I don’t know when the fear of writing became so widespread amongst incoming undergraduates, but it is certainly something that weighs heavily on the minds of my students.
On the first day of classes, I had several students raise their hands when they came to the paragraph in my syllabus that discussed “good writing.” Although the paragraph that followed the header entitled “What Is Good Writing?” was one that explained my understanding of said concept in an inclusive, obtainable way, their eyes went straight to “good writing” and they immediately panicked. Their subsequent introduction letters were brief notes about their personal lives and multiple paragraphs lamenting on what awful writers they were, why they hated writing, and how frustrating they find writing.
After literacy narratives, explanations of academic writing, collages, genre talk, and the one on one conferences, I’ve come to understand that there seems to be some sort of standard for academic papers that students are introduced to during high school and through assumptions of what it is to write academically, ultimately linking this idea that “academic writing”=”good writing.”
According to one of my students who wrote in their introductory letter that “they really enjoy creative writing, and think they’re really good at it, but when it comes to writing essays [they] don’t do so well,” there are certain rules that determine and make the writing academic, and if you cannot master these, you cannot write well. This same student, along with several others, wrote in their letters that they don’t enjoy writing academic papers because they don’t feel like they know anything about how to write successfully, and don’t feel passionate about the subjects they’re asked to write about.
These fears, the misunderstanding of what makes writing good, the lack of knowledge of what it takes to write well, and a lack of passion when it comes to writing the paper itself seem to be the main variables that frustrate my students when it comes to writing. Therefore, I think it is my job, with the support of the curriculum, to show these students how their personal interests, skills, and know-how are all imperative facets to becoming a “good writer.”
According to Shaughnessey, it is detrimental for an instructor to feel “…no need to relate what he is teaching to what his students know, to stop exploring the contexts within which the conventions of academic discourse has developed” and instead lean upon the privileged language that determines what is academic, what is successful writing. This curriculum has permitted students to deconstruct their comprehension of what it is to write well, and shows them how passion, personal knowledge, and the academic can converge successfully.