University English programs claim to teach students how to write. I think they do a pretty bad job of it. I just read through some of my old college essays, and they are an utter embarrassment. It’s not so much that they’re poorly written as it is that they’re full of absurdly contrived subject matter. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s representation of Puritanism in “Young Goodman Brown?” My God, why would anyone want to write or read about that?
Reading one of my blog writings next to one of my college essays, you might think they were written by different people. The whole tone of the college essays is wrong. They’re pedantic and overstated. They’re vague and indirect. They’re banal.
The reason these essays are so bad is simple: I didn’t believe in what I was writing. I doubt many English students do. We wrote those essays for a select and peculiar audience: career academics. Our instructors often told us to “add to the conversation” around a particular novel. Well, those academic conversations around novels were conversations most of us would never have in our regular lives, even with intellectual friends who liked literature. So we faked it.
This is terrible training if they want us to actually become writers, because the only writing that ordinary people will spend their precious free time reading is writing that comes from the heart. Insincerity comes through in print as strongly as it does in speech. People want to read honest voices. And our voices in college essays were rarely that. Could you write 1300 honest words about the symbolism and imagery of the first two minutes of Blade Runner? Well, neither could I, but I wrote those 1300 words anyway, and the result is something I now wouldn’t read unless you paid me.
The most striking thing about my old essays is how overloaded with words they are. They’re bursting with needless adjectives and adverbs. Again, the reason is simple: I had to meet the page count. Most of the ideas in those essays were pretty small, so I had to create an illusion of size.
The mandatory page count (or word count) is one of the big mistakes college instructors make in teaching us to write. It makes students dependent in their thinking and inept in judging the quality of their ideas. There’s no reason that an essay should be a particular length. Some important ideas can be explained in 300 words. Some require 3000. Students should be allowed to judge for themselves when they’ve said something worthwhile. They’ll be mistaken sometimes, but they’ll learn from it.
If you think English students aren’t dependent on page count requirements, imagine giving them an assignment without any. You tell the class, “Give me an essay with one or more interesting ideas in it, explained in depth, and connected to other topics you think are relevant.” If you left it at that, you’d have a room full of panicked kids. But how long is it supposed to be? How will I know when I’ve written enough? How much of our grade is it worth?
The sad truth is that students use the minimum page count as a baseline for ensuring a passing grade. If you write in complete sentences and meet the minimum page count, you can usually rest easy that you’ll at least get a C. English students don’t get too bent out of shape about bullshitting flimsy ideas in the interest of padding a paper. They know it almost always flies. The minimum page count provides security.
Some English majors outgrow this dependency and learn to be their own judges, but I still think paper padding is a bad habit to instill in them. People like concise language. We might as well get young writers writing that way as early as possible.
So what’s the solution? Basically, to completely restructure college writing instruction. Literary criticism is mostly a farce. It’s written by academics for academics. It’s inbred, and irrelevant to people outside that cloistered sphere. So why are we teaching college kids to write it? Writing instruction should allow students to write about the ideas that interest them. Those ideas could come from anywhere.
There’s no point in graduating a class of students who are well-trained in writing half-heartedly. Allowing students more freedom in choosing their subjects would make their work more difficult to judge. Doing away with page minimums would make it even harder. But I think college English departments either need to do those things or drop the pretense that they’re really teaching anyone to write.
No comments:
Post a Comment