Time to begin rethinking some writing assignments for 2023

One goal of mine for winter break is to beef up some of my units/lessons for "Composing Arguments," the First Year Writing course I have taught for over a decade for Metro State University. All courses need a refresh every once in a while, but when an instructor is consistently disappointed by student performance in a particular assignment, there is no time to waste.

A classic argument genre I like to use is the "critical review," which asks the writer to analyze and judge, with the intention of being helpful for the reader who is trying to decide how to allocate limited money, time, or attention.

One staple for all teaching is the model, or series of models, and I clearly need to be more intentional about which models I choose and how I share them with students. 

The immediate cause here is that most of the reviews I have been reading over the past few years have been underwhelming, if not downright horrible.

Here is a sample review (chosen for length and timeliness rather than artistic value) from the New York Times site on a somewhat new Netflix release called "the Noel Diary" that fits this time of year:

The actor Justin Hartley, who won fame on “This Is Us,” is no stranger to the themes in the holiday romance “The Noel Diary.” The yearning of adoptees, the tug of interracial connections and the repercussions of a family tragedy should ring a welcome bell for fans of NBC’s wonderfully weepy melodrama.

In the movie, Hartley plays Jake Turner, a best-selling author who returns to his estranged mother’s home in Connecticut after her death. He learns she had become a hoarder — though a notably hygienic one — and finds a journal by an unknown author amid the clutter.

A young woman pens her worries onto its pages in the movie’s opening scene.

Barrett Doss (“Station 19”) brings nuanced comedic timing and charm to Rachel, whose search for her birth mother — the journal writer — has led her to Jake’s childhood home, where she’s seen standing tentatively across the street.

Although Rachel is engaged, the two immediately share a spark, one stoked by their road trip to Jake’s even more estranged father in hopes of learning about Rachel’s mother.

James Remar, Bonnie Bedelia and Essence Atkins do nicely buttressing work as Jake’s rueful dad, a compassionate neighbor and Rachel’s birth mother. And the director Charles Shyer brings a journeyman’s ease to the screenplay (based on Richard Paul Evans’s novel by the same name): embracing holiday movie expectations here, gently deflecting them there.

The roadways are as snow-dappled as the town of Maple Falls, where a showing of a holiday classic further bonds the traveling pair. Their on-the-road revelations offer hints of what could turn out to be a wonderful life. While this will come as heartwarming news for sentimental viewers, it’s sure to leave one unsuspecting fiancé out in the cold.

Worth discussing: How important to a reader are references to actors the public may know previously? How important is briefly summarizing the overall theme of a movie? How important is giving readers a rough plot summary? How important is it to not simply give away the ending to a new film?

And one thing about the above review, which is rather brief (288 words is too brief for a college argument, so I would be asking for something closer to 600 or more): How important is it to provide examples that support claims made in a review? I highlighted two unsupported claims that a reader might have questions about. Students might wonder what "buttressing" means, and "a journeyman's ease" is so vague that it practically demands more examination and explanation. 

In the end, the above sample review is well-written while remaining remarkable free of "nutritional value," so to speak. Is that what we want our arguments to amount to?

Locally, we worry about the cold snap; nationally, we just worry

I subscribe to a free daily e-newsletter called WT Just Happened Today, and it always begins with a (long) one-sentence summary of the top news as chosen by this site. Here was yesterday's:

Today in one sentence: The Jan. 6 Committee formally accused Trump of inciting an insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and obstructing Congress’ Jan. 6 joint session, and unanimously voted to refer the crimes to the Justice Department for prosecution; the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to make six years of Trump’s tax records public; a federal appeals court rejected an effort by 19 Republican-led states to keep a Trump-era border policy in place; the Senate gave final approval to an $858 billion defense spending bill; the national average for gasoline dropped to $3.14 a gallon; nearly half of 18-to-29-year-olds live at home with their parents; and 65% of Americans say the country is on the wrong track and not headed in the right direction.

This sort of "headline" approach rarely provides much true insight, but does provide some sort of broad sampling of what is going on. I knew something about each of these items, but seeing them all strung together with the help of our friend the semicolon really caught my eye.

It's tough to miss the news about the Jan. 6 Committee (and the soon-to-shift committee power with the Angry White People Party soon to take over the House), and I have no idea where all this is going. It is nice, however, to have an on-going process finally reach a clear conclusion. 

Our border policies are chaotic, as is most everything happening around immigration, and it is certain that we won't be making any helpful changes in the coming year or two, thanks to that slight R majority in the House. I don't know what the clear solution is to it all, but voters really can't complain much about the government doing nothing when they opt for split chambers. That will not keep the whining and moaning from continuing, of course, much like all those "thoughts and prayers" will not stop or even diminish the slaughter of our fellow Americans with guns. Freedom!

