Standing Challenges: From an Idea to a First Page
A class period of four timed rounds that takes each student from no topic to a challenge, a genre, two samples, and the first page of a draft.
Process: Directed drafting1 round of revision
- When
- First-year writing · the research unit
- Length
- One class, 50 minutes
- Slides
- 10, each with its notes below it
Or press P. Arrow keys or a clicker move between slides, F goes full screen, and Esc comes back here.
Today is a starting day. Nobody needs a topic walking in, and everybody leaves with a challenge, a genre, two samples, and a first page of writing. Have a laptop or phone out and a new file open for the draft. The rounds are short on purpose, so no one has time to wait for a perfect idea.
A standing challenge is still standing because more experience doesn’t make it go away. Professors, journalists, and novelists all still have to decide how to start, how to end, and how to bring in someone else’s words. Ask the room for one more example before moving on: what writing problem keeps following you from class to class?
This is the whole assignment on one slide: a challenge, a genre where it shows up, a collection of examples, and a report on what those writers do. It’s the autoethnography’s method pointed outward. There, students labeled what they did themselves; here, they label what other writers do. The four areas come from the assignment sheet, which has more questions under each. The aside under them is a second way in, for a student who’d rather write about a problem in writing itself than a move on the page: the kind of question the course’s readings on literacy and language take up. It needs a data set too, places where the issue shows up (job ads that ask for “excellent written communication,” AI policies on syllabi, a comment thread arguing about grammar), and the readings become its sources. The second aside turns the question on us. I tell students they can frame the challenge as a problem with the professors or the institutions: what are we doing wrong, and is this thing being taught wrong? Some find that harder and some find it easier, so it stays open. Its samples are close to hand: assignment sheets, syllabi, rubrics, textbook advice, a school’s policies. Have anyone going either way run the idea by you. Say how many samples the data set needs before Round 2 starts; the slides leave the number to the sheet.
Plan the clock before class. In 50 minutes: about 8 for these opening slides, 35 in the four rounds, and 5 for the exit ticket, with a minute or two lost to moving between rounds. Each round’s slide has its own timer; press the time to start it. In a longer class, give the Hunt and the First Page 15 minutes each. The rounds work with a partner beside each student, but only Round 1 needs one.
Three ideas, not one, so nobody is stuck defending a first thought. The partner’s only job is the test: could you actually find enough samples of this? A challenge with no genre attached fails it (“writer’s block”), and so does a genre with no challenge (“TikTok captions”). Walking around, listen for pairings where the genre doesn’t have the thing being studied, and send those back to the last slide’s line about introductions and tweets.
A sample is a place where the problem happens; a source is someone writing about the problem. Students mix the two up, and the mix-up sends them to the library databases looking for samples, where they’ll mostly find sources. Those are worth saving for later, but they aren’t the data set. Most samples for this project are out in ordinary writing, so the list at the foot of the slide is there to be scanned for ten minutes: four kinds of places, each with a few to try. Someone studying how writers end things can pull the last lines of ten product reviews; someone studying how writers bring in a source can look at how Reddit posters link to one. Someone who took the bigger issue, say whose English counts as correct, can collect job ads, syllabus policies, or the replies under a post about grammar. Someone asking what’s being taught wrong can collect assignment sheets and textbook advice, their own included. Two samples in the time is the proof that the pairing works. If a student can’t find two, the pairing was too narrow or the genre was wrong, and it’s better to learn that today than the night before the draft is due. Set the timer to 15 if the room needs it. Two cautions to say aloud: use posts that are public, and leave people’s names and usernames out of the paper. Anyone done early can find a third sample, or one source about the challenge: a textbook, a writing guide, or a scholarly article.
Coding sounds technical, and it’s only labeling. Perl watched writers and gave each thing they did a short code; here the label goes on a move in a text, like “opens with a question” or “quote dropped in with no introduction.” For a bigger issue the question shifts a little, to what each sample says or assumes about it, and the labels work the same way. Two samples won’t show a pattern yet, and that’s fine: the labels are what students carry to the rest of the data set. Walking around, look for labels that judge (“good intro”) and ask for ones that describe what the writer did.
This is the round the day is for. Everyone now has something to say: a challenge, a reason they picked it, a genre, and one sample they’ve already labeled. Start the timer and write along with the class. The pad on the slide won’t let anyone go back and fix, the same as the first week’s freewrites, and students can write in their own file or on paper instead. The second step is the assignment sheet’s description of how a strong report opens, so whatever comes out is already the start of the paper. When time’s up, they copy it into the draft file before anything else happens.
One minute on where the paper goes from here, while the first page is still warm. What they wrote today is mostly description, and it should be. The analysis comes once the rest of the samples are labeled and the patterns show: why most writers in this genre make the same move, and what happens when one doesn’t. Ask one or two students to try the second sentence out loud with their own challenge.
The last five minutes. The four lines are a record of where each student stands, and the question is the most useful one to read before the next class: it says who needs a conference and what the workshop should start with. On paper it works the same, on an index card. The stone in the corner has been through the class too: picked out, with the ways other writers got past it marked and counted, and a new path past it begun. The draft that started today is that path.
Readings
- Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, "Analysis of Solutions to Writing Challenges" sample assignment, Writing About Writing, 5th ed., pp. 249–253
- Sondra Perl, "The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers" (1979)
- Peter Elbow, "How to Improve Your Writing through Freewriting Exercises," Writing Without Teachers (1973), pp. 1–4