Descriptive Window Of Writing In College Essay

The history of higher education often reflects the history of writing educators striving to teach within the brief, prescriptive window of first-year writing and to change the course of struggling writers. It remains as true now, however, as in 1958 when Hovey suggested, “the way to learn writing is to write” (p. 437). Yet, most educators lack the stamina and the resources to stay with every student for as long as it takes (Silva, 2012) to inculcate them with the habits of thinking, interpreting, and presenting to which critical readers ascribe good writing (Nauman, Stirling, & Borthwick, 2011; Graham, Schwartz, & MacArthur, 1993). Further, despite good intentions and the common portrayal of college writing assignments as invitation to join new discourse communities (Carroll, 2002), students often maintain rational beliefs that writing in college means giving the educator at the front of the room what she wants (Jeffery & Selting, 1999). As such, college writing remains a familiar but

Particular technologies produce changes in the way students write (Dailey, 2004), but many of the concerns Hovey (1958) raised before such technologies existed remain relevant today. Many first-year students, and more often those students who place into DE writing, still struggle with skills like applying knowledge about what an essay needs to contain (Best, 1996), spelling (Bennett-Kastor, 2005), and the conventional rules of written discourse (Wall, 1986). Technology use suggests a possible contributing factor to these problems, but some technologies also suggest new solutions (Grabill, 1998; Stan, & Collins, 2002), and many of those same students prefer computer-assisted writing instruction (Fang, 2010; Wresch, 1984) to more traditional