The Defense bill came in many billions OVER what President Biden proposed, which shows that however much partisan debate there is, we can all agree that showering the military with unimaginable funding always passes. If having more guns in the country than people remains our policy, it's tough to argue against providing ever-more money for the Pentagon. And both are equally effective.

A gallon of gas had dropped almost $2 since summer, and no one gives Biden any credit. He doesn't really deserve any, in fact, but he also did not deserve all the criticism when rich oligarchs pushed the prices so high for several months. We are a country of morons.

Learning that a huge percentage of young Americans are basically delaying their full entry into adulthood is distressing. It also tells us a lot about the economy and job opportunities. And why wouldn't young people, many coddled a bit too much by anxious parents, think living in their parent's basement sounds like a bad idea?

Bottom line: nearly two-thirds of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, but I would guess there is virtually no consensus as to what direction the nation should be heading. What could be more American than complaining to no effect (as with gas prices)?

We are becoming a nation with no true leaders other than the technocrats who keep things running, enforce rules, and issue checks. 

Maybe someone will show up to take on that role in the coming year. We can hope.

You can't run and you can't hide

It took almost three years, but Covid finally caught up to Kathleen and me about a week ago... and we are now on the backside of the illness (which resembled a bad cold more than anything else). The timing could have been worse, since we are confident that we will be well past the infectious stage (not to mention the sneezing/coughing stage) by the time Saturday rolls around. That is when we fly to Seattle for Christmas.

I am thankful that we both had our flu shots (super shots for seniors!) as well as five total vaccine shots, with the most recent being in September for the Omicron variant, which is likely what got us in the end. But we are not in the hospital or dead or otherwise impaired... and that could be sheer luck but more likely is due to the support our aging immune systems received from our various shots, not to mention staying home more than we would have guessed prior to the pandemic.

We have discussed how and where and when we might have been exposed... and we might have exposed one another in the end. There are no good answers since we were among several large groups in the past couple weeks, mostly involving holiday concerts and churches. We aren't sure exactly when we became "positive," since that may happen days before any symptoms show.

We finally did those at-home tests last Thursday, despite feeling that our colds were exactly like past colds, pre-pandemic, so today may mark one week of Covid, or maybe a bit more. The CDC says on its site that all should be well about five days after symptoms subside, so we feel OK about flying (masked) to Seattle on Christmas Eve.

We have delayed getting together with Lesley, Ian, and girls until after we return from Seattle "in an abundance of caution." as they say.

Bottom line: we feel fortunate that our Covid encounter didn't overwhelm, though today's story that China now predicts up a million deaths from Covid in the next few months is sobering. 

They seem to face some of the same problems the U.S. did in suffering our own million deaths over the past three years. China's extreme lockdown policies appear to have simply delayed the inevitable, and they have not convinced most of their elderly to get vaccines, etc. Their own vaccines may not be as effective, which may end up being one of those "national pride" situations that backfire. Who knows?

The U.S. deaths now are concentrated among the over-65 population (90 percent!), and it turns out that being old equals being vulnerable to this virus, no matter the race or location of the population. 

We are hopeful that we did not inadvertently spread the virus while infectious, but I suppose we can only feel a tiny bit of guilt. After all, the virus is everywhere and we are all behaving as if it's no big deal. I never really believed we were invulnerable, but going so long without catching even a minor illness might have led us to taking a few extra chances. Perhaps we were blissfully "naive."

At some point, though, we have to come to grips with the fact that we did everything we could, for as long as we could. My hope is that our systems are now even more strongly protected, since our immune systems were called upon to fight the nasty bug. We may be stronger in the coming year.

Maybe the virus is not a big deal at this point for a huge chunk of the Western World population, but tell that to the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who will be suffering and dying in 2023. 

Two similes, a metaphor, and an allusion in today's model sentences

You can find great sports writing quite easily, partly because the very nature of sports contains all the elements of story-telling: characters, setting, challenges/problems, and resolution. Sports are also just plain fun and people are so passionate about them.

This week's Frank Bruni feature on "for the love of sentences" reminded me of that, though I will share just a couple examples as we wrap up the week and the semester. The following sentence ends with a striking simile: 

The New York Times’s coverage of the World Cup has brimmed with too many standout passages to mention, but here’s a characteristically excellent one from Rory Smith, regarding Portugal’s often underwhelming play: “The country has for years boasted enough individual talent to match any team on the planet and yet, under the aegis of Fernando Santos, it has been assiduously, unapologetically, and in many ways successfully dour, as if a group of the finest artists in the world had been gathered together and asked to wallpaper a bedroom.”

