The merits of the University Writing Course

One of the most common complaints I hear from the freshmen who live in my hall in Gilbert-Addoms Dormitory, where I am a resident adviser, concerns the mandatory University Writing Course. I will not go into the specifics, as they are likely to be expurgated by the editors, but you get the idea. My residents are not very fond of it.

Now, the course has undergone a few changes since I took it way back in 1996. There is now a peculiar web page to which you upload your completed papers, and it invariably becomes clogged when hundreds of students turn in their papers at the same time. The course is also divided into several sections-or "strands," which highlight six topics-for more focused approaches to rhetoric and research. But of course, the more things change, the more they stay the same. My residents have complained that the class is "pointless," that it "sucks," and that its relevance to engineers is questionable, at best. These comments are eerily familiar to University Writing Program administrators.

I am in a tiny minority at Duke-I had a good experience in UWC. I think it is a great program, warts and all. Out of all my friends and peers at the University, I know only three or four people who will agree with me. And that is too bad, because everything I needed to learn at the University, I learned in UWC. Hands down, it is the most important class I have taken because it has had the most influence on my work in subsequent courses.

I have my own theory on why everyone hates the course. I came to Duke thinking that I was a hot-shot writer and I wanted to be a journalist. I received nothing but positive reinforcement from my teachers and parents in regard to my writing. I even went to writing camp during the summer after my junior year in high school. I was in love with Tom Wolfe and I wanted to write about society and politics. No, scratch that, I wanted my writing to change society and politics. I think my story is similar to that of others: We all came to Duke thinking our writing skills were already perfect, but we were completely ignorant of concepts like ethos and argument arrangement. As freshmen, we are all a dangerous mixture of overconfidence and incompetence.

When I was taking UWC, this dilemma was not clear to me, and I struggled. My biggest difficulty was making a claim. I wanted to present both sides of an issue, without taking a stand, believing that by being impartial that I could better describe a topic. This was all I ever did in high school-expository writing. I described how a theme emerged in a novel, or how the three branches of the federal government were organized. In the transition to college, I did not realize that all of that substance is now the given in a paper; the real meat of an essay comes in the development and organization of claims about the nature of that substance.

Once I understood this, my writing improved immeasurably. Unfortunately, this realization did not take place during UWC. I had no idea what I was doing my freshman year when it came to writing a paper. I was very lucky to have professors who tolerated creative work; my first successful papers were homages or parodies of the literary style of class texts. My writing technique of choice was an artful avoidance of making a claim. My first paper in college that made me proud came in a philosophy seminar at the end of freshman year. Instead of writing a paper, I wrote a dialogue in the manner of some of the texts we read in class. But-perhaps this is a function of writing about two people in a philosophical conflict-by the end of that sleepless night, I had written not only a paper, but an argument.

Without realizing it, I had applied everything I had learned in UWC about how to structure a paper logically. From that point on, writing a paper was transformed from the relatively simple task of becoming inspired about a work of literature to a process of selecting a claim and supporting it with evidence. UWC challenged me to organize my thoughts and to structure the content of my papers around arguments, not appreciation.

So, as I tell my residents, UWC can be frustrating when you are right out of high school. It is hard to adjust when you are suddenly held to much higher standards. Also, do not underestimate the value of this course that you hate now. It will be a resource that you come back to over and over as you refine your craft as a writer and as a student.