Blogs vs. Term Papers

The format — supposed to force students to produce a point, explain it, defend it, repeat it (whether in 20 pages or 5 paragraphs) — feels to many like a workout in rigidity and boredom, like practicing piano scales in a key that is minor.

Her provocative positions have lent kindling to an intensifying debate about how precisely best to teach writing in the digital era.

“This mechanistic writing is an actual disincentive to creative but untrained writers,” says Professor Davidson, who rails contrary to the form inside her new book, “Now The thing is that It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.”

“As a writer, it offends me deeply.”

Professor Davidson makes heavy use of the blog plus the ethos it represents of public, interactive discourse. Instead of writing a quarterly term paper, students now regularly publish 500- to 1,500-word entries on an internal class blog concerning the issues and readings these are generally studying in class, along with essays for public consumption.

She’s in good company. Across the country, blog writing is actually a basic requirement in everything from M.B.A. to literature courses. On its face, who could disagree because of the transformation? You will want to replace a staid writing exercise with a medium that offers the writer the immediacy of an audience, a feeling of relevancy, instant feedback from classmates or readers, and a practical connection to contemporary communications? Pointedly, why punish with a paper when a blog is, relatively, fun?

Because, say defenders of rigorous writing, the brief, sometimes personally expressive blog post fails sorely to show key facets of thinking and writing. They argue that the old format was less about how Sherman got to the ocean and much more on how the writer organized the points, fashioned a quarrel, showed grasp of substance and proof of its origin. Its rigidity wasn’t punishment but pedagogy.

Their reductio ad absurdum: why not only bypass the blog, too, and move directly on to 140 characters about Shermn’s Mrch?

“Writing term papers is a art that is dying but those that do write them have a dramatic leg up with regards to critical thinking, argumentation together with type of expression required not only in college, but in the job market,” says Douglas B. Reeves, a columnist for the American School Board Journal and founder for the Leadership and Learning Center, the school-consulting division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “It does not mean there blogs that are aren’t interesting. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

The National Survey of Student Engagement unearthed that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than 1 / 2 of seniors weren’t asked to complete a paper that is single of pages or more, although the majority of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.

The expression paper has been falling from favor for some time. A study in 2002 estimated that about 80 percent of senior school students are not asked to publish a past history term paper in excess of 15 pages. William H. Fitzhugh, the study’s author and founder regarding the Concord Review, a journal that publishes school that is high’ research papers, says that, more broadly, educators shy far from rigorous academic writing, giving students the relative ease of writing short essays. He argues that part of the problem is that teachers are asking students to read less, which means less substance — whether historical, political or literary — to focus a phrase paper on.

He proposes what he calls the “page per year” solution: in first grade, a paper that is one-page one source; by fifth grade, five pages and five sources.

The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: “old literacy” refers to more traditional kinds of discourse and training; “new literacy” stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and essay that is audio.

“We’re at a crux right now of where we need to find out as teachers what an element of the literacy that is old worth preserving,” says Andrea A. Lunsford, a professor of English at Stanford. “We’re trying to figure out just how to preserve sustained, logical, carefully articulated arguments while engaging most abundant in exciting and promising new literacies.”

Professor Lunsford has collected 16,000 writing samples from 189 Stanford students from 2001 to 2007, and is studying how their writing abilities and passions evolved as blogs along with other multimedia tools crept to their lives and classrooms. She’s also solicited student feedback about their experiences.

Her conclusion is the fact that students feel even more impassioned by the new literacy. They love writing for an audience, engaging along with it. They feel just as if they do so only to produce a grade if they’re actually producing something personally rewarding and valuable, whereas when they write a term paper, they feel as.

So Professor Lunsford is playing to student passions. Her writing class for second-year students, a requirement at Stanford, used to revolve around a paper constructed throughout the entire term. Now, the students start by writing a 15-page paper on a particular subject in the first couple weeks. Once that is done, they normally use the ideas with it to create blogs, the websites, and PowerPoint and audio and presentations that are oral. The students often find their ideas way more crystallized after expressing all of them with new essay writing site media, she says, and then, most startling, they plead to revise their essays.

“What I’m asking myself is, ‘Will we need to keep carefully the 15-page paper forever or move directly to the newest way?’ ” she says. “Stanford’s writing program won’t be making that change straight away, since our students still seem to benefit from learning just how to present their research findings in both traditional print and new media.”

As Professor Lunsford illustrates, choosing to educate using either blogs or term papers is one thing of a opposition that is false. Teachers can use both. And blogs, a platform that appears to encourage rambling exercises in personal expression, may also be well crafted and meticulously researched. At exactly the same time, the debate just isn’t a false one: though some educators fear that informal communication styles are increasing duress on traditional training, others find the actual paper fundamentally anachronistic.

“I happened to be basically kicked out of the writing program for thinking that was more important than writing a five-paragraph essay,” she says. “I’m not against discipline. I’m not certain that writing a five-paragraph essay is discipline a great deal as standardization. It’s a formula, but writing that is good with formulas, and changes formulas.”

Today, she tries to keep herself grounded when you look at the experiences of a variety of students by tutoring at a community college. Recently, one student she tutors was presented with an assignment with prescribed sentence length and rigid structure. Him to follow all the rules,” she says“ I urged. “If he’d done it my way, I don’t know he’d have passed the class.

“The sad thing is, he’s now convinced there was brilliance into the art world, brilliance within the multimedia world, brilliance when you look at the music world and that writing is boring,” Professor Davidson says. “I hated teaching him bad writing.”

Matt Richtel, a reporter at the right times, writes often about I . t into the classroom.

a form of this article appears in publications on January 22, 2012, on Page ED28 of Education Life with the headline: Term Paper Blogging. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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