I try my best to keep up with Inside Higher Ed bloggers, but I don’t always succeed. Monday’s post from the Community College Dean jumped out at me (probably because of the title – The Ballad of the Red Pen) and then once it had jumped out at me, it got me thinking.
So the post isn’t really about using the red pen so much as not using it.
(BTW, the only thing I clearly remember from the award winning one week of training I got before heading into the classroom as a graduate Teaching Assistant was this advice – Never Use a Red Pen.
The argument was that the red pen had become so stigmatized that just the sight of red ink could send students into panic mode. To this day, I use something else)
Anyway, at the heart of this post (according to me) lies the concept of “stretch errors.” These are those errors that happen when someone is trying to grow and develop — when they’re trying new things. The suggestion is that one should be “thoughtful” about using the red pen too much when the errors you see fall into that category – too much discouragement to a student taking a risk and trying something new = problems.
This got me thinking about information literacy and research instruction and what I was saying in the Good Library Assignments posts. If a big part of what we’re doing with college level research instruction is helping students grow, try new things, expand their repertoire — then we must be seeing “stretch errors,” right? I mean, unless we’re totally failing.
But I’m a little stuck on what those would look like in the research context? I have a whole stack of metathinking research narratives that I’m using for another project and I’m thinking I might go through them to see if anything comes to me.
(Please share if something came to you!)
As a starting point, it would probably be useful to think about where they’re likely to stretch. Choosing sources has to be one of those areas. It’s one the areas where we’re really pushing students to expand their toolbox, to try something new. There must be situations where students are trying to choose something scholarly, complex, expert and failing — but failing in a stretch error way, because they are trying something new.
Citing sources correctly is definitely something new, something they’ve not done before, but it’s hard for me to think about the formatting aspect of this as leading to stretch errors. The question of when and where to cite though, the question of paraphrasing and summarizing and using sources in ways other than Quote Then Cite — then yes, I think we may be seeing some there.
In fact, the very first thing that came to mind when reading this post was the Citation Project and its discussion of patchwriting.
Patch writing kind of blew me away when I first read about it because it was one of those concepts that explained so much.
WordPress tells me I have cited TCP a LOT, so I probably don’t need to say, but patchwriting is a kind of almost-plagiarism — defined as “restating a phrase, clause, or one or more sentences while staying close to the language or syntax of the source.”
The piece that really grabbed me when I first read about patchwriting in what is (I think) the first Citation Project paper was the idea that this happens when students are trying to do the right thing. That they’re looking at the examples of academic writing we’re making them use – peer reviewed articles — and trying to mimic what they see. They don’t have the domain knowledge, the vocabulary, or the experience yet to write this way for themselves, so they end up veering too close to their original sources in an attempt to mimic that genre of writing. That just made so much sense to me, and now seems like a classic example of a stretch error.
Now, to find some more.
info-fetishist 
This was greeat to read