Education is a shady queen. It promises empowerment while quietly perpetuating its own flaws. One minute, you’re beaming with pride as your first-grade art teacher praises your macaroni masterpiece—a literal macaroni of macaroni. The next, you’re on the verge of failure in a one-credit Intro to Yoga course because, apparently, “showing up” isn’t enough.
As you climb the academic ladder, education transforms into her final form. Enter the drag queen Aca de Mia. She is glamorous, dramatic and fiercely demanding. However, behind the sequins and stilettos, you start to notice the cracks. The rules shift, and the stakes skyrocket. Suddenly, it feels like the performance is all for her benefit, not yours. Nowhere is this clearer in how alleged “scholars” treat the humanities, especially when it comes to writing.
Modernity has cultivated a new era of education – pettygogy. Pettygogy is the art of dodging responsibility for meaningful teaching. It is that maddening mix of outdated methods, disciplinary buck-passing and wildly misguided belief that it is someone else’s problem. Among the humanities, writing has been a repeated victim of pettigogical principles. You have seen it in action; a biology professor muttering, “I’m not an English teacher,” while handing back a poorly-written lab report with nothing but a red circle around the wrong usage of “there”.
Apparently, asking professors from other disciplines (especially STEM) to teach writing within their field is just too much. After all, these “scholars” have much more important matters to attend to, like perfecting the art of creating unreadable syllabi. Writing is not the English department’s job. It is not some remedial skill we can quarantine in freshman comp classes. This mistreatment has done more damage than we care to admit. Writing is an intellectual pursuit that deserves far better than a role as an educational afterthought.
First, Let’s Blame the System
If there is one thing academia excels at, it is creating a system that looks functional on the surface but is actually a bureaucratic nightmare. Writing instruction is no exception. The way we teach (or more accurately, fail to teach) writing today is not just the result of individual professors dodging responsibility. It is the direct product of a system that, from its very foundation, decided writing wasn’t really its problem.
Let’s rewind to the 19th century, when American education was undergoing its industrial revolution. Universities were not just places of learning; they were being restructured to mirror the efficiency-obsessed logic of factories. Departments became hyper-specialized, each one staking out its own turf. Math did numbers. Science did experiments. History did…whatever historians do in their archives. And writing? Well, writing got tossed into the English department and treated less as a tool for critical thinking and more as a remedial skill students should have mastered before college.
This is when the Great Writing Dodge™ began. As David R. Russell explains in American Origins of the Writing-Across-the-Curriculum Movement, “The literacy problem of the 1870s resulted in the establishment of general composition classes, alleviating professors from the responsibility of teaching writing.” Professors did not want to grade poorly written essays, so they outsourced the problem to freshman composition classes.
At first glance, this might seem like a smart solution. If you give students a crash course in writing, and they will be good to go for the rest of college, right? Wrong. The problem with this approach is that writing is not something you can “fix” in one semester and never revisit. Writing is a disciplinary practice. A historian writes differently than a chemist, who writes differently than an engineer. When writing got trapped in first-year comp, students were never taught how to write within their fields. Instead, they were expected to magically transfer generic essay-writing skills to lab reports, policy briefs and research papers.
The academic world doubled down on this mistake. By the early 20th century, American universities were phasing out institution-wide writing and speaking requirements altogether. The assumption was that if students learned basic grammar and structure early on, they could apply it anywhere. This assumption was, of course, dead wrong. As disciplines became more specialized, so did their expectations for writing. Instead of integrating writing into every field, universities kept pretending that students could just “pick it up” through osmosis.
This systemic failure created what Russell calls a pedagogical paradox: writing became the responsibility of all disciplines yet simultaneously of none. No one wanted to own it, so it languished on the margins of education, treated as a remedial task rather than a way to cultivate critical thinking.
To make things worse, by the 1940s, universities were increasingly replacing written assessments with standardized “objective” exams—multiple-choice tests that required zero writing. This was not just a shift in pedagogy; it was a reflection of the broader industrial mindset creeping into education. Writing is hard to assess quickly and cheaply. Multiple-choice tests? Easy. The factory model of education did not have time for deep intellectual engagement, so it prioritized efficiency over complexity.
