Weekly writing assignments

Weekly writing assignments

• Default due date: weekly
• Points: 100
• Weight: 15%
• Length (in words): 900

Instructions

One of your assignments for this semester is to consolidate your thinking prior to class about something we have read for that class. Each week’s writing is due the day before class. There are dropboxes on Canvas for Weeks 2 through 13 and of these you should submit 9.

Weekly reflections are not judged on whether they are right or wrong, or how well written or sophisticated they sound. It is OK to be unsure of your ideas and to write about things where you haven’t made up your mind or you are not sure what you think. In fact, writing about things you’re still thinking about is how you think about them better. Each week’s question will be one that you can answer many possible ways, and everyone in class will probably come up with different answers. That’s why they are a great warm-up for class; they get us ready to debate our answers.

These weekly writing assignments are meant to be short and to the point. They ask you to define an important concept in your own words based on your understanding of the work we read, or to intepret a passage in the context of the author’s argument, or another similar specific kind of question. Each can be satisfactorily answered in one or two sentences. You are free to write more. As with any suggested length for an assignment, it’s just a guideline. The questions and prompts in these weekly assignments are not designed to elicit a lot of reflection. If they inspire your thinking, you can expand on your ideas in your own writing.

Also, each student will give an “opener” presentation in class on an assigned week. Your presentation in class can consist of an expanded version of your response to the weekly writing assignment. You can turn in your expanded response to this box and to the box for the opener presentations.

How your work will be evaluated

These weekly writing assignments are graded, but not like an essay would be graded.

I am using a modified version of the checkmark grading system. In the traditional checkmark system, you can get a check if your work is satisfactory, a check-plus if you did a better-than-satisfactory job, or a check-minus if it’s just passable.

In my system, you can get a score from 0 to 2.

• A 0 means that you did not turn the assignment in on time by the deadline, or you did not make a good-faith effort to answer the question or respond to the prompt.
• A 1 means you made a good-faith effort to complete the assignment and turned in it by the deadline.
• A 2 means you not only completed the assignment on time, but you did a good job too. Your work is complete and self-contained. Your response to the assignment is thorough.

The score for the whole assignment is out of 9 points. You don’t have to get 2s on every one, and it is easy to get a 100% on this portion of your final grade if you stick to a regular routine each week to prepare for class.¹

Also, I will be grading these with an eye toward AI use. See below.

Feedback on weekly writings

I try to read everyone’s weekly writings each week before class. I will not always leave comments on each week’s submissions. If you receive no comments, but get a +1 or +2, then you have done a great job and you should keep up the good work. If you’d like to discuss your ideas from a particular week, just send me an email to talk about them.

I do often fall behind on reading and scoring all of the assignments each week. If your week’s submission is not scored, that does not mean anything is wrong or that you have lost points. It just means I still have to catch up on them.

The best way to think about these assignments is to see them as a warm-up exercise for class, in two senses.

First, the heavy lifting and intellectual struggle will mainly happen in chewing over big ideas together in our seminar meetings. To get ready, we use these weekly writings as a way to loosen up and get the (intellectual) blood flowing. Given this, the best kind of feedback you can get on this assignment is your own. Read your writing again a few days after. How has your thinking changed? What would you say if you had to revise and rewrite your past writings? Was writing on a specific topic hard or easy? What was hard or easy about it?

Second, the assignment encourages you to make a weekly habit of taking stock of ideas and turning them over in your mind before class. Here too, the best feedback is your own, and can help you reinforce the habit of weekly writing. Instead of giving yourself feedback on the content, though, reflect on what you observe about your process. When did you write the week’s entry? How did you feel doing it? What tools did you use to complete the assignment? Why those tools? Did you spend a solid hour on it, or 5 minutes? How does it compare to the process of writing for other weeks (like, say, writing for Week 3 compared to writing for Week 9)? How did you formulate your answer? What kind of a reader are you? What kind of a writer are you? Were you inspired to say more in other writing?

Maybe in the future you will discover that you enjoy writing your thoughts down every day or every week in your own personal log, and your scholarly writing starts with just copying and pasting an embryo of an idea that you captured in an entry from days, weeks, or years earlier.

Late work and extensions

These weekly assignments are not eligible for automatic five-day extensions.

If you have a formal extension (special consideration) because you are not able to work on the class for a week or more, then you can submit the assignments late for credit. Otherwise, you can submit them late, and I will read them, but they will not count toward your grade on this assignment.

Can I use AI?

This assignment is open and unsupervised. There is no prohibition on using AI tools in an honest way to improve your writing. Any use of an AI tool must be acknowledged. See the AI in Education Canvas site for tips on using AI tools and for how to acknowledge their use. Document everything. When it comes to acknowledging tools, more is better. Documenting your use of AI tools is a way to demonstrate your own independent thinking.

This kind of writing assignment seems to be one where it would be just easier to let an AI bot do it for you. After all, how could one’s own definition of a important concept be any better than what an AI bot will create? It’s literally the first thing you’d see on Google, and that text would be very similar to the top results on Google, including Wikipedia and other encyclopedia. And you might even say that this should still count as good preparation for class too.

Actually, no. The writing assignments ask you to discuss ideas from class readings in the context of the readings. AI bots (and Wikipedia, etc.) sound like they know what they are talking about but they can only give you generic information. Only you can provide your developing understanding of an idea based on your experience of reading about it.

If you use AI tools, use them as a chef uses a classy, super-sharp chef’s knife:

• Use an AI chat bot to teach you how to compose writing in plain text and then apply a template using a document converter like Pandoc. That is, use AI to upskill on other tech so you can have mise-en-place for any assignment.
• Use an AI grammar checker to suggest ways to clarify your writing.
• Give your answer to an AI bot and ask it to ask you questions about it. Or, initiate a chat with a bot in which it plays the role of a naive friend to whom you will explain what you learned from the class readings.

Be careful not to use the AI tools like a 7-11 toaster oven. When students use AI tools in a low-effort way, they get low-effort responses. (AI bots are chat bots, after all; they match your energy.) What’s worse, when you use a tool in this way, you get accustomed to the feeling of completing the task quickly. So you only get a baby version of the ideas you want explained to you and you end up relying on pap instead of developing your palate.²

When I grade these assignments, I will be exercising judgment about whether or not I think a student relied too much on AI tools, especially if there is no acknowledgement or documentation of how an AI tool was used. I don’t think I’m too paranoid, but if your response sounds like a chat bot, and you don’t say whether you used any chat bots, then I don’t think it’s a good faith effort.