Hierarchial POV: In Response

I agree with Fiona’s recommendation that a hybrid of different academic tasks (including essays and blogs) would help develop a writer’s confidence. A continuing assessment of an informal blog/letter allows the student to synthesize knowledge through a personal writing style. As Richard Larson states “our responsibility is to control and vary the rhetorical demands of writing tasks to give students practice in adjusting relationships among writer, reader and subject”[1]. Such a sequence has a cumulative effect on the reader as the writer will be forced to consider the difference between the personal and the impersonal. To increase the benefit of this system all tasks need to be structured so new assignments grow out of old ones. As soon as a student grows accustomed to the main arguments of specific subject they can then summarise and comment on them through the inclusion and exclusion of material.

Notions of a writer’s ‘voice’ should be considered in the context of a collaborative writing process as a voice is not something that is innate in a text but is something that is learnt through experience and is in constant development. If we use Carol McGagary’s concept of integrative collaboration we can see this disclipline as using both the advantages of a hierarchical/dialogic binary[2]. In this disclipline we can see peoples roles changing and overlapping in the process, such a process need not necessarily only apply to group work but also in how the student interacts with the teacher. This dialogic process need not necessarily undermine the autonomy of the teacher, as through peer editing and one-one tutorials a writer can engage in expressing his opinions on texts in an informal context. Without dialogue there is no development but this has to go both ways as the tutor has to be open to new ideas. If the student feels restricted in this mode then he perhaps has to learn to work with other people, a skill which when learnt will prove beneficial when the student goes to work in the job market. Often during the studying for my Paradise Lost dissertation I often came upon references to teachers being influenced by the informal opinions of students (particulary I am with thinking of William Empson) so I would argue that an integretative collaboration is a two-way process. In fact this piece of work we are all doing is an example of this, in that we (or more specifically Tom) asked our tutor to adapt our group project.

To further Nikki’s comments about students achieving greater satisfaction by considering the audience, we should extend this idea to acknowledge the actual reason that most students are at university. As when examining this student’s work we must also consider how the development of these skills is important for developing skills necessary for business and industry. The benefits of perfecting these skills at university are extremely important and must be considered across the curriculum. When Lisa Ade and Andrea Lunsford surveyed university graduates within the workplace, they found that 87% of them said that most of the writing they do is as a member of a team or group and not individual. Other studies have reinforced this idea and found that group writing yields better results in industry and in worker’s individual writing[3]. Of course in this specific case this task can only be done individually but I’m suggesting that Universities should impose it on students to attend group seminar groups and tutorials by making attendenance important for whether or not they pass or not. The benefits of co-operative writing should be stressed more in first year to increase student’s abilities and this type of writing could be improved.

Bibliography

[1] Quoted in Elizabeth Rankin, From Simple to Complex: Ideas of Order in Assignment Sequences, (US:< http://jac.gsu.edu/jac/10/Articles/10.htm>, 1990) para 2.
[2] Quoted in Talitha May, An Overview of PRP Collaborative Writing, (US:< ,2005">http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/students/writing/prpguide.pdf#search='Hierarchical%20writing'>,2005), p.2
[3] Vidya Singh-Gupta, Eileen Troutt-Ervin, Preparing Students for Teamwork through Collaborative Writing and Peer Review Techniques, (US:< http://www.ncte.org/library/files/Publications/Journals/tetyc/1996/ty2302pr.html?source=gs>, 1996), para 6-7