Show students the warts! Using less-than-perfect exemplars to teach writing

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

I've used exemplars in my teaching for years. Most often, however, this has been in the form of providing an example of "A" quality work. For instance, the second assignment for my technical writing class asks students to write a memo to propose a topic for their capstone project and to provide an annotated bibliography of references they plan to use. On paper, it seems a straightforward enough assignment, but it utterly baffles students. Eventually, then, I provided a sample assignment so they could see exactly what I was looking for. And it helped! Students write much stronger proposals, now, and I have to field far fewer questions.

What I have not thought to do, at least not in a long time, is to provide examples of lower-quality work. Many years ago, I used Calibrated Peer Review. I won't go into that here, but providing "low", "medium", and "high" quality examples for each assignments was part of the process. Once I stopped using Calibrated Peer Review, I stopped providing those "less-than-perfect" writing samples. This was a mistake. Worse, it directly violates values that I try to instill in students.

First, a theme I carry throughout each writing course is that writing is a process, not a product. I tell students from the first day that one of the reasons they feel anxious about writing is because they never get to see all of the rough drafts and revisions and rewrites that went into producing the polished products such as textbooks and novels and magazine articles that they interact with daily. Only providing idealized examples doesn't exactly reinforce my thesis that a lot of ugly stuff goes on behind the curtain.

Second, I try hard in my classes to push back against the dominant narrative in higher education that failure is a terrible thing that should be feared. I remind students repeatedly that they once sucked at a lot of things they take for granted now. We don't learn to walk, after all, until we've landed on our butts--a lot! Why should writing be any different? Shying away from showing less-than-perfect examples tacitly reinforces the paradigm that there's nothing to be learned from failure, that failure is something to be ashamed of, the very thing I'm trying to combat!

Finally, as my teaching loads have increased, I've had to move away from providing detailed, personalized feedback to each student. Instead, I lean heavily into my grading rubrics. That has "worked" in the sense that students get some idea of where they stand and what areas they need to work on. However, it's more than a bit vague. Having concrete examples at hand of the issues I commonly highlight would help students see more precisely how they can improve.

It's time, then, that I changed my errant ways, to give real examples of "ugly" work in addition to fully polished exemplars, to show them not just what I'd like them to emulate, but also what I'd like them to avoid.