Well-Designed Writing Assignments

Chapter 9 emphasizes how teachers can prepare writing assignments that are comprehensive, contextual, and applicable to skill development that will benefit the student in future endeavors, writing and otherwise. It is important that teachers create lessons that are relevant to other aspects of the curriculum and to the students themselves. The chapter does discuss how too much focus on personally-driven writing can draw students away from empirical understanding.

The chapter differentiates between goals and objectives. Goals embody the "study and understanding of events and info, interpretation, argumentation, and evaluation" (279). Objectives are the end results of instruction, such as the ability "to write effective, error-free reports on events and information" (280). These are necessary aspects of education because they propel the overall aims of knowledge-building and allow for life-long lessons. Well-guided instruction also prepares students for the next level of life; i.e. middle school writing lessons will prepare you for the expectations of high school teachers and so forth until the professional level.

The downfall of well organized lesson planning comes when we recognize that many teachers do not plan in advance beyond the day before the lesson. Effective teachers know well ahead of time (even before the term begins) what they will expect of students on any given day as well as what will take place in class that day. Overall, effective lesson plans focus on several key aspects: rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, writing as process, and finally writing conventions.

I found it compelling that William's discusses Bloom's Taxonomy from such a negative perspective. He describes how it does not work in relation to writing instruction because of the bottom-up methodology and the flawed assumptions about writing that the taxonomy promotes. He explains, "the idea of moving from the concrete to the abstract has led to the assumption that students perform best when they write about what they already know well" (282). But when students write about what they are familiar with, they tend to only be able to write about themselves. This brings us back to the need to break away from the autobiographical emphasis of writing instruction. While the personal narrative is compelling, it does not apply to the necessary writing skills relevant to college and professional level composition.

I was particularly interested in the table that describes the rhetorical difficulty of different types of writing assignments. The sequence moves from simple to more challenging, beginning with report of events/information, evaluation of events/information, fiction, and autobiography. Williams says that when writing instruction begins with young children, teachers should begin with "report of events" style composition. With experience and instruction, eventually students can move into the autobiographical format. This also emphasizes the move from the personal narrative as the simplest form of writing.

I personally have been a student asked to complete some of the sample assignments given in the chapter. Each one is driven by context and active involvement in writing. They are not open-ended, but allow the student the choice of specific topic.

The chapter is exciting because of the examples and direction within. Instead of relying on pedagogical theory, it instead works with application and process.