Category Archives: academic writing

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teaching content vs. teaching a skill

Sometimes I wish I could be an engineering professor.

Let me unpack that statement, beginning with a massive disclaimer: NOBODY wants me to teach engineering. If I taught any form of engineering, even to a small group of students, you would begin to see news stories of bridges collapsing, neighborhoods losing electricity, chemical factories blowing up, and solenoids failing (if you don’t know what a solenoid is, don’t worry; neither did I before I married a magnetic design engineer). That’s not because I’m a bad teacher but because I don’t have the content knowledge necessary to teach engineering. This might sound obvious, but it’s an important statement that forms the crux of this post.

The other day, my magnetic engineer husband (yes, he has a magnetic personality, and he also works with magnets) and I were talking about the difference between his college experience and mine. The conversation was sparked by an anecdote we had heard about an engineering professor who bragged about how few students passed his final exam. I expressed my exasperation with this kind of thinking, and while Jordan agreed that this is nothing to brag about, he said he did understand and mostly support the concept of engineering professors designing their exams to be difficult (especially in early courses designed to separate the truly capable and serious future engineers from those who thought they’d take an intro course for fun). He pointed out the impracticality, even the danger, of students graduating from an engineering program without really knowing the content and concepts of the field, and explained how tests are one of the best ways of ensuring graduates have the requisite knowledge (second only to hands-on design projects).

I begrudgingly agreed. I knew he was right in the context of engineering, but that gatekeeping mindset is so antithetical to the way I teach writing that I’m used to cringing whenever I see it. The difference, of course, is that writing isn’t a content-driven discipline. Some would argue with me here–there is a whole field of composition that has essential readings and concepts. I recognize and respect composition as a discipline, and I think that disciplinary knowledge is crucial for people who want to dedicate their lives to the teaching and research of writing. But I don’t think it’s necessary for people who simply want to learn how to write. Writing is a skill, and the best way to learn it is to do it (while receiving quality feedback to make sure it’s being done well). That explains why my students earn their grades not by taking tests to prove they know concepts about good writing, but by doing lots of writing, which allows them to practice the skill over and over and eventually reach significant improvement, if not mastery. Mastery is difficult to demonstrate because the definition of “excellent writing” is notoriously subjective, which is why English teachers are all going to prioritize different things in our grading, no matter how hard we try to standardize the process through rubrics, norming sessions, and other efforts.

This explains why I don’t worry too much about whether we’re compromising our standards as a university by allowing students to graduate from our writing programs who probably aren’t going to win any Pulitzer Prizes or who maybe will never even get published. Every student’s goals and reasons for getting a degree in writing are different, and I don’t think it’s my place to judge students by a standard that has nothing to do with their goals. Of course, there are graduation standards students have to meet–e.g., if they’re writing a master’s thesis, it needs to meet a minimum length requirement. And yes, I absolutely do my best to teach students good argumentation, research, and sentence construction skills. But especially when we’re talking about creative writing, there’s a fine line–easily stumbled across–between teaching these skills and trying to reproduce students who write exactly the way we do.

I opened the post by saying I sometimes wish I could teach engineering because I sometimes wish I could have a more objective standard by which to grade–that I could simply mark my students’ work right or wrong. (And by the way, I’m sure there is room for creative approaches in engineering; I realize I’m stereotyping a bit to make my point.) But most of the time, I’m thankful I get to teach a skill that allows me to come alongside students in something resembling a mentoring relationship, even if that means I sometimes obsess way too long over which rubric category to click.

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teaching as an act of care

I just reread my post from February in which I promised to post more often, beginning with a version of a conference presentation I gave in January. I’m embarrassed that it’s July and I haven’t shared that post. Instead of rewriting the presentation into an essay, I’ve decided to share an outline of my talking points. I hope you find something relevant in it, regardless of your calling.

The title of the presentation was Love in Action, and its purpose was to remind us (myself and fellow Christian university faculty) of the value of caring work and to identify ways in which teaching is caring work. I began with the following reasons why the topic is important:

1. AI has made “am I talking to a real person?” a crucial question.

    2. Students are intimidated by their professors.

    3. Students who feel safe are more willing to take intellectual risks.

    4. Most importantly, if we take our calling as Christian faculty seriously, our work is a ministry.

    These claims were based mainly on the following sources:

    •Anecdotal evidence based on ten years of teaching online “full-time” (and a lot of course evaluations to back me up!)

