The Writing Idea Bank: Investing and Sharing Our Wealth of Writing Techniques

Abstract

We faculty members, not just the truckers, are the last of the American cowboys. True and undaunted individualists, we scan the vast plains of scholarship and, usually alone or with only token assistance from our colleagues, develop teaching techniques and work out the everyday problems of motivation and instruction. Generally speaking, we have as little idea of what our colleagues are doing and experiencing on the job as the point rider on a cattle drive did of the drag rider. Like the drivers of old, basically all we know is that there is someone else out there who, we hope, is doing his job. Most of the time, we neither see nor hear from the other guy during the workday unless there is a distinct reason. We, like cowboys, work alone a great deal of the time, meeting only occasionally to exchange ideas about how we do our jobs. So what, you may say. True, we have gotten along all right, we have gotten the job done, but there must be a better way. Even though we are individualists, intellectual cowboys so to speak, we pay a price for it; after all, even academic cowboys get the blues. The price is often a feeling of isolation from our colleagues, limitation of resources which could be increased by sharing material and experiences, and the constant reinvention of the instructional wheel to deal with the challenges of teaching writing. By sharing materials and writing techniques, we can alleviate some of these problems and open avenues for the interchange of ideas and interaction among writing faculty members across America. This is the purpose of the Writing Idea Bank. What is the Writing Idea Bank? The Writing Idea Bank, located at Rochester Institute of Technology, is a mutual idea-sharing system in which faculty members submit practical, interesting, and original writing techniques and receive in return techniques developed by others. By sharing information, we can learn the methods that our colleagues are using to teach writing, share our ideas with others, open lines of communication between colleagues, and receive credit for our innovations. In a way, the Writing Idea Bank is like an academic chain let-