Community Writing

Researching Social Issues Through Composition

Paul S. Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135648428
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Community Writing: Researching Social Issues Through Composition employs a series of assignments that guide students to research and write about issues confronting their individual communities. Students start by identifying a community to which they belong and focusing on problems in it, and then analyze possible solutions, construct arguments for them, decide which are likely to succeed, and consider how to initiate action. This is a primary text for first-year composition courses, covering the basics of the writing process. The assignments are recursive. Short writing assignments in each chapter build up to longer papers. Each of the assignment questions is accompanied by a guide to thinking about and writing the assigned paper, followed by a short Focus On reading that provides a brief account of community activism, a media case study, or a notable success story. The longer papers are accompanied by in-class peer reading groups. Each successive peer reading attempts a higher level of conceptual critique. By working together throughout the semester, students create increasingly adept peer groups familiar with all stages of each other's research. The book is carefully structured, but there is plenty of "give" in it, allowing instructors to be flexible in adapting it to the needs of their students and courses. Community Writing:
* is distinguished by pedagogy based on a collaborative, process-oriented, service learning approach that emphasizes media critique and field research on community issues chosen by individual students;
* answers real student questions, such as: Where do I find articles on my topic? What if evidence contradicts my hypothesis? How do I know if a source is biased?;
* is web-savvy--guides students into building their own Web sites, including a unique guide for critiquing the design and veracity of other people's websites; and
* is media-savvy--topics include media monopolies, spin control, dumbing down, misleading statistics, the Freedom of Information Act, "crackpot" authors, political rhetoric, and fallacious argumentation.

1
Your Community and an Issue That It Faces

DESCRIBING YOUR COMMUNITY

Assignment: Describe one of the communities that you belong to. How would you describe it to a stranger? What misconceptions might people have about your community? What makes it a community to you; that is, what is it that you all have in common? What part do you envision yourself playing in this community in the future?

Defining a Community

“Community” can mean a neighborhood, a school, a profession, even an entire ethnicity or religion—any group bound by a common interest or condition. No matter how small or large this community may be, your own experience of it can become the starting point of worthwhile research.

We all belong to many communities at once, and they may overlap well or conflict sharply with each other. By entering the college community you’ve already experienced a transition from one distinct community to another. You may also have moved from an old hometown, and perhaps even away from an entire job community or group of peers. In either case, what you’re moving into is a new community; the latest of many that you already belong to.

Here are several typical characteristics of a community:

• Shared History. There are people, places, or activities that both you and fellow community members would be familiar with.
• Shared Language or Jargon. Communities often use specialized words that aren’t in common use; for example, when an environmental activist refers to “astroturf” lobbying by industry, a com-puter programmer refers to a “code compiler,” or a drummer uses a “crash cymbal.” There may also be slang to refer to things that an outsider would use a more formal term for. For example, someone in England may refer to the Marks & Spencer department store chain as “Marks and Sparks.”
• Shared Standards of Behavior. There may be an official or an unspoken code of how things are done or not done in your community—how concerns are raised, how problems are dealt with, and how people are expected to act around each other.

Finally, because you’re an insider, you’ll be knowledgeable about your community in ways that most others aren’t. But don’t forget the value of “outside” information. Even chance remarks by outsiders, whether compliments or insults, can reveal much about what others think of your community. Sometimes you’ve been an outsider: when you first joined, after you’ve returned from a long absence, or when the community seemed to turn against you. How did this feel? What were your first impressions of being an outsider in that community?

Freewriting

Do you freeze up when faced by a blinking cursor, or write only a few sentences before obsessing over whether they’re any good? One way around this writer’s block is free writing.

Freewriting is exactly what it sounds like: writing freely. Freewriting allows the pure conversational flow of words on to the paper or the screen. That means simply sitting down and writing as fast as possible. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, organization, grammar, or other nagging concerns. The only rule for freewriting is: Go!

Budget yourself 5 to 15 minutes for freewriting. During this time you must write constantly. If you stop to look back at something, you’re interrupting the flow of your thoughts. Don’t second-guess yourself. (Some people type with the monitor turned off to avoid this temptation.) Write as quickly as possible, and do not allow your fingers to stop moving.

Freewriting is a good way of warming up, because it’s like stretching out and then running a sprint. You may find your freewriting veering into the argument you had this morning or other things that have nothing to do with your assignment. That’s fine. Once you’re getting words on to the page, any words at all, you’ll be warmed up in a way that makes writing your assignment easier.

