How to fix Writing 101

First initiated as part of Curriculum 2000, the only mandatory course for all Duke undergraduates—Writing 101—is a good idea that has become a flawed tool. This is a pity because there is a strong need for a mandatory first-year writing course that prepares all students for college-level writing. Today, we offer some advice to the program’s administrators on how to improve the Writing 101 experience. A better Writing 101 course would focus less on highly specific topics and more on the core set of writing skills required for college-level work.

A good place to start would be to overhaul the information that is made available to students prior to registration. Go on ACES, and you will find that the bulletin course description for each Writing 101 is identical, reading, “Instruction in the complexities of providing sophisticated academic argument, with attention to critical analyses and rhetorical practices.” There are some detailed synopses available for Fall 2013 depending on the topic, often leaving freshmen to pick their course largely or entirely based on the topics, which this semester range from Decoding Disney to Ecology of Species Migrations.

In reality, of course, the topics are a sideshow. Writing 101 isn’t about developing an understanding of the thematic complexities of “Mulan,” it is about developing a core set of writing skills. If there are going to be disparities in the specific nature of skills imparted by each course—one course might focus on writing for science publications, but another deals with fiction writing—that should be reflected in the course descriptions. Students coming into Duke have different needs with respect to writing, and they should be allowed to pick courses based on the skills they want to hone rather than a topic that sounds cool.

In some cases, improvements could be made to the courses themselves. The program deserves praise for being among the only of its kind not to rely on graduate students to do the teaching. Furthermore, many of the courses succeed at imparting a crucial set of skills that benefit students throughout their time at Duke. In other cases, though, professors are given too much leeway to veer from the program’s primary purpose into the minutiae of their course topic. The result is a wide array of experiences: some students come away having developed a core set of writing skills, but others are left only with a deep understanding of a very specific topic. So both students and professors should be made aware that the purpose of Writing 101 has less to do with the subject matter being discussed and everything to do with the process of developing writing skills that can be applied to other subjects, too.

It would be easy to endorse scrapping the program altogether, but this would be an overwrought response to a fixable problem. Good and convincing writing is essential in almost any academic field; it is perhaps the single core competency necessary at every level of academia. Although it is true that students enter Duke with widely disparate needs in terms of writing, all of them can benefit from the peer editing process and focus on argumentation Writing 101 offers. Thus, we urge the program’s leaders to adjust the program to better reflect its very noble intentions.

This editorial was updated to note that some detailed synopses were available for some Writing 101 courses, but the bulletin description was uniform across all.