Essential Elements of UNH Philosophy of Writing Pedagogy

Can Writing Be Taught?

The answer is in the writing folders of the students. Students who explore subjects on which they are authorities or can become authorities, who write frequently--at least once a week or more--who receive individual responses from instructors and classmates on each paper, and who have an opportunity to improve their drafts before a final grade, write better at the end of the writing course than at the beginning, and anyone examining a file drawer of writing folders can see the improvement. (WTW p. 238)

How Does Personal Writing Help Students Write Academic Prose

We do not teach a specific form of writing, for we do not know what writing tasks our students will be asked to complete in school and afterwards. The range of writing within a university or even within an English department can be enormous. One person's high standards is another person's garbage. I cannot tell what my students will be asked to do in their many disciplines, and I certainly cannot tell what they will be asked to write in the years after they leave school. Therefore I try to teach my students a writing process or, better yet, have them develop their own processes of writing they will be able to apply to the tasks that lie ahead of them.

To develop a writing process students usually have to write on a subject on which they are an authority. They have to know the subject well, have an inventory of information, a point of view or opinion, and an audience which can be instructed by the draft. This is exactly the opposite of the experience most of them have had ins school, when they have written on subjects of someone else's choosing and on which they have far less information than the reader-teacher. That, unfortunately, is what often happens in academic writing. In writing writing the writer is the authority and has an abundance of information, and the problem is to distill that information so that it has meaning for readers who know less about the subject than the writer.

Few of our beginning students have an obsessive and extensive interest in an academic subject. When I was asked to initiate a sophomore writing course shortly after I began teaching, I imagined ours truants writing within their discipline--psychology students would write articles on psychology, chemistry students on chemistry, history majors would write history. I was naive. Our students had had Psychology 1 of Chemistry 2 or a survey of world history in one semester, and few of them were able to write meaningful pieces in their discipline.

The more apprehensive the students is about writing, the more we have to encourage the student to find a subject on which the student is an authority. Most students begin to learn to write in personal papers about subjects that are important to them. Once they have successfully gone through the writing process, taking a subject that is not clear to them and developing and clarifying it so that it is clear to others, they are able to write about increasingly objective subjects, and they can see how to apply the process to a variety of writing tasks, academic and professional as well as personal.

Does the Process Work Only for Creating Writing?

Nope the process may change according to the writing task, the experience of the writer with that writing task, and the personality or thinking style of the writer. But its similarities are greater than its differences. (TWT 239-40)

How Do You Tell Which Students Should be Exempt from Composition Courses?

This is a political and economic issue. All students can benefit from an experience in writing from an instructor skilled in the teaching of writing. All students should have an opportunity to write at the level of which they are capable and to rise from that point during the semester. At the University of New Hampshire no students are exempt from Freshman English. The student with a verbal SAT score of 790 can learn to write better, and so can the student with a score of 290. (TWT 241)