Adaptation in writing courses is a vital process and action. This is especially true for first-year college-level writing students. Pedagogical Education begins for everyone from a very early age in elementary schools. Yet, we still need large upheavals and evolutions in the writing curriculum. Reading Anne Beaufort’s College Writing and Beyond: Five Years Later demonstrated a great importance for making class material that helps students to apply their learned writing techniques to professional and academic writing settings. In the essay it is shown that some of the students struggle to write “appropriate” writing for some instances. Tim is one of the students who is used as a case study. In his case, he struggled with appropriately applying expressivist and literary principles to his history essays. He did not know what his teacher had expected from him.
Students do not know exactly what their teachers perceive to be as reasonably expected from them. In these writing classes, it is not possible for students to do well when their professors consider their form of writing inappropriate and they fail to properly educate the student in what is appropriate for “real world” writing. Writing for a company or a job is not easy, so it is even worse when the requirements for acceptable writing is further obscured by a lack of direct communication over what is needed. Most teachers and employers fail to properly do this because they expect students to know everything and nothing at the same time.
For me, I expect teachers to be clear and concise when it comes to what I need to write. Everything needs to be specific and easy to understand, especially if I am already struggling with another task while writing for class. I have talked about this issue before.
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