In Defense of: Writing Seminar

Writing seminars are god-awful. Flat-out terrible. I’m not going to fight that, but I’m of the opinion that they’re a necessary part of Princeton. Hear me out:

The hatred everybody has for writing sem stems from how the Writing Program advertises them. Right now, they’re marketed as small, group-focused classes — with sweet topics! — where you develop close relationships with teachers who actually care about making you a better writer and thrive in an environment that fosters friendship.

Yeah, not so much.

First: The topic doesn’t matter. We all freaked out about not getting our first-choice writing sem, but the writing seminar website doesn’t tell you that “Analyzing Pottery Narratives in the Soviet Gulag” will, in all likelihood, be just as terrible as, say, “Harry Potter and Judd Apatow: Watching Movies in Class.” Case in point: Last semester, word is that WRI 123: Accounting for Taste, in which you look at why people like great things, and WRI 185: Time Travel — how can you screw that up? — were straight-up terrible. I got WRI 198: Imagining America, which sounds awful, but it ended up being pretty bearable — high praise for a writing sem.

Second: It’s a miracle that people make friends through writing seminar. The workshop thing is touted as a great way to make friends, but, in truth, it’s the most brutally efficient way I’ve encountered to get students to violently hate each other. Nobody actually reads the awful draft you crapped out the night before and submitted three seconds before the deadline, and the snarky responses people write to look good for the professor never rub anybody the right way. Getting workshopped is like attending an hour-and-a-half precept for which you did absolutely zero reading with a class full of crotchety preceptors on your ass.

Third: Writing seminars do nothing for your ability as a writer. If you want to become a better writer, take humanities classes. In writing sem, your writing ability stays pretty constant throughout — what gets worked out is your physical ability to write. Before writing sem, you probably thought eight pages were a lot to write — I know I did. Once you’ve violently extruded those eight pages in three hours, it’s arts and crafts.

Oh, and the three papers you’re supposed to write? The Writing Program criminally lowballs that statistic. Every time you write a draft, your professor cuts it up like sushi, and you pretty much have to rewrite it from scratch, no matter how much time you spent on the draft. In effect, you write six papers, and that is a lot of damn writing. Keeping up this pace makes pretty much anything else — except for maybe the Humanities Sequence or Integrated Science — feel simple.

Bottom line: Writing sem is difficult, but its difficulty goads you into making mistakes. You probably started one of the drafts on the night before it was due. I did, and it was an awful, awful experience. And I learned to never do that shit again. When all is said and done, writing sem taught me how to get by with next to zero work, but it also showed me — pretty violently — how much more enjoyable Princeton is if I plan ahead and put in some quality work. For that, I’m very grateful.

If you think of writing seminar as a road trip that someone planned to go horribly wrong, then you’ll love it. Next time you start a five-page paper on the night before it’s due, remember the time you wrote an entire research paper in seven hours and think fondly of your writing sem. Conversely, next time you do things right and start planning that paper the day it’s assigned, you’ll smile remembering how terrible sitting in front of your laptop and extruding that 12-pager at 2 a.m. was. So get up from your chair, clasp your hands and praise writing seminar.