Teaching students how to write papers

I had an illuminating teaching experience this term that I figured I'd share with readers, and which I think might serve as a useful springboard for discussion. First, a little background.

It occurred to me recently that in all my years as a philosophy student, I was never directly taught how to write a paper. I wrote countless papers as a student, of course. But, by and large, I was mostly just expected to 'figure it out.' As an undergraduate, I was given term-paper prompts by instructors, and then did my best to write a paper on one of them. Then, as a graduate student, I just came up with the best ideas I could on the course material, and then write them up. Then, of course, I would received grade--and, for the most part, that was that. In a few cases (for example, my first undergrad course with Dan Dennett), I was able to revise and resubmit papers. But, as far as learning how to write papers, that was basically it. 

Anyway, because I found Dan's resubmission policy so helpful as a student, for many years I did the same thing as an instructor: I had a standing policy of allowing (and encouraging) students to rewrite papers as many times as they wanted. While this was an extremely labor-intensive policy (both for them and me), it generally seemed to work pretty well: a fair proportion of my students would rewrite their papers, improve their work, and appreciate the learning process and their improvement. Still, for all that, there appeared to be a lot of wasted energy in the process: revisions that only modestly improved the student's paper, me spending a ton of time grading them, and so on. Finally, a good proportion of my students never did them anyway--so, it seemed like the rewrite policy wasn't quite 'reaching' them. Those students (particularly the ones who didn't do well) were never learning how to write a good paper.

Because of my dissatisfaction with the revise-and-resubmit approach, a while back I began trying a new strategy: term-paper workshops. Toward the end of the semester, I'd devote half of each class period to helping work their way through each stage of putting together a good term paper. First, there would be a day devoted to brainstorming. I'd post a worksheet on Blackboard asking them to sketch out a few ideas they have for their paper (in response to the term-paper prompts), and which asks them to not only state a rough thesis (or theses, if they have multiple ideas), but also how they plan to argue for it and what kinds of objections a reader might have. Then I would have them discuss their worksheet with a randomly selected peer, who would then fill out a series of questions, commenting on how promising the peer thought the topic, thesis, and argument were, and so on. Then, over a few weeks, I'd use a similar process for workshopping drafts of parts of the paper. The workshop schedule would go something like this:

1. Brainstorming
2. Outlining the paper
3. Drafting an introduction
4. Drafting an exposition/summary section
5. Drafting an argumentative section
6. Drafting a critical discussion section (e.g. grappling with objections)

Finally, in order to incentivize student effort, I would grade students on the basis of the extent to which they put a good faith effort into both parts of the assignment: as author and peer-reviewer. I have to be honest, though: after a few semesters of trying this, I found the 'peer review' part of the workshops to be mostly useless. This was for a couple of reasons. First, my undergraduate students simply didn't have a very good idea of what a good philosophy paper looks like--so their peer feedback was often counterproductive. Second, they often seemed reticent to be sufficiently critical: they seemed like they wanted to avoid offending their partner, so oftentimes their feedback would (in my view) be artificially positive (and again, not very useful).

So what I did this fall, and in a couple of other recent semesters, was do the workshop, but only have students submit their workshop materials to me. I found this works like a charm. Indeed, the term-papers that my students turned in this fall were, on balance, the best papers I think I've ever had students submit. Why? Well, think about the process I outlined above. Anyone who has graded undergraduate term papers knows that students can majorly screw up at many different points.

First, they may simply have a bad/non-viable topic (i.e. thesis and argument). Having students brainstorm things, and then giving them formal feedback on their ideas before they draft the paper, can enable them to avoid this error. Indeed, even if what they brainstorm is bad, they can see why and then develop a better/more viable topic (several of my students this fall did this).

Second, in my experience students simply don't have a very good idea what a good introduction, summary exposition, etc., looks like for a philosophy paper--so, having them workshop each and every stage gives them a clear idea before moving on to drafting the next part of their paper.

Third, and this in my experience may be the very best part of the workshops, formally grading (and giving an 'unofficial grade') for earlier parts of the paper incentivizes better student effort when drafting. Here's what I mean. Most of us, I think, have had students submit shoddy papers--papers that show that they didn't put much effort into their paper (writing it, let's say, the night before it's due). Then, of course, we've had experience with these same students getting upset about their eventual grade, thinking they should have done better on the assignment than they did (let's say, because their instructors in other disciplines aren't very rigorous graders). What workshopping each stage of a developing paper enables me to do as an instructor is to show them very early on just how rigorous of a grader I am. So, for example, when they draft their 1/2 page introductory paragraph, and I grade everything about it to very strict standards (grammar, editing, organization, content, etc.), the student is apt to think to themselves, "Wow, I better put a lot more effort into my exposition section than I thought!". Then, when I subject their exposition to the same high standards, that seems like it solidifies the same point (viz. "Wow, I ought to put a lot more effort into my argumentative section than I thought!").