Although much of what you freewrite may look like junk, remember that freewriting is for creating raw material. You can always go back and remove paragraphs that go off track and fix misspellings or missing words. Sometimes you’ll eliminate everything from a freewriting session but a sentence or two, but those sentences will form the core of your final response, and they’re often written more fluidly and honestly than anything you could have written deliberately.

Sample Response

I don’t often think of voters as forming a community unto themselves—after all, any adult citizen can vote—but the group of people who actually do vote is small, and it becomes smaller with each election. It’s a special experience to me, though, and I can recall election days quite vividly. After being ready to vote in my first election in 1988,1 ended up spending election day shivering in bed with the flu; in 1990 I was out of the country, and hadn’t thought to file an absentee ballot beforehand. I finally got my chance to vote in the 1992 primary in Pennsylvania; it was held in a drab county services building, and I finished at the voting machine by pulling on an enormous handle. It felt like I was playing the slots at the world’s blandest casino. My candidate didn’t win, so I guess I didn’t hit the jackpot.

By that fall’s election, I was living in Manhattan, and I had to vote at a school gymnasium just off Times Square. An ancient man sat on a chair next to the line, waiting for poll workers to help him to the booth and to pull the levers for him. “I voted in every election since ‘28,” he explained to me. “I use a walker now, but by God—I’m here to vote that s.o.b. out of office!” A few people in the line cheered when he emerged from the voting booth. I wonder whether I’ll be as dedicated when I’m his age.

In 1994 I was a poll worker myself. I was sent out to a quiet residential neighborhood with a guy who had been let out of a halfway house for the day to work. Our hostess, an elderly Ukrainian woman, fussed over us with cookies and sugary tea while we manned the flimsy polling station set up in her garage. Ironically, because I was sent to a different precinct before the polls opened and was busy until after they closed, I didn’t get a chance to vote that day.

I was upset about that, even though friends said it was no big deal. But the greatest misconception about voting is that individual votes don’t count. Local elections can be decided by slim margins; here in San Francisco, the construction of a stadium was passed by a fraction of a percentage point. Even in national elections, a sufficient number of votes insures federal financing for a party’s next campaign. Not voting for, say, the Green Party or the Reform Party because they “can’t win” also prevents them from having a chance in the next election.

There are other deterrents to voting, I suppose. I’ve heard that voters are disproportionately older, whiter, and wealthier than the population as a whole. I’m not sure whether it’s cynicism, apathy, or both that causes this. But there’s no reason why the young, the poor, and minorities have to be excluded. Even though voters are an increasingly homogeneous community in decline, it could change in the future. One election is all it would take.

Focus On: The Communities of San Rafael

After all this talk of communities and writing, you may be wondering what exactly this all means when translated into an essay topic. Spring 2000 writ-ing classes at Dominican College, in San Rafael, California faced this question. Looking through some of their term papers reveals a wide range of investigations into student communities:

Affordable Housing—An appraisal of options available to new residents and city planners in the increasingly tight low- and middle income housing market in Marin County.

Binge Drinking—The problem of binge drinking among college students, particularly in dormitories, fraternities, and sororities.

Police Brutality—An examination of the tension between the police and members of the community in Humboldt County, where a number of environmental protests have been broken up with force.

Maintaining Momentum in Recycling—A discussion of the slowing pace of recycling programs in some towns and cities, and the challenges faced in keeping these programs financially viable.

The Preservation of National Parks—The dilemma faced by national parks in maintaining their ecosystems as budgets are tightened and attendance rises.

School Shootings—The causes of and possible deterrents to mass school shootings.

Balancing Tourism and Residential Planning—A description of the conflict between residential needs and tourist development in a popular area of the San Francisco waterfront.

Water Fluoridation—The debate over the fluoridation of the water supply in a small California town.

Domestic Violence—A discussion of the symptoms, causes, and treatment of abuse by a partner.

Drunk Driving in Africa—The problems facing African countries in preventing drunk driving, and possible solutions drawn from other countries with longstanding anti-drunk driving measures.

MTBE Damage to the Environment—A look at the damage caused by the seepage of MTBE, a gasoline additive, into water supply.

Basque Terrorism—A historical overview of the minority Basque conflict in Spain, as well as approaches that the government and citizens might take to work toward peace.

Only a few of these topics refer to the writer’s immediate geographic vicinity, but all the problems discussed had direct effects upon a self-identified community interest of these students. The paper on school shootings came from someone who had been a high school student just a few miles from Littleton, Colorado, when a mass shooting occurred, while the paper on affordable housing resulted from the experience of a student who was struggling to find housing as the semester began. The study of preserving national parks was written by a student who was an avid backpacker; the papers on domestic abuse and binge drinking were also by students with direct interest and experience in their subjects. Even the most seemingly arcane top-ics— “Drunk Driving in Africa” and “Basque Terrorism”—were by foreign students concerned by worsening developments back home.

