Introduction
Introduction
I've taught with a number of good textbooks on college-level writing over the past seventeen years. But I've noticed that students like you tend not to read them, or tend not to want to read them. I'm not entirely sure why, exactly, but I'm more certain than ever that you don't. When these books seem too informal in tone and too much like common sense, you feel like it's all too obvious to have to spend time reviewing. When they seem dry and formal in tone, you feel like they are sucking the life out of you (not to mention making you never, ever want to work on your prose).
Writing about writing can be pretty boring, can't it? These books are often written as if to empower you, and you are often not feeling particularly disempowered by anything except having to read about writing and then write about something else.
I've started to think that one of the primary problems (aside from the fact that you don't always want to read anything) is that these books are so much about the process that writing starts to be the point of writing, when in fact, writing is actually the means to an end, or rather, several ends. As a scholar of English Literature, I find that writing serves many purposes in my life. But I never write just to "be" a writer. And I can't write well if I don't have an intellectual stake in what I'm writing about. I'll get to what I mean by "intellectual" stake at some point soon in this book (and in this course).
I write to communicate, of course, on a daily basis. But aside from that perfunctory kind of writing, I write primarily to teach myself things that I want to learn, and I write to teach other people about the things I have learned. Sometimes I won't know if I fully understand something until I have written about it--and even then I have to return to what I have written over and over and push myself to write something else. Or something more. Or something better.
You may feel like you're already a writer. You may be encouraged to become one as you move on from this course and into an academic major. Or, you may, like me, find that writing is fine and offers a necessary and useful set of skills, but that the stuff that interests you most lies somewhere else.
In this class, we will all write to learn about the things we want to know more about. Whatever that something is for you, writing about it will require academic research and the development of what scholars call "information literacy." It will also require learning more about different contexts for writing and the ways you can vary your tone, style, and diction to address different audiences. Your primary goal in this class will be to get a better handle on a particular audience: the academic readers you will find in your professors and fellow students. Your professors may tell you they value the clarity with which you express your ideas; most audiences will value clarity, in fact. What we all really value, however, is substance. In fact, more than wanting you to be able to write clearly, they want you to think deeply. It's actually easier to write a clear and grammatical sentence than it is to think deeply about something and to have a complex, sophisticated comment about it. And so you'll often find that professors will hope for the latter but settle for the former.
I want you to aim for substance in this class.
We will talk more about what that means over the course of the semester. But you can get started now. Between now and the next class, I want you to come up with three subjects that you want to learn more about in college. They can be subjects you'll be covering in courses this semester, but they can also be things you're interested in but are not yet able to take, or things you aren't sure are even academic areas of study. Indeed, one of the lessons I hope you'll learn quickly as we move through our work is that almost anything can lead to deep, analytical thinking and academic inquiry.
One last bit before we move forward...
You'll notice here that I've probably done many things your high school teachers told you not to do.
I didn't start my discussion with a broad generalization such as "In higher education today, there are many composition textbooks available to professors." I used the first person pronoun. I've used contractions throughout. I've also used the second person pronoun in addressing you, my student and reader. I'm doing some things here that I wouldn't do in my formal academic writing, just as you do many things in your communications online or with friends that you wouldn't do necessarily in emails to your professors or in the work you submit for credit.
In many of the contexts in which you submit academic work, I'd advise you not to use the second person pronoun. And I'd also advise against the use of the word "thing," which is vague, and against using contractions, which can make for a tone that is far too informal for academic writing. I would, however, object to the idea that writers should start general and move into more narrow claims. Generalizations can be the worst way to begin because your readers in academic contexts know that generalizations are often wrong, and if they are right, then they don't need to be repeated. Using "I" is fine--even desirable in many academic disciplines, including my own, English Literature. We like to use "I" because in using it, we are taking ownership of the ideas therein. What we have here are basic conventions for good writing, and you'll find as you take your college courses that different professors (and different academic areas of study) have different conventions. You are responsible for either intuiting or asking about these conventions in your courses, generally speaking, but you'll also learn quite a bit about what they are simply by reading. You see, academics and published writers often break these so-called rules in their work, and it's usually fine as long as their readers still see them as credible voices and sources of information. The only way to be seen as a credible voice and source of information is to write with substance.
Next up: How can reading help in this endeavor?