Our professors want us to write well, but they don’t give us the tools to do it. I’m a public high school kid, and I mean “public” in the ugliest sense of the word. The last time I was taught how to write, I was in fourth grade, and the end of my five-paragraph essay was greeted by a “MEAP IT!” cheer from the rest of my study team. I’d like to think I’ve progressed from my days of writing about the core democratic values for the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), but no one has taken the time to make sure. Sure, the essays we’re returned are littered with notes scribbled in the margins – literally scribbled, step up your penmanship game, profs – but these notes rarely address whether you’ve adopted a persuasive voice or whether you have a narrative arc. Instead, your essays are attributed with “explore this,” or “are you sure this is what you’re trying to say?” For professors, these are helpful comments because they help your thought process, and they fit with the professor’s goal to teach you the subject of his or her coursework.But they don’t help you become a better writer. In fact, I’ve yet to encounter a class that explicitly states that one of its goals is to make students better writers. Last semester, one of my psychology classes took 45 minutes to talk about writing papers, and it’s the longest I’ve ever been instructed on how to write at Williams. So what is our solution? I don’t think that requiring a universal writing course or even explicitly requiring all students to take an English course fits with the Williams ethos, but I do think critically examining the Writing Intensive requirement is a good place to start. You see, I’ve already proven the Writing Intensive requirement is flawed by writing this op-ed – I’m about 650 words in, and I haven’t even gotten to my point. A quantity-based requirement isn’t going to get us anywhere good. Instead, Writing Intensive classes should prove that they make an effort to address the quality of writing, the ability of students’ words to convey a complex argument efficiently and compellingly in their coursework. Writing Intensive courses should focus on the craft of writing and take time from the course to workshop pieces not just for the strength of their ideas but also for the strength of their eloquence. In order to make Williams students great writers, we have to dedicate our resources to developing their thoughts and their verb usage. We can’t rely on fourth grade MEAP preparation to do that work for us.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 08:13:53 +0000
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