work book to the stu-
dent notebook for practice in revision of actual student writing; notebook entries are
read regularly; but, as shall be seen, I read only a sampling of the notebook writing,
and within class time. Students write far more than I can reasonably correct, yet get
valuable responses.
StaffroomInterchange 347

My classes buy a hard-bound, sewn composition notebook, the fatter the better. No
pages can be torn out undetected. They write every day of the semester (seven days a
week) on the right-hand pages, leaving the left-hand pages blank. They write for at
least twenty minutes regardless of the level of the class. This writing is done outside
of class and is additional to all other assignments. During the first quarter of the
term, they can write about anything they like. By the start of the second quarter, I
expect an identifiable thesis, and I reinforce this expectation with classroom exercises
in identifying or creating suitable thesis statements.
By mid-semester the assignment shifts: Mondays to Fridays are still used for origi-
nal entries, two of the five in response to the news, to force students out of the first
person. Saturdaysand Sundays, however, are for revision. On Saturday the student se-
lects his best entry from Monday to Friday, and revises it (using the blank left-hand
page) in about ten minutes; then with the whole revised entry fresh in mind, turns to
the new (Saturday) page and rewrites the essay without looking back over the first
draft. On Sunday he does the same thing with the Saturday revision. One of the five
weekly essays, then, goes through three drafts, the revisions arising out of but un-
shackled to their predecessors.
Most students require at least two notebooks to get through a term. Each dated en-
try begins at the top of a new (right-hand) page. Students understand that entries are
not graded for quality or style, but that periodically they are checked for quantity.
Thus students can be free to experiment, to pursue their own subjects in their own
manner. All this is aside from the graded essays written for the class.
Notebooks must be available at every class meeting. One of my frequent uses is in
group correction. Let us say that a basic writing class has just studied the differences
among fragments, run-ons, comma splices, and correct sentences. Theory has been
followed by work-book or ditto exercises. Now I ask students to arrange themselves in
groups of three, to open their notebooks to a specific recent date, and to pass them to
the right. They read each other's writing and indicate in the margins (in pencil or in
red) the symbols FRAG, R-O, or cs where applicable and underline the juncture where
a run-on or comma splice seems to have taken place. After some seven or eight min-
utes, they pass books again to the right and a second reader goes over the same entry.
If that reader disagrees with any of his predecessor's corrections, he circles the symbol
that has been scribbled in the margin. Both readers must strenously confine them-
selves to the features at issue: no correcting spelling or agreement during a session on
FRAG'S, R-O'S and c.s.'s. Finally, the notebooks are returned to their authors, who
re-
view the corrections.
Having now written and edited, the student learns about his own susceptibility to
committing these basic errors, and about his ability to detect them in the writing of
his classmates. The sparks fly most when there is disagreement, when the student be-
lieves that his editors have mis-corrected his writing. The student who disagrees with
his critic is asked to go to the blackboard and copy the sentence in question. In a nor-
mal class session, seven or eight students proceed to fill the board with sentences.
Then, using the students' grasp of theory, I direct questions, elicit verdicts, and settle
matters. The editor is confirmed or corrected. If the class is still shaky, I know I have
some more explaining to do. The notebooks are ready for another proving session next
meeting. But these seven or eight sentences may be all I have to read out of a class's
total writing of twenty-five entry pages for this particular date. Consider the savings.
The same procedure may be used in advanced classes for revising parallelism, reduc-
ing tautology, correcting diction. Notebooks sometimes present problems that no
professional textbook writer can dream of, such as this locution from a fairly good
foreign-born freshman: "Iocaste doesn't have a slice idea Oedipus is her son." And this
use of the real writing of students is the paramount virtue of in-class notebook use,
for models of sense as well as of error, for encouragement as well as for blame.
348 and Communication
CollegeComposition
The notebook as a collection of rough writing also lends itself to applications in re-
writing. Writers and classmates can be asked to respond on the blank page to the raw
material opposite: to codify it in logical sequence; to provide a thesis statement; to
shape a whole introduction; to pick out a central image or metaphor and develop that
at greater length; to reduce for economy; to expand for supporting details. One can
return again and again to the notebooks, sometimes for a starting activity, sometimes
for application after theory. The notebook entries are not sacred; therefore they can be
corrected without being violated; there are many more, and it is good for the student
to be able to detach himself from his writing by these frequent revisions.
At the beginnings of terms, oral readings from notebooks help acquaint the class
with one another and with the larger features of essays. Knowing one another is
important, for the class is to be the audience or readership for whom most of their
writing is intended. And when they listen to the reading (by the student or by the
teacher) of a single-page entry, they can respond to its tone, to its overall intent (does
it inform, persuade, entertain?), and to its structure. In a second oral reading, they
can identify and evaluate the introduction. A slow reading, with pauses between sen-
tences, can get them to spot certain basic errors without having a page before them.
Perhaps best of all, they can praise without having to analyze closely, and at the
beginnings of terms praise is invaluable. Even the resentful student, who thinks his
"drift" is obvious to everyone but his obtuse teacher, can be brought playfully around
to acknowledge his problem when twenty different students jot down twenty different
thesis statements in response to his reading. And if the class tears into a piece, it is
only a notebook entry: not written for a grade, easily put aside after the working over
is through. Progress comes best to the writer who goes on to the next piece without
getting too fond of the one at hand.
By mid-semester students may be able to rewrite one of their earliest entries as an
expanded essay for a grade. I assign them to reread all the entries for, say, the third
week of the term and to note on a separate sheet for each (labeled simply by date) the
principal virtue and the principal weakness of each. Example: "September 21st, loose,
rambling, no central idea; but strong whimsical tone and concrete images." And so
forth for the entries of the rest of the week. At the next meeting, I arrange the stu-
dents in groups of three, and have the two other readers make similar comments on
the blank pages opposite the same entries. Then I have the writer compare his notes
with theirs, and pick one of those entries, one for which he can muster some residual
fondness-preferably one about which there is agreement on the strengths-and have
him expand it into a formal essay of three or four times the original length, keeping
its principal virtues intact and somehow overcoming its inherent weaknesses. This re-
turn to an earlier subject, boosted yet correctively criticised by others, allows both the
shedding of a husk and the nurturing of a kernel, a kind of sifting and forced
strengthening of the writer's own natural seedlings.
Toward all these and countless other operations that a class can be led to perform
on their notebook pieces, the teacher must maintain realistic expectations. If he is
going to get the student to advance from C to A (whatever that means) during the
semester, he must not insist that every page look perfect or even clean by the third
week. Many horrendous errors will have to go by, forever uncorrected, on many a
page. The improvement can come only gradually. Notebooks are for trial and lots of
error, just as daily music practice is for sour notes-if sweet ones are ever to come out
at performance.

Yet Another Reason Not to Write A 500-Word Essay: A Biography is Better,

Krystan V. Douglas, University of New Mexico