    •Books on Christian love in action: Real Love for Real Life by Andi Ashworth and Making Room by Christine Pohl

    •Findings from a doctoral research project by Nat Mercer (my colleague at Grace Christian University)

    This quote from Ashworth was foundational to my thinking on this topic: “Hospitality can also mean sitting with another person over coffee, showing an interest in who they are” (p. 71, emphasis mine). I asked my audience, “Can this happen in a virtual setting as well?”

    The remainder of my presentation was set up as a series of real or perceived contrasts.

    Contrast 1: Important work vs. recognized work: Crucial work can be done in secret, as we see in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. While it is valuable for faculty members to be able to articulate the work we do, not all tasks are easily trackable.

    • Principle: Work doesn’t have to be financially compensated to be important, and there is value in doing work that isn’t formally rewarded.
    • Caveat: This shouldn’t be used as excuse not to fairly compensate people for their work.
    • For example, as an adjunct working on a contract basis, I get paid for teaching my courses. At a bare minimum, that means giving feedback on assignments and recording grades. But is meeting with students who want to talk about their career future also teaching? What about writing recommendation letters? What about reading a book I’ll later recommend to a student? (I think the answer to these questions is “yes”!)

    Contrast 2: Creative work vs. busy work: “Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” –David Allen, Getting Things Done

    Allowing space for creativity is related to allowing space for serving others.

    Overcommitted faculty have less capacity to notice others’ needs and create ways to serve them.

    Principle: Caring takes creativity.

    Contrast 3: Students: problems or people?

    I know I need a “heart check” when I start thinking of my students as problems, annoyances, or tasks to deal with.

    Practical ways to remind myself that my students are people: praying for them by name, offering/saying yes to phone/Teams conversations

    Principle: If we want our students to think of us as real people and not just machines that grade their work, we also owe it to them to view them as people.

    Contrast 4: Rigorous vs. relational (which turns out not to be a contrast after all)

    Attachment theory posits that people with “a secure base from which to explore the world” are more willing to take healthy risks.

    Nat’s research on academic rigor and faith integration: “the impact of the expression of grace and mercy by professors and the way students persist as a result of these values”—Nat Mercer, email communication, 1/6/2026

    Principle: Being kind and caring toward our students does not mean compromising academic rigor.

    Contrast 5: Transactional vs. self-giving

    I read the poem “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, which gives a concrete picture of self-giving love. I also cited the research on servant leadership by Robert Greenleaf.

    Biblical servanthood is not reciprocal—Jesus didn’t sit down and ask his followers to wash his feet, nor did he resent them for not doing so. But he did tell them to do the same for each other!

    Principle: Teaching can be incredibly rewarding, but even when it isn’t, God calls us to keep giving.

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    Searching into the Inimitable: A Guide to Research on Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens sometimes referred to himself in correspondence as “The Inimitable,” and while it’s unclear whether this was meant to be straightforwardly hubristic or cheekily self-deprecating (knowing Dickens, it was probably both), the phrase has proven to be prescient. Dickens was an astonishingly prolific writer of journalism, fiction, letters, and plays; a mesmerizing performer of his own work; a passionate social critic, and the creator of some of the most memorable characters in the English language. So perhaps it goes without saying that the field open to the Dickens-focused researcher is deep and broad. Here is a guide to get you started.

    Primary sources: Dickens wrote fourteen full-length novels (plus a good portion of an unfinished fifteenth, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which has spawned a cottage industry of potential endings), five Christmas novellas, many short stories and journalistic pieces (some comical, some melodramatic, some addressing social issues of his day), several theatrical works written for himself and his circle of friends to perform (Dickens was a talented actor who almost pursued a career on stage), and countless letters (including manuscript critiques from his time as a journal editor). Some of Dickens’ working journals, in which he outlined his novels and jotted down queries to ponder, also survive, along with extensive reworkings of his novels and stories that he created for his public readings. To borrow a line from Hamilton, Dickens wrote like he was running out of time. No Dickens researcher should feel obligated to read every word he wrote, but neither should any Dickens researcher attempt to write about him without making acquaintance with his work.

    Other people’s reactions to Dickens are an important category of primary sources as well, including contemporary reviews of his works and accounts of his (literally?) mesmerizing performances at his public readings. You can find many of these quoted in secondary sources, but also check out historical periodicals databases, such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals Collection.

    Contextual sources: Dickens undoubtedly helped to shape the Victorian period (the era spanning Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1903), but it also shaped him. Perhaps even more so, Dickens was marked by his childhood in the late Georgian period, which still contained elements of a pre-industrial “old England.” While Dickens’ works and especially his characters are often called “timeless,” he was a man of his time, and no serious Dickens researcher should ignore the historical and cultural contexts of his work. One of the best places on the internet to begin learning about 19th-century England is the Victorian Web (victorianweb.org), a massive, well-maintained site that combines contributions from scholars and readers around the world. (It also contains some articles about the pre-Victorian context of Dickens’ early years.) It’s also a good idea to read writings by and about Dickens’ contemporaries, some of whom were his close comrades and collaborators (Wilkie Collins) and others who were at times closer to frenemies (William Thackeray).

