Central to our writing students’ (and hence our own) success is their reconceiving of their language-activity and of themselves as language-actors.

--from an unpublished dissertation, 1976

Website: http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/john_dinan (All our 4 C’s handouts as well as those for the three individual writing projects can be found at this website.) Email: john.s.dinan@cmich.edu

Presentation Outline – John Dinan, Central Michigan University

A. Segment Objectives

B. Background

1. Creative Nonfiction (CNF) – an Evasive Characterization

a. Mr. Clinton: It depends upon what you mean by “is”

b Common Features: Personal Indwelling

Truth

Resonance

Craft

c. For young students, most of the power seems to be in the combination of Personal Indwelling and Craft—combining the Expressive/Participant role with the Poetic/Spectator role (Britton)

2. Our teacher-research questions:

a. General:

(1) Do our customary developmental assumptions apply to integrating this genre into freshman writing classes?

(2) What relationship does a novice writer have with his/her CNF text that might make writing it different from—better than?—composing more traditional E101 essays?

b. Somewhat more specific:

(1) How ready are they?

(2) How can we make this kind of writing “do-able”?

(3) How does the writing produced by CNF projects relate to standard E101 course objectives?

(4) What do writing teachers need to know/be in order to do this well with their young students?

C. My own curiosities:

1. How do I resolve the tension between my students’ need for genre knowledge on the one hand and, on the other hand, the importance of their operating as much as possible on their own?

2. How important is it for a teacher of novice writers to preserve the purity of the Fourth Genre as it is defined by the work of professional essayists?

3. Can I find arguments that will allow those more vulnerable than I to work with students in this genre and still function within the parameters of a traditional composition course?

D. What I Did

1. I took a standard and highly-regarded component of our English 101 syllabus and added to it a CNF segmented essay done prior to and—once I got smart—without specific reference to the traditional project.

Rationale: The idea was to use a CNF project to get students familiar with their PS topic—an elaborate prewriting, if you will—while at the same time creating in them not only a high degree of involvement with their subject typical of CNF writers but (hidden agenda alert!) also to put them in a position to see themselves—and writing—in a somewhat new and maybe healthier way.

2. The “Steps” [see handouts, here and on the web site]:

Topic Selection (same brainstorming activity I use for the regular PS project [see website]

--Key element: It is to be a personal problem

Assignment Description

Samples (not models)

Gathering Time

Drafting Segments (typically—and unconventionally—done before organizing.)

Arranging and Revising

E. How’d It Go?

1. Survey Results:

--High level of engagement and (even) enjoyment

--Acceptance (eventual) of an unconventional genre

2. Payoffs: Practical—stuff for their std. essay Emotional: “Cool” (vs. grim satisfaction)

3. Results in terms of the groups’ 4 main guiding questions:

a) How ready are they?

Less ready than more experienced (and less-conditioned) writers, but increasingly willing to have a go at this very new genre once the conditions for engagement are met.

b) How can we make this kind of writing “do-able”?

This is tricky. Like any writers, our students need genre knowledge and procedural knowledge in order to proceed successfully. We could be very prescriptive, something many of them expect and even want at the outset. But to do so seriously undercuts the power of this CNF process.

1) Advice (to myself as well as others) for making this do-able

--Self-Selection of as many aspects as possible, including the topic

--Be sure they have some expertise in the topic, an insider’s relationship to it

--Limit analytical large-group discussions of the genre itself, esp. at the outset

--Provide a whole lot of samples that look somewhat different (but also somewhat the same) and are written by different kinds of folks (including students).

--Provide class time for reading and individually reflecting upon these samples--but don’t get into much teacher-led discussion of them.

--Do your own piece as they are doing theirs; share it.

--Force some segmentation, but don’t assess it.

--Get them together in peer response groups more often than usual, but for shorter periods of time than usual

--Don’t refer to the upcoming (and related) traditional essay

c) How does this kind of writing project relate to the actual (traditional) objectives of our English 101 syllabus?

--Do I care?

--A legitimate, useful prewriting for a traditional essay with traditional objectives

--Recommendation: Use it in this way for other conventional assignments as well

d) What do we writing teachers need to know and be in order to do this well?