How much first-year writing instruction does a college student need? Are changing standards for writing instruction at the high school level going to have any real impact on the first-year writing requirement?

When I look at standards for high school students--our Virginia SOLs and the draft of the national standards--it looks to me as if those who develop the standards want students to leave high school with the writing skills we have taught in first-semester composition courses for the last forty years, at least.

But will that mean we no longer have to teach the same skills? Will creating standards for high schoolers to write well-developed argumentative essays actually make them college-level writers? Or is there a maturation factor involved that we can't hold high school teachers responsible for? That is, will they--like the 18-year-old students of my generation--simply write jejune essays that have a somewhat more polished surface?

I believe that young people can engage with joy and intelligence in intellectual debate in writing, but I don't believe they can bypass first-year writing courses (or writing-intensive courses in other disciplines) by doing more writing and receiving more writing instruction in high school. And standards, by their nature, tend to standardize writing. Good writing, by definition, is individual--not standardized. By all means, have students do lots of writing. But for heaven's sake, don't evaluate their writing ability with a standardized writing test.

Good writing is not just a product of thesis sentence + paragraph development + transitional wording + documentation + proofreading. Good writing comes out of a lot of thoughtful practice, and things to say--things which we learn over time. Most published writers at age 30 or 40 or 70 would be embarrassed if not downright mortified by their youthful scribblings. When we read the juvenilia of canonical literary writers, we read it as juvenilia.

On the other hand, that need for things to say is a strong argument for courses in various disciplines that include a significant writing component. The problem with writing courses--as a general requirement for all students--is their decontextualized nature. The "skills" don't transfer. Moving this first-year-composition approach into the high school will just produce more writing-that-doesn't-really-matter, writing-to-prove-I-can-write (no matter how gifted or passionate the teachers).

By all means, have students write more. Have them keep journals in all of their classes, write summaries of what they've learned in the last 5 minutes of a class, write collaboratively for projects in the subject areas, write creative pieces, write to make a difference in their communities, correspond with students in other states and countries, write their way through trauma, write poems for their grandparents and their mothers and their friends, create Webpage guides to their communities and reviews of their favorite music and books--write, write, write. Let's see them, from age five to age ninety, write for real audiences.

In such a milieu of writing, first-year composition might be a course in which students focus specifically on developing an academic tone and awareness of audience and hone their research skills--useful, but just a little piece of all the writing they do. And let's not try to move that foundational college writing into the high school, whether with "higher standards" or with AP or dual enrollment or promises of first-year-composition exemption on the basis of high SAT Writing scores. Their first-semester writing course is still a means of acculturating them to the expectations of the specific college writing community that they are joining. Let's keep it as such.