Controversy and Consensus in Freshman Writing: An Overview of the Field

Freshman writing programs, though universally required, are expensive, are difficult to staff, often fail to produce hoped-for improvements, and often operate in a theoretical vacuum filled by pedagogical lore and unexamined assumptions. To help university policy-makers and curriculum planners make informed decisions about writing programs, this essay sketches the origins of freshman writing and analyzes current theories of rhetoric and points of consensus in the scholarship.