Teaching useful writing in UW

I could never bring myself to say that my writing after high school is perfect. I believe, as most of us do in our heart of hearts, that there is a place for writing instruction in college. Whether we are strong or weak writers, there is value in learning—or re-learning—the basic structures and conventions of argument, rhetoric, and style. At the risk of sounding cliché, in this highly technological age, where informal ad hoc writing has become the day-to-day norm, formal writing classes are especially necessary. In our working lives as well as in our more mature correspondences, value is still placed on our ability to articulate ourselves clearly and convincingly. 

The Core Curriculum is geared toward these ends, and classes like Lit Hum and CC have composition as one of their goals. However, while we learn in each of our classes to write according to the style of the curriculum (textual analysis for Lit Hum, philosophy paper for CC, etc.), it is even more important to learn the basic techniques required to write any sort of essay. 

University Writing, judging from its name alone, would seem to fulfill that need. When I started at Columbia, I assumed UW would be a comprehensive refresher in good writing. I thought its goal would be to teach the student the techniques necessary to effectively express himself in non-technical language to any audience in any style. These tools range from the involved, like the techniques of logical argumentation, to the mundane, like the proper structure of a sentence and paragraph. When larger essays are assigned, case studies of styles might be used as models for the student, but emphasis would be placed on the common standard of good prose, regardless of particular format. In other words, whether I choose to write a literary analysis or a political science or philosophy paper, I should be able to write clear, expressive, and logical prose. If this were the goal of University Writing, I might well have been satisfied with my experience in the course. 

Instead, I learned that the University Writing curriculum simply calls for teaching a few more styles of writing: the so-called Lens, Conversation, and Research essays. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether or not UW succeeds at this goal (I would argue it does not), it is important to realize that even if taught successfully, this strategy does not prepare students to write in college, because professors will still fail our papers—whether or not we write in the correct style—if we cannot articulate our thoughts (in essence, if we cannot write in a straight line). 

There must be reasons why University Writing is designed this way. Perhaps it is because the instructors of our courses, being very specialized in their own graduate level work, cannot be expected to teach so broadly as I have suggested they should. If that is indeed the case, then at least instructors should be given a minimum number of topics in general style to teach, with clear instructions to reserve at least some time for them in class, and to incorporate them when grading papers. It would certainly be an improvement upon the opaque grading criteria in use when I took the class last year. However, more fundamentally, perhaps the powers that be (by which I mean the Undergraduate Writing Program) feel that we as students have progressed past the stage where rigorous training in the fundamentals is necessary. To be frank, I would challenge any professor on campus to claim this is true when he grades papers. Finally, perhaps the good people of the UWP simply do not believe as I do—perhaps they do not agree that there is a fundamentally correct way to write. If that is so, then it is possible, perhaps, that they are progressive and that I am in fact reactionary. If that is so, then I welcome a good argument against good writing. Both are woefully in low supply. 

The author is a Columbia College sophomore.