Let's pledge to have students, not write A Thing but Write.
THIS, from Liz Wardle; > So when I say that we use literacy narratives here, I am using that term as a shorthand, really. About THIS, from Maja: > how I get around the problem of what to call the blasted paper seems to me to be not just at the root of the undead literacy narrative crisis, but of a lot of other crises. I forget who else in the thread asked, "But what section of the textbook would it go under?" (Liz Bryant?) which also crystallizes the issue. After all, if you can't give it a one- or two-word textbook-chapter name, How Could Anyone Possibly Assign It As Writing?? or even, How Can It Possibly Still Be Live Writing??? I used to think it was just The Comparison-Contrast Paper that was my nemisis. (Well, it still holds a very, very special place on my intellectual dartboard.) But more and more I think it's The ____ Paper. All those names are "shorthand" to us, but the rest of the world, including very much our student population, may be reading them more as absolutes. Just as one offshoot problem: how will students glimpse the route toward transfer of what they're learning if the Papers are never again named by the same Word? (Gwen G's recent research suggests this is a significant barrier.) My vote is for writing projects or writing problems titled like those 19th-century book chapters, In Which Meredith and Tom Discover What Is Living Under the Jamison House and Have to Compose a Response. Who wants to take the pledge with me for fall? No more shorthand "Paper" names, but Project #2 descriptions that lay out the rhetorical scene as clearly as we can describe it, under the assumption that our students are ready to be thinking like rhetoricians from the very moment they imagine starting work on a composition, rather than only at some point later on? So they're not writing a Thing, but they're Writing?