Long story short, I've found that the first drafts of student papers (viz. their workshop materials) tend to be far better than the final drafts of papers that I used to receive, and that insofar as students use the feedback I give them in the workshops to revise their papers for final submission, their final drafts (on average) this semester were vastly better than any that I received before. A couple of closing thoughts: it occurred to me that, in all of my years as a philosophy student, I never went through a process like this--and it was probably to my detriment. For example, I think it would have been great in grad school to have a seminar or workshops entitled, "How to compose a publishable paper", where an instructor would give step-by-step feedback on what journal reviewers would think is good or bad about this or that section of a paper. I never feel like I had a very clear idea about this except by learning it through trial-and-error (via lots of journal rejections). Second, I imagine that one potential concern about my workshop approach is that it might be 'too overbearing', imprinting upon my students what I think a good philosophy paper looks like, giving them too much direction rather than letting them figure stuff out on their own. I appreciate this concern, but think it can be mitigated by taking care to not simply "give students the answers" (viz. 'writing their paper for them'). The key, I think, is all in the kind of feedback one provides.

Anyway, this is just a teaching experience that I figured that I'd share, and I figure it could give rise to some good discussion. Here, for example, are a few questions to potentially discuss in the comments section below:

1. How do you teach students how to write philosophy papers?
2. Does what you work well? If so, how?
3. Do you think you were given enough instruction on how to write a good philosophy paper (say, in grad school)?
4. If so, what did that instruction look like?
5. If not, what do you wish your instructors (and/or grad faculty) had done?

Comments

[Rosa]

This sounds pedagogically so wonderful! But it also sounds like a truly massive amount of grading work. How many students do you end up doing this with at once? Can you give us a sense of how your grading time for this stacks up against grading time otherwise? Thanks!

[grader]

Marcus
In general, I appreciate your framework. But I worry about "incentivizing effort". There is a little too much of that in the American education system. At the end of the day it is not effort that will be evaluated to determine if (i) a students gets into grad school, or (ii) a paper is accepted for publication. Rather, it is the results. The reason to encourage effort is that it may (and we hope does) produce results. But it does not always. So students should be rewarded for results. Effort, if well spent, will pay off in the long run. One will cultivate good work habits, etc. But we should not over-value effort either.

[Marcus Arvan]

grader: fair points--but to be clear, by incentivizing effort I do not mean *grading* on effort (which I agree, does seem to be a real problem in US pre-collegiate education). The point I was trying to make in the OP is that I've found the workshops I run lead to *better student work* because it leads students to work harder than they otherwise would to actually produce better work. I grade papers with very high standards, and getting high grades in my courses is very difficult.

[True story]

My two cents on teaching graduate students to write philosophy papers.
I was VAP in a R1 university, teaching for a good-leiter program. I had to teach an intro class to philosophy of science to PhD students. Even if students in this program are usually quite good, I thought to have a class specifically tailored to write philosophy of science papers. I have prepared a class on how to write a paper for the PSA, with specific information on what to put in each section - the goal of the course was indeed to write a paper that could be accepted for that conference. I thought that what I was teaching was straightforward, and probably covered by other philosophers of science or analytic philosophers in the department - I even apologized if that was perceived as a waste of time.
To my complete surprise, most of the students said it was the first time they attended a class on how to write papers. Seriously??

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Rosa: Thanks! It is a lot of grading, and to be honest, I think that I do more grading than a lot of people are willing to do--in large part because, as much as I hate doing it, I think grading/feedback is one of the most important parts of my job (it's the *one* place where students receive clear feedback on their performance, after all).

What I've tried to do, to alleviate some of the strain as an instructor, is to reserve the practice for some of my courses but not others. Specifically, I've tended to do it only in my writing-intensive courses. Since all of our upper-level (300-level) courses are writing intensive, and I only teach one upper-level course per term, this means that I'm almost always doing it in just one course (this fall, in a course of 20 students). That's still a lot, but actually I found it more manageable than grading entire papers! I'd also schedule the Workshops in a way that would give me sufficient time to grade everything. For example, I would have students submit their 1/2 page introductions at a Monday workshop, grade them on Tuesday, hand them back on Wednesday, hold a Wednesday workshop where they submit 3-page exposition sections, grade them on Thursday and Friday, hand them back on Monday, and so on.

It is a lot, but I'm only doing it in one class once a semester--and I normally leave the workshops until a point late in the semester when my other lower-level courses for non-majors have final in-class presentations. In other words, I try to get very creative with scheduling things across my courses so that it's not too overwhelming.

Also, in some ways, it's actually *less* time consuming that grading term-papers 'the normal way' (without workshops). The reason for this is pretty simple: as I noted in the OP, because my students see my high standards very early (prior to writing the major sections of their papers), they tend to do a better *job* on their paper drafts! And, as I think we all know, better paper drafts are much, much easier to grade than worse ones (where you have to, for example, note every dumb grammatical error, every editing error, every organizational error, every absent citation, etc.). The workshops, in my experience, lead students to make far fewer of these errors the first time, making grading each little section of their papers less bad than they otherwise would be! Finally, the whole process sort of spreads grading out over a longer period of time. Rather than grading 20 8-10 page papers, I'm only grading between 1-3 pages per workshop--which is actually quite a bit less dispiriting that slogging through full 8-10 page papers.

