Elizabeth Wardle’s and Douglas Downs’s excerpts about First-Year Composition Courses are very interesting. Not only because it shines a light on how First-Year Composition (FYC) has been viewed, but it also enables readers to gain an inside look at how changes are coming to the program through various research methods. As I was getting into the readings, I found some interesting things that went into First-Year Composition courses.
Starting with Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs’ excerpt Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’, they discuss how in traditional FYC courses, they often assume that writing follows a set of universal rules that, once mastered, can be applied to any situation. Which then leads to generalizing students’ writing skills, such as building a thesis and creating five paragraph essays, which typically don’t prepare them for diverse writing contexts that they will most likely encounter either in their academic or professional lives. Downs and Wardle argue this by stating that that particular approach is flawed because we know writing is not a static, context-free activity, rather we know writing is a highly dependent activity that relies on its audience, purpose and rhetorical situation to bring it to life. And by teaching students’ rigid structures and decontextualized skills, it mostly fails to equip them with the ability to become adaptable in different writing environments.
That’s why Wardle and Downs mentioned that there should be changes in FYC that can better teach students to write for all different genres of writing. They mention that there should be a new approach to teaching writing, not just teaching to write in general, but to teach it as a subject in and of itself. Downs and Wardle state that by having students’ study how writing works, specifically in different contexts, it allows students to gain a better and deeper understanding of rhetorical choices that they make in various situations. This approach in particular encourages students to:
- Engage with writing research to understand how writing functions across disciplines and professions.
- Recognize that writing is socially constructed and varies by context, audience, and purpose.
- Reflect on their writing processes and experiences, developing meta-cognitive awareness that supports transfer of learning to new writing tasks.
Turning the page, so to speak, we turn to Elizabeth Wardle’s article “Intractable Writing Program Problems, Kairos, and Writing about Writing: A Profile of the University of Central Florida’s First-Year Composition Program” she expands on the ideas mentioned above, in addition to exploring the structural and institutional challenges that make writing programs reform somewhat difficult situations into better developed ones. One major issue that Wardle mentions is that there are a lot of misconceptions about FYC and how it should “fix” student writing, specifically ensuring that students will leave the course as fully competent writers. Which, in Wardle’s Opinion, is completely unrealistic because writing development is a process that occurs over a person’s life.
Wrapping up, both Elizabeth Wardle and Douglas Downs take a different approach to creating and transforming FYC, one that allows institutions to change the way they teach writing from a “academic writing” approach to a more realistic and useful conception of writing. By treating writing as a subject of study rather than a set of transferable skills, educators can better prepare their students for the complex, dynamic nature of writing in academic, professional, and civic life. Remember, there is a clear message: learning to write is not about mastering a formula, but about understanding writing as a flexible, context-dependent, and lifelong endeavor.
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