Bridging the Extracurricular:
Bringing Students’ “Real” Writing Into the Classroom
At the start of the semester, I ask my English 100 students to write love or hate letters to writing. Their answers are always fascinating, but rarely surprising. These letters lay out a clear trend: Most students have very fond memories of writing in early childhood. They see composition, especially creative and playful writing, as an important and valuable means of expression. Then, at some point (usually around middle school), something happens (usually tied to school) that makes them hate, dread, or even despise the act of writing.
Dear Writing: I hate you. Maybe I don’t hate you, as hate is a strong word. But I most definitely dislike you. I understand that you are important for many reasons, but I believe in a world where you aren’t as important as you are. Ironically, I am writing this letter to convey this idea to you. (Ella)
Middle school was where our relationship became fuzzy. As bigger, more complex versions of yourself became schoolwork, I began to slowly resent you. Whether it was research papers on difficult subjects or essays with plain prompts, I found myself not wanting to spend time with you. (Emilia)
…loving you isn’t always easy. When you ask me to write about things that don’t come from me, topics i dont care about or dont fully understand, I start to drift. My mind loses focus. I reread the same sentence over and over, unsure why I’m writing it at all. I wish I were better at staying focused. I wish my words came out strong and confident, instead of hesitant. Sometimes I feel like I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to make it sound the way it should. As I spiral in my head and my backspace button on replay, I feel lost. (Stephanie)
Despite the fact that many of my students have strong, negative associations with writing, I am astutely aware of the fact that, in the modern, digital era, they are deeply immersed in complicated composition networks. As Mueller describes in “Digital Underlife in the Networked Writing Classroom,” our students are “composing in more outwardly social venues, entering into highly interactive exchanges prone to drift across multiple institutions, even transcending institutionality” (244).
How do we square these observations? How can it possibly be the case that (1) our students are increasingly (and enthusiastically) engaged in vast, complex social networks mediated primarily through writing, and (2) that they they strongly dislike the act of writing? As it turns out, students seldom see the kinds of composition they do outside of the classroom as ‘real’ writing (Davis and Marsh 176). In fact, over 73% of students believed that “their online writing made no difference to their school writing” (NCTE 3).
This belief is, according to scholarship, unfounded. Davis and Marsh observe that the skills student employ in their extracurricular writing (considerations for genre, audience, purpose and the use of a complex lexis, for example) are exactly the skills we hope to develop among our students in the writing classroom (181). But we can not expect our students to bridge this gap on their own. The forms of extracurricular writing our students engage in, despite requiring significant rhetorical techne, are often looked down upon, particularly as they’re situated outside of academic and professional contexts.
I hope to assert the following claims:
- The kinds of writing done by students outside the classroom are rhetorically significant and meaningful;
- It behooves us as teachers of writing (at any level) to legitimize these forms of composition;
- Legitimizing the forms of writing that our student writers joyfully engage with helps strengthen their relationship with/to writing, and to improve their identities as writers.
There is no single, straightforward answer to any of these claims. To truly take extracurricular student writing seriously and build it into our classrooms is no easy task, and it is in line with ongoing projects to incorporate the multimodal and experimental spearheaded by scholars like Yancey, Wardle, and Selfe. Rather than an encompassing curriculum, I hope to describe a single activity that I incorporate into my practice, intended to help students recognize the kinds of writing they engage with as legitimate and worthy of rhetorical situation.
The Activity
For this activity, I put my students into groups of 4 or 5. They were given a packet that included three example texts and a handout to guide their reading and conversation. For this activity, I chose a Reddit advice post, the summary page for a popular piece of fanfiction, and a Discord recruitment post for a video game community. You could use any pieces you like; I selected these texts because they were written with serious consideration for audience, and each text demonstrated distinct characteristics that we had been working on identifying in preceding class sessions.
I asked students to read each text on their own. Then, with their groups, they were guided through a discussion on the topic.
Students engaged in thoughtful and meaningful conversation about these texts. They were asked to consider the rhetorical construction of each, and to pull out specific elements that informed how they were written. Some students were familiar with some (or all) genres of text; some of these genres were unfamiliar with students.
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At the end of the discussion, students were asked to identify what “writerly skills” were employed by the authors of these texts. This question assumes that students have already been given a vocabulary to work with, and that some amount of class time has been dedicated to identifying, using, and practicing writerly moves. We then transitioned to a full-class discussion, where students were invited to share their lists, consider which of the skills they identified would be useful in our classroom context, and reflect on how they may incorporate these skills into their own writing.
Wrapping Up
In the digital era, our students engage with writing in new and interesting ways. However, they rarely see these forms of engagement as “writing,” and are even less likely to see the texts they compose for these situations as being meaningful or useful in academic contexts. Through activities like this one, I aim to bridge the gap between the writing our students do and what they think writing ought to be, and to foster and develop skills they are already employing without realizing it.
As you consider your own classroom and writing context, I ask you to consider the ways that your students are composing outside of institutions. How does text mediate our lives? What rhetorical principles do they utilize without even realizing it? Even things as simple as text messages and memes are rich for these purposes. Writing is already an important part of our students’ lives, but it falls upon us, as teachers, to help foster and cultivate positive experiences with and relationships to the act of composition.
Works Cited and Further Reading
Baldwin, Kathleen Marie. “New media rhetorics: Redefining multimodality for the 21st century FYC classroom.” Journal of Global Literacies, Technologies, and Emerging Pedagogies 3.1 (2015): 250–263.
Davis, Octavia, and Bill Marsh. “Networking, storytelling and knowledge production in first-year writing.” Computers and Composition 29.2 (2012): 175–184.
Fishman, Jenn, et al. “Performing writing, performing literacy.” College Composition & Communication 57.2 (2005): 224–252.
Mueller, Derek N. “Digital underlife in the networked writing classroom.” Computers and Composition 26.4 (2009): 240–250.
Peary, Alexandria. “Walls with a word count: The textrooms of the extracurriculum.” College Composition & Communication 66.1 (2014): 43–66.
Selfe, Cynthia L., ed. Multimodal composition: Resources for teachers. Hampton Press (NJ), 2007.
Selfe, Cynthia L. “The movement of air, the breath of meaning: Aurality and multimodal composing.” College Composition & Communication 60.4 (2009): 616–663.
Shepherd, Ryan P. “Digital writing, multimodality, and learning transfer: Crafting connections between composition and online composing.” Computers and Composition 48 (2018): 103–114.
Shepherd, Ryan P. “Social Media and Its Connection to University Writing.” Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer (2024): 125.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made not only in words: Composition in a new key.” College Composition & Communication 56.2 (2004): 297–328.
Wardle, Elizabeth. ““Mutt genres” and the goal of FYC: Can we help students write the genres of the university?.” College Composition & Communication 60.4 (2009): 765–789.
