As 'Prince' columnist Jeff Wolf '02 rightly pointed out in the Nov. 15 issue, Princeton students should learn to write well. However, a new, more rigorous writing requirement, along the lines of a mandatory freshman seminar, is not necessarily the best way to teach writing skills.
First, the process of writing is highly personal, and necessarily differs from individual to individual. It should therefore be learned on an individual level, not in a group classroom setting. Different minds work differently. This is a beautiful trait of our species, and one that is responsible for many of our greatest accomplishments.
Therefore, something inside me cringes at the thought of hundreds of freshmen being indoctrinated in the Five Commandments of the writing process: Thou shalt draft. Thou shalt revise. Thou shalt rewrite. Thou shalt proofread. Honor thy MLA handbook, that thy days may be long.
Different students, using entirely different writing techniques that they learned in entirely different ways, can and do produce work of similar quality. Consider a not-so-random sample of my friends and housemates. I, for one, will move on to the next sentence in this column only when I'm completely satisfied with the wording of this one, and will revise the final product little, if at all.
One of my friends, on the other hand, writes her papers in longhand, rewrites them in longhand, then revises them once more as she's typing them up. Another student I know types a rough draft, then goes through the hard copy line by line with a red pen before typing a final version.
Each discipline requires of its students a different kind of writing. It would be difficult for even the broadest feasible selection of seminar offerings to provide useful writing skills to future comparative literature majors as well as to prospective history, chemistry and engineering majors. As my neighbor, an evolutionary and ecological biology major, commented somewhat bitterly as I wrote this column, "Nothing I learned in LIT 131w is helping me write this lab report."
Discipline-specific writing styles and formats are best learned in the context of discipline-specific courses. In fact, students frequently need to have a fairly detailed factual and conceptual understanding of a given field before they can understand the reasoning behind the formal and stylistic conventions of its literature.
Rather than require all freshmen to take a writing seminar, Princeton should require its instructors to grade students according to the quality as well as the content of their writing. If the University were to implement such a standard, each student would be free to develop his own optimal composition technique and to perfect the writing style compatible with his chosen field of study. Emphasis would be placed on product, rather than process, just as it is in the world outside of school.
Most importantly, students would be more apt to act like the adults that they are, seeking help with their writing on their own initiative — and taking a hit in their grades if they choose not to. Melissa Waage is a politics major from Johnson City, Tenn. She can be reached at mrwaage@princeton.edu.
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