Learn to write despite writing seminar

This spring, it is one year since I completed that most dreaded of all Princeton rites of passage: the freshman writing seminar. Designed to prepare students for academic writing at Princeton, the course entails the composition of four essays on topics ranging from animal behavior to fairy tales to tragedy. For many students, the moment when they turn in that fourth and final paper is one of joy in which they are finally liberated from a semester of torture.

The writing seminar was actually my favorite class of the semester, the one for which I worked to the extent of ignoring other courses. But now, a year later, I reflect back on those long hours of writing and wonder how they have helped me in other courses and with other writing assignments at Princeton. In some cases, the writing seminar provides useful lessons. Because the program differs significantly from other writing experiences at Princeton, however, in some aspects it falls short of its goal.

The most useful thing I learned from my seminar experience was that I am a painfully slow writer. Writing seminars give you ample opportunity to realize this by considerably lengthening the writing process. Professors first assign a draft, which they laboriously work over with you; only a week after this conference, the final paper is due. Writing seminars impart well the lesson not to let the first draft be the last, but this extended process is a luxury found in no other course at Princeton. Writing seminars, unfortunately, do not provide students with the opportunity to complete a paper in real time. This means that when a student later finds himself with only a week between when questions are assigned and the due date, the experience may be a first.

Another thing writing seminars do well is to emphasize critical peer editing. Sometimes a fresh perspective can make the difference between an excellent paper and a mediocre one. However, every other course at Princeton leaves you on your own to find that new pair of eyes, and writing seminars don't instruct students on how to recognize readers qualified to critique their work. Because I can't send my father 10- and 20-page papers on top of columns and applications, I've learned to make friends in the course — preferably with people smarter than myself — and propose paper swaps. I've learned to swallow my fear and seek out professors on my own, at least to discuss ideas. Writing seminars teach none of this bravery, nor do they mention how to identify good editors for later academic work. Emphasizing the importance of second readers is of little use unless students are equipped with strategies to find them.

The writing seminars make other omissions as well. I did not learn how to outline until this September, when a senior friend introduced me to this most useful skill. By starting with an extremely detailed outline that includes all citations, one can set up structure before agonizing over wording and syntax. This system hugely increases efficiency in terms of page output per hour. Using this method, I've twice churned out relatively polished drafts of 15- to 20-page papers in two days. Unfortunately, this miracle was due to the advice of my savvy friend, not to the teaching of my writing seminar instructor.

The writing seminar program should also encourage students to select seminars that are related to their potential majors. Academic writing styles vary dramatically in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. A student majoring in the humanities will find a course on Shakespeare more useful than one based in sociology, and thus be more likely to apply the lessons learned in his seminar to later coursework. Although students often get their first or second choice seminar, placement remains rather random, and little instruction is given to help students select a seminar that is appropriate to their interests.

The writing seminar program could do more to prepare students from different high school backgrounds for academic writing at Princeton. An artificial construct, the writing seminar does not take into account the actual writing conditions found in other courses in which students find dictated questions of varying clarity, short turnaround periods and no designated source of help or second opinions. While slowing down the process of writing can help to smooth the transition to college academics, students are best served by instruction on how to cope in classes that leave them writing independently and without structure. Emily Stolzenberg is a sophomore from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.