One week ago, Dartmouth College launched the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and officially came over the to dark side. For Big Green students, this means one thing: like us here at Penn, they no longer have the right not to write.
Starting next fall, Dartmouth students won’t be eligible for exemption from the school’s freshman writing requirement. In past years, up to 20 percent of Dartmouth’s incoming class was excused based on high SAT scores. But now every single one of them will enroll in the dreaded First-Year Seminar.
One part of me thinks this is a good thing. After all, Dartmouth students should graduate with writing skills in certain areas — like how to record the minutes for meetings run by Penn grads. But the other part of me remembers those Writing Seminar horror stories I’ve heard from students at this university, and I just can’t wish that kind of torture on our Ivy brethren in New Hampshire.
Don’t get me wrong; I loved my writing seminar, “Television Criticism” with Gail Shister. (Take it.) But very few students like theirs. Instead, they complain about Penn’s horrid writing system, which gives teachers a chance to pen “clever” course titles (”Tainted Love?”) while generating billions of dollars for some dude named Bruffee. Let’s face it: nobody likes to be told they can’t do something. So where do professors get off telling us we write wrong?
And furthermore, why do those teachers think their such good writers? Who’s idea is it that there’s one “good” style of writing, anyway? Us Penn students don’t need grammar and spelling maintenence, much less criticism on how we use too many big, excessive, verbose adjectives. Nor criticism on fragments in the process. (Its not like these are rules we’ve never heard of.) No one wants their first bad grade on a paper because of some missing comma and that’s more than likely to happen in a writing seminar. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we know how to write, not just the mechanics, but, also how to choose the word with the greatest affect on any reader.
So there’s my argument, Critical Writing Program. Good luck finding any evidence against me.
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February 6th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
wow my stat class blows
but this article rocks.
lmao - “meetings run by penn grads” hahaha so true
and what’s the deal with “Institute for Writing and Rhetoric” first of all, that sounds like the wrong preposition - or at least it’s just awkward as hell. and second, rhetoric has such a shitty reputation with our political climate. What a pretentious bullshit-sounding program.
the big green brethren at dartmouth should stick with what they 24/7, smoking green
February 6th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Have you read your peers’ papers? I have proofread many papers here, and Penn students are definitely in severe need of some grammar lessons. That’s not necessarily saying that we’re not better than average, but that’s because average is really, really bad - just look at the comments section on YouTube sometime.