Editor:
The revelations of Christopher Alexander's guest column ("Make students competent writers," April 9) certainly came as a surprise to this graduate teaching assistant. I suppose I disobeyed departmental policy every time I told my students over six years of teaching that mechanical errors undermine their authority as writers and that they will be judged on that basis, or told them to "show, not tell," that the concrete is better than the abstract, or that the specific is better than the general. And now I discover that we are forbidden to teach these things!
The problems of teaching college-level writing are not at all what Mr. Alexander thinks they are. Students should indeed "be able to recognize and understand" their grammatical mistakes; but when these errors are identified by the instructor in the first draft and left uncorrected by the student writer in the second draft, I must wonder, in frustration, where the real responsibility for this problem lies. Who really "encourages incompetence" in writing? Mr. Alexander quotes a tennis instructor as saying "if (he) had to grade (his papers) from a serious English basis [sic], they'd all get ripped to pieces." Well, here's a novel thought for instructors in all fields: just grade your papers on the merit of their writing, instead of awarding C's, B's, even A's for the "ideas" that poke through the garbled prose. Too often, non-composition teachers will argue it is not their responsibility to grade their students' writing; they would have to fail most of their students if they did. But isn't this a problem of the university as a whole and of Mr. Alexander? The division of teaching labor he takes for granted, that makes a single department or program or course responsible for fostering a universally important skill, seems to me to be what is to blame.
Freshman composition may indeed be the only opportunity many students here have to work extensively on writing skills. But whose decision is it to require only two semesters of composition at the UA? I assure you, it is not ours. Does Mr. Alexander believe these two semesters are sufficient to "make competent writers"? As for composition instructors behaving like therapists, the only connection I have noticed is that the people we work with often come to us similarly "damaged": by years of indulgence of bad writing habits and by negligence of basic skills. Freshmen will often arrive predisposed to resent their writing classes, believing that they already write well enough and that they will never use the kinds of writing that composition classes teach. But if they do poorly, it must be the instructor's fault - a complaint with which Mr. Alexander seems to agree.
What disturbs me the most about this column is the author's passive acceptance of the status quo. Far from suggesting a way things might be shaken up by all and for the benefit of all - students who need to learn to write, professors aggravated by bad student writing, graduate students teaching larger sections of less adequately prepared freshmen - he declares the ability to write well a "right" that is the "responsibility" of only a few to provide. I imagine that being led to water is the "right" of every horse, too. But is the handler alone to blame when the horse has neither the will nor any real incentive to drink?
James Champagne
English graduate student