College Writing (ENGLWRIT 112)

Philosophy of Writing

Every curriculum, particularly one with multiple sections like 112, is guided by an overall philosophy that defines the instruction given in the course. While teachers have a great deal of flexibility in how they teach 112, the program has defined four, key principles that offer a common definition of how writing works that should guide the instruction in all sections:

• Writing is a series of choices (about genre, organization, style, etc.) made in response to the context, purpose, and audience of a given text.
• Writing can serve a variety of purposes for writers throughout their lives, including but not limited to personal, academic, civic, and creative purposes.
• Writing is a recursive process of continual revision, reflection, and response from others.
• Writing exists to be read, and thus writers must also be readers—of other texts, of contexts, of culture—in order to read their own texts and assess its effects on potential readers.

These principles help distinguish 112 from other writing courses that might be more structured around personal writing and/or writing to form. They encapsulate our belief that “good writing” can never be defined outside of context, and that writing emerges not only from the self (i.e. what I want to write about) but also from exterior influences that prompt one to write, whether it be in the form of required writing (professional, academic) or writing prompted by external forces (responses to events, political action, etc.). If writing emerges from context, then the choices one makes about how to best “form” a text also emerge in response to that context: the audience’s expectations, the writers’ goals, the topic taken up, the style used, etc. Thus, how “good” a text is can only be evaluated according to the choices a writer makes along the way about the context. For instance, is the purpose fitting to the context? Is the purpose accomplished? Is the content organized so that the audience can follow it? Are the modes of development and level of support appropriate to the audience and purpose? Rather than teaching writing as “rules” or “advice” on how to produce specific forms, we focus on writing as a process involving questions that shape a writer ’s choices.

As a result, each unit in College Writing is structured around and/or invokes a particular rhetorical situation. The teacher’s role becomes helping students examine how each situation defines a range of choices available to the writer in terms of purpose, genre, organization, and style. Such analysis involves understanding both the writing context itself and the contexts students bring with them to any writing act. More than a simple accommodation to context, writing then also involves the ability to adapt or change the expectations of the audience in order to meet one’s purpose. In this way, we presume writers are given some degree of power over the ways they might respond to particular rhetorical situations. Academic contexts, for example, proscribe a certain set of norms that student writers, admittedly, must learn to reproduce (e.g., textual analysis, authoritative support for claims, etc.). But, writing for this context is not necessarily controlled by such norms. Instead, we introduce such contexts as embodying particular assumptions that an audience will bring to a text—expectations about purpose, genre, development—which a writer needs to understand but not necessarily reproduce. Depending on the writer’s purpose, the choices he/she makes in this context may also include attempts to alter the audience’s expectations (e.g. using narrative to make an argument) rather than simply acceding to them. Thus, while much of the course focuses upon making the expectations of context apparent to beginning writers, we also focus on how the writer’s own experience, knowledge, and desires interact with such a context. The goal, in short, is to offer a range of choices in how a text might be produced for that context rather than focusing solely on audience expectations.

This is where the focus on writing as a recursive process of drafting, reevaluating, and revising connects to the more rhetorical goals of writing as choice developed through critical reading of contexts and other texts. Through the writing process, writers help develop purposes that are their own and will help serve their purposes for communication. Simultaneously, through reconsidering their goals in light of their context and audience, their own thinking and goals may also change. Invention and drafting become ways of “re-seeing” one’s own positions in light of local contexts and of putting the writing subject at the center how that context might be negotiated.