Gopen's “Why So Many Bright Students and So Many Dull Papers?"

Gopen, George.  “Why So Many Bright Students and So Many Dull Papers?: Peer-Responded Journals as a Partial Solution to the Problem of the Fake Audience.” WAC Journal 16 (Sept 2005): 22-48.

Gopen identifies several problems with writing assignments: students dread them, teachers dread grading them, and our traditional mode of feedback—comments in the margin and at the end of the essay—does “not accomplish nearly enough of the intended good” (24).  Like many others, Gopen blames the fact that students are often asked to write for no audience or for the teacher.  Obviously one solution is to build a specific audience into the assignment (“you are the commencement speaker at a…”), but Gopen seems concerned not only with awkward attempts at joining a discourse community, as Bartholomae’s sample essays showed, but with students’ intellectual engagement based on their perception of the audience.  Gopen believes that if a student writes for a teacher, she aims to demonstrate her own (partial) knowledge for an expert whose knowledge she imagines to be complete.  Instead, Gopen points out , we want our students to write to communicate, to exchange information, which they cannot do if they believe the audience to have it already. 

  

As a solution, Gopen suggests a series of journals for a peer audience.  In the model version he presents, students are placed in groups of three to four, which should change a few times during the course.  If a course meets Monday and Wednesday, the students complete their reading and respond in a 500-word journal entry.  Students bring hard copies to class for each group member and the professor (who reads but neither comments on nor hands back the papers).  On Monday, group members bring a 500-word response to each journal entry, which must engage with ideas, not make teacherly comments.  This pattern repeats every week that formal writing is not due and, with repetition, creates a real sense of audience for the student writers—audience that can learn from them and offer genuine responses to them.  At the end of the term, the professor assigns a high-percentage grade to each student’s journal and response work based not only on quality but on improvement. 

Gopen’s concept seems a bit simple for a 27-page article, but the length allows him to provide all the information one needs to apply it, including consideration of a teacher’s reservations and warnings against pitfalls.  While I do not teach a two-day-a-week course, the many advantages of this system—especially the increased intellectual engagement, in which students take their own thinking seriously—convinced me that it’s worth trying.  In fact, it could offer solutions to some problems I have faced regarding the balance of work at night with the speed of our progress in class.  Assigning readings and these journals at two- or three-day intervals would automatically give me several days with each reading, while also making me feel less guilty if I cut back on the amount of reading we do.  Thus I could model analysis of our readings at the depth I would prefer and students would not lose chances to write because of our slower pace.  I might even use Gopen’s passage (37-40) demonstrating a student’s intellectual progress through one cycle of journals and responses to show students the honesty and engagement they should aspire to.