Trying to Sound Smart Might Make You Sound Stupid

Have you ever had to write a paper and felt that neither the way you usually speak nor your most academic or "smartest" language would work for the assignment?

I think everyone has felt this way, at least once his or her life. I know I have!

Now, have you ever read through your own paper or perhaps even when you were writing it got confused about what you were saying? If you answered yes, what was the cause of your confusion?

Was it because you were trying so hard to sound smart that your writing became so convoluted that your meaning was lost? Or was it because you hit that right click and went to the Thesaurus option a little too often?

If either of these rang true, revise, rewrite, or rework that paper. If you get lost writing or reading your own paper, imagine what your intended reader will feel!

Sounding smart at the expense of losing your reader(s) is not a risk worth taking. Meaning and comprehension hold much more weight than using a bunch of those 50-cent words (read: big, long words that may or may not fit the meaning you are trying to convey) does.

Otherwise, you run the risk of sounding like Joey's speech from the Friends episode for Monica and Chandler's upcoming wedding.

If you clicked on the link, the message that Joey was trying to get across to his audience was so confusing and aimless that it became meaningless. Essentially, what he meant to say was that he loved his friends and hoped that they would live a life full of happiness and love. Well, why not just say that!

Often times, we spend so much time trying to sound smart that we end up sounding, well, stupid to our readers (especially if they are more educated and/or more familiar with the material we are writing about). This is the exact result we were attempting to avoid by using big words. In other words, it is counter-productive.

If using the simplest word that means exactly what you want and need to say works, then why would you use a bigger word that does or could lose some of your meaning?

The smartest thing you could do is use that simple word with the exact meaning you intended to convey to the readers.

Recommended WAC Resource: Engaging Ideas

Last month the second edition of what some people refer to as the "WAC Bible" was published. Engaging Ideas now has a new edition.

If someone were to ask me what I think is the single best WAC resource out there, my recommendation would be Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom by John C. Bean. It's an outstanding resource.

Since the book's first edition in 1996, colleges worldwide have used this text as the basis for professional development workshops because it offers different ideas, approaches, and methods for using writing as a tool for critical thinking and reflective engagement in diverse disciplines.

Bean is a Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment at Seattle University, and he's the author and co-author of a number of writing textbooks. As part of the second edition's "About the Author" section relates, Bean "has done extensive consulting across the United States and Canada on writing across the curriculum, critical thinking, and university outcomes assessment," and "In 2010 his article "Messy Problems and Lay Audiences: Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum" (coauthored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2008 McGraw Hill-Magna Publications Award for the year's best scholarly work on teaching and learning" (xxi).

Like the first version of Engaging Ideas, the second edition provides a progression from why to how. The book has four parts with sixteen chapters. Below are the chapter titles to show what the text covers:

1. Using Writing to Promote Thinking: A Busy Professor's Guide to the Whole Book
2. How Writing is Related to Critical Thinking
3. Helping Writers Think Rhetorically
4. Using a Range of Genres to Extend Critical Thinking and Deepen Learning
5. Dealing with Issues of Grammar and Correctness
6. Formal Writing Assignments
7. Informal, Exploratory Writing Activities
8. Designing Tasks to Promote Active Thinking and Learning
9. Helping Students Read Difficult Texts
10. Using Small Groups to Coach Thinking and Teach Disciplinary Argument
11. Bringing More Critical Thinking into Lectures and Discussions
12. Enhancing Learning and Critical Thinking in Essay Exams
13. Designing and Sequencing Assignments to Teach Undergraduate Research
14. Using Rubrics to Develop and Apply Grading Criteria
15. Coaching the Writing Process and Handling the Paper Load
16. Writing Comments on Students' Papers

While the book is geared more toward those of us who teach at the college level, the text would also benefit Education majors who could implement a writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines approach in their classrooms.

Discusion of Agency in Assessment and a Classroom Idea for Educators: "Text Discussion Demo"

In an article by Libby Garland and Kevin Kolkmeyer in the March 2011 issue (38.3) of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, the authors discuss their collaboration as part of Kingsborough Community College's Opening Doors Learning Communities Program.

The article, "A Culture of Conversation: Faculty Talk as Meaningful Assessment of Learning Communities," is a critique of assessment measures that are mainly quantitatively driven since they argue that exclusively data-focused assessments "fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making" (231).

In fact, as Garland and Kolkmeyer relate at the conclusion of their article, how their college touts the learning communities program does not take into account that professors have something to do with learning: "Naturally, we care about those things all the studies [of retention, of success, of graduation rates, et al.] track. But we see two related dangers in allowing such quantitative data to 'drive the bus,' as it were. First, much that desperately needs to be discussed, if we want to know how or why classes succeed or fail, gets lost. What we see and know and do, as professors, does not get factored in. We find it telling, for example, that the MDRC study of Kingsborough's learning communities explicitly says that the study's positive results in no way have anything to do with what professors teach. Rather, they say the data have only to do with the program's structure (Scrivener et al.)" (241)

For professors, that point has to be disconcerting if not enraging.

Their work connects to Christopher Gallagher's theoretical article in February issue (62.3) of College Composition and Communication. In "Being There: (Re)Making the Assessment Scene," Gallagher "propose[s] a rewriting of the assessment scene that asserts faculty and student agency and leadership for writing assessment" (450). For readers interested in writing assessment, whether a university professor or someone who plans to teach at the K-12 level, his article is a must read.

But in a more practical (and hopeful) vein, in Garland and Kolkmeyer's article, they concisely describe an activity they have used to model the type of discussion they want in their classrooms.

They call it a "text discussion demo." Early in the semester they show the type of wide-ranging and text-specific discussions they expect in their classes. They describe the activity in this way: "In other words, the two of us sat in front of class and talked with each other about a short article the whole class had read. We hashed out what the text was getting at; we pointed to specific places in the text that we found central and explained why; we made connections to class discussions; we posed questions about ideas we found dubious or interesting. Afterward we discussed our discussion with the students, asking them to talk about what they observed and how it was like or unlike other kinds of conversations they have had" (237).

If you're planning courses for the fall and you value strong discussion, the text discussion demo might be something that can work.