I'm taking a course call EDU 98 which, for those who don't know (which may be everyone as I am constantly asked what this class is,) is a freshman seminar where they basically teach us how to transition into and succeed here in Berkeley.
Well anyway, we had a guest speaker from the Student Learning Center talking to us yesterday. He asked everyone in the room how our classes are going so far, and here's where things got interesting. One student commented on getting his first essay back in his english class (I cannot recall which) and he was bummed that he received no higher than a B-! And I was stunned as I and many others would consider this a satisfactory grade, including the guest speaker.
Our guest speaker advised that the first essay should be used to determine what our instructor is looking for in our writing, and that we should build upon and highlight those points for future use in that class. In essence, the first essay is merely a guide to how we should write for the rest of the semester. He argued that every teacher, GSI, professor, and what have you look for different aspects in writing and grade accordingly. Therefore, in order to succeed, we must bend towards their desires.
This brought me back to an earlier discussion we had in class, about "Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers", in particular how we should write while keeping the perspective of our audience in mind. But how does a student writer grow when his audience consists of only his instructor and himself? How do we learn if we change the way we write every semester?
I agree with Sommers here, where in her essay she claims:
"...students see their writing altogether passively through the eyes ofRather than follow the rules set forth for us, we should apply what we have learned and integrate it all into our very own writing style. We can only become experienced writers if we build upon each experience rather than starting anew each semester. College is a place for us all to find our identities, like who we are and what we're all about, and writing is a good place to start.
former teachers or their surrogates, the textbooks, and are bound to the
rules which they have been taught."
3 comments:
That's a good point, Raynard. It also corresponds with something Sommers and Saltz pointed out in "The Novice as Expert": even though students do better if they think of themselves as novices with something to learn, they can't stay novices forever. That learning has to mean something.
That means figuring out what parts of what you've learned from one class is applicable in another (and what isn't).
While I agree that learning to write for ourselves, and defining our own style, is important, I feel like the lecturer was not altogether amiss in his observations. Each teacher does have a different preference; being human, we all do, and bending our writing styles to match those preferences signals adaptability, not blind conformity.
For all I know, professional writers in newspapers and magazines don't really believe what they write -- but they sure make it sound convincing, to the right audience. In the real world, other people's preferences matter; we don't live in isolation, and writing to the largest audience starts with writing to the tastes of an audience of one.
I think of it more as a test of adaptability, of malleability, to stress -- a literary equivalent of Darwin's "Theory of Evolution." Those whose writing styles are best adaptable to the widest range of audiences will succeed in the real world.
I agree that developing one's own style should be the goal of every student writer. And a student should experiment with different styles until they find a nice fit. However way you look at it, though, I feel that every teacher will be partial to one style of writing over another, and that will reflect in grades.
In that sense, I would agree with what the SLC lecturer was saying, and caution the students to learn who they write for, and learn what their teachers want from them.
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