    Scholarly works: Though in his own day, Dickens was sometimes dismissed as merely a popular entertainer, it didn’t take long for scholarly literary criticism to latch onto him. You can find scholarly monographs on Dickens through the lens of crime, the theater, the city of London, and many other topics. There are also many good biographies of Dickens, and while all will give you the same basic facts, each of the best ones has its own angle that makes it worth reading. (As one example, take Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens, which includes a number of interludes that imagine Dickens as a character in his own novels.) Dickens scholarship is regularly published in journals such as Victorian Studies and Dickens Quarterly, the official publication of the Dickens Society.

    Fan productions: Not everyone who is a devoted reader and careful observer of Dickens is a scholar with a PhD and access to channels of peer-reviewed publication, and thus researchers should not ignore the productions of fans. While the word “fan” itself might be anachronistic in the context of Dickens, the phenomenon of fandom is not; Dickens’ serial novels had people lining up outside booksellers eager to get their hands on the next installment, and his public appearances (especially during his 1842 American tour and his famous readings later in life) filled auditoriums with people desperate to get a glimpse of him. Dickens’ fans range from prominent 20th-century writers such as G. K. Chesterton (who also wrote some “legitimate” scholarly work on Dickens) to the contributors on the Charles Dickens thread on fanfiction.net (there are quite a few). While the world of fan-produced writing is a bit of a Wild West, requiring the researcher to apply non-traditional methods of assessing credibility, research in this realm can yield exciting results.

    Adaptations: Dickens may be the most adapted writer of all time. People were adapting his work even before he finished writing his first novel—the loose (indeed, almost non-existent) copyright laws of the time, and the fact that Dickens published his novels in serial, allowed unscrupulous publishers and low-brow theater impresarios (not that Dickens had anything against low-brow theater as such) to come out with speculative endings to his works before Dickens himself had a chance to finish the stories. The tradition of adapting Dickens’ work for the page (see recent novels such as Drood and Death and Mr. Pickwick), the stage, and eventually the screen has continued, and the various interpretations of his characters and stories can provide the researcher with nuanced insights. Besides that, many of them are purely fun to read or watch. Dickens’ works, with their visually abundant settings and the exaggerated mannerisms of many of the characters, lend themselves particularly well to theater and film.

    This brief guide has barely begun to plumb the depths of knowledge available to the Dickens researcher. May it introduce you to a lifelong friend.

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    a poem to share

    Last week I received a beautiful, thick volume of Victorian poetry, published as a textbook in the 1960s, with excellent editorial notes and a fantastic breadth of coverage. My only complaint about the book is that it inexplicably omits one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ve always been under the impression that this was one of his best-known poems, so all I can guess is that either its omission was a mistake or the editor was tired of hearing it. I’m not tired of hearing it, so I’m going to share it with you here. This poem is in the public domain, and I obtained this text from the ever-helpful poets.org. (The accented syllables are meant to receive emphasis. Try reading this poem aloud; it’s even better that way!)

    As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame

    As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;	
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells	
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's	
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;	
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	        
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;	
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,	
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.	
 
Í say móre: the just man justices;	
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	        
Acts in God's eye what in God’s eye he is—	
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,	
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his	
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
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    what my online students can expect from me, part 2: appropriate grading feedback

    This is the latest post in a series about expectations in online education. You can read the previous post here.

    You can expect me to give you grading feedback in an amount and kind appropriate to the assignment. I use the word “appropriate” instead of “substantial,” a term greatly emphasized at one of my institutions in relation to grading feedback, because I don’t think all assignments require substantial feedback. For example, when I am grading students’ participation in a peer review discussion, it’s probably enough for me to say, “Thank you for your participation.” When I’m grading a topic proposal, I might record a three-minute video giving the student guidance on narrowing down the topic and starting to look for sources, but I probably won’t launch into a nitpicky critique of their APA format. However, when I’m grading a final/summative paper, I will give feedback on all areas of the assignment–content, organization, research, mechanics, and documentation–and my comments will likely consist of several sentences each. But still, there will be issues I overlook (intentionally or not), because my goal is to give students useful suggestions for improving their writing, not to discourage them by making the paper illegible with overlapping marginal comments on every sentence (the digital equivalent of a paper bled through with a red pen). I know from personal experience how discouraging this can be!