Questions to Consider

1. How would you classify the types of communities covered in the above topics? What other kinds of communities might any of these students belong to?
2. What communities do you belong to, or have you belonged to in the past? (Bear in mind that this includes the types discussed above, and not just your immediate neighborhood.)
3. Which of these communities have other members that you can easily contact? If a newcomer to the community could only speak to one or two people to learn about this community, who would you send them to first?

WHAT ISSUE CONCERNS YOU?

Assignment: What issue or problem in your community concerns you or even makes you angry? Give an example of a specific time it affected you or someone you know. Go into as much detail as possible: when and where it happened, your feelings at the time, how you look back at it, and how it’s affected you since then.

The Power of Anecdotes

Large-scale news events don’t always affect us in large ways, and yet sometimes a small incident can capture our attention easily. While we may follow the sufferings of a single celebrity or a troubled friend, our eyes glaze over at the news of endless foreign carnage or spiraling debts and disease infections.

But this also gives amazing potential to the individual writer. While sanity compels us to shut out overwhelming problems, we can’t ignore individuals so easily. An eyewitness account allows the reader to put themselves in your shoes—in other words, to feel empathy. Once that reader starts to care the way you do about a problem, you’re closer to getting them to do something about it.

A skilled writer knows this, and uses detailed pictures of relatively minor incidents as clues to some bigger picture. For example, when Malcolm X’s Autobiography describes the feel of burning lye on his scalp as he tries to straighten his hair, it tells you more about the price of conforming to white standards than any general description of race relations could.

You may find a similar use of everyday details useful in describing an issue. This is because all writers first experience an issue as an everyday challenge in their own lives; it’s only later that they become experts with ideas about it. So before we can explain our ideas, first we have to explain the conflicts that they arose from. Without understanding these experiences, readers won’t understand why you’ve had these ideas.

Plagiarism and the Need for Citations

So far you’ve relied on your own experiences for this class writing, so you haven’t had to worry about plagiarism yet. But very soon you will, so you need to know what to look out for in advance.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as “The wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas…or the expression of ideas of another.” If you plagiarize at school, you violate the honor code against cheating and you make it hard for others to learn more about the subject of your paper.

If you plagiarize on the job, you’re liable to get sued for the royalties and credit due to the original author. Take a rash of public plagiarism that occurred in late 1999. Scottish historian James Mackay was caught plagiarizing so many times that in October 1999 his latest publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, had to recall and destroy all copies of his new biography of John Paul Jones; a New York Times writer had discovered multiple plagiarisms in the text. In August 1999 Nixon biographer Monica Crowley published a piece in the Wall Street Journal that lifted entire sections from a 1988 Commentary article by Paul Johnson, which a sharp-eyed reader of the paper immediately detected. And earlier that summer, the Indianapolis Star fired a television columnist who had plagiarized from another columnist. In each case, the writer’s career was badly damaged or destroyed by carelessness and a lack of ethics in citation; all for a shortcut that may have only saved an hour or two of actual work. It wasn’t always this way. Shakespeare lifted the titles, plots, and characters’ names from other people’s work in order to write “his” versions of Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. This was all quite normal. But printing presses made libraries grow more complex, and authors saw profits being reaped by publishers. Authors wanted to make a living on this market of ideas, and readers needed ways to track down the huge numbers of new sources these presses were generating. By the 18th century our modern notions of copyright and plagiarism began to form, and they’re still evolving today; the Internet has raised a whole new set of questions about who owns what!

Here are some basic ways to avoid plagiarism:

Cite Your Sources. In the longer papers for this course you’ll include a Works Cited page and citations within your text. (Look for more on how to do this in our next assignment.) They’re essential if your readers want to learn more about the subject, how recent your information is, how reliable it is, and what kind of biases your sources may have.

Acknowledge Assistance. There is nothing wrong—unless your instructor has explicitly forbidden it—with getting assistance on your paper from friends, family, tutors, or classmates. But if they contribute an important idea or significantly alter part of your text, you should acknowledge it in your Works Cited page with a brief note; for example: “Ed ward Gomez provided editing help and ideas on the employment statistics used in this paper.”

Don’t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• A Note to Instructors
• A Note to Students
• The First Day
• 1: Your Community and an Issue That It Faces
• 2: Media Views of an Issue
• 3: Examining Solutions
• 4: Working Toward Solutions
• 5: The Term Paper
• Appendix 1: Further Readings
• Appendix 2: Using The Freedom Of Information Act
• Appendix 3: Citing Your Sources In The MLA Format