This course is part of the Junior Year Writing program at UMass Amherst. It was created to meet the needs of that program—it had to include a lot of peer review, and different types of writing assignments, and it had to be accessible to any junior philosophy major—there are many aspects of the course that I think could be adapted to other courses, especially writing-intensive courses.
My main goal was to have students write a longer (10-page) paper with several rounds of revisions. Pedagogically, I also wanted to experiment with teaching writing in the same way one would teach art or music: a lot of class time is devoted to the practice itself. Students take a lot of time in class to work on their writing together, talking to me and/or each other as necessary, the way you would in a library or coffee shop. My goal here was to provide accountability and to give them as much incentive as possible to take the drafting and revising process seriously.
The course is broken into two parts. In the first part of the class, we read three papers, which the students chose from a menu I provided. For each paper, we spend one week discussing the paper as I would in a traditional class, with a fair amount of lecturing and reading questions. After that, students spend a week on short writing assignments, which they work on in small groups. One project involves writing a four-sentence paper based on some part of the dialectic in the article we are reading. Another involves writing up that same part of the dialectic in a longer prose format, using as little jargon as possible. (To get them into the spirit, I have them pretend that they’re explaining the paper to an attractive stranger on the bus, a smart but impatient 1920s gangster in a bar, a teenager at their cousin’s bar mitzvah…) Finally, students spend a week looking up other papers (using JStor and PhilPapers) that disagree with the paper we have read. Their last group writing assignment is a four-sentence paper explaining a disagreement between the two articles.
Students write their own papers, responding to one of the papers we read, in the second part of the class. These are built up in gradual, scaffolded stages, and they meet with peers at every stage. Students practice giving and receiving feedback and responding to it in writing, as well as revising their own papers step by step.
I have taught this course twice now, and students both times have said that they liked being forced to write so many drafts. Most of them also appreciated the sessions where they worked on their drafts together in class: it forced them not to write their drafts at midnight the night before they were due, which ultimately resulted in a better product. This past spring, students got really into the “explain the argument to a stranger on the bus” assignment, which resulted in a lot of silly role-playing. (Most of it was also pedagogically useful, but admittedly not all of it!)
My own favorite part of the syllabus is the four-sentence papers. It is surprisingly hard to write one of these well. I think it really helped students to crystalize the dialectic in what they were reading and writing, which set them up nicely for their final papers.
I have used the group work assignments (the four-sentence paper, and the “stranger on a bus”) in other classes, and I think they work well. My advice to anyone wanting to try them out is to do it a few times in the same semester. They are harder than they look, and my students got much better with practice.
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Sophie Horowitz
I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at UMass Amherst. I work on epistemology, and I also teach Medical Ethics and Junior Year Writing. Right now I’m writing a book on guessing, accuracy, and degrees of belief. UMass is about to replace my website, but you can find my papers here.
