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  • Writer's pictureShaun Anderson

Defining Good Writing

The last two times I have taught freshman composition, I've started with a discussion in which I ask my students to define the term "good writing." It's always an interesting experience, made more interesting by the fact that a few of my students take this as an invitation to tell me about how terrible their experiences have been with their previous English teachers (which, to be fair, it is an invitation for them to tell me how they would like to be taught and how they would like to grow as a result of our time together. Often definition work requires that we set boundaries not just around what the object of our definitional efforts is, but also what it is not). My students will talk about favorite novels, writing assignments they cared about in the past, songs with lyrics that have shaped their lives. Or they will debate the value of grammar, some students arguing that grammar doesn't matter, so long as the writer's ideas are conveyed, while other students argue that correct grammar is how a writer creates clarity. We discuss how the audience, the purpose, the medium, and the genre shape our expectations of a piece of writing. A rhyme scheme doesn't fit into a lab report, and most poems probably won't contain a methods section.

What matters in the discussion is that my students recognize how subjective the term "good writing" is. Every time I teach freshman composition I meet with each student, individually. I ask each student what they hope to get out of the course, and without fail I get two answers: "I want to get a specific grade and I want to be a better writer."

Freshman composition classes are always a messy conglomeration of students with varying levels of interest, confidence, and skills. Each of my students will leave my class and enter fields of study and employment where the writing skills required look different than those of the peers they met in my classroom (or my Zoom, while we're still living through a pandemic).

For the first years of teaching, I stepped into my classroom, nervous, and unsure that I had the skills to teach, but certain I had the knowledge that would help my students create "good writing," if they would just listen to me.

I have started these discussions with my students, because each year that I stepped in with the self-assurance that I know "good writing," I could see myself failing a group of my students. I would watch them enter the classroom nervous, and I would watch them leave defeated. They would recognize in my determination to make them "good writers" that my teaching, no matter how careful I tried to be, would conflict with the knowledge they have built about what "good writing" looks like to them.

Listening is difficult work. I still get defensive when my students begin debating grammar. I still know what assignments I teach, and what I think a "good" example of that assignment will look like. But in having these discussions, I am trying to sit with my students. I am trying to sit with them, to assume intelligence, and to hear what they have to teach me.

If I wanted to, if I were a bigger person, I would try to extend this idea of sitting with, of listening to, of learning from to the people across the political aisle from me. I see the way my openness to my students allows for an openness from my students to me. The openness is reciprocal, and feels instinctive. I am not there politically.

The world is a mess. I have kept the news on more constantly in the past few months than I can remember ever doing in my life. My stomach knots up each night when I try to lie down, turn off my brain, and sleep. I don't know how to fix anything, and all I see is violence and fear.

And then I step into freshman composition courses, and I ask my students to define "good writing." I step out of the role of instructor, or maybe I reconstruct it. I let my students tell me what they value about writing, and I listen. I ask them more questions. I try to understand and learn, rather than teach.

I have been fortunate that violence has stayed out of my classroom. I am fortunate that when I have assumed and believed in the intelligence and kindness of my students, they have shown it. The idealist inside me believes in the way this open listening could fundamentally shift the systems that we exist inside of. But I still have the teacher inside of me who bristles when my own concepts of "good writing" are dismissed.

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