Response to Brereton’s “The origin’s”, along with other thoughts

Brereton’s article really made me think about the logistics of the freshman composition course. It was an eye opener, especially from Scott’s perspective, on the struggle that still exists between the number of available teachers and the amount of students. Never before had I considered how teaching this kind of course worked out; I had always taken it for granted. From a student perspective it’s easy to take the teaching for granted: there’s an instructor that stands in front of the class that I’m supposed to acknowledge and maybe listen to every now and then, and then go home and complete the writing assignment. Now as a pseudo teacher, I realize that there’s so much more that goes into teaching, especially teaching composition, and since I’ve started this class I find myself constantly asking what the most crucial part of teaching composition is. Is it to stress grammar and make sure the student never makes a grammatical error? Is it to emphasize the writing process, so that the student understands that writing is an ongoing process, and sometimes may never be finished? These are questions that I struggle with and I don’t have the knowledge or experience to answer them ye, and may never be able to. I do champion Scott’s notion of the three essentials (Brereton 106), however I don't think that it is possible to achieve all three, especially the third essential, within the course of a semester.

I also find myself struggling with the evaluation aspect of the composition course as well, and while I do believe that evaluation is essential in promoting “good writing”, it’s the definition of “good writing” that eludes me. How do we evaluate the student’s writing, if we as a field of composition cannot define the terms and necessities that make “good writing?” True, we can outline the ways in which the student should be able to achieve good writing and enforce constant drilling and repetition of writing exercises with the hopes that they’ll produce “good writing”, but if we cannot universally agree and define what “good” is, and what makes certain writing more successful than others, how can the composition course as a whole succeed?

I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point when we’ll be able to list out steps and check boxes that define what good writing is. I think that we’ve achieved pinpointing bad writing and defining what bad writing is, but that still doesn’t help in defining what good writing is. Simply saying don’t do this, don’t do that doesn’t work when trying to write. However, it’s very interesting to me because I think not being able to define good writing is a good thing, because when we do define what is and how to produce good writing, so many other good things will be left out. That’s just my two cents anyways.