"What is the most difficult thing to teach in the teaching of writing, and how do you go about teaching that?"

Keeping in mind that I have never taught before, I look at this question and I barely have a clue about what the most difficult thing to teach will be; my only experience stems from the one year I spent working in my undergrad university’s writing center. Based off my time working with students in the writing center, the things I have found most difficult to explain are editing and using secondary sources to enhance a paper.

Yesterday, my first quota of grades was due for ENGL 1301.  After grading twenty-nine papers, I can say that I wrote twenty-nine comments that each advised some serious revisions.  I saw students struggling to fill word counts with repetitive sentences.  I saw students attempting to write for an audience they couldn’t begin to analyze—the unnamed, faceless grader.  I saw students testing this grader to see how little effort they could expend on an assignment.  On the other side, I also saw concerned freshmen who were used to writing what a teacher wanted to read, as well as a small few who genuinely appeared to want to build on their prior experience with writing.  As I began grading, I found myself searching for ways to comment constructively, rather than giving in to the vague, easy critiques that I had so loathed receiving on my papers.  I am afraid that over time it will become increasingly tempting to give vague commentary.  I think that, in teaching students to edit their work, it is important to first teach students to distance themselves from their writing. For new writers, it is much easier to critique others’ writing than to hear critiques about their own.  To give an example of this distance, some professors ask students to revise a paper they wrote previously.  This assignment, I have seen, tends to help students solidify their voice and update it. For many of these students, we also tell them to read their writing out loud so they can hear the flow of their paper and revise it accordingly.

In this generation, almost none of these students are coming to college ready to revise their work at all.  I will be the first to admit that I came to college with this “one-and-done” mindset.  In my whole high school experience, I wrote one research paper.  One.  This paper took a whole semester to write, as my teacher stuck to this process-based mentality of teaching.  She said to pick a poem; I picked a poem.  She said to make an outline; I did.  She said to get research from books rather than online, to make an outline, make note cards, make a rough draft, and a final draft.  Throughout this entire process, never did I truly understand the motivation behind it.  I did not understand how I was supposed to integrate my scrawny ideas about a Langston Hughes poem into a paper with published authors and critics.  In my mind, a paper alluding so much to others’ research seemed akin to plagiarism, a watered-down version of these authors’ works.

Working in the writing center, I saw students constantly fail to integrate good sources that both enlightened and supported their work into their papers.  Most students would come through with an assigned number of sources, and they would have already filled them with random websites (from which they took a statistic or one solitary quote) or, oddly enough, Bible verses.  I found it incredibly difficult to explain to these students that, to be worth using, a source must enhance one’s writing.  Teaching students to determine useful, credible source material is, I believe, vital to academic writing and intellectual thinking.  Credible sources are one of the most useful tools of rhetoric when used well.  They create a conversation within a piece of writing between persons that are knowledgeable of the topic, and they allow a writer to insert him/herself into the discourse.  I came to understand finally my relationship with source material by reading across multiple disciplines.  This is why I believe that, in a freshman composition course, reading and discussion are as important as writing, if not more so.  Many of these students openly say they “don’t like” reading, and some will never attempt to read anything more intellectually stimulating than their Twitter feed.  However, relevant reading and in-class discussion, I have witnessed, can sometimes pull students out of this mindset and inspire them to take part in a bigger discourse.