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.

Former Students' Writing

Homecoming at Bridgewater College--I had a long conversation late Friday afternoon with one of our former English majors, who told me, "Dr. Trupe, I'm writing two books," and eventually asked if she could send me a manuscript. I was delighted. I told her, "Sure. Just make sure to send it at the end of the semester, so I can look at it during the break." I'm passionate about writing, and when someone else is passionate about writing, I love sharing the enthusiasm. I am looking forward to reading her novel.

Homecoming, Saturday night--I was at a party, where I talked with a recent alum, who said, "Dr. Trupe, I'm really doing 'professional writing' now. It isn't very creative, but I write on my job every day." Once again, I heard the enthusiasm--and that underlying message that yes, my conversations with students about writing have some long-term effect, even if it's only that my former students recognize me as someone who cares to hear about their development of talents they honed as college students.

Nervous about Sharing Writing

I hate showing my own writing to other people. This puts me in a contradictory position because I incorporate response--peer response, my response--into my writing classes and expect my students to use the feedback in revising. I should probably tell them how uncomfortable doing this makes me.

When I submit chapters for inclusion in books, I hang onto them forever, doing as many as 10 or 12 revisions. When I was past deadline for my book on young adult literature, the editor kept begging me for my manuscript, but it wasn't perfect yet. It's hard for me to let it go.

When I get a chapter or a book back in galley form, I procrastinate about editing it, because I know that it's set at that point and, while I can make minor editing changes, I can't reorganize the text or completely change my thesis.

When something is published, I usually don't look at it. When I got copies of my book, I couldn't open it for weeks, even though I gave away the copies I intended to. The first time I opened it up, I saw a sentence with a mixed metaphor.

So, when I read something I've written aloud to a class (unless it's something like a writing assignment!), I cringe. I can hear all the flaws. I want to sink into the floor.

But I keep writing anyway.

Time for another fresh start

We're blogging in my Professional Writing class, so it seems like a good idea to start up here again. The fall semester is pretty full for someone who teaches three classes, directs a Writing Center, and runs a placement procedure for first-year students and works with selected students on a one-to-one basis. Committee work and assessment get squeezed in around the edges. Time for scholarship? Hmm. When will I get back to that writing project?
I get really excited about students' excitement when they are writing. I find writing not only relaxing, but necessary, and it's very difficult to make time for it. This is a challenge we all must cope with, students and professors alike. So far this fall I've been able to maintain my personal journal, writing 3-4 times a week, but I haven't done much experimenting, as I'd planned to do following Natalie Goldberg's writing suggestions in Old Friend Far Away.
I like to tell students that I write along with them because it "keeps me honest." But I didn't write a personal essay with them over the past couple weeks because I became a grandma Sept. 17, and the baby and her parents live with me--so my personal life has sort of overtaken my professional life. I've sent out quite a few longish personal emails to the people who want to know about her, and I texted my other daughter at some length yesterday, describing her and taking guesses at who she looks like. Speaking of baby--I think it's time to go home and see if her mama's ready for a break.

More Alternative Writing Assignments

These may seem more appropriate to high school than to college writing courses, but I am more interested in having students enjoy writing (and reading) than in impressing me with their mature academic style. (And I continue convinced that such assignments can develop critical thinking skills, and can be incorporated into more formal critical writing.)

• Students can write letters from Pip to Estella and from Estella to Pip (or emails or text messages);
• they can write diary entries for any character they know enough about (and if their knowledge is limited, they can write a single diary entry, say, by Mrs. Pocket at the end of the day when Pip is introduced to the Pocket household;
• they can write a dialogue between Matilda in Mister Pip and Pip, imagining them as contemporaries in one world or the other;
• they can write a humorous narrative of a performance (a play, a movie, a TV show), as Pip does in Chapter XXXI, in which he sees Mr. Wopsle in Hamlet.

Alternatives to Critical Papers

The longer I teach college writing courses, the more convinced I am that we drain student writing of interest and vitality when we teach and require only academic analysis. The language arts and secondary English teachers know that there are many ways for students to engage with literary and other texts and often make interesting assignments that engage students more fully than formal essays of literary analysis, book reports, or research papers.
So today my ENG 102 students have several alternatives that involve them in close, critical reading of Great Expectations but don't require a full-blown literary analysis:

• they may lay the groundwork for a character analysis of a memorable minor character;
• they may fabricate a life history, weaving together their own identity with either Pip's life story or the life of Matilda, protagonist of Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip;
• they may do a close analysis of Dickens's style in a passage of their choice; or
• they may imitate Dickens's style, choosing a passage from a text they've written in the past, possibly from another course (especially our first-year seminar), or writing a new passage.

These are all assignments I would have enjoyed at just about any point in my reading of Dickens--from my ninth-grade reading of Great Expectations for English to my current rereading of the wonderful novel.

Brainstorming about writing texts

In the midst of working on my midterm grades, I keep thinking of wonderful ideas I just must pursue--avoiding the discipline of ranking and justifying the ranking. I truly love reading student writing, finding out what students have to say, commenting, inviting revision. I really hate having to give grades. After 24 years of this, you'd think it would be easier, not harder, right?
The latest scheme is the assembling of various instructional materials for our writing classes, to create a textbook of sorts. We have materials and assignments for our PDP program (first-year seminar, seminar for transfer students, second- and third-year reflective conversations, senior reflective essay/portfolio), and some of us share and modify colleagues' first-year writing assignments and classroom activities, and then there are the shared assignments for upper-level courses and the coordination of first-year and second-year writing courses for English majors, not to mention assessment rubrics. And, in this season of choosing textbooks for next fall's courses, I find that the textbooks just never match the ideas I have for classroom activities and writing assignments, so I usually pick several trade paperbacks that sort of work, and I tell people to buy the handbook but I don't much use handbooks myself (with so many materials online). This spring I'm thinking about spending my summer assembling various readings for the activities I want to do, drafting reading guides and activities related to the readings, and, in short, making my own master textbook from which I can draw various materials for an electronic-reserve anthology for each course I teach.
Maybe I should go back to grading, though!