Student Writing & NaNoWriMo: A Socially-Networked Composition Community

“After realizing that I hated my novel and it was the worst thing I'd ever read in my life. I took it outside, grabbed some kerosene, and sent as an offering to the gods for them to have pity on me... Now, I'm back and have something even better...a continuation of the novel I wrote last year.” (Odum)

“Funny. I too changed my original idea of mine. It was too complex and I hadn't figured out some key parts in my head, so I started writing some other melancholy story. Of course I didn't make an offering. I did however stoop outside in the rain during lunch on Monday and made my decision if that counts for anything.” (Tucker)

The exchange above between Ashley and Aaron on our class social network, regarding their writing for the National Novel Writing Month challenge (NaNoWriMo.org), reflects both their writing and their frustration with writing. However, it portrays something more than a reflection about writing. It is writing that engages multiple readers, as other comments responding to this blog post show, and it creates a community culture, as illustrated by Aaron’s mirrored response of going from inside self to outside self to seek a resolution in writing as Ashley has with her writing dilemma. Aaron also reflects back in his response using Ashley’s words of “offering” and “outside” with the implied supplication of “stoop” to show his offering to “the gods” of writing.

Texts created by my students on our classroom social networking site; such as the ones above, portray student writing and illustrate the building of a composition community, as do brief textual site updates proclaiming; “trying to find a way to express my frustration for Frankenstein in 140 characters or less,” “uggg...I lost my voice:/,” and “Reading criticism on THE POWER AND THE GLORY and thinking about things... Exciting!!!!!!!!” (Rattanawan) (Rosado) (Ionescu). However, is all this writing in the service of learning? Should it be? The easy assumption that writing is or should always be in the service of something else is a concept challenged by Sánchez in his work, The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. Sánchez’s work argues that existing theories that have shaped our teaching of composition have focused on writing as the act of representation and placed teachers in the role of the analyzing this representation. After all, “it is much easier to reproduce and analyze what people read or should read, than to retrieve and make available what they write, just as it is more comfortable to appreciate or critique what people hear and see than to argue for the circulating power of what they say and make” (Miller 4). It is the idea of “circulating power” and its ability to grow in a socially-networked writing site that changes students into “composing subjects who are both producers and products of discourse” in a community that is of their making (Sánchez 71).

How does theory drive composition studies? This is the question that Raúl Sánchez seeks to understand in his writing. While he is not presenting a practical approach to teaching composition in the high school classroom, his challenge that composition studies should undertake the goal to theorize writing has important applications for how we engage students in writing. In practical terms, he is asking us, teachers and students, to enter into a conversation about writing as a human activity as opposed to simply examining it as an artifact. We need to engage in writing that “interrupts the meaning-making machine” and interrupts the myth of a community built on our being-in-common into a true community of us each being active agents of meaning (Davis qtd. in Sánchez 29). This does not mean that we do not create communities of writers who do not seek common ground or who do not try to connect through writing. However, even as our students mirror each other on social networks through their writing, their topics, their avatars, and other visuals, they also produce their own meaning and add to a community of equals. This writing is not necessarily in the service of knowledge although knowledge might be created for others. This community’s culture is “enunciative” in which the act of writing and the marginalized ‘other’ as subject/ object transforms to become the writer of their own culture. Thus “culture is writing” and creates the community’s cultural contexts (Sánchez 80-1).

There is a constant negotiation in Sánchez’s argument between cultural theory as damaging to composition studies, in that it has prevented composition studies from developing its own theory of writing, and his use of ideas within cultural theories to bolster his arguments. Sánchez appears to see that as well. “[T]he theory of writing for which [he argues] seems to require one more step in the process” (Sánchez 81). That step is the teacher and the classroom community. The goal is to follow Sánchez’s urging to turn the “gaze back to writing” as it “gives composition studies the ability to articulate writing in new ways” allowing the teacher to enter into a conversation with other instructors and theorists in the composition community and to look critically at our own practice (10). It also presents the idea of looking to our students as active agents in this community of composition conversation.

The practical application of Sánchez’s “grammar of writing” is looking at how generative meaning-making writing acts can vitalize writing and empower student writers (Sánchez 100). The meaning-making writing of self-directed socially-networked composition through such mediums as a Ning or Edmodo is a culture-creating act. The immediate, easily proliferated, and uncensored writing created by writers in social networks are articulations in which writers instantly gain audience and community. Thus social-networking in the classroom allows the sharing of power in defining identity and culture. Socially-networked student writing is even more powerful in that it can transcend the confines of the classroom walls. Students can move their writing to alternate sites both in school and outside of it. In these alternative sites, students not only write to fulfill curricular demands, but they can write to create an individual self-conception and a communal connection with their fellow students. In addition, as all of my three Advanced Placement English Literature classes are on the same social networking site and my two senior language arts classes are on a shared classroom networking site this overlap allows connections between students in different class periods to occur. It also promotes the construction of a wider community then what interaction within the school day allows.

This non-representational type of social-network writing has practical difficulties in a classroom setting. How to you assess it? If you attempt to remove yourself from evaluating this community’s writing, how do provide a model for self-evaluation? To provide some direction the following guidelines are helpful in creating a community that takes on the writing risk to create their own meaning.

