Durst Reading for Sept. 12th

In reading this week's chapters from Durst, I was overall pleased with the efforts of the writing program at the University of Cincinnati. I think it is beneficial for students to have a sequence of writing courses, as it is done at UC, which move them progressively towards being more critical and analytical in their writing. The first course, which is designed to "start where the students are" seems like a nice gateway course for students who are making the transition from procrastinating and writing papers in one draft two hours before it's due to drafting and thinking more about the writing process. I think it is crucial for students to learn this right off the bat in their college careers, because otherwise, they get into habits that last for the entire time they spend as undergraduates. I know several people who were English majors with me as an undergraduate who never thought about purpose, audience, or revision for a single paper they wrote (English majors!), and it makes me wonder why they are even studying the discipline. If that's how (un)serious English majors are taking their writing, then think about all of the people from other disciplines who are only taking composition as a general education requirement. Most of them don't even know what audience, purpose, voice, tone, or revision even are. I noticed in the reading that the beginning writing course at UC aims to get students thinking about these things by starting out with personal essays and moving towards more argumentative ones, which I think is a good idea, but I think students should be considering these aspects of the writing process (audience, purpose, revision, etc.) from the get-go. If it isn't made clear to them what they should be considering when writing a paper, they won't do it. We talked a lot about teaching function before form, and I don't necessarily think that students should be given definitions of these aspects before writing a paper, but they should know what they are through example. Revision should be emphasized the most, I think, and clearly defined, because most students think revision is merely correcting grammatical errors or changing the wording of their opening paragraph. I did think that the peer evaluation of the portfolios was great, because the students would be more likely to feel at ease about their writing, which is so important in an introductory course. While I agree with the overall goals of the first writing course in the program at UC, I still think there is room for improvement, as there always is in writing programs.
The second course, which students could only enter after passing through their teacher and peer evaluations, seemed (I think) to appropriately move from the more personal styles of writing in the introductory course to "reading and writing about larger culteral and political issues that help to shape contemporary thought" (16). I think this is a really hard transition to make, especially because most students will want to write very structured, thesis driven, five-paragraph essays that they learned how to write in high school. While that style of writing may be organized and generally a safe mode to write in for essays (as far as getting the desired "A"), I don't think it is challenging at all for student. I can remember mastering that type of writing in high school and the beginning of college, and thinking of it as a formula; I would do the necessary research, plug the information in to the formulaic structure of the essay, and spit out an A paper, and it never failed me. However, it wasn't until I was about halfway through college when I realized there are limitless approaches in writing essays, and that, though the way I was taught pretty much always guarunteed a good grade, I wasn't getting anything out of writing the essays. In fact, I have forgotten most of them. Once I started experimenting with forms, and making composition creative writing, I started to understand myself as a critical thinker on a whole new level. This shouldn't happen halfway through college, it should start happening in Writing 101 (or 11000, whatever it is here at KSU). I think that in my own classroom, I would want to encourage students to explore their writing in many different ways that will help them to be effective writers, not just to be able to write an A paper, but to be able to think and understand themselves and the world in a way that they haven't before.