Shipka and English composition

The idea of the subject of communication going head-to-head against the subject of composition was a major moment of contention in Shipka’s book, and it reminded me in a lot of ways of the battle between composition professors and literature professors. In this case, however, composition teachers are the ones being too judgmental and trying to control the communication department. This divide between how Freshman English is taught and how it should be taught is something that I suppose every college department is going through, especially with the changing writing climate. Shipka explains that the main issue with Freshman English is that “traditional English course’s lack of…unified course content…[is] one of its fundamental weaknesses” (24). The fact that no one can seem to agree, even within an English department, on what English Composition should look like shows how unwilling some professors are to step outside of what they were taught as students and adapt to the changing world of writing.

            Shipka quotes Briggs about the major difference between communication teachers and compositions teachers:

                        A key difference between teachers of communication courses and traditional                                 freshman English courses is that the former tends to exhibit an “experiemental

                        attitude”…meeting routinely to exchange information and solicit feedback on

                        the way their courses were designed…Clyde Dow notes... “there is a tendency [in                         many of the newer communication courses] to disregard tradition and to

                        substitute an attitude of ‘I don’t know, let’s see.’ (25).

It makes me wonder what the road block is for composition professors. I would think that an English professor would want to make writing as accessible to others as possible because it is such an important skill for everyone to have a strong grasp on, from English majors to scientists. The fact that communication professors are more concerned with this is surprising to me. I understand that, obviously, communication includes writing, but by the time a student gets to a communication course, I would think that they should already understand how to be convincing with their writing, which is the job of the freshman English department.

            Even though I am an English major, I am in support of the communication approach. According to Shipka, there are multiple advantages to this communications approach to teaching freshman composition:

 A communications approach to freshman English…[is] grounded in social

l scientific theories of discourse [which] would underscore for students the            connection between the social and personal dimensions of communicative

practice…A communications approach…would examine how writing relates to

the other modes and media of communication…[and would ask] students to

examine the communicative process as a dynamic, embodied, multimodal

whole- one that both shapes and is shaped by the environment [meaning]

students might come to see writing, reading, speaking, and ways of

thinking and evaluating as “a function of place, time, sex, age and many

other elements of life” (26).

To me, this is exactly what writing should be today. We can no longer expect to interest students with worn out teaching techniques, such as mapping sentences, when there is so much more to writing. Making students interested in writing has to extend into their personal lives; if someone cannot relate to something, they cannot learn to understand or like it. I think that the communicative approach makes it easier for students to say “I like to write” or at least “writing is not scary to me, because I do it every single day.”

            This integration of writing into everyday life is indicative of the textbook my group analyzed for the presentation, Everyone is An Author. Both want to introduce the idea that writing is not this elitist camp that only the sacred few can enter into. I think there is nothing more important to teach students than that writing is an accessible task. How can English professors expect their students to want to go into the English major, or to even succeed in college, if they put a cloud around writing that makes it foreboding. Keeping up with the times is something that has to happen in college since the students walking through the doors are right in the middle of the changing media climate; students have smart phones and Tumblr accounts, and to not be aware of how everything they know impacts writing is a form of ignorance that needs to be remedied if English professors expect their students to push themselves into writing with enthusiasm.