Putting It All Together (Part III)
Bridging Everyday and Academic Writing
How can a teacher connect out-of-class and in-class writings? First of all, teachers should make students aware of the skills most of them already have: familiarity with different modes of writing, descriptive, narrative, and persuasive skills, awareness of audience and purpose, and ability to write in different tones. I propose an activity in which students find examples from their own writing, the writing of friends, or the writing of peers who are strangers online or off for as many different modes of writing they can discover, including, but not limited to, text messages, online chatting, posts on social network sites, emails, and blogs. This exercise should also include paper-based media such as postcards, letters, comics, zines and fanfiction. If the assignment is open-ended, many unexpected forms of text should also appear.
In a related assignment, they could look for examples of text written for different audiences (parents, friends, teachers, bosses, politicians), and text for different purposes (description, narration, persuasion, requests, offers, refusals, invitations, excuses, praise, complaints). Students could hunt for samples of different tones, such as: accusatory, angry, apathetic, cynical, condescending, callous, critical, fanciful, gloomy, honest, humorous, intimate, judgemental, matter-of-fact, mocking, optimistic, sarcastic, sincere, solemn and whimsical (adapted from Scirocco). These samples could be posted on the class forum or shared in class, so that students could compare and analyze what they found.
Another activity would be the creation of a class wiki about tone and register. One axis: very formal, formal, medium, informal, very informal. Second axis: humorous, optimistic, matter-of-fact, gloomy, critical. Sample combinations: “Formal / Gloomy,” “Medium / Optimistic,” “Very Informal / Critical.” Students would be assigned one square in the grid, then given a short piece of writing that does not fit the description in their box, which they would have to adapt as a homework assignment. Then students would be required to look over other students’ entries and make changes here and there to make the pieces conform to the label. Since students would not be altering each other’s original pieces of writing this exercise could be a humorous, interactive and illuminating exercise. Other wikis could include audience and purpose or mode and genre.