Of course, I do have to read the final 8-10 page drafts at the end of the term--but here again, I ran into the same pleasant surprise as before: because the papers were so much better than papers in past courses, grading the final papers went far more quickly and more painlessly than normal!

[Trevor Hedberg]

This process would be too time consuming to be useable in courses with my current number of students, but it is definitely worth at least having them submit an outline for a grade before they write their full papers no matter the class size. This provides an opportunity to steer students away from poor topics and dubious arguments before using these as centerpieces of their papers. Doing so can massively improve the average quality of the papers that are submitted and often makes the process of term paper grading less disheartening as a result.

[Daniel Immerman]

Another tactic I tried with a lot of success was to do a series of short assignments (which I called mini-papers). Typically one each week for the first half of the semester. These taught students the skills they needed to write papers piece by piece. The assignments would be quite brief (typically a page max).

E.g the first would have them briefly summarize some key part of some text they read. The next might have them reconstruct an argument in premise-conclusion form. The next might have them create an objection to a such an argument. And so on.

Before each I would have a class devoted partially to the mini-paper in question. I would explicitly discuss how to do write that sort of paper and then have them work, individually, in pairs, and then as a group to practice relevant skills.

Each of these mini-papers assignments would explicitly have two or three things I was looking for. The grade would mostly be on the basis of whether those were present. In addition, a little bit of the grade was devoted to whether the things I had been looking for in past papers were manifested.

I found this strategy worked well; it helped them concentrate on a few things at once and gradually scaffold.

[Tim]

I teach composition in all of my courses. In my experience, the most valuable thing for students is not necessarily laying out a detailed procedure like this. (Though, of course, that really helps a lot of students.) In my experience, the most valuable thing for students is giving them the conceptual resources to understand the writing they are already doing. Writing frequently involves a number of discrete and distinct tasks. Labeling and describing those tasks can help them understand how to write--even the writing they already do.

[Russ Abbott]

I teach computer science and have become convinced that students should not only write code but explain what they are doing. They should do this for all assignments, not just final papers.

This would be wonderful if I had a dozen students and could talk with each one about what they wrote. But I have far more than a dozen students and can't possibly talk to each one about their work every two weeks.

So I strongly agree with you on principle but have no idea how to make it a feasible approach to teaching.

[Derek Bowman]

This is great, Marcus. Like many commentators I think this is too time intensive given the number of students I have, and given that I'm primarily teaching introductory level gen-ed courses.

I do a less intensive version of some of this by (1) having students submit a rough draft, and (2) having a draft workshop day in which I give students a checklist-style draft-worksheet for evaluating and revising their own drafts. (I agree with Marcus about the ineffectiveness of peer review, especially in gen ed classes).

I don't grade the rough drafts except to check that they are submitted (as part of 'participation'), but I do give students the opportunity to ask me questions and to discuss their drafts together.

In addition to being less time intensive for the instructor (and thus scalable to much larger classes), this method also serves to promote some of the philosophical practices I try to teach: self-evaluation, knowing what you don't know, and asking questions. It provides opportunities and incentives for students to take responsibility for their own learning.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to share a sample prompt and draft worksheet. But basically I try to ask questions that anticipate/simulate the kind of things I used to do in 1-hour individual conferences when I worked at the campus writing center as a grad student.

[Evan]

Why not hire philosophy tutors? Most universities should have tutors from each subject help students. At a very large university, there should be one available. I like to ask, “How many of you have written a philosophy paper before?” This question helps to identify students who are already competent so they can be a resource to other students via tutoring. Encourage your more advanced and experienced students to be helpful to their peers. This may also be good for letters of recommendation. A helpful person is valuable in many workplaces.

The first time I was ever taught to write an essay was back in third grade. I still remember. One of the best essays I wrote back then was a biography on Martin Luther King Jr. My teacher was preparing us for the MCAS that year (The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System) test. She gave us examples of essays that scored a 1-5 and 5 being the highest. She read them all to us and went paragraph by paragraph on why it was a strong or weak essay. My AP US History teacher did the same thing with an anonymous student sample. It wasn’t some superficial gloss at it. It was an actual in depth reading if it. We highlighted transitional words, underlined the thesis statement, made notes on the side of the paragraph on what the author was saying or trying to show, etc. We were dissecting the essay like an biology student would dissect an animal noticing its complex systems and parts.

With an excellent example, I can do this in a breeze because the paper would be organized, not pretentious, straightforward, impartial, and offers compelling arguments and evidences. If I am ever tutoring argumentative writing, I give people the best example of one that I think is compelling both in content, organization, and style. I’ll encourage them to copy the tone, organization, and style of said author until they are comfortable competent enough to write in their own voice. You start off by learning or imitating your teachers or other writers until you grow to find your own voice.