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Among the many topics we might cover this week, one of them is what do we do with first year writing in the field of Composition & Rhetoric? If there was one question that you could say has shaped this discipline, I would argue that this most certainly is it. Tonight's reading demonstrates ways the discipline remains committed to first year writing and the ways it has complicated, even distanced itself, from that relationship. I do not think we will ever settle on what FYW is, what it should be, what role it should play in the scholarship of the discipline.
Central to any discussion of FYW is a discussion of student experience in the class, and, so, for tonight's in-class writing, please post what you can remember about your first year writing experience. I know it's been a while for some of us, but, still, try. Once everyone has posted, we'll read and respond to each other's posts as part of tonight's class discussion.
11 Comments
Sarah M Bond
2/8/2022 03:37:35 pm
I tested out of First Year Writing (I don't remember exactly how that worked...) but I was relieved to do so! As much as I felt confident as a young writer, it never came quickly to me and I was glad to not put hours into it. At my liberal arts college in Western PA, we submitted essays and full papers in every course, so I did plenty of writing across disciplines, and I remember helping a few friends survive FYW, which, as I recall, was a lot of in-class writing exercises and revisions meant to solidify basic grammar skills and supporting a central argument.
Matthew Cutter
2/8/2022 03:38:15 pm
I honestly can't remember anything about my first year writing experience. I don't even remember who the professor was. All I know is that it was at UMASS Dartmouth in 2009, right after I graduated high school.
Brian Seibert
2/8/2022 03:39:24 pm
I may be conflating my first two college English classes I took, but either way I remember very little. At that point, I had no clue I was going to eventually become an English teacher. I also did not have much confidence in my writing. However, I remember one instance where we read "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass." There were several writing prompts for us to choose after we finished reading and I chose the one based on the court scene sentencing Alice. I have no memory of what I wrote, but the professor claimed that my paper on that subject was the best of his classes that year. I also remember being somewhat incredulous when he told me that information.
Alyssa Campbell
2/8/2022 03:40:17 pm
My own personal experience with first year writing is (fortunately and unfortunately) nonexistent. I both took AP English courses and received qualifying scores on them that allowed me to count them toward English credits. At my undergraduate college, I was also required to take a placement exam for several subjects, one of which being English, and most specifically, with a writing component. I tested well, and therefore I did not get the experience of being in a FYW course.
Ashley Merola
2/8/2022 03:41:36 pm
During my undergraduate experience, I did not take a first-year writing course. I did, however, take a Literary Study course in the fall of my freshman year that incorporated literature-specific concepts from the typical FYC curriculum. We read the works of Virginia Woolf before engaging in an extended research project on one of her texts. I remember going to the library on campus with my classmates, learning about the databases available to me, searching through the institution’s catalogs, and using Interlibrary Loan when I could not find what I needed. Thus, the focus was more so on writing skills and tools that would assist us as we further embarked on our journeys as English majors.
Megan G.
2/8/2022 03:42:13 pm
My experience in first-year writing came sooner than I maybe would have liked. In my senior year of high school, I enrolled in "English 4A" which was also known as MCC English. At the end of the course as long as I had a B, I knew I would earn 3 college credits. This seemed like a great deal at the time, but I later realized I missed out on certain aspects of the FYW experience that would have served me well later on in my college career.
Maura Geoghegan
2/8/2022 03:42:17 pm
I was able to place out of the intro to writing course during my first year, so I can't speak to a specific experience within a FYW course. I did, however, have to take the intro to literature course and we obviously did some writing in that course, but nothing particularly memorable jumps out to me. I don't remember the intro to literature course being very challenging, so it would have been interesting to see how the FYW course compared had I taken both.
Kayleigh Holt
2/8/2022 03:42:44 pm
For my undergraduate degree I attended Emerson College. While there I tested out of the traditional first year writing course, but at Emerson everyone is also required to take a course titled “Research Writing” during their first year. The overall goal of the research writing course was to introduce the students to what a college level research paper would intel as well as what level of writing was expected. Over the course of the semester we worked on smaller writing pieces, created annotated bibliographies, and finally wrote a full research paper that we then had to defend in front of our professor and a group of other professors as a final.
LT
2/8/2022 03:42:49 pm
Ironically, I did not take first year writing. I was in AP in high school--a total fluke really because I was not entirely AP material. AP was kind of a new fangled thing back then. But the AP class I had was in literature and the AP test I took was the lit one--not the language one, which, now, is what most schools accept for testing out of first year writing. But back then, my university accepted that for the first year writing requirement. I did, however, have to take the junior level writing requirement at my school (Ohio University--not Ohio State, Ohio U very different). By that time, I'd written enough college papers that I had learned the formula to write a successful college paper. I did all the worst things: I wrote them last minute. I wrote the easiest thing I could write that would get me to the page limit. I didn't really care about any of the things I wrote. We never did anything like I do in my writing classes. We never had a workshop. We never learned things about writing. I don't even think we had to attend. I was not a super great college student, so this suited me just fine. I credit my high school education with making college feel so easy that I blew a lot of it off until I found things I really cared about and was really interested in--English and History. It's not like we did all the revision and all of that in high school, but we wrote a lot and we wrote in classes I liked--English and History. One other thing that I remember about my college writing class is quote loading. I would write the whole paper and then go find the number of sources I needed for the requirement and then jam in whatever half-ass quote worked with what I was writing. I told you all the story about the computers ad how this changed my life, and that is absolutely relevant to this story. Because once I discovered 1) things I cared about and 2) a way to make the noodling around and time that good writing requires (for me), then I was a different student, a different writer. Entirely. And I realize now that so much of what I do in the classroom now is entirely about how to force the Lee Torda's of the world to take their writing seriously from jump.
Olivia Limoncelli
2/8/2022 03:42:58 pm
During my first year, I went to Oakland University in Michigan. From what I remember, we had to complete the basic writing assignments all of which included writing some sort of research paper. I remember going twice a week and I was with a whole different group of students. I think the most interesting part is that we all have completely different majors, and yet this writing course can apply to all of them. My writing was still very stuck to the high school process because I was never taught differently. I don't remember the comments I received, but I do remember him having us write a paper related to the 2016 election because it had just happened that past semester. I feel like the course did not push me or help me to be a better writer, although I did get a taste of what college papers looked like.
Melissa Batty
2/9/2022 04:03:33 pm
I can honestly say that my FYS courses were a mixture of process pedagogy and who knows what. I distinctly remember a large focus on grammar and sentence structure during my first semester. I also recall an assignment that made me deeply uncomfortable at the time: keep a personal journal for three weeks and then write a five page essay on your experiences –– my professor gave off very creepy vibes –– so I was hesitant to share any portion of my life with him. Leave a Reply. |
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