In his essay, “First Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing,” T
In his essay, “First Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing,” Tyler Branson makes the argument that FYC Courses like this one should be seen not as corrective classes intended to provide remedial instruction on grammar. Instead, students should see FYC courses as opportunities to develop the strategies and skills necessary for civic discourse. He argues that viewing FYC as only teaching research and essay writing skills is too limited a view. FYC courses, Branson claims, do more than prepare students to write in college. Courses like EGL 1010 prepare students to engage in productive arguments beyond the college classroom.
To begin to understand Branson’s argument, we first need to see writing as something more than a task students are forced to do. Instead, we need to understand writing–even academic writing–as a technology for communicating ideas.
Writing as Communication
Many students write essays because they are required to pass a class. Students write because their teacher has assigned a topic and because they want to pass a class. Often, students will use the format of the Five-Paragraph essay not because it’s the best way to make their argument, but because the teacher said that it’s the correct–maybe even the only way–to write an essay. The student may or may not care about what they are writing or whether their writing made any kind of impact on the reader.
But this isn’t usually how communication works.
Normally, people don’t write or communicate without a reason. Usually, people choose to communicate because they are responding to some specific situation.
The Five-Paragraph essay or any single set of “rules” about how to write an essay ignores this very important idea about writing. Because of this, essays written using the Five-Paragraph format can often become awkward and repetative.
Rather than learning a set of hard-and-fast rules that you have to follow, this semester we will be learning strategies that you can apply to a variety of writing tasks and situations so that your writing is more effective. Most of all, we will operate under the following assumption:
No one assigns scholars and researchers essays for homework. Instead, professional academic writers use their writing in scholarly journals and books because the want to communicate complex arguments to specific audiences. No one forces them to do this. They choose to write in order to join a larger conversation that they believe is important and urgent. They write essays, articles, and books to join the conversations already happening in their discipline because they have an important idea that needs to be shared.
Your college courses will ask you to do more than write essays that simply repeat what you have learned. Instead, college courses will require you to become scholars-in-training. Through reading and research, you will learn about topics in the discipline and “listen” to the conversations already happening. Through writing research-based argumentat