Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: Because writing is usually learned in school (where it is virtually always graded or evaluated), and because writing tends to be used for more serious occasions than speaking ("Are you prepared to put that in writing?"), most people feel writing as an inherently high stakes activity.But writing is not inherently a high stakes activity.Indeed writing is better than speaking for low stakes language use--for exploration and experimentation.This is because writing can so easily be kept private--or revised entirely before sharing with any reader.Of course we need to set high stakes writing assignments in our college courses, but that writing will result in more learning for students and go better for us if we also exploit the resources of low stakes writing.Why high stakes essay assignments?If we ask students to articulate in clear writing what they are studying we help ensure that they will in fact learn it.And without these carefully written papers, we can't give trustworthy final course grades--grades that reflect whether they actually understand what we want them to understand.For if students take only short answer tests or machine graded exams, they may often appear to have learned what we are teaching, when in fact they don't really understand.Besides, writing is a central skill for higher education, and students will not get good at it if they write only for English or writing teachers.And low stakes writing?The goal here is not so much to produce excellent pieces of writing as to increase how much students think about, understand, and learn what we are teaching.Low stakes writing is usually more informal and tends to be ungraded or graded informally.You could describe the goal this way: we can throw away the low stakes writing itself, but keep the neural changes it produced--the new insights and understandings. LOW STAKES WRITING KindsThe most obvious approach is to ask for comfortable, casual, exploratory writing about a question or topic, and urge students not to struggle too much to try to get the thoughts exactly right or the writing good.Make it clear that the writing is for exploring and processing course material--and will not be graded.Low stakes writing also increases fluency and confidence in writing and helps with creativity and risk taking.These benefits are maximized if you sometimes ask for low stakes writing in the mode of freewriting--asking them to write without stopping, putting down whatever comes to mind, even if it doesn't make sense.
Authors: Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Peter Elbow
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1571668227