blog post #4 (Chris)

I really like what Bri wrote about a rough draft—"treating it always as a work-in-progress brimming with potential," and giving the paper some leeway to talk about it in terms of what's "effective" rather than "inadequate or wrong."

In my experience I find students are much more open to the process of workshopping their drafts when they can feel my acknowledgment of the "rough draft" as a work-in-progress, as a starting point, as something that by definition is, well, rough. Sometimes I pepper in my own anecdotes or experiences as I chat with them about their writing, assuring them that the difficulties they're facing in organizing their ideas effectively are universal, and that writing is a laborious process for basically everyone.

I like the discussion in someone else's post (couldn't find the author on the blog site) about a student's ability to recognize the strength in their own "ideas" but not always in their "structure." The notion of structure becomes, for many students, a sort of mechanical thing, a strange puzzle to be solved--while they have an easier time feeling confident about the ideas themselves. This is where I love to "map out" the student's argument on paper in front of them, as they describe out loud what they're trying to say. Ideally, this exercise shows them that the argumentative structure of what they're doing is right there, embedded in the very way they explain it. The only tricky part left is putting it on the page in a way that conforms to the flow that they (often) can exhibit effortlessly when describing their idea aloud.