Re: one's own students and everyone else's too

[diepenbrock@UHCL4.CL.UH.EDU]

Hello Margaret and Chari!  I thought it would be appropriate for another 
UH type to jump in on this conversation.  Here at UH Clear Lake most 
professors do not require WC visits, but some say that if students want 
to revise an essay for a higher grade, they must take it to the WC.  In 
those cases, we have copies of their assignments and an on-going 
discussion/relationship with them.  One history professor has also 
supplied us with a guide to writing history.  I have required my Advanced 
Writing students to visit the center in the past and received just the 
kind of complaints Chari is speaking of: too little time, too far away, 
etc.  For the *most* part they come to me afterwards and say "I had no 
idea how much this would help me!"  I now strongly recommend attendance 
and require it for those who are really in need of additional help.  

RE: whether there is such a thing as academic writing, Margaret.  I 
really like what Patricia Bizzell has to say about the academic discourse 
community in her essay "What is a Discourse Community?" (_Academic 
Discourse and Critical Consciousness_).  "We [compositionists] want to be an 
academic discipline, yet we want to be unlike any other academic discipline in 
that we neither rule out nor require any form of knowledge or 
methodology." She explains this "eclecticism" as the result of 
compositionists' desires to avoid the dominating nature of canonical 
knowledge.  Yet, as writing instructors, we do hold the metaphoric "keys" to 
the gate of the academy, a position that Bruce Herzberg characterizes as 
a mythical one.  In other words, we do not simply offer the means to 
accessing any type of academic discourse (as we may wish); instead we 
do, in fact, indoctrinate students into certain ways of thinking about and
producing knowledge.  Those ways of thinking can be classified as 
academic and most of them cross disciplines, though some disciplines 
focus on particular intellectual activities to the exclusion of others.
Bizzell does an excellent job of classifying the intellectual practices that 
academics have in common, while providing the slightly critical and 
seemingly detached point of view she seems to bring to most of her 
discussions.  (The quintessential feature of academic discourse?)

Well--I'd love to hear what others think about this issue.

Chloe Diepenbrock
UH-Clear Lake
Houston, Texas

On Mon, 4 Nov 1996, Margaret Clark wrote:

> Chari, hi from another Houston outpost. We're at the Downtown campus. Your
> post reminded me of how many of my students in my developmental courses
> say that they got A's in high school English and are stunned to be in a
> non-credit course; they really do not get it that college English is
> something quite different than anything they've done before. I think we
> have a lot of fine writers with fine minds in these pre-fyc classes who
> haven't a clue to what's being asked of them in academic writing. 
> 
> Two disclaimers here, please; I am not, repeat not trashing high school
> writing instruction. Believe me, I'd never do that.  
> 
> Also, I'm uncomfortably aware that I'm assuming that there is such an
> animal as "academic writing."  I've heard a lot of the issues snapping at 
> the toes of this puppy and have a hearty respect for the frailty of a 
> definition. 
> 
> Nonetheless, the guys I get in my classes often know nothing or right next
> to it about expository writing, or the concept of forming an original idea
> and supporting it. And that, more than punctuation or grammar god knows,
> is why I think beginning writers need to be hooked into the lab in any way
> possible. What they don't know about college writing -- and critical
> reading and thinking -- can hurt us all, big-time. So I'm for requiring
> token visits of folks who are as busy at UH-D as yours are at UH-V (is
> that a legal abbreviation?).  Any start is better than no start at all. 
> We have so much to lose if we don't jump over our hypothetical ivied walls
> and make contact any way we can. 
> 
> Margaret Clark
> clark@dt.uh.edu
> 
>