You might be thinking that the school paper–thesis driven, topic sentences in each paragraphs, logical transitions, adhering to an academic style guide MLA, APA, or Chicago–is an artificial one, a genre that most students won’t use after commencement. And you might be right. I would counter, though, that first-year composition students have three more years of working in this genre ahead of them–more if they pursue graduate study–and there is value in preparing them to work in a genre that occurs only in the academic environment. Their scholar-professors in their major classes write and read thesis-driven, highly structured, style-guide-following scholarly articles all the time, and most of them expect students to turn in work that demonstrates progressive levels of mastery of this form. The school papers that seniors submit in their major classes should be starting to look like they might be able to be revised into a scholarly article.
Beyond the classroom, though, the principles of the school paper retain value even as the genres in which we write look less and less like the scholarly article. Most feature articles, op-eds, and blog posts have a guiding thesis, even if it is implied and can’t be underlined. The topic-information-explanation paragraph structure that I teach my students makes for solid presentation of information in formats ranging from snap and tweet to professional memo and e-mail. And every workplace, *every single one,* has a house style that guides the way work must be presented, whether that work is an engineering drawing, patient notes, or newspaper article. Being able to compare their work against the model and revise as needed will stand my students in good stead with future bosses.
I’ve been really frustrated by the lack of good models to share with students for the school paper. It’s one of the biggest challenges of teaching the compulsory composition sequence for first year students. Most first year students are not ready to read academic journal articles. They just haven’t taken the introductory classes in other disciplines that would allow them to make sense of the content and the vocabulary. Composition readers include either professionally written essays or model student papers, the former can be engaging, but don’t generally use the kind of thesis-driven model that the students are being asked to write, while the latter are often contrived and uninteresting. My current university’s composition program uses public writing such as feature articles from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, but like the professional essays collected in the readers, these rarely have an overtly stated thesis, and they lack the sort of internal paragraph structure that we ask students to produce. Some faculty have success using student work from previous semesters, but this requires obtaining and tracking permission, and the work is only marginally better than that which the new students are producing themselves.
I had an epiphany today–my current university has an journal of undergraduate non-fiction writing. My colleague who is the faculty advisor has a shelf of annual volumes full of exactly the kind of writing the students in the compulsory first year composition course should be working toward as they move through their liberal arts core and major classes. So in my summer section of our EN101 course, rather than reading and discussing public writing while struggling to produce school papers, the students will be reading and discussing articles from Magnificat, while striving to produce work in that same genre. These articles have been written by students like my students, not professionals. The writers have a genuine interest in the topics they have chosen. These student writers have opted-in to having their work published with their names attached, and the articles have been through several rounds of revision to reach their current form.
I’m really looking forward to piloting this choice of reading material for the department.
Update:
This pilot of reading fromĀ Magnificat was successful with the students in my summer intensive section of composition. The students were able to engage with the ideas in the articles and were also able to notice and critique the structural elements that I was requiring of them in the writing they were producing. These articles will definitely be on the syllabus of my fall section of the course.