This resulted in a higher education system that fundamentally misunderstands what writing is for. Writing became something students did to prove they learned something, rather than something they did to learn. Instead of being an intellectual process—one that helps students refine their thinking—writing became an academic performance, reduced to rubrics, word counts and citation policing.
With this, writing instruction was shoved into a corner and treated as a one-and-done affair. Students were left to flounder, trying to navigate the unspoken rules of academic writing in different fields, while professors scratched their heads and complained about “poor writing skills”…as if they were not part of the problem.
Seriously, every few decades, universities act shocked when student writing turns out to be abysmal. This has led to waves of literacy crises, where faculty, employers and the media collectively clutch their pearls and lament that “students today just don’t know how to write” and “it’s that damn phone”. Spoiler: they never did, because no one ever actually taught them how.
Now, here we are, in a system that has spent over 150 years perfecting the art of not teaching writing properly. Still, every semester, we still expect students to “just know” how to write a research paper, a case study or a policy brief, because that is how intellectual osmosis works.
This is the true brilliance of pettygogy—it allows an entire system to dodge responsibility while pretending to care about student success. Now, what if I told you that there was an era where writing was a pinnacle of pride, a staple of excellence, a beautiful art of human exceptionality?
Yeah, with the state the world is in today, I wouldn’t believe me either.
The Holy Rhetorical Empire
Before writing got booted to the kids’ table, rhetoric was the crown jewel of intellectual life. In classical Greece, if you could not argue, you could not lead. Rhetoric was not just about making a point—it was about winning hearts, minds, and, if necessary, court cases.
The story begins in 5th-century BCE Sicily, where a man named Corax of Syracuse saw an opportunity. After a period of political upheaval, citizens were suddenly responsible for arguing their own land disputes in court. However, not everyone was naturally persuasive, which led to Corax devising the first known systematic approach to rhetoric, teaching people how to craft arguments that could sway a jury. His student, Tisias, helped bring these ideas to Athens, where rhetoric flourished as an essential skill in democracy.
From there, the debate over rhetoric’s true purpose began. Enter the Sophists, traveling teachers who claimed they could teach anyone the art of persuasion—for a fee, of course. The Sophists were the original “fake it ‘til you make it” crowd, arguing that truth was relative and that what mattered wasn’t what you argued, but how well you argued it. This didn’t sit well with Socrates and Plato, who saw rhetoric as dangerously deceptive, a tool for manipulation rather than truth-seeking. Plato went so far as to compare rhetoric to “cookery”, something that merely appeared useful but lacked true substance. In his dialogue Gorgias, he accused rhetoric of being nothing more than “the art of persuasion without knowledge,” designed to flatter rather than enlighten.
Then came Aristotle, who tried to reconcile the tension. He saw rhetoric not as deception, but as a necessary skill for any well-rounded thinker. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle laid the foundation for what we still consider the three essential appeals of persuasion:
- Logos (logic) – Making your argument rational and well-supported.
- Ethos (credibility) – Convincing your audience you’re worth listening to.
- Pathos (emotion) – Tapping into feelings to make an impact.
Aristotle’s perspective won out, at least for a while. Rhetoric became a cornerstone of Roman education, championed by figures like Cicero and Quintilian, who argued that the ideal citizen should be both a thinker and a skilled speaker. As Rome’s democracy declined, so did rhetoric’s reputation. By the Middle Ages, it was largely relegated to preaching and letter-writing, stripped of its broader role in critical inquiry.
The Controversy Continues
Even today, rhetoric is haunted by its history. People still associate it with empty persuasion (think politicians dodging questions or corporations spinning PR disasters). This narrow view ignores how rhetoric is woven into every act of communication.
Academia, in particular, has an odd relationship with rhetoric. On one hand, scholars rely on it constantly—crafting arguments, responding to peer reviews, structuring persuasive essays. On the other hand, many disciplines pretend rhetoric does not exist, acting as though knowledge should “speak for itself.” This is peak pettygogy. The reality is, writing does not just record thought; it creates thought. If we do not teach students how to use rhetorical principles effectively, we are setting them up to struggle.
Today, rhetoric is more relevant than ever. The internet has turned persuasion into an everyday survival skill, from fact-checking political claims to decoding corporate jargon. That is why scholars are pushing for a renewed focus on digital rhetoric, examining how persuasion operates in online spaces, from social media to AI-generated content. If you are curious about how rhetoric has evolved in the digital age, check out this deep dive where I discuss digital rhetoric with my forever rival.
