Post-thesis evaluation of writing seminar

The writing seminar, as all undergraduates have experienced, is a class on writing and editing. Its nominal goals are to promote critical thinking, reading and writing, the conventions of writing and writing as an intellectual practice. It’s a brilliant, necessary idea: all freshmen need to learn the practice of academic writing and proper editing. So many of us got A’s throughout high school that we have little conception of the fact that improving our work might be worthwhile.

Sadly, writing seminar did not live up to that goal. In reality, it’s an introductory course to editing, covering most of the same skills that were required to revise the application essay that got us into this school. It was a poor representation for academic writing at Princeton, and worst of all, it taught bad lessons: that papers at Princeton can — and should — be written the night before and that starting from scratch is rewarded more than performing real edits.

If writing seminars were to teach what they were supposed to, they would be incredibly useful classes. And strangely, my freshman seminar on life in a nuclear-armed world did far more in that regard than writing seminar ever did. The key difference was a clear purpose in writing that arose from an intellectual engagement in the material being covered.

Once, a guest lecturer spoke to our class, and his economics was wrong. Dead wrong. So for the final assignment for that class, I worked incredibly hard to find and compile the evidence to prove he was wrong. Being right, and having the evidence to show it, was the purpose of writing. That should be the essence of academic writing.

The assignments were structured in order to give a fair amount of freedom. I grew more and more interested in economics as the course progressed, so I could feature more and more economic arguments in my work. We also wrote fiction, imagining what it would be like if a nuclear blast destroyed our hometowns, and we wrote reviews placing cultural works about the nuclear age within their contexts. The assignments allowed for approaches from disciplines other than the humanities. For each assignment, we were expected to meet with one of the Writing Program fellows. The course was about the topic, and selecting a suitable approach and writing style was inherent to the topic. Learning stronger editing skills was not an expectation of the program but the natural result of caring about the topic.

Some people genuinely did enjoy their writing seminars. But every person who has voiced that opinion to me has mentioned that they did so because of the topic, in spite of the editing component. Freshmen should be learning that writing is an enjoyable part of the college experience, not a boring chore inflicted on the unlucky. My thesis is an intellectual achievement, and when I was making progress, it felt good to write. It should have been my writing seminar, not freshman seminar, which encouraged that feeling.

Writing is easier when one has an audience. Consider the columns in this paper: My readership is predominantly college students reading the morning paper for entertainment, half-hungover from the Thursday night before. These columns have to be somewhat entertaining, regardless of whether the intent is to convince, moralize or pontificate. They must find some narrative thread to follow, to bring readers from start to end. It’s a very different experience from a writing seminar, where it’s very clear that the audience is the grader, and the grader’s main concern is form and not content.

Fixing the writing program is simple: Separate the writing component from the academic material being covered, with separate educators in charge of each component, so that intellectual commitment can be maintained. Give more, smaller assignments to encourage finding a preferred approach to a topic, whether that be literary analysis, economics or pure science. Most importantly, recognize that Princeton should not waste students’ time explaining that which we can just as easily learn from a simple handout, especially if many of us learned the same things in high school.

Writing seminars ought to be the beginning of preparation for theses. It’s what undergraduates need and deserve. Believe it or not, four years will pass quickly. Before you know it, you’ll be holding your own bound thesis. And if you become a non-humanities major, your independent work will reflect little to no knowledge gained from your freshman writing seminar.

Christopher Troein is an economics major from Windsor, England. He can be reached at ctroein@princeton.edu.