[Teaching_Composition] Academic Discourse

[Russ Hunt]

Like Rich Haswell,

> I'm happy to see someone questioning the focus on "academic writing" 
> in the current college-writing curriculum, and questioning it in the
> interest of the kinds of writing students will do after college. 

We need to bear in mind, too, that we can't anticipate what those 
kinds of writing will be, and even if we could we probably couldn't 
"teach" them. A book which makes a similar argument to Anne Beaufort's 
_Writing in the Real World_, but with piles of real-world empirical 
evidence, is _Worlds Apart_, by Aviva Freedman, Patrick Dias, Anthony 
Pare and Peter Medway. They followed writers moving out of 
pre-professional programs of various kinds and into professions. Their 
work convinces me that the best I can hope for is to help students 
learn how to figure out and adapt to the new genres they'll encounter 
in whatever they do. One thng we can be sure of, though: the classroom 
essay almost certainly won't be one of them (even if they become 
academics).

-- Russ

Russell Hunt
Department of English
St. Thomas University
http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/