New writing requirement

For all those who have ever struggled to craft the perfect paper only to have it butchered by a professor's pen and bloodied with red ink, it is hard not to envy the Class of 2005. The new freshman writing seminars proposed by Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel will tack an additional class onto the A.B. course load, increasing the number of classes required for graduation from 30 to 31. But if the seminars succeed in improving the writing skills of freshmen — as Dean Malkiel suggests — they will be well worth the extra time and effort.

Raising the standards for student written work is an ambitious goal, and special care must be given to ensure that students are given the proper tools to improve their writing skills. By limiting the number of students to 12 per seminar and incorporating teaching techniques such as peer reviews and line-by-line editing, the new writing requirement promises to provide students with an intensive educational experience. If successful, the program could do more than merely ease the transition between high schooland college-level expectations — they could ease students' anxiety about general assignments, junior papers and, of course, senior theses.

Students who have fulfilled the University's writing requirement under the current system can attest to its "arbitrariness." The only real and consistent difference between writing requirement courses and regular A.B. courses is the "w" that appears after the course number. While popular classes like LIT 141w may require students to complete more written assignments than comparable courses, they do not provide students with the kind of intensive writing instruction that so many freshmen need to succeed academically.

However, many of the program's details still need to be worked out. With larger classes of incoming freshmen looming on the post-Wythes horizon, finding enough qualified instructors to teach these seminars could prove difficult. Should the Faculty Committee approve this proposal next month, the program will take effect next year, leaving the University little time to recruit new staff or outline a broad-based writing curriculum.

In addition, we strongly urge that the new writing requirement not be allowed to detract from the existing Freshman Seminar Program, which is widely believed to be one of Princeton's strongest academic components. To overtax Freshman Seminar professors with the responsibility of running writing workshops in addition to — or even in conjunction with — their existing seminars would be a mistake.

If set up properly, the new writing requirement could very well represent a significant improvement to Princeton's curriculum. As part of the ongoing revision process for this proposal, we encourage the University to solicit student suggestions about how to maximize the program's effectiveness. For students still struggling to improve their written work, it is somehow comforting to know that even the Princeton curriculum can stand a little editing from time to time.