More Alternative Writing Assignments

These may seem more appropriate to high school than to college writing courses, but I am more interested in having students enjoy writing (and reading) than in impressing me with their mature academic style. (And I continue convinced that such assignments can develop critical thinking skills, and can be incorporated into more formal critical writing.)

• Students can write letters from Pip to Estella and from Estella to Pip (or emails or text messages);
• they can write diary entries for any character they know enough about (and if their knowledge is limited, they can write a single diary entry, say, by Mrs. Pocket at the end of the day when Pip is introduced to the Pocket household;
• they can write a dialogue between Matilda in Mister Pip and Pip, imagining them as contemporaries in one world or the other;
• they can write a humorous narrative of a performance (a play, a movie, a TV show), as Pip does in Chapter XXXI, in which he sees Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet.

Alternatives to Critical Papers

The longer I teach college writing courses, the more convinced I am that we drain student writing of interest and vitality when we teach and require only academic analysis. The language arts and secondary English teachers know that there are many ways for students to engage with literary and other texts and often make interesting assignments that engage students more fully than formal essays of literary analysis, book reports, or research papers.
So today my ENG 102 students have several alternatives that involve them in close, critical reading of Great Expectations but don't require a full-blown literary analysis:

• they may lay the groundwork for a character analysis of a memorable minor character;
• they may fabricate a life history, weaving together their own identity with either Pip's life story or the life of Matilda, protagonist of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip;
• they may do a close analysis of Dickens's style in a passage of their choice; or
• they may imitate Dickens's style, choosing a passage from a text they've written in the past, possibly from another course (especially our first-year seminar), or writing a new passage.

These are all assignments I would have enjoyed at just about any point in my reading of Dickens--from my ninth-grade reading of Great Expectations for English to my current rereading of the wonderful novel.

Brainstorming about writing texts

In the midst of working on my midterm grades, I keep thinking of wonderful ideas I just must pursue--avoiding the discipline of ranking and justifying the ranking. I truly love reading student writing, finding out what students have to say, commenting, inviting revision. I really hate having to give grades. After 24 years of this, you'd think it would be easier, not harder, right?
The latest scheme is the assembling of various instructional materials for our writing classes, to create a textbook of sorts. We have materials and assignments for our PDP program (first-year seminar, seminar for transfer students, second- and third-year reflective conversations, senior reflective essay/portfolio), and some of us share and modify colleagues' first-year writing assignments and classroom activities, and then there are the shared assignments for upper-level courses and the coordination of first-year and second-year writing courses for English majors, not to mention assessment rubrics. And, in this season of choosing textbooks for next fall's courses, I find that the textbooks just never match the ideas I have for classroom activities and writing assignments, so I usually pick several trade paperbacks that sort of work, and I tell people to buy the handbook but I don't much use handbooks myself (with so many materials online). This spring I'm thinking about spending my summer assembling various readings for the activities I want to do, drafting reading guides and activities related to the readings, and, in short, making my own master textbook from which I can draw various materials for an electronic-reserve anthology for each course I teach.
Maybe I should go back to grading, though!