Reflective writing, reflective practice

There is no doubt that students’ writing grows during their university

education, attended to or not. However, when students execute their
project work in the final year, many exhibit writing traits identifiable with
inexperienced writers, or that are intolerable at their educational level.
Part of the reason is that their growth process lacks feedback mechanism
that would indicate to students how well they are doing (that is, beyond
the scores they achieve at the end of a course), or what areas of their
developing skills they need to work on.
However, in a writing course, students must be prepared to write and the
teacher to give feedback. In large classes, the process approach to writing
can provide a feedback scheme for peer and teacher evaluation. A
process of assessment will give insight to their competence in the literacy
skills and how and if they are growing as teaching goes on, and lead them
to an intimate understanding of their dispositions in writing and towards
its practice as well as problem areas.
Unfortunately, in a large class, students try to hide behind the crowd, and
attempt to use their number to frustrate their teacher through poor class
attendance and failure to take assignments seriously. Group assignments
are usually done by a few, while some individual submissions suggest
shoddiness in approach, as well as plagiarism, making it difficult for the
teacher to move students from one point to an advanced one. A sure
means of curbing students’ pranks is close monitoring of attendance, such
that the teacher can at any point in time figure out those missing classes
regularly. This makes nonchalant students feel uncomfortable, and many
consequently try to do the right things. Experience shows that while they
ought to realise at this level the importance of writing classes for better
academic performance and future career development, most students,
incidentally, still need to be cajoled as kindergarten to attend classes.
Beyond the truancy of youth, many students believe they already know
how to write.
The reflection poems, detailing different energies that students had
repeatedly put in doing assignments confirm that writing is an iterative
process. What they did not seem to know, just as I also did not some years
ago, is that not being satisfied with one’s writing is actually fundamental
to growing in the art of writing. Oluwadamilola (p. 94) says:
This fear of writing to fail
As if I will be put in jail.
She tells me the process is simple,
But I try and it hurts like a pimple.
Over again I try harder and it seems fine,
Alas! It was just a matter of time.
The “fear of writing to fail” must be done away with. Rather, one should
expect one’s writing to fail, and be ready to work on the initial draft and
later outputs. It should also be understood that the mind is limited in what

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 it can handle at a time, and tends to drift from one idea/detail to another,
causing change in the direction of message development and flow as one
writes. Therefore, the failure of the initial effort to meet one’s
communication desire should not be discouraged but explored creatively.
Some, for fear that they would have to rewrite/revise, choose not to read
their writing – their “first draft.” Paradoxically, the very inadequacies they
fear to discover about their writing is the very reason they should read
over their works. The fear of finding out that one’s writing does not
communicate effectively is a good fear that should lead one to working on
what is already on a medium to produce a piece that meets the reader’s
need. When reading through one’s writing, one takes (should take) the
place of the person that would be reading the write-up, and considers if
one has communicated one’s intention effectively.
It is quite unfortunate that many Nigerian textbooks – primary, secondary
and tertiary – are poorly developed due to writers and book editors not,
probably, being conversant with writing conventions, particularly with the
techniques of rewriting and revising with the prospective reader in mind.
Many students would probably fear that Sharples (1999) diagram (p. 31
below) indicates unwarranted “struggles” that writers have to go through
in deciphering and producing their thoughts and then shaping them. This
may not be wrong. But many would have observed that even when the
ideas seem to have been well thought-out in the head they may not come
out quite right on paper. It pretty well does for some, such as Janks
(2012); but who, mid academic career, discovered the beauty of creatively
developing his ideas on paper using, not just words alone, but diagrams as
well to connect points and divert from points. Thus, Sharples (1999, p. 10)
observes that “external representations are the modelling clay of writing.”
When writers conceptualise ideas or string ideas into/onto a medium and
revisit them, they are able to reconstruct them into a proper shape for a
reader’s consumption. Even though writing is a mental activity, it still
relies on the use of physical tools and resources; and this “rich
interactions between the mind and the external world” (Sharples, p. 10)
increases the ability of the mind to create. Thus, students and most other
writers should realise that the process of conceptualising and producing a
piece of writing that will communicate necessitates doing a draft,
evaluating the draft, redrafting and may be doing other earlier stages of
writing where necessary; not forgetting to use brainstorming strategies to
generate and order ideas.
The underlying questions one needs to ask when setting out to write are:
Do I really need to (or have to) write? If yes: Do I have something to
communicate? If “no” how can I source information; if yes: Is it important
to me that my reader(s) understand what I want to say? These questions
in most cases for many students may actually elicit a “no” in their heart of
hearts, since writing tasks are more or less “forced” on them and topics
are not their own original conception. Nonetheless, students would be
better off if they responded to essay topics with a desire to own their
writing. The poems worked because students engaged their subject
matters creatively (and passionately). The infusion of one’s identity and

