The author of the following essay is a Professor at a top-ranking, metropolitan U.S. university. The names of both university and professor have been fictionalized to protect the professor from retaliation.
http://quillette.com/2017/04/13/de-professionalization-academy/
I have so many thoughts on this.
First, this second-tier status of writing goes back to the late 1800s with Harvard and its entrance exams. They made the exams so difficult and so many students failed that writing instruction was deemed unavoidable, thus creating the composition program. In this way, writing has historically been viewed as something that students “can’t do” and “need help with,” as well as a simple “skill to master” before moving on. Students needed to get through first-year writing before they could move on to the higher-level subjects. The professors who taught those higher-level subjects didn’t want to teach freshman composition and so outsourced writing instruction to the junior faculty, who felt as though they had to “pay their dues” before having the chance to teach their treasured literature courses.
So, from a very early time period, writing was viewed as secondary and remedial. Does it really surprise people, then, that this model continues to this day with brand-new English TAs thrown into the first-year writing classroom so that their literature professors are free to teach the graduate classes in which they are enrolled? And so the literature TAs can get funded to study literature and one day teach literature? No offense to literature folks and creative writers, but do they study and research writing pedagogy? If “anyone can teach writing,” then why is there an entire field devoted to it (Composition and Rhetoric) along with several conferences on the topic (Conference on College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, Computers and Writing, etc)? Why are we one of the only fields where someone who can be completely unfamiliar with writing process pedagogy can walk into a classroom and start teaching?
It’s a serious problem, and I really don’t know what the solution is. To start, I think we need to start respecting writing instructors and the field at large. We should give writing instructors livable wages with a manageable workload so that we won’t have adjuncts teaching 7 courses a semester at 3 different schools. With this will come a better teaching environment, and better access to best practices in the field since these instructors can perhaps find time/funding to attend conferences and workshops. And the next generation of both tenure-track writing program administrators and adjuncts need to take a stand. At what point will they say, “No; I’m not going to let you take advantage of me like that”? When can we break this pattern? Who will stand up for what’s right, and in the numbers that can actually DO something?
I get the whole public outcry about it, but this isn’t anything new. This has been happening for a very long time starting with the very best schools in the country. And I really don’t know how we can improve it because it’s part of our complicated tradition.
What I find mysterious about this fictionalized post is that the author, who is supposed to be a full professor teaching writing, is a terrible writer. I don’t care what his credentials are.
I agree with @Hunt. Although I do not teach writing, I read a lot of bad writing in exams and research papers.
One general recommendation: “Get the little book!” Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” is the best single guide to effective writing. I used to re-read the book after I had written a draft of a paper.
Although the entire book is instructive, I love this ironic paragraph: “Omit needless words”: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
When I was an undergrad, I relied not only on Strunk and White but also the Chicago Manual of Style, Fowler’s “Modern English Usage,” and Kate Turabian’s “A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.”