Yesterday in the last WIC seminar of the fall term, Vicki Tolar Burton had the participants (myself included) decide the top ten things they valued in writing, choosing terms from a list of about 30 characteristics of writing. I’ve done this before, back when I took Vicki’s teaching of writing course a year ago, but I don’t remember what I chose.
After we chose ten characteristics, Vicki asked us to narrow it down to five. Mine included:
- Innovation
- Purpose is clear
- Appropriate for audience
- Ideas fully developed
- Effective layout
Vicki was surprised that I chose effective layout as one of mine. In fact, after a business professor shared his, and effective layout was among them, Vicki immediately said, “I bet that effective layout wasn’t among your top five, was it Michael?” But it was. I think Vicki was thinking about assignments on the page, the traditional assignments that we have students perform in first-year composition. In those, there generally isn’t layout, like there is in digital media or in scientific reports with headers and graphics. However, I’m an advocate for new media writing, and layout is key, as it is, I think for “on paper” texts that also subvert traditional style and are actually laid out on the page.
I also think this would be an interesting activity to hold with first-year writers in a writing classroom (or any writers in a writing classroom), and to talk about what we value in writing, in teaching writing, and in assessing writing.
