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The Question of University Writing Instruction 5 1 T H E Q U E S T I O N O F U N I V E R S I T Y W R I T I N G I N S T R U C T I O N Anne: What’s your sense of yourself as a writer now, compared to four years ago? Tim: Uh, well, shoot. Four years ago I would have said, you know, I’ve got . . . I don’t know . . . Four years ago, before taking classes here, I would have said, well that’s not really writing . . . realizing that . . . it’s not like a particular genre that qualifies as writing. Okay, now you can use style or you pay attention to this, but it’s like, you know, whenever you scribble something down, I mean anytime you sit down at the keyboard then that’s writing. Even if it’s one, two, three, four . . . —Tim, senior year of college Anne: Do think you grew as a writer? Tim: In college? Oh yeah, yeah. Anne: How? Tim: Well, I grew to enjoy it and I think I enjoyed it because I was set free, and in being set free I think I found that I had some skill at it . . . I had occasions that were handed to me (laughs). Write! Well, might as well make this fun. —Tim, two years after college This book has two stories to tell: the story of Tim’s somewhat limited growth as a writer (from this researcher’s perspective) between the time he started a freshman writing class at a major US university until two years after he had graduated from school; and second, more argument than story, a case for a re-conceptualization of writing instruction at the post-secondary level. In an earlier ethnography, I examined the struggles of four writers to acclimatize themselves to the demands of writing in college and then in the workplace. Out of that work came a beginning articulation of the nature of writing expertises and a demonstration 6 COLLEGE WRITING AND BEYOND of why transfer of writing skills from one social context to another is a major issue as yet given too little attention in conceptions of writing curricula. In this work—a blended genre of both ethnography and argument—I draw on the data of a longitudinal case study of one writer bridging from high school writing instruction to freshman writing and then to writing in his two majors, history and engineering, to answer the fundamental question college administrators, college professors in disciplines other than composition studies, and business leaders ask: why graduates of freshman writing cannot produce acceptable written documents in other contexts? At the same time, for those readers who are well acquainted with the scholarship that answers that question, I provide additional empirical work and pragmatic suggestions (in the final chapter and appendices) that may aid the effort to build more coherent writing instruction at the post-secondary level. And for theorists and critics who have not focused on these issues, I hope to provide food for thought on the nature of writing expertise. I see the issues I raise here as relevant to all venues for college-level writing instruction: freshman writing programs, writing-in-the-disciplines programs, programs to train teaching assistants and tutors in teaching of writing, and writing center pedagogies. We know that writing is a complex cognitive and social activity and that the mental processes involved as well as the contextual knowledge bases that must be tapped are enormous. Writing skill is honed over a lifetime. A ten or a fourteen-week college course in expository or argumentative writing is only a small step on the journey. But given that that step is costing universities in the US (and ultimately, taxpayers) billions of dollars in their collective budgets every year and that there are major industries (publishing, testing) associated with these programs, the question, more finely tuned is, “Could these expenditures of dollars and human capital be made more wisely?” What has recent research in literacy studies or composition studies told us about why Dick and Jane cannot write documents of use to employers or colleagues at the end of college? And how could this research be applied to re-conceptualizing writing curricula and teacher training and tutor training? The biggest, most costly aspect of writing instruction at the post-secondary level is the compulsory writing course offered in the freshman year to...

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