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 individuality is productive in subject matter development and
manifestation of writing competences.
It was always very difficult to make students to appreciate the importance
for them to own their own writing. “You must own your writing,” said
repeatedly in class did not make any impression on them. Therefore, these
poets and their predecessors, in failing to own their expository writing,
submitted texts that exhibited, among others, these inadequacies:
— unclear goals for writing
— limited number of points
— poor development and organisation of ideas and details
— plagiarism
— failure of topic, audience and writer to meet
— absence of voice
— incoherence
— weak and ungrammatical sentences
I have learnt from the poems that owning is intricately linked with
knowing. It is when a student knows the subject matter that they can
aspire to own their writing. Again, they cannot own unless they seek to
know. While it is imperative to teach students to present their own
perspective on the topic of discourse (owning), they, of necessity, have to
do research as an integral part of writing until they know what they are
writing about.
The secondary school era of writing a paper the night before its
submission has to go. It is occasionally unavoidable, but should remain
occasional. As a scholar, in two separate occasions, due to extreme
excess workload, I have written a conference paper the night before its
presentation, and hope to be able to do that any day. But that is only part
of the story; I should actually have said that I penned the paper in one
night. The writing began several weeks earlier, as soon as (probably
before) I submitted an abstract for the conference. As I researched for the
paper, my mind was equally working on what I wanted to say, and so it
was relatively easy to spend about six hours to compose what could be
presented at a conference. Nonetheless, such paper presentations are
usually accompanied with apologies for various shortcomings, least of
which are misspellings and ungrammatical sentences. In reality, the paper
was never fully developed and always had to undergo rewriting before its
publication.
In my very brief narrative is the indication that the writer is responsible to
herself and her reader, just as the novice poets were. If only the students
had similar desire to communicate while writing their expository essays,
they would have been more engaged in sourcing for materials/information
that would arm them for developing their subject matters. Moreover in
writing, the engaged mind has a message or attempts to develop a
message, which is communicated in the most effective way within the
competence of the writer. Too often students write “for the teacher,” their

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 intention being to get the teacher off their backs, rather than become
participants in a community of discourse (Kasule and Lunga, 2010).
Again, students exclude themselves from their writing, particularly by not
indulging in critical thinking. According to Fisher (2001, p. 14), “good
critical thinking will meet various intellectual standards, like those of
clarity, relevance, adequacy, coherence and so on.” He explains that
“critical thinking is essentially an ‘active’ process – one in which you think
things through for yourself, raise questions yourself, and find relevant
information yourself, etc.” (p. 2). Sharples (1999, p. 7) explains further:
An engaged writer is devoting full mental resources to
transforming a chain of associated ideas into written text. At
some point the writer will stop and bring the current state of the
task into conscious attention, as a mental representation to be
explored and transformed.
Sharples illustrates the relationship between engagement and reflection.

Each aspect of the engagement/reflection cycle would elicit different level

of energy from individual writers and by individual projects.
By indulging in the learning of conventions and techniques of writing,
learners discover themselves and their peculiarities, and begin to
understand how to cultivate their own strategies for gathering, handling
and organising information. To support this recommendation, the learning
discoveries of Hilary Janks and David Pulling, both established scholars,
would suffice. Janks (2012), after participating in a writing workshop
discovered that creative strategies facilitate the development of the
subject matter when doing conventional academic writing. Pulling (2010),
on the other hand, learnt new things about writing after several years of
teaching writing courses, and concludes his review of Carroll’s book
(earlier cited) on writing thus:
I’m eight years from the pasture, twenty-two years vested in the
retirement system, and saddled more with administrative chores
than teaching chores. But this book showed that an old (er, let’s

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 say middle-aged?) teaching dog can learn some new tricks, or at
least rethink the way he performs some of the old ones. I am a
better teacher this semester than I was last semester because of
reading this book.
Good writers keep learning from their writing experience, and thus the
process of becoming a writer is a continuous one (Sharples, 1999). Citing
Leu (2000), Kucer (2005) observes that becoming literate (a process)
rather than being literate (a state) describes our relationship with the
written language. The author notes further that the more one writes the
better one gets, and this by gaining greater control of various dimensions
of literacy. Further, growth depends on the frequency and depth with
which one interacts with language. One’s writing, as its companions,
reading and critical thinking, grows; and one needs to indulge in more
challenging writing tasks to grow. As Franklin tells us metaphorically,
“letterings not letters” – writing is more than spelling and stringing words
together.
Obviously, students should never think that any literacy teaching programme, reading or writing, is a
waste of their time, or that they already know how to read and write. By extension, those that have
passed writing courses that were viewed as difficult must not now think that they have acquired all
the essential writing skills. There are vast areas of writing and communication, vast subject matters
that will try their skills, different situations that will require them to determine how to say what to a
particular audience. Finally, those who stop writing will also stop growing their literacy skills. We
learn writing by writing.

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