    I hasten to admit that I’m not perfect at this. I often worry about whether I’m giving enough grading feedback, whether my comments make sense, and whether I got the tone right. And there are definitely times, usually when I’m on vacation or just really not feeling like grading, when I give a completion grade on an assignment that I probably should have taken the time to carefully assess using the rubric. But I think I largely succeed at my goal of making the overall message of my grading not “Here’s what you did wrong” (though I realize some students will still read it that way) but “Here are some things you can consider doing differently next time.”

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    what my online students can expect from me, part 1: collegial communication

    Last week, I wrote about the top three expectations I have for my online students. Now, I’m going to write a few posts focused on things my students can expect from me. I’m choosing to write these posts exclusively in the first person because I think it’s more difficult to make safe generalizations in this area as compared to the area of my last post. But I’d love to hear from other online faculty members–are your expectations similar?

    You can expect me to reply to your communication and not be annoyed about it. First, I want to clarify what this does not mean. It does not mean I’ll reply to your emails, text messages, or voicemails (I do sometimes get those!) immediately. I go to bed pretty early, and I put my phone in sleep mode when I do. Another rather countercultural practice I have, which I believe has done wonders for my mental health, is that I do not receive email notifications on my phone. I sit down to check email, usually on my computer, at designated times when I’m ready to focus on email. So this may mean that, especially on weekends, a student may go 24 hours, or slightly more, without receiving a reply from me. But here’s what this expectation does mean: When I respond to your message, I’m going to read it carefully and give you a substantial answer. (And yes, I may occasionally say, “Go look at p. 24 in the APA guide” or something similar, but I won’t be snarky about it.) I’m not going to be annoyed at you because, as I explained in my post last week, email and other personal communication forums are where I do some of my best work. In fact, right now I have a student who’s been sending me some fairly lengthy emails a couple times a week–sometimes to ask questions, other times to say she appreciated something I said in a video, etc.–but I’m not irritated at her, because our email exchange is allowing us to build a collegial relationship. Also, it helps that when she doesn’t expect a reply to one of her messages, she will actually say that in the subject line.

    I’m always baffled when students are profusely grateful that I responded to their emails, when to me this seems like a bare minimum expectation. Apparently, some professors aren’t doing this, or they’re giving their students the impression they’d rather not. I’m thankful for this simple practice that allows me to tailor my instruction to individual students, build relationships, and get good course evaluations in the process. 😉

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      What online instructors want from their students

      I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the misconceptions–or complete mystification–some online students have about what their professors are looking for. In an asynchronous online class, there’s no regular meeting time when students can ask questions and professors can pointedly emphasize certain desired behaviors. I don’t want my students to have to guess what my expectations are for them–nobody likes that game. While every instructor will have expectations specific to each of their courses, there are some that, at least in my opinion, transcend contexts. In this post, I’m going to list and briefly explain several of these close-to-universal expectations.

      1. We want you to write like a real person, not a robot. I’ve been saying this for years, but the recent revolution in accessible generative AI tools has made this advice particularly urgent and very literal! An essay written by ChatGPT and an essay written by a student in a stilted, impersonal academic-ese, while ethically different, are both really boring to read. I want to get to know you through your writing, especially in an online class where writing is about the only thing we have to build a relationship on. Let your own voice come through!
      2. We want you to communicate with us. Often, students who email me will preface their message by saying something like “I’m so sorry to bother you.” I always reassure these students that answering their questions is what I’m paid to do and that my best teaching often happens through email. Again, since you’re not sitting in a classroom with me, I don’t have that weekly or daily time to check that you’re understanding the material and doing okay in life in general. If you’re turning in assignments, at least I know you’re alive, but I’ve found that the students who do best in online classes are those who communicate with me outside of assignments–asking questions, running ideas by me, letting me know what you think of the course materials, etc. And this might go without saying, but if you’re not turning in assignments and you’re not emailing me, then I have no choice but to assume that you’ve fallen off the face of the earth! I would much rather receive an email explaining that it’s been a hard week and asking for an extension than receive no communication at all. Talk to me!
      3. We want you to read our feedback. This one may sound like a pet peeve rant (“I spent all that time writing feedback and they didn’t even read what I wrote!”), but there’s more to it than that. I guess I can’t speak for all instructors here, but I try to grade with the goal of helping my students on future assignments, both in my class and later classes. I don’t make as many grading corrections as I used to (I was trained in the bleeding red pen school), but the comments I do leave are substantial and, I sincerely hope, constructive. If you don’t read my feedback, you’re missing out on a big part of what you’re paying for in my class. If an assignment has a rubric (and I think rubrics are used pretty much across the board in online education today), find out how to open and read the filled-out rubric–otherwise, you don’t know why you lost the points you did, and you’re left to assume the professor just doesn’t like you. I can’t promise that I like all my students (that’s a different topic for a different post!), but I never deduct points just because–the rubric always makes it clear!

