Forming
and running a Writing Improvement GroupForming
and running a Writing Improvement Group
This document describes a technique to help students help each other to improve
their assignment, essay and report writing skills. It involves you getting together
with fellow students and forming a group that meets with the specific objective
of assessing and improving each other's written work.
There is nothing shameful
about admitting a need to improve your writing skills or style.
Many students come to this University with styles that are inappropriate
to the demands of Higher Education, or skills that have been insufficiently
developed before they arrived, or that have deteriorated through
lack of use. The University does not have the resources to be
able offer individual taught instruction in improving writing
skills, but you are perfectly capable of helping each other.
You need at least three
or four people to form an effective writing improvement group.
The members of the group must be committed to the group's objectives.
The most difficult task with any self-help group is keeping it
together. Maintaining a group requires considerable effort from
all concerned. This is made impossible if some members of the
group are not committed to its continued existence.
It is important that the
group remains at around three or four members. Any more than this
number and the practical procedures involved become excessively
time consuming. Any less and you lose the benefits of having a
variety of opinions and personal experience to draw upon.
The principal technique involved in the group activity is simple. You all
read each other's written work and comment on its strengths and weaknesses.
With a stable group of individuals your ability to provide useful feedback to
the others in the group will improve with practice. Some of you may feel that
the logic of forming groups of individuals who are aware of their own weaknesses
as writers, and then expecting them to be able to help each other, is flawed.
Such an opinion is itself based on the faulty premise that weak writers are
incapable of identifying weaknesses in the writing of others. It is always easier
to spot weaknesses in other people's work than it is in your own.
Writing is a personal business, and we are frequently too close to our own work,
particularly in the rush to meet deadlines, to be able to be objective in evaluating
it ourselves. Moreover, we all have different weaknesses, and by working
in a group, each individual's strengths cover the weaknesses of the others.
Thus by working in a group you reduce enormously the risk of leaving a collective
'skills blind spot'.
Having said that, there
are also strong grounds for occasionally using the services of
students who are recognised to be outstandingly good writers
(after their credentials have been established through formal
staff marking). It is likely that such students, once their credentials
have been established, may be 'persuaded' with the offer an appropriate
inducement, to supply their particular expertise and opinions.
(see Appendix A for possible ways of setting up a trading system
for such services)
The group should meet at
least once a fortnight. Each member submits a piece of written
work the week before the meeting. Thus, for a four-member group,
copies are made of the four pieces of work and distributed to
each of the group members for reading prior to the meeting. During
the meeting you take it in turns to tell each member in turn about
the strengths and weaknesses of their work. 15 minutes is enough
time for three people to express their opinions to a fourth. Thus
with four members, each meeting will take approximately an hour.
The University has explicit rules about plagiarism, and students who are caught
in breach of these rules may be penalised. Consequently care must be taken not
to allow writing improvement groups to become facilitators of cheating. It is
not normally appropriate for members of such groups to use essays or assignments
that they are preparing for formal assessment on a Course as material for group
comment. However, an exception to this rule might be made, for example, where
a student is working on a company-specific assignment. In these circumstances,
if there is no possibility of the other members of the group copying and using
the content in their own assessed work, you might consider using it for group
assessment purposes. In general you should use either work that has already been
marked by staff, or, in the early stages of courses, written work from previous
courses or even pieces of non-academic writing from outside activities. If you
do not have any of the above you can always obtain previous exam questions and
assignment topics from the staff on your Courses and write short answers, or sections
of answers for discussion in the group (this last suggestion has the benefit of
giving you practice at the kind of writing that the staff are likely to expect
from you in the future).
When reading each other's
work and forming an assessment of its 'quality' 'it is useful
if you have something other than simply your personal opinions
about what a piece of writing should be like. Ideally you need
the assessment criteria that the formal markers on a course are
going to use when equivalent pieces of work are assessed formally.
However, these criteria are not always easy to obtain. Frequently
they are not written down, but held in implicit form inside staff
head's. Staff may well be able to describe what kinds of writing
they are looking for if they are asked directly, and this tactic
is always worth trying. If all else fails, try the Formative Feedback Sheet
- a document that was designed for use in a peer assessment
procedure of written work which provides many of the factors that many
staff (but not all!) consider when marking a piece of work.
When giving an opinion about someone else's work, try to be specific rather than
making broad generalisation. For example. a statement such as 'Your writing is
very stilted' is of no use to the writer. What are they supposed to do with this
opinion ? However, if you were to say something like, 'Here in paragraph 3 the
sentence would have read much more smoothly if you had changed the verb to ....'
and so on, then the writer can understand what you mean, and can, if they wish,
change their writing habits in future.
When giving an opinion,
always end with a strength that you found in the piece of work.
We all need negative feedback in order to improve our writing
performance; we all need to be told what we are doing wrong and
how we might go about correcting it, but negative feedback only
is not enough. As Humans we all need positive feedback also, and
the area of writing skills is no exception. Indeed no Group lasts
long if its members allow it to become a forum for criticism only.
Nobody will continue to support a group that only attacks and
never praises.
Try to keep five minutes available at the end of each meeting to briefly review how the meeting went, to encourage the discussion of any ideas that members have for making it more effective in future and to agree the time and date of the next meeting.
John Ramsay. Economics Division, The Business School. 13:07 02/09/96