Writing as a Way of Learning
Prof. Pat Bizzell

I. The Writing Process

From high school, you may be accustomed to thinking of school writing as something you do to show the teacher what you have learned. In this view of writing, first you learn about some topic or method, and then you use the written work to show the teacher that you have mastered it. This view of writing suggests that the real thinking goes on before you write. If you've done your work well, you should be able to sit down and bang out the paper or lab report in a short timene draft and you're finished.

In college, you need a different view of writing. You need to realize that the process of writing is actually a learning process. As you take notes, rewrite passages, and re-organize the argument of a paper, adding information here, cutting details there, you are actually improving your mental grasp of the material. You are learning the material better than you would be able to do if you simply read about it or listened to a lecture about it. You probably already have a sense of this process of using writing to learn, because typically when a teacher is lecturing, you don't just listen. You take notes. And you have probably realized that the very act of taking notes helps you to learn the material, even if you never look at them again (not that I'm recommending that!).

It follows that if writing about something is actually a way of learning about it, you need to give the writing process time to work. That is, you should not expect to be able to pour out a finished draft of a paper in one sitting. You need to start your writing assignments far enough in advance so that you have time to think, rewrite, ask your professor questions about the assignment, maybe look up more information, and ask a friend, a Writer's Workshop tutor, or your professor to look over a draft before you submit it for a grade. Maybe in high school you were able to succeed by writing papers the night before they were due. That won work in college. Professors expect you to use a complete writing process, giving yourself time to master the material and refine your thinking through writing. A paper that does not show evidence of this effort will be marked down accordingly.

II. Writing in Response to Reading

As implied in the above account of the writing process, the great majority of  the writing that you do in college will be in response to something someone else has written. You will almost always have to read before you write novel, textbook, history, scholarly article, or maybe more than one of these! While the amount of reading you have to do will vary from paper to paperot all assignments require extensive researchou will always have to factor in reading time when planning your writing process. This reading time should also include time to go back to the professor, in class or office hours, to ask questions about anything in the reading that you did not understand. Think you'll look stupid asking a question? Youl look a lot more stupid if you write a whole paper based on a misunderstanding of the reading.

A large part of what you learn in college courses in any academic discipline is how to make use of the reading. How do you analyze a poem or story in correct literary-critical fashion? How do you respond to historical accounts like a true historian? How do you analyze research reports like a trained psychologist? And so on. In high school, giving your opinion might have been enough. Here, you have to figure out how each academic discipline approaches its material. Look for opportunities to compare approaches, as this will help you learn: for example, if your history teacher assigns a novel, note how she handles it differently from the way your English teacher does.

If you are writing in response to reading, of course, then you are using other people ideas in your writing, the ideas you get from your reading. There is nothing wrong with thisrovided you meet certain requirements. You probably already know that when you use someone else exact words, you need to put them in quotation marks and tell where they came from. Even if you put someone else ideas into your own words, which would not require quotation marks, you need to tell where you got those ideas. Every academic discipline has special ways of reporting where you get the ideas you use in your writing. You must learn these special ways and use them, or else risk being accused of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is the academic crime of presenting someone else ideas as if they were your own, whether you use their exact words or not. If you plagiarize a paper at Holy Cross, you will receive an F for the assignment, and your teacher may also place a record of the offense in your file with your class dean. If you commit a second offense, you can be expelled from the College. If you copy any words from anyone else's work or present their ideas without citing the source, you have plagiarized. If you purchase a pre-written paper and present it as your own, you have plagiarized. Be aware that your professors will know of most of the sources from which you might copy or buy a paper (the English Department, for example, keeps files of on-line paper sales sites and of services that assist professors in tracking down the place from which a suspect paper came). To avoid any appearance of dishonesty, always cite your sources in proper academic form and be prepared to answer questions about them.

Remember, what your professors are most interested in seeing in your written work is your own thinking. Your professors are most interested in seeing how you are learning to use the intellectual tools with which they are trying to familiarize you, the ways of understanding the world that their academic disciplines use. So even though you are usually using ideas, and sometimes words, from others in your writing, what is most important is not how much you have read, how many quotes you can include, or how many items you can list in your bibliography. Most important is what you do with the information, to show your own original perspective in dialogue with the work of literary critics, historians, psychologists, and more.
 

III.  Sample Citations of Sources

Below are some examples of how to cite sources using the format acceptable in English classes. Not every type of source is listed here, but the Writers Workshop has reference books that will tell you how to cite other types (an essay in an anthology, for example), and so do I in my office. The general pattern is: mention the author name and the work at some point, give the page number, and include full bibliographic information in an alphabetical list of "Works Cited" on the last page of your paper. Pay special attention to the punctuation in the examples below.

1. In Bone, Fae Myenne Ng tells the story of a woman, Leila Fu, who tries to help the people in her Chinese American community. She helps as a school liaison. We know that Leila wants to do well at this job, because she says that when Edward Yee's parents don arrive on time for their meeting with her,  "I called, ready to offer to go over for a home visit, but there was no answer" (47).

2. Leila is a person who always tries to look on the bright side. For example, Leila tries to think positively about her relationship with her mother, who is often hard on her. Here is how she reacts when she finds her mother at home unexpectedly:

The living room was dark except for a glow from the quiet television. ow come youe sitting in the dark? My harsh tone surprised me, so I snapped on a light, trying to push the bad feeling away before it settled into the room. (48)

3. Works Cited
Ng, Fae Myenne. Bone. 1993; rpt. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

4. Fadiman argues that doctors should expect to have to negotiate with parents when different belief systems are involved. In Lia's case, for example, the doctors thought that Lia seizures were much more dangerous than her parents did, who saw them as signs of special spiritual talent. But, says Fadiman, doctors should be careful not to let their negotiations with parents escalate into conflicts of power, in which doctors use their superior authority to over-ride the wishes of parents, even sometimes to the point of breaking up the family, as Lia doctors did when they had her placed in foster care. When conflicts reach this level, doctors should not be surprised if parents begin to stop trusting them (84).

5. The "mestiza rhetoricof Gloria Anzaldúa may be a way to nable transformations that, while often brutally painful, can allow for non-binary identity, for new states of mestiza consciousness, and for multiple writing strategies" (Lunsford 2).

6. Lunsford, Andrea. "Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric: Gloria Anzaldúa on Composition and Postcoloniality." Journal of Advanced Composition 18 (1998): 1-28.