      I’ll stop there for now, because those are by far the three biggest expectations I have for my online students. Of course, students also have a right to know what they can expect from their professors, so look for a future post on that!

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      writing goals for 2024

      As I think about my goals for the new year, I’m considering how I want writing to fit into my life in 2024. I have always seen myself as a writer, but after a few highly productive years leading up to the completion of a novel in 2019, I’ve been in a dry spell, at least by comparison. I do a lot of writing for my work–mainly emails and grading feedback–but in this post, I’m thinking about writing that is both more enjoyable and less ephemeral than those, important as they may be. So here are some writing goals I’d like to focus on in the new year.

      1. Get back into the habit of writing in my notebook for 15 minutes a day. I started doing this in September after I read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and wanted to rediscover the joy of writing, especially in longhand (a practice Goldberg speaks highly of). Throughout that month, I wrote for 15 minutes every morning. Most of what I wrote will never be shown to the world (though this post was a result of one particularly productive day), but it was a good practice, and I’d like to get back into it consistently in 2024.
      2. Research and revise two short stories based on incidents in the life of Christ that I drafted in 2023. These stories resulted from my daily writing practice. They are quick sketches that need research give them accuracy and authenticity. I may use my research and revision process to help me develop some resources for my students (I wrote about this idea here), but even if I don’t end up doing that, I would like to get these stories into a state that I’m happy with.
      3. Reread Sam’s Town to help me decide whether I want to work on the sequel. Sam’s Town is the novel I self-published in 2019. Soon after I completed it, while still riding a writing high, I started the sequel, Sam’s Home. But then I got married, moved, and lived through the pandemic, and the few brief attempts I’ve made to pick the manuscript back up haven’t really gone anywhere. So in 2024, I’d like to reread Sam’s Town in hopes of recapturing some of that excitement. Even if I ultimately decide not to make writing the sequel one of my goals for this year, I think I’ll enjoy revisiting those characters who played such an important role in my life for several years.

      Three is a magic number when it comes to goal-setting, so I’ll stop there. What are some of your goals for 2024, writing-related or otherwise?

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      a quick bite of food for thought about grading time

      Yesterday, I was watching a video about creating a teaching calendar (which I can’t share here because it’s part of a paid professional development package one of my universities subscribes to), and I heard some research findings that caught my attention. The study was conducted by the video presenter, B. Jean Mandernach, Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Research and Teaching at Grand Canyon University, and her colleagues.

      Here’s a summary: The research team approached a group of doctoral-level faculty who taught writing-heavy courses and asked them how long it took them, on average, to grade a paper. They monitored their grading time and came up with an average of one hour per paper. The researchers asked if they could lower this to 30 minutes. The faculty expressed doubt, but limited themselves to 30 minutes per paper. In a third round of grading, the faculty then limited themselves to 20 minutes per paper. Next, an objective rater scored the quality of the professors’ feedback, and there was no qualitative difference between the three sets of papers.

      I’m just going to leave you with that. I think the data speaks for itself. I’ll simply say that as English professor who tends to reflexively equate more feedback with better teaching–but who feels overwhelmed by the volume of writing I have to respond to each week–I found these results to be encouraging. Let me know what you think! And if you’re not a teacher, could these findings apply to other areas of life?

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      Don’t ask your students to do anything you haven’t done yourself.

      This post is part of a series on bringing a human touch to online education. See the series introduction here.

      I recently wrote a rough draft of a story, provisionally titled “Sunrise at the Sea of Tiberias,” and I know it needs some historical research. So I have an idea: I’m going to do the Writing in Your Field Project, the major multi-step assignment in my graduate writing class, along with my students.

      I have never done the project, and I know that’s a classic teacher mistake: expect my students to do something I haven’t done myself. I know what some of the common challenges of the project are based on student feedback, but as I often tell my students regarding their research, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience.

      I’m thinking of taking notes on my experience as I go through it (maybe using a combo of written and voice notes), then creating some supplemental videos/documents I can share with students and maybe eventually make an official part of the course. I would also like to write about this experience, with a teacher audience in mind, on the blog!

      I hope to start this project soon, when (I’m hopeful) some extra space will be opening up in my grading schedule. Stay tuned for details!