There is something about our relatively slower sports -- like soccer and baseball -- that seems to inspire writers. Maybe that is due to writers having time to process what happens on the field, with plenty of time to speculate about the causes of great success or spectacular failures... not to mention the quirky, driven personalities who dominate at the highest level of sports.

This soccer writing features a provocative metaphor:

Andrew Das, also covering the World Cup for The Times, described a match in which Brazil grew frustrated and “pivoted to some of soccer’s darker arts: dives and flops, shirt pulls and shoves and appeals to the referee for justice. None of it worked. Croatia had brought a vise to a gunfight, and for more than two long hours on Friday it calmly and methodically squeezed the life and the joy out of Brazil.”

It helps if our students realize the expected cliche is "a knife to a gunfight," but it's not strictly necessary for them to get the idea. 

This comparison requires the reader to be familiar with both a 1981 movie and recent controversies with Ye and a fellow-bigot dining with the former president:

And Bret Stephens rued our country’s trajectory: “Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from ‘My Dinner With Andre’ to that dinner with Kanye.”

For most of our students, this may be asking too much, and it's a good reminder that allusions always assume a lot from our readers. Handle with care. 

And let's finish with another simile:

An unsigned article in The Economist asserted: “Trying to learn about sex from Hollywood is like watching James Bond for tips on a career as a British civil servant.” 

This one appealed to me both as a nice figure of speech but also because we have decided to revisit our James Bond collection of DVDs, combining Friday nights with the movies in chronological order and pizza night. 

There's little meaning to be found in those movies and lots of things to criticize and bemoan, but if we turn off our critical minds for a couple hours each Friday evening, what's the harm?

Don't look now, but the machines are catching up

From today's Seth Godin post:

Typing the right things into Google makes it more likely you will find what you’re looking for.

Now, with GPT and Stable Diffusion and other machine learning AI tools gaining widespread use, there’s a gap between people who are simply stumbling around with silly short prompts and folks who are figuring out how to engineer an excellent prompt.

We’re all the boss. Giving better instructions gets better results.

I have been fiddling with ChatGPT for a few days, establishing an OpenAI account and experimenting with various prompts that might approximate assignments I make in my online writing classes. 

Here's a quick example:

My prompt that I shared with the AI software: write a Hallmark TV movie parody opening scene. 

What the software came up with: 

As the camera pans across a cozy suburban neighborhood, the narrator's voiceover begins:

"Welcome to the town of Maplewood, where the picket fences are white, the yards are perfectly manicured, and the residents all seem to have picture-perfect lives. But as we all know, things are never as they seem...

Cut to a montage of scenes showing the main characters: a perky housewife struggling with her husband's infidelity, a single mom working two jobs to make ends meet, and a high school mean girl scheming to ruin her classmates' lives.

"Join us for an emotional rollercoaster of love, heartbreak, and triumph as we explore the deep, dark secrets of Maplewood," the narrator continues. "Will love conquer all? Or will the town's hidden skeletons come back to haunt its inhabitants? Tune in to find out on tonight's episode of 'Maplewood Lane: A Hallmark TV Movie Parody.'"

Not a bad starting point for something more, IMHO. Note the choice of "Maplewood" for the town name, which is entirely the computer's decision. Note the rhythm of "three" in that second graf (fences are white. yards are manicured, and all seem to live perfect lives. Note the main characters that the software created: a housewife, a single mom and a mean girl. I don't know why they are all female, but the AI knows that female characters are usually the leads in Hallmark movies. 

Of course, the AI also chose to explicitly create a title for the show that gives away the fact that the show is a parody, which is a bit clunky. 

But there is quite a bit to work with here if I were trying to write such a script. There would be lots to do to develop each main character, plus the supporting characters we would need. But I would have some basic themes to work with, including the importance of love as well as the carefully hidden "sins" that many in the town would like to keep covered up.

Let's face it: students will soon be exploring AI software for writing assignments, among other things, which makes Mr. Godin's advice about teaching how to write more sophisticated prompts quite timely. 

The point is not that traditional writing assignments are going to become obsolete (though they certainly MIGHT) but that we can add ChatGPT to student "toolboxes," along with spellcheck and grammar check.

The best writing often surprises us. In our little parody test above, I have say I was a bit surprised, and in a good way.

The 'magic' of science is hard to resist

The announcement of a successful test of nuclear fusion yesterday, which produced more power than it took to create the very fast reaction, is a reminder that progress in many areas of life are not obvious or even on most people's radar. 

If lots of technical challenges can be overcome -- and it likely will take decades for that -- fusion offers a way to further disentangle fossil fuels and even nuclear fission from the power grid. The process produces no harmful radiation or other environmental damage. It's the stuff of Star Trek or other sci-fi shows and books.

I assume the development of cell phones was somewhat similar, with decades of work going into the technology and then the "sudden" release of smart phones. 

