Prelude: The Chipmunk Connection - Moravian College

Not Your Mother’s Freshman Comp
Moder n English101 is more process, less rhetoric.
By Joel Wingard
First-year writing—or freshman composition as it used to be
called—is the most widely required course in American higher
education. Since a course of this type was first taught at Harvard
in the 1870s, its main purpose has been to introduce students to
the practice of academic writing—the kinds of writing students are
likely to encounter throughout their college careers. Some 135 years
later, the methods of teaching this course have changed considerably.
A major force in making first-year writing what it is today was
the process movement, which recognizes that most good writing,
especially good academic writing, follows a process that involves inventing
ideas, arranging them for expression, trying out that expression
in an early draft, and then revising and editing until a paper is
“finished.” Older models of instruction in first-year writing assigned
students regular “themes” in which apprentice writers were expected
to demonstrate competence in “rhetorical modes” such as narration,
description, comparison, and argumentation. These papers
were typically due, in finished fashion, one week after an assignment
was given or even at the next class meeting. And the evaluation of
student writing most often focused on its correctness in terms of
grammar, spelling, and writing mechanics, such as punctuation.
But in the 1970s and ’80s that method began to change as
teachers and composition scholars realized that rhetorical modes
were artificial and that no one—other than a first-year writing
student—ever purposely wrote to demonstrate competency in
comparison-and-contrast, for instance.
Studies in the writing practices of professional writers have
shown that written prose is driven by the purposes of the writer
and the needs of the audience, and that it often takes several drafts
of an essay with the attendant revision to each draft—to make it
what the writer wants and what the reader needs.
An influential book by composition scholar Peter Elbow, Writing
Without Teachers, in the early 1970s contributed to a shift in
writing teachers’ roles from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the
side.” Instead of being a classroom figure who tells students what to
do and how well they have done, the writing teacher now facilitates
student development by coaching the writing process.
This involves providing feedback—not just grades—to student
writers as they work on an essay: talking over a student’s ideas for
an essay before she ever sits down at her keyboard; commenting on
a preliminary draft so that the student can make revisions herself;
creating writing groups in a class and guiding them in “writerly”
ways of reading each other’s work; and perhaps most especially, attending
to deeper matters of a piece of writing—structure, development,
consistency—and leaving attention to correctness until the
piece is nearly finished.
It follows that the students’ writing is the central text in the
class: student writing is what is primarily practiced, produced, and
studied. Any other writing, such as essays by professional writers, is
secondary and used only to exemplify writing strategies or provide
intellectual context for the students’ work. First-year writing
courses are writing courses, not literature or history or political
science courses in disguise.
Traditionally, first-year writing was taught by English faculty
members, based on the premise that their training in the belletristic
canon gave them responsibility for student literacy. In recent years,
however, many small liberal arts colleges “decentralized” first-year
writing beyond the English Department. At Moravian, this occurred
with the institution of the Learning in Common (LinC) curriculum
in 2001. A typical semester at Moravian would have sections of
Writing 100 (the required course) taught by biologists, psychologists,
musicians, political scientists, economists, mathematicians—
in short, faculty from a variety of disciplines other than English.
Now, first-year students can see that writing is an important way of
knowing in every academic field, not just in English.
The teaching of first-year writing continues to evolve. Starting
in fall 2011, the course will be called First-Year Seminar. The crossdisciplinary
model will continue, but the faculty members who
teach the class also will serve as academic advisors to the students
enrolled in their sections.
This makes sense because the approach to teaching this course
encourages close student-faculty interaction anyway, and a first-year
writing student often gets closer to his instructor than a student in
a lecture or lab course might. And the notion of “writing” itself is
broadening and changing to include digital media and genres, so
one would expect to see not just print essays developed in first-year
writing, but audio essays and video mash-ups as well.
Even with these anticipated changes, the process approach
continues to be well suited to helping students develop the clear
thinking and clear writing they will need throughout their college
years and beyond. W
Joel Wingard is professor of English and director of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program.
Taught by faculty members of all disciplines, Moravian’s Writing 100 develops
writing skills that students will use througout college and beyond. Shown:
Jennifer Gillard ’07
SUMMER 2010 MORAVIAN COLLEGE MAGAZINE 15