In Defense of First-Year Writing Done Right
image from pixbay.com I have this awesome colleague who I admittedly disagree with often. This is one of the things I enjoy most about our conversations, though. I always leave feeling smarter. Either he has taught me something about the other perspective that I had not considered before, or I am able to better articulate my own stance on something for myself. Most recently, the latter happened in regards to First Year Writing (FYW or First-Year Composition/FYC). My colleague definitely falls into the First-Year Writing abolitionist group. He believes it's useless. After all, outside of the FYW classroom, where would students ever need to write essays like that again? At the university where we work, the FYW course also has a social reform focus, which can sometimes wind up confusing students-- they feel forced to choice a side that they might not buy into based on what they think their teacher feels about the issue. It seemed to me that my colleague had a singular vision of FYW an...