FAQs

Lance’s answers to frequently asked questions:

About Class

Do you want to see students succeed?

Student success is the main point of teaching. It should be the main point for those of us teaching at WCC, anyway. Although college professors also need to care a lot about their subject matter and about the learning process (how people develop as writers, or researchers, or mathematicians, or political scientists, or biologists, in other words), caring about students is #1.

How do I do well in this class?

Following the pace of the course and front-loading your work (as much as possible) when it comes to writing papers, reading the book, and reading your research materials is the way to do well in this class. The grading system is set up to your best advantage–you’ll be assigned the highest possible score on your assignments based on your work and revisions throughout the semester. We’ll probably have to discuss the specifics of this a couple of times, or more, in class, but my basic grading philosophy is that I’ll give you “preliminary” scores that will motivate/annoy you to do revisions in the beginning and middle of the semester so that you can get the highest possible grade at the end.

Where do I go for help?

I’m your first stop for help, unless you get sick of me. 🙂 Reach me by email at lkuyeda@hawaii.edu or by phone at 236-9229 (see Lamakū for my cell phone number). The easiest way to find a time to have a zoom chat, either during designated student hours or at a time that works better for you, is through my scheduling page, uyeda.youcanbook.me. My zoom room is zoom.us/my/uyeda.

Please see your course syllabus and Lamakū page for a detailed, up-to-date description of WCC and other resources, including your embedded tutor (if any), the TRiO Student Support Services program, the Ka Piko Student Success Center, which includes writing, speech, and math labs as well as learning tech support, the Library Learning Center and our amazing librarians, the wide variety of advising available from our excellent WCC counselors, and the Online Learning Academy at UH Mānoa.

How much of a stickler are you for grammar?

Grammar and punctuation are surface-level features of writing. They are usually the third order of business. In composition and business writing classes, the first order of business is to identify/clarify your purpose for writing and then to select and tweak the organizational pattern that might best help you to achieve that purpose. In fiction writing, your first-order concerns are your characters and their actions (or if you prefer, your world/plot). The second order of business, depending on what kind of class you’re in, is going to be about building up your reasoning/evidence/support, working with outside sources, and/or developing your story. Grammar/punctuation/proofreading-related tidying up comes third.

The most important insight I’ve had about helping students who struggle with “writing mechanics” (another way of saying grammar/punctuation/proofreading) is that most people write on a writing-mechanics spectrum that ranges from “OK/pretty good” to “all over the place” depending on what the writing task is. The more familiar a person is with the writing task and topic, the more mechanically sound their writing will be. For example, most everyone can write a detailed, readable paragraph on a memorable date they went on with their current love interest or what their best friend or favorite relative is like. Even writers with low confidence are pretty familiar with paragraphs. I haven’t met one yet who can’t say something interesting, affectionate, or at least specific about a friend, romantic partner, or family member.

But some of these same students might start having proofreading missteps (missteps serious enough to interfere with a reader’s understanding of what they’re saying) if asked at the last minute to write a ten-page paper worth 75% of their final grade about whether Barack Obama fulfilled or betrayed what Malcolm X’s hopes for the first African-American US president would have been. Or, having just started biology class yesterday, a lab report on a gel electrophoresis of some rat’s DNA.

The idea I hope to convey in presenting the examples above, again, is that the more familiar you feel with your writing assignment and topic, the better the mechanical, grammatical, and stylistic properties of your writing will be in the end. Why? Because there’s a limit at any given time to the directions in which we can stretch ourselves, or to the difficulty level of the challenges we’re trying to embrace. If we sit down to write about subject matter that’s brand new to us, and also to write within expectations and a formatting framework that are brand new to us, it’s not totally crazy to think that under those tough conditions, the quality of our writing at the sentence-level might go down.

So, a few suggestions: do the class activities regularly, read, ask questions, participate in discussions, ask more questions, read and re-read the assignment sheets/prompts, and take multiple stabs at writing out brief trial answers to any big essay question(s) as soon as you get them. To me, this is the least grueling, most effective way to write at your grammatical best. (And to write at your best, period.) (If you find yourself cramming to get done at the last minute a paper on something you read for the first time an hour ago, an emergency measure is to use more periods–write shorter sentences.)

Along the way, I’ll work to point out to you any grammatical/mechanical aspects of your writing that require urgent attention.