{"id":1757,"date":"2019-07-10T17:53:31","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T21:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/english\/?page_id=1757"},"modified":"2019-07-10T17:53:31","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T21:53:31","slug":"narrative-introduction-to-the-new-syllabus-for-college-english-i","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/english\/narrative-introduction-to-the-new-syllabus-for-college-english-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrative Introduction to the New Syllabus for College English I"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most first-year writing programs\u2014or we should say, like most writing programs until the last ten years or so\u2014ours has focused on \u201cacademic writing.\u201d This phrase is in quotation marks to suggest that there is something questionable about the term.\u00a0 \u201cAcademic writing\u201d implies that there is a generic type of writing that is academic, that academic writing is a genre<\/em> in itself.\u00a0 In fact, of course, academic writing is real only to the extent that it occurs within a discipline.\u00a0 Thus literary analysis, philosophical proof, and ethnography are all academic genres; and they vary quite a bit from one discipline to the next.\u00a0 In other words, generic<\/em> academic writing doesn\u2019t really exist, and we don\u2019t want to teach our students that it does; we don\u2019t want to teach them that they can readily, without reflection, apply what they\u2019ve learned in ENGL1201 to their tasks in biology, psychology, or nursing.<\/p>\n

Ed once had a nursing student in his Composition Theory and Practice class.\u00a0 She was in the middle of learning how to do charting\u2014the notes scribbled on charts at the foot of hospital beds\u2014and she was very frustrated because the lessons she took from previous writing classes about narrative details and \u201cgoing in depth\u201d in no way prepared her to do charts.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t help that her nursing instructors didn\u2019t know how to talk to her about the problem she was having, which isn\u2019t surprising because they probably weren\u2019t trained in Writing Across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines.\u00a0 If her ENGL1201 class had focused on making choices appropriate to the rhetorical situation, she might have anticipated challenges to writing in new contexts for different purposes.<\/p>\n

We can hear some objections to this line of reasoning (notice, please the naysayer in the text), pointing out that good grammar is good grammar, good punctuation is good punctuation, and concision is concision.\u00a0 While we could point to differences among various disciplines when it comes to the use of passive voice, the first personal singular, and verb tense conventions, we would generally agree with this naysayer.\u00a0 We would even agree\u2014touching on critical thinking here\u2014that mastering the art of developing claims, warrants, and evidence is likely universal, but also point out that we wouldn\u2019t want to teach our first-year students what counts as good evidence in their history classes or which warrants connect evidence and claims in their philosophy class.\u00a0 (For example, Ed Jones got a D+ in his Introduction to Philosophy course in college and, the same semester, got an A- in his Introduction to Poetry class.)\u00a0 Finally, we\u2019d agree that it\u2019s important in all disciplines to cite sources, but we wouldn\u2019t want our students assuming that they were all set just because they could use MLA style.\u00a0 Rather, we\u2019d want them to be able to recognize that citation styles vary quite widely among the professions.<\/p>\n

In fact, in general, we would like to teach our students how to be flexible writers, to be aware that they should expect to be surprised when they write in situations that are new to them, whether that be a new discipline or a new job. And we want them to be prepared with a whole arsenal or, more peacefully, a whole tool kit or even better a whole personal theory of writing that can guide them.\u00a0 According to current theory in the world of composition studies, the following are important parts of curricular design:<\/p>\n