The food synthesizers of Star Trek are a great example of a fictional breakthrough that quickly changes attitudes toward food and hunger... though most viewers have no idea HOW a machine creates food on demand. there has to be some sort of fuel, I would think, or at least some substance to mold into a requested hot tea or ice cream sundae. 

We should not passively sit back and hope that scientists will "solve" or at least minimize problems like affordable energy and the abolition of hunger, and we should always be alert for how technological leaps might turn out to be negative.

Smart phones are a terrific example of "unintended consequences" and how the ubiquitous phone connects everyone at all times, though only tenuously, and how the phone contributes to shorter attention spans, distracted driving and walking, etc. 

Barring some disaster, we don't go backwards technologically. Smart phones will not go away any time soon, nor will artificial intelligence or online shopping through Amazon. Our only hope is to find best ways to incorporate tech into our lives without losing our humanity.

During an online department meeting for Metro yesterday (a wrap up for the semester), I brought up ChatGPT, the newly released AI software that does a solid job of mimicking human speech and sentence construction.

It was apparent that I was the only one of the college teachers who had actually established an OpenAI account and experimented with the program. In fact, the chair clearly thought the samples of essays that she had read in the media were not "up to snuff." Maybe, but technology tends to pick up momentum and how long will it take for the ChatGPT responses to create well-argued essays and posts that are indistinguishable (maybe better!) than even solid college writers?

As usual, universities will hang back until they are forced to recognize new trends and then will try to hustle to create new policies and ethics documents. They will be flawed since they will be rushed. 

But it occurred to me that it shouldn't be the 72-year-old writing instructor who is fiddling with AI for writing... at least not ONLY me. 

At least one of my teaching peers described the AI-produced writing as "terrifying," which led me to mention that for many of the students I work with there might be some good coming out of quickly creating a basic essay structure. Would it be top-notch? Probably not (for a while) but a solid start can lead to giving young writers a foundation on which to add specific examples, for instance. 

My initial experiments have produced solid short pieces filled with assorted claims. Most of those claims are not supported with specific examples. Perhaps THAT will be the future of student writing: expanding and sharpening arguments that begin with machine-created claims.

Yes, AI could go horribly wrong, but it might become a useful tool to produce better thinkers and better writers. 

It will be up to us, if we take the time to explore.

Sometimes we need to return to the 'obvious'

This week's Scott Young blog post featured some thoughts based on the idea that "everything is obvious once you know the answer," and the timing connected perfectly with this week, which is the last of the fall semester for my college writing classes.

His conclusion is that most people he knows tend to fall into one of two camps when it comes to taking and using advice.

I, of course, translated "most people" into "most students." A large group of students believe in "secrets." They are quite certain that there are special methods and ideas that can make you a successful academic writer (or any sort of writer). They are in the class hoping I will reveal those secrets. I have met so many students who believe there must be some sort of "recipe" that they can follow on the road to success.

A second group of students believes they already know what to do to succeed, but that a lack of willpower, motivation, or talent is holding them back. These may be students who have been exhorted to "work harder," whatever that means.

Perhaps the lack of rapid progress among my college writers is due to most students missing the "obvious" points... despite me repeating them over and over all term. 

The problem may be that advice like "show, don't tell," and "no claims without support" are too obvious to many students, since they have heard teachers urging them to write with those simple ideas in mind for years. 

Here is Young's concluding sentence: "... it’s about figuring out which boring, yet plausible, account of how things work is actually right."

I will try to keep this idea more firmly in my head as I make adjustments in the spring semester courses I will take on, and am thinking I should make this idea explicit in my first week's readings. Maybe THAT tactic will flip some sort of switch and allow students to unlock the many examples they have in their memories and finally share them on paper (or the screen, in my case). 

I suspect that students tend to find my repeating "show us" and "use specific examples" as boring because I am a bit bored simply typing versions of those two pieces of writing advice over and over, for years and years, with little evidence that anyone is incorporating tried and true advice into their essays, reviews, and reports. 

Some of my college writers think they are poor writers because they aren't solid on basic grammar and sentence structure, and while I do want college writers to be more precise in their mechanics, what is really at the heart of their writing problems is that they can't seem to create a clear thesis/claim to work from. 

Many just sit down at the computer and start "writing their way" into what they want to say... and once they finally get to a meaningful point they almost always choose to not return to all the junk they used to get themselves there. 

Just typing the above statement into this blog leads me to a new goal for this spring: Slow down the course early and concentrate on strong theses and claims... and only then ask for more complete essays that provide compelling evidence that will back up those claims.

My error has been to assume that my college students had covered how to write a solid claim in high school and earlier college classes. 

That is an assumption that is not working.