Posted on 05/01/2019 5:45:27 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Freshman composition occupies a unique position in a college curriculum. It is the only class required of about 90 percent of enrollees whose diverse aptitudes and prior writing experience present a challenge for instructors every semester.
In Why They Can’t Write, instructor John Warner of the College of Charleston proposes a course he says will minimize the challenge for instructors and have students writing “clearly, persuasively, even beautifully” by semester’s end. His “dream” is to have his course “adopted in every classroom across the country,” but this classroom veteran hopes that the Warner model stays just that—a dream.
Before I say why Warner’s approach raises concerns, I’ll note that there is much to admire in his attitude toward teaching composition. A Yale professor once called the job “a torture to body and soul,” but 20 years in the classroom have not dampened Warner’s enthusiasm for teaching or his commitment to students, who may experience “overwhelming anxiety” during their college years. No other class requires as much one-on-one student/teacher interaction, and instructors who take an interest in students out of class will indeed boost their in-class performance.
Warner is also forthright about the commitment students must make if they are to improve their writing. He tells students that “writing is difficult, that it takes many drafts to realize a finished product, and that you’re never going to be as good as you wish.” He adds that writing well will “deliver lasting pleasure and knowledge” to students who do the hard work.
Prior to the mid-1980s, composition students followed a strict formula that treated writing as the “product” of an assigned topic, a due date, and a grade. Then came a new breed of scholars known as “composition theorists” who redefined writing as a “process” done in stages—planning, prewriting, drafting and revising.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Must use she for him! Now that’s prescriptive!
Tell em what you’re gonna tell em. (and why they care about it)
Tell em.
Tell em what you told em
If the reader is busy you will have to hook them in that first paragraph. Decision makers in the real world will not finish reading if they are not hooked and someone else will get their proposal funded.
college writing isnt what it used to be:
My daughter took a college writing course at USM during her Junior year in Highschool. The readings were all fraught with feminist anger and victim ideology, written in the most turgid style. I worked with my daughter to decipher the text of the handouts, and to find some connections with the questions. It took me a while to realize that the instructor’s questions were a misreading of the texts she assigned. No practice in college writing actually happened in the course. It was all victimhood and hate propaganda. Instead I taught her how to string the correct words together to ensure she was hitting all the victimhood and rage necessities for the instructors emotional well-being. It became a homeschool education in how to recognize and respond to this political correctness. She was never in jeopardy of receive less than an A anyhow. In today’s vernacular, her brown skin privileged her, although I didn’t tell her that.
My daughter was chased by the English department that was losing students during this time . She was highly praised for her writing and it was a heady experience to have these profs taking her out and telling her of the promise she had as an English feminist write. I homeschooled her, and knew her talents and her significant limitations as a writer. Although her head was momentarily turned, she eventually, with discussion came to see that the profs in English wanted the black student for numbers and for the “diversity” she provided for she was the right color. Fools.
I spoke to a friend who ran a different but related humanities department about the content and the lack of teaching in the courses and she admitted that college writing was seen as an introduction to “different ideas” for the students. IOW propaganda. The friend was quite taken aback that I would find it wrong to sell a class on College Writing which actually a class on Victim Studies.
I worked with an English major. He was of the mind that language is always evolving. I just think it’s laziness.
Our daughter, special, no HS diploma, writes beautifully.
lay down as much BS in as flowery language as I could muster,
So you use a dumbed down vocabulary that loses information in the resulting ambiguity. It is a balancing act. What you call flowery language, in the hands of a serious writer, is an attempt to pin point something. Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t. Know your audience. And if your audience is too broad, or you don’t know them, the average compression level in the US, is, sadly, at fifth grade level so that’s what you use.
Well yes, the left has co-opted the English department. I’m beginning to think what is required is a conversion to rationality so that writing well makes sense again.
Total claptrap that perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with education today.
You may be on to something...
Of course, there are other types of business writing beyond one-page reports.
But concise is always good.
In order to write clearly, you need to think clearly.
I think what John Warner is doing is akin to moral relativity and cultural relativity. In his case, it is grammar relativity. Standards based on how an individual “feels” never work. Without absolutes, our society will drift into an unrecognizable state.
I have masters degrees in electrical and nuclear engineering and a graduate certificate in National Security policy. I really had to learn to write after I graduated with the MS degrees. At least way back then in the 70s sentence structure was still taught.
During the grad cert program we had to write a 15 page paper. After fixing all the problems we had to turn that into a 4 page summary. When that was all fixed we had to turn it into a 1 page decision document double spaced. Complete with all the positions and arguments and a decision choice and why. This was a 1 month compressed complete semester (approximately 1 normal week per daily 3 hour class).
One of the most difficult things I ever had to do but it taught me a lot. Too bad this took place 25 years after I got the first graduate degree. It was very useful the last 10 years of my career.
All students should have to do something similar.
Wow, that’s very interesting. I recall in grade school having to diagram a sentence. Kind of like doing long division, but with words. I am sure that’s no longer taught.
“Cavalry” University in Vermont. It must be NORWICH!
Mass Maritime is also a fine college. And yes seagoing marine engineers make good money. We are also finding that our freshly minted engineering graduates working in power plants and paper mills in New England are making almost as much and they are home every night.
When I send messages to them, I have to write like ‘See Spot run.’-to make sure they understand.
It’s not strange that this was creeping up on us from start of the George Bush Senior in the late 80’s and all throughout the 90’s.
The root cause was computers and school systems that didn’t know how to integrate them into the classroom/curriculum. They just knew they needed them and that the kids should have access to one at home. That’s the death of English composition and general penmanship.
re: “I find word choice to be a zero sum game with communicating. The more precisely you want to describe something, you increasingly use words outside of the common spoken vocabulary. The chance of baffling the reader, ie , failing to communicate, grows with precision.”
I have, and have never had a problem with technical writing.
It is “composition”, so-called “creative writing”, going on and on about some subject which I care not a whit about (SUCH as may be assigned in said classes) where I had trouble in finding an angle from which I felt compelled to write.
Had I approached it in purely BS, I-could-give-a-care mood, I would have had much more success in those early years. The BIG problem is overcoming a “writer’s block” to subject in which I had at the time ZERO interest.
Give me a technical subject, and it’s a whole ‘nother story ... the engineer/STEM mindset tends to ignore, discard, regard with little value just plain-out, “writing” for writing’s sake. We tend to have more on the mind than the ‘flavor of the day’.
Well yes, the left has co-opted the English department.
It is not English, it is Propaganda 101.
I was in junior high when diagramming was dropped.
That would be around 1956.
re: “I was in junior high when diagramming was dropped.”
Public school?
Parochial school carried that on into my grade school years, a decade later.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.