Product versus Process: How to Deter Robotic Writing

            As noted in class, many of us had negative experiences with writing during high school. To me, writing assignments always seemed like a chore: write a 3-5 page essay on one of the following prompts, write a 1 page reflection on today’s class discussion, or write a short essay about how _________ affected __________. In one word, it was monotonous. A majority of assignments seemed to have a “right” answer that teachers wanted to see, rather than serving as a creative way to draw out our higher order thinking skills. For this reason, writing just seemed like a way to make assessments more drawn out than they needed to be. For example, I specifically remember that my homeroom teacher only liked to hear his own opinion parroted back to him during class. During his literature classes, he always became really defensive when students had opinions other than his own. My classmates and I quickly caught on to this, so we would take notes on his interpretations of the novels we read and incorporated his voice into the writing we submitted to him. Lo and behold, the students who aligned themselves with his point of view did well in the class, while the “defiant” students did not. Unfortunately, many of us came away from the class thinking that our voices were not important unless we mimicked an adult’s perspective. In essence, writing assignments were simply products that should mirror something that already exists, rather than bring new ideas to the table.

The robotic 5-paragraph essay, fittingly explained by a robot

            That being said, it was refreshing to see that Brozo and Simpson focused on writing as a process rather than a product. The steps involved in the process―planning, drafting, revising, editing and polishing, and postwriting and sharing―all involve a level of metacognition from the students; there is not a way to passively go through the motions if these steps are taken. In high school, if teachers had modeled the writing process and emphasized that writing has more than one purpose (like the Gallagher chapter had mentioned), I might not have seen writing as much a tedious task. As mentioned earlier, I thought that writing had a singular purpose: repeat what a teacher has already said. Things may have played out a lot differently if that particular teacher had emphasized that our opinions had meaning, especially if we could back them up with textual support.

Furthermore, if there had been more low-stakes and creative writing tasks, such as quick writes, learning logs, and RAFT activities incorporated into lessons, writing essays, research papers, and lab reports may not have seemed like such daunting tasks. If students perceive thoughtful writing as a “normal” task, higher-stakes assignments will not be as intimidating to them. In essence, I feel that it is necessary for teachers to work their students up to the longer writing projects, rather than relying on them as the end-all, be-all of assessments.

Additionally, if we expect students to be engaged in writing, we need to guide them through the process and also create assignments that would evoke innovation. We need to model original writing and demonstrate that not all text is completely dull and formulaic. After all, if a prompt is boring, the writing will most likely follow suit.