Welcome to Freshman Comp
A Few Introductory Remarks for a Course on Writing
For the next four years (or more) most of you will be,
essentially, unpaid professional essayists. That is, most of
the work you do in your university careers will involve
expository writing of one kind or another. In your liberal
arts courses you will produce papers and you will sit essay
exams. In the sciences you will have to write up experiments
. . . and you will sit still more essay exams. If you
compete for special awards or scholarships there will very
likely be essays involved; if you become graduate students
you will have to write up grant proposals. As a college
student you can't escape writing, so you might as well be
good at it.
Many students believe that the ability to write is a gift
that a few people have and most do not. They believe that
someone who is not a gifted writer is fated to struggle
along and suffer and never really get it at all. In fact,
writing is mainly the determined application of learned
skills, and the point of this course is to develop those
skills and give students confidence in their growing
abilities. Those of you who think that writing is hard are
right -- writing is hard -- but you should consider that
writing is hard for everyone, including (and maybe even
especially) full-time writers. This being the case, you'll
have to learn to pace yourselves, to structure your time.
Often that will mean looking ahead and getting an early
start on the longer reading or writing assignments. Most
important, it means learning enough about your own habits of
mind and quirks of creativity that you can make the fullest
use of your abilities. When Wilson Pickett sang, "I'm gonna
wait till the midnight hour," he couldn't have been singing
about writing, or at least, not about writing well.
Writing is all about self-discipline. Just as an athlete
has to keep in shape with daily workouts, so does a writer
have to exercise his or her abilities to keep them sharp.
You cannot improve your writing without practice. Every
student of writing (in other words, every writer, because
the learning never stops) should try to write a page a day,
whether this is for a specific assignment or a journal entry
or a letter. "A page a day" means just that; it's not the
same as seven pages once a week. Writing has to become a
daily habit.
We'll try to take a long and careful look at the process
of writing, and though this will be something complex and
unique to each student, still we can generalize for the
moment that writing is essentially a three-stage process of
planning, drafting, and revising. By zeroing in on each of
these stages we can begin to take some of the mystery and
even the difficulty out of writing. We can help to nip
trouble in the bud by seeing that "writer's block" is most
often the result of trying to work the process out of
sequence . . . when it's not simply procrastination. Don't
confuse the two. If you sit at your desk for hours and hours
and you're not daydreaming but really concentrating on the
task at hand and still the words won't come, then you may
indeed be suffering from writer's block, a very rare and
serious condition. If, however, you decide to put off
writing until you're "ready," and in the meantime figure
that you might as well finish watching just this one episode
of I Love Lucy, and then you remember that you need to go
out for paperclips, what you're suffering from is
procrastination, and the only cure is to sit down and get
busy, and before you know it you'll be absorbed in what
you're doing and you'll forget all about how unready you
are, or were.
I'm willing to bet that, for most of you, writing is an
irksome and unpleasant business, and that you wouldn't be
here at all if the course weren't required. I'll wager
further that for most of you, writing means English class
and finding yourself stuck in the almost hopeless game of
trying to guess what the teacher wants you to think about an
essay or a poem or a story or a play. Often the premise of
literature courses is that authors are secretly philosophers
or politicians (and this is sometimes true), and so the
point of reading is to ferret out the darker meanings and
hidden symbols and deeper intentions of a work.
I hope you'll be pleased to learn that this is not an
English class, or a Comp Lit class. This is a writing
course. In this course the idea is that a good writer
chooses a given form because it suits his or her imagination
and purposes in some special way, and that the point of
reading is 1) to enjoy the work, and 2) to understand the
work as writing, that is, as an example of rhetorical
strategies.
I should emphasize that by "rhetoric" here I don't mean
the hollow and even deceptive oratory implied by the phrase,
"empty rhetoric" -- no, what I mean by "rhetoric" is simply
"the artful and effective use of words." Rhetoric as such is
one of the very oldest university disciplines, and it was
studied formally for many centuries before there were any
English or Comp Lit departments. If "writing" and
"literature" are all knotted uncomfortably together in your
head with "symbolism" and the verbal section of the SAT,
maybe the problem is simply: too many English classes. If
you haven't been able to see the forest for the trees,
that's all right. In this class we'll look at the trees.