A classroom discussion on how and if this writing should be graded needs to be a community decision. If grading occurs on writing that is self-directed as opposed to writing in response to a specific curriculum unit’s text, students will stop creating meaning and simply return to focusing on writing as a technological act or an interpretive act of something else—someone else’s text, culture, and ideology. Sánchez’s argument is that this type of composition works to mold student writing and thought so that “writing is, once again, only a means to an end, the by-product of a prior, interpretative act” (Sánchez 69). This is also damaging to community. In writing-as-representation type of community students seek to give the teacher what they believe the teacher wants to hear. Students do this by locating themselves into an acceptable pre-existing societal role instead of seeking to write “oneself into a variety of perspectives” (Sánchez 68).

To go further into practical applications of utilizing social networking in the classroom, creating communities of writings, and encouraging students to write for their own purposes, books such as William Kist’s The Socially Networked Classroom, Jim Burke’s Writing Reminders, and Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them provide great classroom tools. One practical way I have found to unleash generative writing in student writers and build a supportive writing community is through the National Novel Month Writing challenge that takes place each November. Prior to November, students are introduced to thinking about writing and the lessons to be taken from other writers through reading and discussing Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Students are then challenged to search out approximately three books to create a personal text set. These books are chosen due to theme, plotting, or style as inspiration for students own writing. The books provide a model for those feeling overwhelmed and yet do not inhibit other students in their writing-as-generation. Posting their work for word count verification along the way on our class NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program (nanowrimo.org) site provides incentive to keep up with writing as our class social-network provides a place to post excerpts, talk about frustrations, and offer encouragement. Because of the amount of time devoted to this project in class, a method of evaluation that is both fair and provides a grade that honors the student work is beneficial and fulfills the practical need for grading accountability. One method of assessing is to develop a rubric that is collaboratively created by the entire class. Many students actually express resistance to this because they are not used to wielding the power of evaluation, a power usually reserved for those in authority. Providing a sample rubric that can be modified by the classroom community is one way to begin this discussion. Our class rubric is below as a model.

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It is through this type of project that the individual is composed while composing text, and in the process a community is created. This is a community where meaning is generated by its members and not imposed by an outside prevailing culture. As Diba shows through her statement, “I will never stop this novel. It means so much to me,” her writing has become hers rather than a task in service of representing others’ texts and the ideologies that accompany them (Rowhani). To build an even stronger sense of community, students can collectively grade themselves and their peers.

Sánchez’s call for new alternative theories of composition may change composition in the classroom, but it will not happen overnight. Students have spent much of their school career as creators of representational writing texts—standardized writing tests, class papers, research paper assignments, other technically required writing—and will continue to do so. This type of writing does not magically disappear. Seniors in my classes prepare for the SAT, ACT, and the Advanced Placement English Literature exam. These tasks require students to be able to create representational texts that will be evaluated and often carry cultural ideologies that are not student generated. Students exist in a world that values these texts, and so instruction in our classroom focuses on this type of writing as well. However, Sánchez’s provocative stance argues for us to give space for students as generative writers and creators of culture. The benefit of a social network, and the writing community it creates both online and in the classroom, is that the writer remains in focus. This prevents writing from continually “fetishizing the text and the reader” at the expense of the writer (Sánchez 74). It is also beneficial in our school, which is Title 1, and contains many students who come from high poverty and includes many minority and immigrant students whose voice is not always heard by those in power.

Writing, whether it is writing-as-generation or writing-as-representation is an act of communication, and community is an essential element of this. Both the words community and communication originate from the Latin, communis, “to make common”. It is writing that makes things “common” and communal. Writing is itself is the something else that is made into something common shared by all communities including our classroom community. Writing-as-generation changes this something else that Sánchez explores beyond a representational concept of knowledge or culture. This writing becomes the human activity that creates culture.

When my student Kevin stated on our social network that, “it seems kind of cheesy to say that my characters came to life, so I won't. Instead, I'll say that my characters grabbed my keys by the throat, and forced it to write them a new identity,” he articulates the ability of writing “to create, rather than merely transmit, a meaning” (Darnell) (Sánchez 93). It is this call to focus on writing-as-generation that is essential for allowing students to develop as individual writers so that they become creators of communities as opposed to servants enslaved to the goals of societies existing communities.

Works Cited

Burke, Jim. Writing Reminders: Tools, Tips, and Techniques. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

Darnell, Kevin. “Untitled.” Blog posted to The AP Way. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

Ionescu, Daniel. Comment posted to The AP Way. Web. 21 Feb. 2011.

Kittle, Penny. Write Beside Them. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2008.

Kist, William. The Socially Networked Classroom: Teaching in the New Media Age. Thousand Oak, CA: Corwin, 2010.

Miller, Susan. Assuming the Positions: Cultural Pedagogy and the Practice of Commonplace Writing. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Odum, Ashley. “November Insanity.” Blog posted to The AP Way. Web. 17 Nov. 2010.

Rattanawan, Ashley. Comment posted to The AP Way. Web. 21 Feb. 2011.

Rosado, Diane. Comment posted to The AP Way. Web. 21 Feb. 2011.

Rowhani, Diba. “NEVERRRR.” Blog posted to The AP Way. Web. 1 Dec. 2010.

Sánchez, Raúl. The Function of Theory in Composition Studies. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005.

Tucker, Aaron. Comment Response to “November Insanity.” Blog posted to The AP Way. Web. 18 Nov. 2010.