Apprenticeship Session 2: 2/25/08

Today was my second session shadowing a writing fellow. Today a student came in with a paper for CORE, which she wanted some help with. The assignment was different than anything I have done in my own CORE class, so on the one hand it was interesting just to see the different assignments that teachers with different teaching styles give to their students. On the other hand, it got me thinking about what I consider to be some of the downsides of academic writing.

Early in this semester, my CORE professor, Dr. Essid, gave our class an essay topic in which we chose the two texts from the first semester which we felt had influenced us most over the year, or the texts that had resonated most deeply with us. The closest thing to that essay that I have written would be my college admission essay, mainly because Dr. Essid allowed us to draw upon our personal experiences in our papers, and to use the first person.

While I understand that academic writing does not support the use of first person, I feel that the "style" of academic writing is a little too strict. It is very easy for a writer to write a paper that sounds academic without actually saying very much. I am guilty of this myself. I know how to make a paper sound like I know what I'm talking about without actually making much in the way of an argument, and while the final result may look acceptable at first glance it does not help my grade and I do not take much away from the assignment. I wonder if there is a way to encourage students to drawn more on personal experience, or to make their papers more personal, simply to help them engage more in the paper. I feel that, as tutors, if we can help students and writers put more of themselves into their papers while maintaining the standard of academic writing, the resulting papers would almost certainly be stronger. It is so much easier to write and to argue a point convincingly if one cares about the subject matter or is invested in it in some way. I think that if tutors can find a way to connect the paper to the student, both the paper and the writer would benefit.