Since this is not an English class, the focus is not so much
on "ideas" or "themes" as on rhetorical craft. We'll be
doing quite a lot of reading, but never with the coercive
fear that ideas or themes might show up on the next test.
Personally, I believe that, if the writing is good, the
ideas and themes will take care of themselves just fine, and
that this is just the way the author intended it. After all,
Melville wrote Moby-Dick, not the Cliff Notes to Moby-Dick.
We'll work on learning to read as writers, in much the same
way that Mozart might have learned to listen to music. It's
not that hard to imagine little Wolfgang hearing a piece by
Bach, say, or Vivaldi, and thinking, Hmm, that's good, how
can I use it without just stealing it, what can I do to it
to make it mine?
Writing is an art just like music is an art, but there is
at least one crucial difference. Music is much more
intuitive than writing. Language skills, on the other hand,
and especially the skills of preserving language in written
form, draw more on the considered experience of the writer.
Almost without exception, the best writers have been the
best readers, and it is very rare to find something worth
reading by an author who hasn't done a great deal of writing
already (most of it, certainly, unpublished). We can talk
about a musical "genius," and we can talk about a literary
"genius," but clearly the word doesn't mean the same thing
in both cases. A great musician can seem to come from
nowhere; when Mozart was still a child the music was already
pouring out of him. Writing is a set of skills altogether
harder and slower to develop, and they never arise in a
vacuum. The history of writing has no young Mozarts dashing
off novels at the age of six.
Why is this so? I think it's because language is such a
complex social phenomenon, much of it not intuitive in the
slightest. There is really no good, sound, logical reason
not to put adjectives after the noun, as the French do . . .
but for all kinds of quirky historical reasons, we just
don't do it that way in English. The Russians seem to get
along just fine without using articles, but we can't do
without them in English. Our language is a vast teeming
swamp of rules and exceptions to those rules and strange
conventions and exceptions to those conventions. . . . There
is really no end to it, and there is certainly no way that a
six-year-old girl could master verbal skills enough to
enable her to write, say, a polemic against the capital
gains tax, or a description of twelfth-century farming
techniques. And even if she did, magically, have the verbal
dexterity for the job, it's hard to imagine her assimilating
sufficient knowledge of the world and its workings. Good
writing is the art of keeping all kinds of unrelated balls
in the air: words, logic, rhythm, adherence to convention,
defiance of convention, understanding of the subject,
understanding of the reader and the reader's expectations.
Writing, in fact, is a completely impossible activity and
it's no wonder that writers over the ages have gotten into
the habit of talking about "the muse" or the holy spirit
whispering in the ear. The only thing more difficult than
writing is describing all that goes on in the act of
writing. And that's why, ultimately, the only way to learn
to write is just to do it.
If our six-year-old genius isn't quite ready to do much
writing, though, she nevertheless may already have to an
exquisite degree some of the necessary intuitive abilities
of a good writer, and the chief of these is the ability to
tell a story. Even the most abstruse and difficult piece of
writing, if it is good writing, is in some way a story. An
essay, for example, is the story of an idea, and the idea
stays alive as long as readers nod their heads in agreement
(not sleepiness). Let this be our starting point then. Early
in the course most of the writing we'll do will be in the
narrative mode, and gradually we'll work our way to the mode
of argument -- that is, to the much more complicated
business of telling a story in two ways (or more) in order
to demonstrate that one way gets at the truth of the story
better than does the other.
Writing is the principal means of communication amongst
educated people, the means by which ideas are transmitted,
and it's fitting that the University of San Francisco
emphasizes writing as the paramount skill of a college
education. And more than that: writing is a form of
thinking. Writing is not just a way to demonstrate what you
have learned in college; it is also how you learn. The act
of writing engages the imagination in unique ways. The
writing mind often finds closer combinations and deeper
connections than does the reading mind, or the talking mind,
or the TV-watching mind. If you think that writing is just a
particularly unpleasant form of regurgitation, then you've
never done any serious writing.
In writing the real issue, then, is: How deep will you
dig? In this course we'll dig very deep indeed. We're about
to embark on the adventure of making ourselves better
writers, better readers, and most of all, better thinkers .
. . and writing is the way we'll go about it.
© Michael Fleming
Berkeley, California
September, 1991
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