Rhetoric is not just about sounding smart. It is about being heard. If we want writing education to be effective, we need to bring rhetoric back into the conversation where it belongs.
Enter WAC: Writing Across the Curriculum
While academia spent decades treating writing like an orphaned child, a group of radical educators in the 1960s and 70s had a simple but revolutionary idea: writing is for everyone (gasp!). Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is a movement that called out academia’s failure to teach writing, insisting that writing should be embedded in every discipline, at every level.
WAC flipped the script on traditional writing instruction by rejecting the “one-and-done” model of first-year composition. Instead, it emphasized three core ideas:
- Writing is a Tool for Learning, Not Just Assessment – Writing is not just about proving knowledge; it helps students develop and refine their thinking.
- Every Discipline Has Its Own Writing Style – A chemistry report isn’t a history paper. Professors should teach writing in their own fields rather than expecting students to magically figure it out.
- Writing Should Be Integrated Across All Courses – If students only write in first-year comp, they never develop discipline-specific writing skills. Writing should be a continuous process, not a box to check.
In the 1970s, schools like Carleton College and Michigan Tech pioneered WAC programs, encouraging faculty to incorporate writing into their teaching. By the 1980s, WAC had spread nationwide, leading to writing-intensive courses, faculty workshops, and peer tutoring programs. Scholars like Janet Emig argued that writing was not just a skill but a mode of learning, a process that forces students to engage deeply with ideas..
Of course, not everyone was thrilled. Many professors clung to pettygogy, insisting that teaching writing “wasn’t their job.” WAC pushed back, proving that students write and think better when writing is integrated into every subject.
Today, WAC’s influence shines in a few writing-intensive courses, faculty development programs and initiatives like Writing in the Disciplines (WID) at NYU. However, the fight is not over. Too many universities still treat writing as an afterthought rather than a foundational skill. Until academia fully embraces WAC’s principles, we will keep hearing the same tired complaints about students “not knowing how to write”, as if the system itself is blameless.
If we want students to succeed, we need to stop outsourcing writing instruction and start treating it as what it truly is: a cornerstone of learning, not just an academic chore.
Down with the Pettygogy: How to Combat a Broken System
The solution to pettygogy isn’t complicated, but it requires academia to stop passing the buck on writing instruction. First, we need to recognize that writing is a shared responsibility, not just something the English department should handle. Every professor—whether in biology, history or engineering—needs to teach writing in the context of their field. Students should not have to play a guessing game about what “good writing” means in different disciplines. If professors expect well-written lab reports, case studies or policy briefs, they need to provide direct instruction on what those should look like, rather than hoping students will figure it out on their own.
Beyond simply assigning more writing, we need to focus on how writing is taught. We need to bring rhetoric back into the conversation, teaching students that writing isn’t just about grammar but about organizing ideas, making persuasive arguments, and engaging critically with information. When students see writing as a tool for thinking rather than just a way to rack up points on a rubric, they write with more confidence and clarity. Faculty workshops should train professors in every field to incorporate rhetorical principles into their courses, helping students understand the purpose of writing within their discipline.
We also need to invest in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) programs. Schools that have adopted these models see real improvement because they treat writing as a continuous learning process, not a one-time requirement. Universities should support writing-intensive courses, fund peer tutoring programs and encourage cross-disciplinary faculty collaboration on writing pedagogy.
. . .
Education loves to pat itself on the back for being progressive, which would be cool if it progressed where it counts. Progress isn’t about sounding innovative; it’s about being better. If we actually want to prepare students for the real world, we need to stop treating writing like a chore and start treating it like the transformative, intellectual pursuit it is.
Educational reformer John Dewey once mentioned that education starts with experience and grows into something bigger. Writing is not just about stringing sentences together; it’s about shaping ideas, making connections and pushing knowledge forward. It is how students learn to think critically, argue persuasively and engage meaningfully with the world around them. If we neglect writing, we don’t just weaken students’ ability to communicate—we weaken their ability to think.
Let’s grow up. Let’s evolve beyond pettygogy and get back to actual pedagogy. Let’s embrace writing as a tool for learning, questioning and discovery. Education is not just about transferring knowledge. It is about creating it. Writing makes that possible. We just have to let it.
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