Student Choices in Writing Assignments

Giving students choices in writing assignments makes students better writers. The process model of writing instruction draws its rationale from the practices of "real" writers--professionals. Professional writers select topics and make choices about genre, style, length, and so forth. In many cases, they write to others' specifications (say, when writing for a specific publication or under contract for a book), but they do so by choice. When students can select their topics and make choices about genre, style, and length, they make writerly choices--not student choices. Too often in the classroom, we strictly limit these kinds of decisions. We tell students, "An essay should have five paragraphs and a three-part thesis sentence," "A paragraph should be five to seven sentences long," "Each paragraph should include a quotation from the text you are writing about," "Each quotation should be introduced with one of these phrases," etc. (Have you read an essay by Francis Bacon or George Orwell or Joan Didion?!) Students have figured out how school works, and when they associate writing with school, they boil it down to, "Tell me what you want, and I'll give it to you." Believe me, they will give you exactly what you have asked for. But what does this have to do with writing?

I don't want my students to "give me what I want." I want students to be good writers. I want students to surprise me with their insights and creativity. Most importantly, I want my students to understand that you write when you have something to say--about an academic topic or about a personal topic, for the campus newspaper or for a loved one, to make sense of life challenges or to organize a voluntary activity. To be good writers, they must make choices. If I am making all the choices, all my students are doing is playing at advanced Mad Libs.

If I'm not telling them how to write, what am I teaching? I can teach students how to pay attention to their choices and the choices that other, published writers or peer writers have made. I can teach students a repertoire of strategies for organizing, improving style, following academic conventions, incorporating dialogue, or overcoming writer's block. There are some elements that they must pay attention to in order to achieve maximum growth as writers. Paying attention to their writing and the writing of others facilitates their decision-making about their own writing.

Are there drawbacks for a teacher of writing in giving students a wide range of options? Yes, we don't get comparable "products" from students, and some might see this as creating more difficulty in grading consistently. Sam turns in an informal five-page narrative, and Sue turns in a succinct academic argument. Can we apply the same standards to these two texts? One way is to grade students' performance in realizing their rhetorical goals: we can assess whether they made good choices for the audience and purpose they envisioned for their writing; we can assess appropriateness of style and tone; we can assess adequacy of development. Another way is to assess individual development over time: is paragraph focus in this narrative more successful than it was in the letter to the editor that this student wrote two weeks ago? We can assess portfolios and require all the students to submit specific kinds of papers over the course of a semester, to be written in the order that each student chooses. And of course, another way is the tried-and-true assignment of a specific genre with student choice of topics, along the lines of the "I Search" paper, for which students conduct personally meaningful topics.

In most cases, students choose topics and styles that interest them, that are meaningful to them, given true choice. This makes the writing process more interesting for them, and it makes the products that we read more interesting for us as well.