Teaching Writing Intensively (and Often)
by James Hoff
It happens at the beginning of every semester. Tucked into my tiny mailbox are a stack of about fifty blue and white student evaluations. The scantron sections of these evaluations, where students “rate” their professors in several categories on a scale of one to seven, never seem especially helpful to me. After all, it is inevitable that some classes will go better than others from semester to semester. And even when the students are responding to a specific prompt, such as “was the course material presented clearly” it is only natural that many of them are going to respond to their overall sense of the course, which is not limited to my instruction but includes their relationship to the course material — whether or not they “like” poetry, for instance — and the experiences, good and bad, that they have had with their fellow classmates. These evaluations, more cynically, as has been shown by many studies, are also often informed by the students’ own sense of whether or not they will receive the grade they wanted or feel they deserve. Because I am a demanding instructor and a moderately tough grader I often feel like I am actively sabotaging my student evaluation scores, which regularly tend to be on the cusp of the departmental average.
As most of us would agree, however, school is not about teaching, but about learning, and I have a feeling that many “good” teachers are not necessarily helping their students to be good learners. Often the students themselves are the last ones to realize this, especially in literature classes where quantitative measurements are impossible. How many times, after all, have we heard our students say to each other: “you should totally take a class with professor so and so, he’s a really cool guy”? For me, the point of teaching has always been very simple: make sure that the students think and learn, and it is the open response sections of the student evaluations that I actually find most helpful when re-evaluating the methods I use to achieve this goal. Sadly, most students skip this part of the evaluation, but those who do respond often offer a constructive view of their own experiences and struggles in the class. Many students say nice things, some occasionally complain, and, less frequently, others express anger. I have come to realize that those expressing anger are usually unhappy about the fact that the course was too difficult, that the reading was too boring, and most often, that there was just too much writing. In fact, one of the most common laments I have heard from my literature students (who are generally required to write two 10 page essays over the semester and regular 1 – 2 page informal responses for each class) is that it is unfair for me to require so much writing in a class that is not “writing intensive.”
This argument is perplexing. Although there is a part of me that sympathizes with this complaint — after all, CUNY students have incredibly busy lives outside of school — I cannot help but ask: if these students really feel this way, what does that say about their expectations about college and college level writing? And what do those expectations mean for the future of higher education more broadly? Should we, after all, require less work when our students complain, or should we hold our ground? Is less work going to help them learn more and is the amount of work required for a class really up for negotiation? Where do we draw the line? And how much writing is the right amount of writing?
But these student complaints also raise a question that is specific to the work that so many of us do as writing and communication fellows at CUNY, and that is: has the creation and promotion of writing and communication intensive classes actually done as much harm as it has good? After all, aren’t writing and communication the very means of learning, and aren’t good writing and communications skills the hallmarks of a liberal education? Shouldn’t every class then be writing and communication intensive?
Despite the labors of countless writing program directors overseeing vast armies of Composition and Rhetoric PhDs, there are always those students who seem to have a hostile relationship to writing: they don’t like it and they want to do as little of it as possible. Perhaps this resistance is natural for some people; as Frank O’Hara says of poetry: “if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too. And Only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the Americans are better than the movies.” To this I would add Stevens, but I digress. No one said students have to like writing, and bully for them if they would prefer to become filmmakers or beauticians, stock brokers or Broadway dancers, but in a liberal university that values expression, eloquence, and clarity of thought, they should at least be asked to think, write, and communicate. And they should be asked to do it often. How well they choose to write and with how much love and enthusiasm is up to them. Writing and communication should not be a requirement, but a method and an expectation, like doing the assigned reading, or preparing for an exam. We should ask students to write not so we can evaluate them, but so that they can put their ideas into words, helping to improve their writing skills while simultaneously reinforcing the course material and making it their own. To expect students to fulfill a writing requirement or to fulfill a communication requirement just two or three during their college career, only underscores the idea that the classes emphasizing these skills are another hoop to jump through, like the general arts and science requirements: “Rocks for Jocks” geology classes or “Music Appreciation.”
I have always thought that writing intensive curricula were a good idea in principle, and still do. However, it is becoming increasingly clear to me that the way we have used writing and communication intensive classes are maybe not the best way to get students to learn. Instead of spending our time developing specific writing and communication intensive courses, which, in my experience are all-too-often not very intensive at all (some in-class writing and a few extra pages a semester tend to qualify as writing intensive for some courses), administrations should also be working with students and faculty to devise college-wide expectations for the kinds of writing, speaking, and interpersonal communication that should be practiced in all courses as often as possible. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, for instance, should automatically be designated as writing intensive, and professors should be encouraged to assign a minimum amount of regular written work for each. Likewise, instructors in professional programs and the sciences should be encouraged to integrate more speaking and interpersonal communication activities into their classrooms.
It seems clear to me that it has become all too easy for students to regard writing and communication as something distinct from the learning process, as a requirement to be fulfilled rather than a method of learning. Writing and communication intensive curricula, by compartmentalizing these activities, only reinforce the false dichotomy between writing and learning. If students are to learn to write, they must be required to write to learn. The question we should really be asking ourselves is how we can get students to recognize and embrace the idea that writing is not something you do for a grade at the end of the semester or during a written exam, but rather that it is an essential part of the learning process itself. Requiring students to write only in designated “writing” classes undermines this important fact and reinforces the often problematic relationship that many students have with writing.
