On Writing

So last semester I taught a seminar for the general student population called "Astronomical Arguments", which is focused on how scientists -- astronomers in particular -- deal with differing scientific models. We start with a reading of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", which the students hate. I will admit it is not a summer beach read, but it's very interesting and provocative. Then we talk at great length about the Copernican Revolution, astronomy throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (the nature of galaxies, the expanding universe), then on to modern questions of dark matter and dark energy, the issue of whether or not Pluto is a planet, etc. This is pretty close to the historical astronomy course my mom always wanted me to teach, and she's right -- I enjoy teaching the historical side of things. Kepler cracks me up...

But the course is as much about writing as it is about science. So we talk about writing styles, the structure of arguments, choosing your audience, etc. Most of the grade revolves around a series of written papers, and I'm big on having the students do revisions of their papers once they've been graded.

This is the second time I've taught the course; this time, I've had a great writing co-instructor, Terri, who handled much of the actual writing pedagogy. And I've learned a lot watching and listening to her.

But the hardest thing for me has been evaluating writing. Some things are easy. Basic grammar, punctuation-- that's straightforward. And God help you if you turn in a paper with spelling errors. That just tells me you were too lazy to hit the spell-check button before hitting 'print'. That doesn't go over well with me. (And having said that, you can bet I'm gonna hit the spell checker before posting this to the blog!)

Other things are tougher, but manageable. Logical structure takes more time to figure out, but if I'm reading a paper and have no idea where it is going, it's a good bet there's been a problem with structure. And I can work it out, or at least scribble in the margin "What's the point of this?"

Then there are stylistic issues, and that starts getting hard. Sometimes it's obvious, and I can jut circle a phrase and write "awkward", because it is. Or "wordy". Or "choppy". But sometimes you read things and think "that just doesn't work" and it's hard to say why. This is where I struggle with the grading end of things. Is it that their writing doesn't work, or that it doesn't work for me? It’s a very different, much more diffuse type of grading from what I usually am doing in my regular astronomy classes (in which there is typically a clear and demonstrable right or wrong to a scientific problem or mathematical argument).

Also, when grading, students accept feedback and correction much more easily in my quantitative courses. If I can circle on their paper the spot where they divided by pi instead of multiplying by pi, or where they switched the terms for emission and absorption in an atom, they recognize their error and accept the grade. But when I say "this paragraph doesn't logically support your argument", they then go to great lengths to tell me how I hadn't read it properly, (typically bringing in many arguments that, had they written in the first place, would have made the paragraph work!).

The flip side of grading is that the less-quantitative nature of writing evaluation led to some rather comical experiences. I was completely flummoxed when a student turned in a paper that had almost nothing to do with what I had assigned. The student said to me "I know you assigned us to write about that, but I really couldn't, so I wrote about this instead." How do you handle *that*? Do my faculty friends in the humanities have to deal with this kind of stuff frequently? I can't imagine a student in one of my science classes saying "I couldn't figure out how to solve for the distance of the Andromeda Galaxy, so I worked out its color instead."

But I digress...

I recently heard somewhere that you learn to write not necessarily by writing, but by reading. And that makes sense to me. The more you read, the more you experience good writing, and learn what works and what doesn't. Thinking about that a bit more, it becomes obvious *why* students should read so much literature. Not because there is going to be a test on Joseph Conrad or F. Scott Fitzgerald once they get out into "the real world", but because some day they are going to have to produce mature, well-crafted writing and they better see how it looks.

So when all is said and done, did I help my students improve their writing? I hope I did, and at least a few of them said they felt their writing had gotten better. But it was clear many of them still were struggling with their writing, and will continue to do so. And after hearing that comment about needing to read to be able to write, suddenly things clicked for me. If a student really doesn't know what good writing looks like, can they ever hope to produce it themselves?