“Yeah, most people hate their writing seminars,” a junior told me outside J Street Library when I made a face to his question about whether I enjoyed my writing seminar. Immediately, a freshman boy who had been sitting across me protested, claiming that he immensely enjoyed his writing seminar and that he felt it did an adequate job in helping him become a better writer.
Writing seminar, which is the one class that every Princetonian must take, seems to be a hit-or-miss experience for students. The effectiveness of writing seminars has been discussed numerous times before, many times in this very section. In the last academic year, there were two columns that discussed the effectiveness of writing seminar. One discussed the lack of focus on teaching research skills and called for a curriculum that places equal emphasis on writing skills and research skills to prep students for junior papers and senior theses. Another, written by a freshman enrolled in writing seminar at the time, pointed to the lack of uniformity among the various writing seminars and the fact that many students can evade doing assigned work in their writing seminars. One of the comments on this article echoed what I view as the main issue with writing seminars: the lack of acknowledgement that people enter the University with different levels of writing preparation.
Freshmen do not arrive at the University having had the same high school experiences; some come from competitive schools with strong writing programs and some come from schools that barely required them to write. Placing all of these freshmen into the same level writing seminar makes as much sense as placing a person who is conversationally fluent in Spanish and someone who is a beginner in the same course. Effectiveness is maximized when students are on the same page, when professors do not need to struggle between the need to teach the basics of how to write an academic paper on one hand and the need to keep a more fluent writer engaged on the other.
Our peer institutions seem to have discovered the issue of non-differentiation in teaching college-level writing courses. The website of the Critical Writing Program at theUniversity of Pennsylvaniasummarizes the need for differentiation when it says, “Just as students who attended math- and science-intensive high schools may be better prepared for such courses at Penn, so too students who excelled at writing-intensive schools may be more advanced writers upon arrival. In turn, some students have had a bad experience with writing and, shying away from it, are not as practiced as their colleagues.”
Understanding this, many of our peer institutions divide their freshmen into different level writing classes, either through a diagnostic test or self-placement. Harvard, for example, requires freshmen to read approximately 40 pages of scholarly work and compose an essay based on it within a 72-hour frame during the summer before they begin. They are then placed into one of two different levels. At Yale, most students choose to take a writing class despite there being no formal requirement. Students are allowed to go into either two different levels of freshman writing seminar or one for both freshmen and sophomores, which is more intense. Penn offers both the option of taking a diagnostic test and opting for self-placement into its three different writing seminars. It also has a course specifically designed for international students who do not feel comfortable with the prospect of having to write at the college level in English yet.
Princeton should follow the lead of its peer institutions to offer classes that can help each and every student leave this place having become a better writer. The University should not offer classes where some people are feeling too challenged and some too bored. Writing is a universally important skill that should be continuously cultivated at every stage of someone’s life. Some people may have entered Princeton with the ability to write at a college level; they, too, have room for improvement. It is not only the people who lacked good guidance in high school who will benefit from differentiation. Everyone can become better writers in an environment that poses the right amount of challenge, and the University should take measures to cultivate such an environment for all students.
Erica Choi is a freshman from Bronxville, NY. She can be reached at gc6@princeton.edu.
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