MCC Daily Tribune

Composition Cemetery: Debunking Myths About Teaching Writing

Myth: ENG 101 is a general education cornerstone because it is a skills-based course that is universally transferable.

At first glance this myth has some truth to it. Yes, ENG 101 College Composition teaches important reading and writing skills that students can use in other courses at college, and this is evidenced by the learning activities, assignments, and tasks in our classrooms. The course is useful, then, to teach students some of the cornerstones of writing at college; specifically, ENG 101 teaches how to summarize, analyze, and synthesize sources in their writing so they are sharing their voices in conversation with authors on a given topic. And, yet, there is something too simple about the above statement that creates a false sense of security. While ENG 101 is a valuable addition to a liberal arts education and transfers to other colleges for general education credit, it is not only skills themselves that we teach, and the course by itself cannot create the conditions for universal transferability.

Here is something to consider as food for thought on the first problem with this particular myth. If we focus on skills themselves, will that be sufficient for college composition? Does writing itself involve only skill, as in what AI can do by simply combining words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs? Yes, it’s true that practicing paragraphing and sentence constructions can help anyone write. The more they write, the more practice they get, which translates to more opportunity for success. In fact, in an article from Inside Higher Ed by Linguist Naomi S. Baron entitled “5 Touchpoints Students Should Consider About AI,” the author discusses how “writing is a profoundly human activity” and “human writing is often time consuming, even painful.” Let’s admit that there’s something good writing does that goes beyond the skill of sentence or paragraph completion: it’s about self-discovery. It includes good thinking, which means asking critical questions, as well as coming up with insightful answers and ideas. So teaching skills goes hand-in-hand with teaching good thinking. And the how and the what can’t be separated.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just teach something early and students could repeat this everywhere? Ah, the ability to share and continue the practice of good thinking: how wonderful. That’s one of my favorite parts of teaching students to read and write at the college level: seeing their insights bubble up out of the hard work of engaging with complex texts. But does it always get repeated easily? The reality of teaching and learning leads us to a more ambiguous process than "universality" allows: teaching itself is re-teaching. So, while transfer of knowledge from one situation to another is the goal, the outcome is quite complicated. Even when we as teachers engage students successfully and provide good materials for practice and create good assessments and feedback, students of all walks of life might or might not see how one set of knowledge and skills applies to another. In her University of Colorado Press book entitled Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing, Kathleen Blake-Yancey, asks and finds some answers for these sorts of questions. A composition theorist and professor of rhetoric at Florida State University, she postulates that based on her research that good outcomes are tied to good practices, but the more students are exposed to the variety of tools in the writing process, the more they can create good habits and make it their own, no matter where they go. What does this mean we can do? We can design curriculum to support writing success in each of our unique settings across the curriculum so students’ time here at our college shows repetition and reward for good academic habits; and perhaps we can adopt some genuine academic humility to recognize that how students take and animate the knowledge we hope to inspire in them is tricky and theirs to own.

Baron, Naomi S. “5 Touchpoints Students Should Consider About AI,” Inside Higher Ed.com, Sept 26, 2023. 

Blake-Yancey, Kathleen. Writing Across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing. U Colorado Press, 2014.

Want more? Reach out to me at ajohnston@monroecc.edu for the newest edition of the newsletter Comp Notes, out this week.

Angelique Johnston
English/Philosophy
12/07/2023